The Fall of the Aztec Empire
In August 1521 after a last stand on the steps of their temple buildings, the Aztec defenders of Tenochtitlan surrendered to the Spanish forces of Hernán Cortés and his Mesoamerican allies. In the aft...
14 Aug 202142min
Escaping the Berlin Wall
There were many attempts to escape over and under the Berlin Wall but Tunnel 29 was highly unusual for tunnelling into East Berlin rather than out to the West. Led by Joachim Rudolph, who had himself ...
13 Aug 202127min
Gallipoli: What Led to Britain's WW1 Disaster?
What does the price of wheat and global food supplies have to do with one of the greatest disasters in the history of warfare? Why was the decision made to send thousands of Allied troops in an attemp...
12 Aug 202153min
England's Great Viking Battle
On 11 August 991 one of the most important anglo-Viking battles took place near Maldon in Essex. This clash was immortalised in one of the finest examples of early English poetry that tells the story ...
11 Aug 202125min
Royal Mistresses
The role of the royal mistress may, on the face of it, seem a simple position but in reality, there was a lot more to being a royal mistress than it might seem. Throughout the courts of Europe, the ro...
10 Aug 202142min
The Bombing of Nagasaki
The second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki is less well known than the one a few days earlier on Hiroshima, but was it more influential in forcing the Japanese to surrender? To find out who exac...
9 Aug 202123min
The Ultimate Cold War Spy Story
A Soviet double agent at the top of his game, a deadly game of cat and mouse with the KGB and one of the most daring escapes of the Cold War from the very heart of Moscow. In this archive episode, Dan...
7 Aug 202153min
The Origins of English
Approximately 1.35 billion people use it, either as a first or second language, so English and the way that we speak it has a daily impact on huge numbers of people. But how did the English language d...
7 Aug 202138min
