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Oct 17, 2025
They performed before thousands and could become celebrities, yet actors in ancient Rome were stripped of their civic rights. What was life really like for the men who took to the...
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Oct 15, 2025
What were the lives of women like throughout the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods? Modern archaeology is only just beginning to provide a clear picture
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Oct 6, 2025
Historian Josephine Quinn explores how the Phoenicians and their great colony, Carthage, built a maritime empire that once overshadowed both Greece and Rome
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Oct 3, 2025
How did the Norse adventurers of the Viking Age impose themselves upon eastern Europe? Not with longships and raids, says one historian, but through canny adaptation
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Oct 1, 2025
Vlad III Dracula, the brutal warlord and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s genre-defining vampire, has long held a reputation as medieval Europe’s most terrifying ruler. Now,...
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Sep 15, 2025
Historian Karen Jones reveals how barbed wire and other surprising inventions transformed the frontier, reshaping the lives of settlers, as well as the land and its peoples
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Sep 10, 2025
Cleopatra persuaded Mark Antony to order the execution of her sister Arsinoe IV on the steps of one of antiquity’s greatest temples, breaking the sacred law of sanctuary and...
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Sep 5, 2025
Folklorist and historian Francis Young explains how the medieval church conquered Europe’s last pagans not only through force, but by taking over their sacred spaces
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Sep 1, 2025
Historian Eleanor Barraclough reveals the brutal challenges faced by Norse settlers in Greenland – a Viking world of fragile farms and endless winters
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Aug 25, 2025
Historian Richard Overy explains how the US firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 killed more civilians than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – and why it has been largely...
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Aug 13, 2025
Physicist Frank Close traces how British science – and fear of a Nazi bomb – lit the fuse for the nuclear age
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Aug 1, 2025
When Old Norse explorers reached North America, they made history. But their brief, violent encounter with its indigenous peoples shows how cultural collisions could end in chaos....
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Jul 28, 2025
Historian Tom Holland uncovers how politics, myth and maternal ambition collided in the scandalous reign of the Roman emperor Nero
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Jul 25, 2025
Journalist Caroline Alexander uncovers the stories of those who flew ‘the Hump’ – a little-known Allied supply mission that sent young pilots into uncharted skies – and...
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Jul 21, 2025
Historian Helen Carr explores the disastrous 14th century, a time when famine, war, pestilence and rebellion took medieval England to the brink of collapse
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Jul 16, 2025
From tail-wagging agents of battle to divine deities, ancient Mesopotamia’s civilisations saw dogs as more than just pets. Discussing the civilisations’ attitude to their...
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Jun 25, 2025
Assassins, royal marriages and diplomatic gift-giving: historian and archaeologist Max Adams explains how the kings of Mercia blended brutality with statecraft to dominate...
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Jun 23, 2025
From peaches and lentils to your favourite herb, ancient Mediterranean doctors had strong opinions about what you should (and shouldn’t) eat – and their verdict on some of...
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Jun 20, 2025
In 1943, Australia tried to send a live platypus across U-boat-infested waters to Britain as a diplomatic gift. The mission, part zoological experiment, part geopolitical theatre,...
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May 30, 2025
Amazons, werewolves and unnamed traders: historian Owen Rees uncovers the lives hidden at the edges of ancient empires – and explains why they were written out of history
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May 23, 2025
Explore the story of Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear catastrophe during the height of the Cold War…
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Apr 30, 2025
Gordon Cummins was a seemingly ordinary RAF airman. But amid the darkness of blackout-era London he became one of the city’s most vicious killers
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Apr 9, 2025
A bankrupt treasury, disastrous foreign policy and a civil war: this is the story of how Henry III lost control of his own kingdom.
