History Cafe

#122 Queen Elizabeth's Toyboy - Ep 4 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:00:00 GMT

The Earl of Essex, it always used to be said, was an airhead. Elizabeth’s swaggering toyboy who posed as a military genius. And yet Shakespeare took the young Earl of Essex seriously, portraying him as Henry V in early performances in 1595. It riled Essex’s rival at court, the Queen’s Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, so much that he ensured English history plays were banned.

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#121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Shakespeare confronts homelessness with his aging king, reduced to beggary. He makes the audience ask what it would be like if it was you who found yourself out of house and home, shivering and hoping someone would give you their cloak. Is it not, Shakespeare asks, an outrage to blame the poor for their condition?

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#120 'Hang, beg, starve' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

We reveal the real-life factional feud that inspired the Montagues v Capulets and which makes the groundling audience so angry. It’s London. 1595. Life is tough. It’s wet and cold and only three years ago 20% of the population died of the plague. And it’s not fair. The rich can commit murder, duelling in the streets, and get away with it. While young apprentices are hanged for arguing over the price of a fish because the Queen’s Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, is in a feud with the Lord Mayor. As the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet ‘some shall be pardoned and some punished.’ It’s an outrage.

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#119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Nothing is what it seems? We, poor Londoners, paying our penny to stand at the Globe in 1606 would agree with that. With Robert Cecil’s government relentlessly pumping out fake news around the Gunpowder Plot, it’s not at all clear who the real criminals are. As Macbeth, murderer of a Scottish king, is overtaken by the evil of ambition we begin to see that our Scottish king James is also in danger. Doesn’t the ambitious scheming of his Principal Secretary threaten to reduce him to an irrelevance? Didn’t Cecil’s father, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, kill our own king’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots?

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#96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had fatally damaged the status of the nobility and caused the rise of the small independent farmer. Feudalism in England and Wales was over… or at least we thought it was, until now. (R)

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#95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales. (R)

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#94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the historian Michael Postan long ago (in 1939) famously called ‘political gangsterdom.’ (R)

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#93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague… (R)

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#92 'Welcome traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister as a traitor in 1450, by sailors dissatisfied with an ineffective king, was shocking. It revealed that the common people believed the true crown was the community. You can’t get more modern than that. (R)

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#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon. (R)

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#106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. (R)

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#105 Smears, imprisonment, assassination - Ep 5 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Neoliberalism was welcomed, finally, as a way to tackle what seemed to be a breakdown in American society in the late 1960s. Big business and FBI under J Edgar Hoover felt threatened by Keynsian consensus on welfare and the eradication of poverty. They had plenty to gain by provoking the extremism, and clearing the way for Milton Friedman. (R)

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#104 Catch 22 - Ep 4 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The breakdown of American post-war consensus in the 60s calls for desperate measures on all sides: a government war in Vietnam, inner-city rioting, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Alarmed, US businesses seek salvation from the previously dismissed economic theory of neoliberal free-market capitalism. (R)

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#103 Disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump - Ep 3 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMT

We look at the roots of free market Neoliberalism and discover that big business in the US has been championing freedom from regulation since 1895, even claiming in 1923 that the anti-child labour movement in America was secretly being run from Moscow… (R)

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#102 'The cuckoo in the Nobel nest' - Ep 2 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMT

How did less welfare, less government regulation of business (aka neoliberalism free market) become a global ‘fashion’ without any evidence of its benefits? Something to do with an imposter ‘Nobel’ prize and a PBS TV series funded by American big business? (R)

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#101 'everything absolutely maxed out' - Ep 1 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Civil liberty is different from individual liberty. Philosophers have known this since at least the 17th Century. We explore the two fundamental fallacies of neoliberalism to show why neoliberal economics can only bring prosperity to the few, and is incapable of predicting financial crashes. Today in the USA those damaged by neoliberalism have been driven to elect an unhinged criminal... (R)

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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:00:50 GMT

In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction. (R)

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#06 London fires were visible from France - Ep 6 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended. (R)

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#05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - Ep 5 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMT

The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason? (R)

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#4 More than a double bluff - Ep 4 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who? (R)

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#03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - Ep 3 Who Really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight.’ So why in private is Churchill saying he doubts the invasion would ever take place? (R)

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#02 A battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether. (R)

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#01 Waterworld Flotilla - Ep 1 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible?

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#118 'She will be called a man' (Jerome) - Ep 6 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Church Father, Jerome, wrote this about women who took vows of chastity for God. ‘When she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man.’ What now survives from the Roman Empire – and the Church in particular - only tells one, heavily redacted, medieval version of the past.

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#117 The Rich man and Melania - Ep 5 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT

By AD400 all it took to be bishop was to be stratospherically wealthy. There was no demand that bishops even knew their bible until AD787.

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#116 Chariot races in church - Ep 4 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Chariot races in church. How did we get there? 3rd Century climate change.

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#115 The Missing Women - Ep 3 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:00:00 GMT

What happened to the women? Until the late second century, committed, educated women and men who perhaps had space in their own homes, led informal house churches. But once church leadership became a paid, public role, the roles were taken by the men. This was not theology. It was the way of the world.

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#114 The Missing Link - Ep 2 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 06:00:00 GMT

What real connection is there between the earliest, informal meetings of the first apostles and their friends, and the mighty, glitzy, authoritarian institution that mushroomed in the 4th Century, and especially after AD320? And is still here today. Is it possible that there is in reality, no direct connection at all?

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#113 Whatever happened to Saint Peter? - Ep 1 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 06:00:00 GMT

The Church says that Simon Peter was chosen by Jesus as the foundation of the Church. It says that Saint Peter was the first bishop of Rome and that there is a chain of direct continuity from Peter to the present pope Leo. It’s these direct links that gives the Church the right to tell its followers what to do and what to think. But is there any historical evidence?

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#16 The Men behind the Myth - Ep 7 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Within days of 28 October 1962 two journalists publish the official but untruthful White House account, as instructed and edited by the President. They also call-out a political enemy for daring to consider a humiliating missile swap with the Soviets. But we show how the Kennedys had already suggested this very missile swap to Khrushchev via private backchannels, on condition he kept it secret. Which he did. (R)

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#15 'The Fourteenth Day' - Ep 6 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

28 October 1962: by holding his nerve Kennedy defuses the crisis in just 13 days. He says it’s over although he’s unable to verify whether Khrushchev ever withdraws his missiles or not. The last missiles do indeed leave Cuba on day 48 of the crisis but for very different reasons. (R)

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#14 'Eyeball to eyeball' - Ep 5 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

22 October 1962: President Kennedy goes on prime-time TV and announces a blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet missiles reaching the island. But US sailors call the so-called ‘quarantine’ nothing but ‘grand theatrics.’ Not a single Soviet ship is stopped by the US Navy. What was going on? (R)

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#13 'Russian roulette' - Ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

15 October 1962: Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at the polls; as would ignoring them which is what his allies advise him to do. So, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the President chooses ‘to play Russian Roulette with nuclear missiles.’ (R)

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#12 'The only way to save Cuba' - Ep 3 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet. (R)

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#11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - Ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba? (R)

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#10 'These missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - Ep 1 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that the Soviet missiles on Cuba made ‘no significant difference.’ So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war? (R)

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#112 Loss, love and the struggle to stay alive in 1912

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Jon explains his decision to write an historical novel, A Spring Marrying. He discovered the extraordinary history of the sail trawlers working off the English coast before 1939 whilst making a film for C4. It was the men who crewed them that fascinated him the most. Down in Brixham, Devon, they had four crew – skipper, mate, deckhand, and a cookie who was often only 12 or so. Theirs was an unremitting routine. Danger and death were never far away: it was the most dangerous job in the land. Yet they earned a reputation as supreme, quietly proud seamen, religious, brilliantly able to navigate without charts and survive just about anything. Except, maybe, falling in love with the town’s most complicated young woman.

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#31 'Remember, remember, the fifth of November' - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

At the time, London gossip accused the king’s chief minister Robert Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more? (R)

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#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing. (R)

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#29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

As his father had done, Cecil built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it. (R)

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#28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

We dig deeper into the animosity between the king and Cecil whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father and son had spies everywhere and openly boasted of their policy of entrapment. (R)

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#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course. (R)

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#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done. (R)

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#25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 07:00:21 GMT

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (R)

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#24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT

We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told. (R)

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#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT

After the disaster of the Somme, whitewash was elevated to a new military art form. Haig and other senior officers lied in their accounts. Haig ultimately blamed the French. Haig was even promoted by his friend the King. But he got his comeuppance on 26 March 1918 when command of the British army was handed to the French. The defeat of the Germans would be masterminded not by Haig but by Ferdinand Foch. (R)

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#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT

At the southern end of the line, next to the French, British units took all their objectives on the first day of the battle. They succeeded mainly because their maverick commanders had learnt from the French how to bombard the Germans accurately, putting them out of action long enough for the infantry to mop up. They’d also been assisted by the French big guns. By lunchtime some of these units were being served a hot meal in a newly occupied German trench. It’s a remarkable story the British Army has done its best to forget. Some military historians say, with all that French help, they cheated! (R)

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#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The French decided they only had enough artillery to attack on a 9-mile front if they were to neutralise the German guns so that their infantry were not needlessly slaughtered. Haig had fewer guns – enough for perhaps 4 miles of front – but he chose to attack across 16 miles. 57,000 British soldiers died on the very first day, 1 July 1916, and no ground was gained. The French achieved all their objectives and lost 1,500 men. This is not a story that’s usually told (R)

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#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 28 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

On the eve of the Somme the British had far too few artillery guns, and most of the ones they had were the wrong sort. They needed five times as many heavy guns before they could launch an attack. The few big guns they did have were grossly inaccurate, sometimes missing a target by one mile. They were firing shells that were not fitted with delayed-action fuses which meant the German machine-gunners were safe in their deep underground bunkers. And yet British schoolchildren are still taught it was a surprise that the bombardment that preceded the infantry attack failed so catastrophically. (R)

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#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 21 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

The British Army wanted to throw men against machines. Its generals had not thought about how to cross 100-200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. They had been offered plenty of designs for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks but had ignored them. It was Churchill, head of the Royal Navy, who eventually funded the development of the first ‘tank’. But they arrived late at the Somme and were so badly deployed they couldn’t save lives. And that wasn’t the worst of the problems the British army had created for itself. (R)

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#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

Wed, 14 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board: trench warfare, the machine gun and the tank to name a few. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders. Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themselves as gentlemen – and gentlemen could not be bossed around. (R)

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#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 07 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench warfare seriously even though it had been around for 60 years. (R)

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#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT

We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup? (R)

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#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT

As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT

2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people? (R)

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#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 06:00:00 GMT

Amundsen reached the South Pole a month before Scott, but his story never captured the imagination of the English. They wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making. Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because he believed British spirit was stronger than the polar cold, or German bullets.

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#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:53:02 GMT

When Scott took a fifth man with him to the South Pole he signed each man’s death warrants. Not for the first time, Scott’s endless calculations for four men – pages and pages of scribbled notes on weights and distances and food and cooking fuel to carry – proved to be a waste of time. His surgeon had already warned him he’d calculated too little food per day for manhauling a sled. What’s more they only had four pairs of skis. They’d have to take it in turns to walk.

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#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Over a year before he and two of his men starved to death, just two days’ march from a depot with food and fuel, Scott confided to young biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘This is the end of the pole.’ He wasn’t questioning his planning or his leadership. He was blaming what he saw as the failure of their ‘transport,’ their dogs and ponies. Now they would have to rely on the British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges into blizzards of the Arctic winter. Scott doubted it was possible.

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#108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:39:07 GMT

The race is on between Captain Robert Scott of the Royal Navy and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As Scott’s wife, Kathleen Bruce, requires, and as Edwardian culture expects, Scott will test the manliness and endurance of himself and his team. Amundsen will test the efficacy of Norwegian Telemark skiing combined with Inuit survival techniques. We know which team we would prefer to be on.

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#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:20 GMT

By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by rector George Wilson Bridges and his white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution. (R)

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#58 The ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 08:00:41 GMT

When the HMS Lutine went down, 9 October 1799 off the Dutch coast, carrying a million pounds of gold and silver, it led to the collapse of the Hamburg sugar market and within a few years the banning of the slave trade. (R)

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#56 The Empire strikes back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 08:00:22 GMT

We look at a map of the British Caribbean to understand why losing the British north American colonies after 1783 mattered to British enslavement. We explore how the trade winds had helped create the four-cornered ‘triangle’ of the British slave trade involving North America, Africa, England and the British Caribbean – and how this doesn't work once this section of the 'Empire' - the North American States - strikes back and becomes 'out of bounds' for British trade. And we begin to see why the British government, having fought at great expense to protect the British Caribbean in the American War of Independence, began to isolate the British planters in the Caribbean and favour the East India Company instead. (R)

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#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 08:00:15 GMT

efore we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to Margaret Middleton and an enormous number of people who aren’t much remembered now. Not just William Wilberforce. The campaign of course stretches from the 1780s to the 1830s. (R)

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#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 08:00:34 GMT

We start this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807, the enslaved were 'emancipated' in 1833. (R)

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#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:00:14 GMT

Most of those executed for their beliefs under Philip and Mary 1555-58 came from places with a long history of religious dissidence. It matches European evidence that many – perhaps most – of those burned at the stake were not Protestants, but ‘anabaptists’ or people with similar beliefs – usually poor - whom both Protestants and Catholics were persecuting. The government of Edward VI had already begun before Mary came to the throne. But why so many in England? We discover literature appearing from the late 1540s that openly encouraged dissenters to die for their beliefs. And we explore the possibility that so many died because the English uniquely insisted on public hearings, in which there was no room for quiet, face-saving compromises. (R)

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#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:00:43 GMT

Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any potential causes of unrest – including any remaining shreds of die-hard Protestantism - and promptly. We also discover, that the majority of those who were burned were not Protestants at all, but followers of much older, rural religions. (R)

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#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 08:00:09 GMT

Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No, again. Cranmer was tried by the pope and Mary had no power to spare him. As for Mary’s Privy Council, they turn out to have been more interested in pirates than heretics. Much more important was Bartolomé Carranza, a Spanish friar, King Philip’s trusted eyes and ears at the English Court, but he was later accused of heresy by the pope for being too lenient. Finally the campaign in England was distinctively English, not Spanish. That points the finger for responsibility at Philip’s own select council of veteran English courtiers. But almost all of them had for years been Protestants. What was going on? (R)

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#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:00:35 GMT

England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism. (R)

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#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 08:00:30 GMT

Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians, mainly using Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ written by an Elizabethan Protestant. We look at why Foxe exclusively blames Mary and why he’s wrong. (R)

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#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:33:11 GMT

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R)

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#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 08:17:24 GMT

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#106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 06:46:34 GMT

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#105 Smears, imprisonment, assassination - Ep 5 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:01:34 GMT

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#104 Catch 22 - Ep 4 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:37:36 GMT

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#103 Disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump - Ep 3 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:00:19 GMT

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#102 'The Cuckoo in the Nobel nest' - Ep 2 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 08:05:01 GMT

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#101 'everything absolutely maxed out' - Ep 1 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 08:08:30 GMT

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#78 Remembrance Day - aren't we forgetting something?

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:39:10 GMT

At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were “civilians in uniform” – conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them? (R)

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#23 The Last Million Men - Ep 7 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 07:36:59 GMT

One day after Britain goes to war - ‘at sea’ - on 4 August 1914 the first War Council unceremoniously throws out the army’s secret plan to send a few divisions to meet the Germans head on and win quick, painless glory fighting alongside the French. Only then do the four men who had single-handedly thrown away the chance of avoiding a general European war, understand what Britain’s most prestigious soldier, Kitchener, has been warning since 1911. That a war with Germany would last at least 3 years and it would come down to ‘the last million men’ Britain could send. (R)

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#22 The Bullying of Edward Grey - Ep 6 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 07:53:53 GMT

A right-wing anti-German contingent call their campaign for war, the weekend of 31 July-2 August 1914 a ‘pogrom’. All talks of peace are, in their words, a German-Jewish plot to keep Britain out of the war for financial reasons. They have the support of the Conservative party, the British and French military, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the press. But how on earth does Grey persuade the anti-war Liberal Cabinet and Parliament? And WHY? (R)

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#21 8pm 1 August 1914 the War is Off - Ep 5 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:46:00 GMT

8pm German time the Kaiser orders champagne, halts the German advance towards Belgium, and sends a telegram of congratulations to his cousin George V at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal British Cabinet had voted to remain neutral on 31 July. Earlier on 1 August Foreign Secretary Grey met the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky (one of a string of meetings that week) to tell him that France might also remain neutral. A few hours later they met again and Grey added that even if France went to war Britain would not. So what went so catastrophically wrong in the next 72 hours? (R)

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#20 Hanging on Russia's apron strings - Ep 4 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 07:06:43 GMT

In 1912 a deal between War Secretary Haldane and the German chancellor Bethmann-Holweg to allow Britain to retain naval supremacy if they both remained neutral (if neither side had started the war), was rudely sabotaged. It involved lying to Cabinet that the Germans were demanding a full-scale Anglo-German alliance, which they weren’t. It meant throwing away what the majority of the Cabinet saw as the best chance to contain Russian expansion, by making common cause with Germany. Russia, allied to the French, could now call all the shots. (R)

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#19 Bicycling holidays along the French-Belgian border - Ep 3 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:20:05 GMT

How did what friendly chats between British and French generals since 1905 turn into a commitment to send a small British Expeditionary Force to France at the start of a war with Germany? A commitment that had not been agreed by Cabinet, Parliament or the Navy? (R)

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#18 Spies of the Kaiser - Ep 2 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 05:55:49 GMT

We look at anti-German hysteria in Britain 1906-1909. The British publishing phenomena of 1906 was The Invasion of 1910 (by Germans), serialised in the Daily Mail and marketed by men walking around London in Prussian uniforms. This chimed perfectly with the anti-German clique at the foreign office. (R)

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#17 The Elephant in the Room - Ep 1 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:01:39 GMT

Britain’s main problem by 1910 was Russian expansion towards its Persian oil and India, the jewel in Britain’s crown. So why did Britain go to war to SUPPORT Russia and AGAINST Germany which was its closest European friend and trading partner? (R)

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#40 Henry VIII: the pope, Katherine, Anne and Florence

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 17:44:21 GMT

After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing. Pope Clement was trapped between a rock and a hard place: the only way to save his Medici family’s city of Florence was to refuse Henry his divorce and split Christendom. (R)

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#52 Anne Boleyn - Henry's MacGuffin

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:14:00 GMT

Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her. (R)

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#51 Marrying Anne Boleyn, the best of a bad job - Ep 6 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:40:44 GMT

The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry’s French allies now needing him more than he does them, Henry’s long game to get the Pope on side against the Spanish is now in extra time. Henry is free to make himself head of the Church in England. See the painting at the National Gallery, London. (R)

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#50 No more ménage á trois - Ep 5 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 07:05:08 GMT

In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England? (R)

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#49 Like an episode of the Borgias - Ep 4 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:11:06 GMT

31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other. (R)

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#46 Missions Impossible - Ep 3 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:03:26 GMT

1527: The pope is a prisoner of the marauding Spanish in Rome and yet Henry sends his man Knight on a madcap mission to ask Pope Clement VII for permission to marry a young woman he is already sleeping with. It’s the first of a whole series of crazy errands, asking the pope for the impossible. Does Henry have a hidden agenda? (R)

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#45 The Jilting of Princess Mary - Ep 2 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 07:53:38 GMT

Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England? We find that the dates don’t add up. Instead we look at why in June 1525 Henry promoted his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy over the head of his heir Mary. And why Charles V broke off his engagement with 9 year old Mary to marry a Portuguese princess instead. (R)

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#44 Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - Ep 1 Henry VIII, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 06:56:13 GMT

In 2010 a document from 1527 was found in which Henry admits to the pope that he is sleeping with the woman he wishes to marry instead of, or as well as, his Spanish wife Katherine. Very little of the traditional story can be believed. It’s Katherine who matters in the story of Henry’s Reformation, not Anne.

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#77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 10:14:26 GMT

The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed to have signed with African leaders. One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa; the other was what we now know as the ‘scramble for Africa’, a gruesome series of invasions and seizures by European states. Stanley’s presumption earned him the lasting scorn and hatred of the British establishment. But his ability as a publicist won Livingstone a place in the nation’s affection – and that lived on much longer. (R)

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#76 Twelve Reckless Americans - Ep 4 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 13:24:31 GMT

Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, barometers, sextants’. Stanley and other ‘energetic… reckless Americans’ would ‘command … an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa’ and infinitely more ruthless. (R)

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#75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 07:35:26 GMT

The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and other diseases fatal to Victorian Britons (in much the same way as he casually dismissed as an ‘inconvenience’ the arm savaged by the lion and rendered useless even before his real exploring days had begun) fewer missionaries and their families would have died trying to follow in his footsteps. (R)

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#74 Smoke that Thunders - Ep 2 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 12:39:00 GMT

Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boats navigating any further inland he remained undaunted. He calculated that just being able to bring a ship this far would be well worth the effort. Now he just had to hope that there was nothing else like these immense falls before the Zambezi reached the sea. (R)

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#73 'Stronger than the ox he rode' - Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:18:46 GMT

Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone. We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did he become an international sensation? (R)

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#100 'My dreams were merely dreams' - Ep 4 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 06:07:03 GMT

Did Robert Peary or Frederick Cook reach the North Pole first? In our 100th podcast, we weigh up what evidence remains after a ruthless campaign to destroy records and reputations. And we discover the new evidence that has begun to emerge from the most unexpected places.

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#99 Shadowlands - Ep 3 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

Wed, 29 May 2024 06:09:27 GMT

A full year before US commander Robert Peary claimed he had been the first man to reach the North Pole, a younger, medical doctor, also from America, had beaten him to it. Or so he told the press. His name was Frederick Cook and he had expedition history with both Peary in the Arctic and Amundsen in the Antarctic. He not only treated the Inughuit well but also returned with credible latitude readings and unique observations of the movements and character of the polar ice. None of which was unacceptable to Peary and his millionaire backers.

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#98 'So coarse, so manly' - Ep 2 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

Wed, 22 May 2024 06:03:32 GMT

Robert Peary’s backers were the wealthy railway barons and bankers of New York. It didn’t matter to them whether Peary was the first to get to the North Pole or not. What mattered to them in 1909 was that he would say he’d reached the Pole, and then tell a strong, manly tale about it. In their eyes the future of Americans, as the tough frontier people, depended upon it. It may well have pushed Peary, a man who was known to be both ruthless and exploitative, towards murder…

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#97 'a day of undiluted hell' - Ep 1 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

Wed, 15 May 2024 07:20:03 GMT

We may think the main controversy surrounding American, naval commander, Robert Peary’s claim to be the first to reach the North Pole on 6/7 May 1909 was whether he, and the other ‘invisible’ five men accompanying him, actually got anywhere near the Pole. However, it’s a much more complicated and sinister story than that….

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#48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 08 May 2024 07:56:43 GMT

What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east. The majority of frontiers-people were peaceful Americans.

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#47 The Law-less Frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 01 May 2024 07:55:31 GMT

A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this belief: Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain’s Six-fingered Pete and many others. And we examine what really went on!

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#39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 07:16:27 GMT

Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin.

Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very English strand of occult philosophy. In fact it was only because Newton worked in this tradition that he was able to think of gravity as an unseen and mysterious force. Europeans like Leibnitz wrote the idea off as magic.

More striking, like other English philosophers, Newton believed that all this had been known to ancient thinkers going back to Noah, and spent much of his life trying to decode the myths and symbols they left behind. He was, he believed, the only man in his generation privileged to understand them. The last of magicians? Maybe.

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#38 Newton the Alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 07:30:56 GMT

The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practise alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.

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#96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 06:05:05 GMT

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#95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 05:58:44 GMT

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#94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 3 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 06:39:08 GMT

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#93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 09:13:16 GMT

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#92 'Welcome Traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 07:49:57 GMT

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Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #34 Getting the vote in 1918 - the secret strategy

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:07:23 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY - Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her. [Please note on our logo the NUWSS colours of berry red and leaf green - not often seen today]

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Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #35 Most women didn’t want the vote

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:07:11 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.

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Ep 3 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #36 The Pankhursts didn’t want the poor to get the vote

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:59 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.

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Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #37 Hunger strikes and forced feeding

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:48 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say but Emmeline Pankhurst tears it up and manoeuvres anyone with a socialist agenda out. Who exactly is this organisation for?

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Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn’t admit to

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:36 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.

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Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #42 The violence backfired

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:24 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.

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Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:12 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 election all three parties will be vying to give women the vote. But then… war breaks out.

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Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #60 After 1918 - the secrets are out - Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:06:00 GMT

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?

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#91 Death Camp tattoos were IBM numbers - Ep 10 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 08:17:08 GMT

During the war US and British bankers continued to send cash to Germany, while American companies in Germany were drawn down a slippery slope of collaboration. American bosses may have kept in touch with German subsidiaries via neutral hang-outs (like the fictional Rick’s Bar in the 1942 film Casablanca). Some made use of prisoners of war for slave labour. The five-figure tattoo on every death camp inmate began as an IBM-Dehomag punch card number. Nobody was going to be called to account for trading with the Nazis.

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#90 British appeasement, a sinister game? - Ep 9 Trading with the Nazis

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 22:46:58 GMT

In 1937, the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, believed he single-handedly could ensure world peace. He told the King, George VI, that he would do this by pursuing his objective of Germany and England being ‘the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.’

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#89 Britain's Nazi Allies - Ep 8 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 08:18:06 GMT

In 1935 the Etonians in the British Cabinet and Foreign Office rejected all calls from the USSR to unite with France and Eastern Europe against the rise of the Third Reich. They were far too terrified of Communism. Instead, Britain agreed a treaty allowing the Germans to expand their navy. When supporters of the elected left-wing government in Spain faced annihilation by Franco’s fascists in 1936-7 the Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, openly welcomed the carnage in Spain. It would, he declared, make the British public understand that Nazi Germany would be ‘an ally of ours and of all order-loving folk.’

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#88 'It haunts me' - Ep 7 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:37:51 GMT

Horrified by the implications of aiding German rearmament, a few British and American companies made serious attempts to get out of Germany in the 1930s. Particularly after Kristallnacht, 10 November 1938, when Nazi thugs attacked Jewish businesses. But the British Establishment saw Hitler as ‘a man who could be relied upon’. The Bank of England argued as late as March 1939, four days after Hitler had marched into Prague, that the British couldn’t just pull out of Germany, without bringing down the whole London banking sector.

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#87 Kill Nazism with kindness? - Ep 6 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 11:21:06 GMT

A perfect storm created the conditions for the Nazi’s march to war. The naïve belief that you could kill Nazism with kindness (aka trade agreements from which bankers and businessmen personally hoped to profit) was held simultaneously by the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, and the second in command at the British Foreign Office, Orme Sargent. Their opponents in government argued that tough action was necessary to contain Germany ‘even at a cost’ to those who had invested. They were consistently undermined.

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#86 'Hell-bent to supplant our democratic government' - Ep 5 Trading with the Nazis

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:38:31 GMT

In 1936 the US Ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, wrote to President Roosevelt warning of a pro-Nazi clique of US industrialists ‘hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government.’ We look at the notorious Liberty League and the dinner in New York’s Astoria to celebrate the fall of Paris to the Nazis. We showcase the businessmen who believed they were above democracy and could achieve world peace (under fascism) through world trade.

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#85 Nazi sterilisation, the American way - Ep 4 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:40:36 GMT

For all the complaints about the difficulties of doing business in Hitler’s Germany, the Americans seemed strikingly settled there. Now we get to the nub of why, when Germany occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and then part of Poland in 1938-39, its military rolled out in General Motors and Ford cars and trucks, and its planes were using General Motors and Ford parts. They were also burning American fuel. And using American research to justify forcibly sterilising those they considered mentally unfit.

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#84 Dollars and Dictatorship – Ep 3 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:43:28 GMT

STAND-ALONE. The Americans insisted on extracting every cent from war-torn Britain and France in the aftermath of World War I. They made them repay the money they had borrowed, at increasingly high interest rates, to buy American weapons to fight Germany. It led to economic depression. The 1929 Wall Street Crash was part of a global financial meltdown which led to economic nationalism – survival of the fittest, everyone for himself. And that was before Hjalmar Schacht Reichsminister for Economics in Germany, trapped American companies in a series of clever regulations. It enabled Hitler to rearm. [We'll soon get to how the British also enabled Hitler!]

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#83 Enrich your enemy, impoverish your allies - Ep 2 Trading with the Nazis

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 07:52:43 GMT

The US had a paradoxical strategy to ensure repayment of its WW1 loans. It would make Germany economically prosperous to ensure Germany was in a position to pay reparations to France and Britain (as per the Treaty of Versailles). This would mean that impoverished Britain and France could keep repaying the interest on their wartime loans to the Americans.Economist Maynard Keynes, aware that Britain and France would never recover from endless interest repayments, proposed cancelling all war debts. Everyone would end up better off in the long run, as was later proved. But the US government refused and American companies, including Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil, began to invest in Germany, exploiting its economic collapse and setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis.

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#82 'The whole world belongs to the Americans' - Ep 1 Trading With The Nazis

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 12:32:00 GMT

Carl Siemens, chair of Siemens the German electronics business, complained in 1929, ‘the whole world belongs to the Americans.’ If you want to understand how it was that American businesses ended up investing so heavily in Germany in the 1920s and 30s – so heavily that eventually they enabled Hitler to arm the fascist Third Reich - then you have to start by going back to the First World War. It starts with asking why the Americans declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 but mysteriously did not ally with either Britain or France.

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#33 Sex, Hollywood and Fashion

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 21:24:06 GMT

Why did fashion become so much more conservative in the 1930s? We look at the puritanical Hays Motion Picture Production Code that banned indecent passions, and at MGM’s Adrian Greenberg, the most powerful Hollywood designer of his day. The arrival of colour film stock and the invention of the close-up meant Adrian designed for the camera, experimenting with hats and calf-length dresses that flattered both the lead actresses and ‘Nancy’ in the plush seat. MGM’s Louis B Mayer, who’d started out selling second hand clothes, made a fortune producing mass-made copies to coincide with each film’s release for Nancy’s modest budget.

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#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:16:28 GMT

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#30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 13:12:13 GMT

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#29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:26:03 GMT

As his father had done, King James I's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil ,built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it.

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#28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 17:13:09 GMT

We dig deeper into the animosity between the King, James I of England and VI of Scotland and his Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils (father and son) against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father was Elizabeth I's Chief Minister, like his son he had spies everywhere and openly boasted of his policy of entrapment.

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#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 17:42:45 GMT

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#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:00:30 GMT

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Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:27:45 GMT

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

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Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:23:06 GMT

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

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#25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:21:58 GMT

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything.

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#24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:42:05 GMT

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND - FOR 5 NOVEMBER! We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told.

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Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 20:00:48 GMT

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

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#06 London fires were visible from France - ep 6 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 19:57:44 GMT

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Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 19:54:45 GMT

Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

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#05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - ep 5 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 10:06:30 GMT

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Battle of Britain - Taster Ep 5 - Forcing Britain To Her Knees

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:47:24 GMT

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#04 More than a double bluff - ep 4 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:44:58 GMT

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#03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - ep 3 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 19:54:34 GMT

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#02 A battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 19:47:14 GMT

Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether.

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#01 Waterworld Flotilla - ep 1 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:15:29 GMT

The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible?

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#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 21:01:04 GMT

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#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 15:05:26 GMT

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#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 14:26:22 GMT

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#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 18:10:58 GMT

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#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 of Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 16:40:56 GMT

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#16 The men behind the myth - Ep 7 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 20:42:40 GMT

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#15 ‘The Fourteenth Day’ - Ep 6 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 10:01:58 GMT

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#14 ‘Eyeball to eyeball’ - ep 5 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 11:26:30 GMT

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#13 ‘Russian roulette’ - ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:26:55 GMT

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#12 ‘The only way to save Cuba’ - Ep 3 of Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:43:07 GMT

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#11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - Ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 13:18:59 GMT

Synopsis: 1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba?

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#10 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - Ep 1 Cuba Missile Crisis

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:34:44 GMT

We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power.' So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war?

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#77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 11:15:49 GMT

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#76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 14:42:25 GMT

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#75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:14:56 GMT

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#74 Smoke that Thunders Ep 2 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 15:19:41 GMT

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#73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 21:23:33 GMT

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Memory and Myth – Oxford research project ‘Their Finest Hour’ - SOUND CORRECTED

Wed, 10 May 2023 23:24:52 GMT

Their Finest Hour is a University of Oxford project that aims to collect and digitally archive the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War that have been passed down from generation to generation in the UK and Commonwealth. Closing date July 2024.We interview project manager Dr Matthew Kidd and reflect on the evidential issues this online collection raises about memory and myth. website: theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk

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#81 Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher

Wed, 03 May 2023 07:22:54 GMT

The coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023 has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the first world war. It was then that British royals turned into a strange mix of an oddly middle-class family that was given to stagey, mock-historical popular pageants, with an increasing display of military uniforms to boost Britain’s failing international image. Thespian imperialist Lord Esher, who headed the coronation planning committee in 1902, had very little time for the ordinary British people he called ‘millions of drudges’. He insisted that everyone in royal ceremonies – not just the military – had to wear a uniform. It was meant to distinguish them from the mere mortals who could watch from the sidelines. Ultimately these events were always about international politics. The coronation of Charles III occurs in the context of Brexit and deep economic crisis and carries as much international weight as anything that has gone before.

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#57 From mayor to meat market. Getting elected in the 18th Century

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:00:16 GMT

It is still wrongly but commonly thought that in the 18th Century the gentry bought their way into a parliamentary seat, mainly by purchasing land, or by gaining the approval of some unrepresentative local patron who had the borough in his pocket. You've heard of pocket boroughs, and rotten boroughs? Well, Jon's 1985 doctoral thesis, researched entirely from local documents rescued from mouldy parish chests and corporation vaults, contradicted so many of the leading historians of the day so baldly that although Jon was awarded his doctorate he could never publish. But NOW that the old orthodoxy has collapsed and everyone agrees with Jon, he’s been able to bring out his book updated with all the latest scholarship. It’s a world of lively – not to say riotous, overheated, rumbustious, often embittered, endlessly partisan, endlessly changing and challenging - local politics. What reading the local records tells us is that it was a world of lively local democracy.

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#53 '1066 And All That' - really serious nonsense

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 06:39:58 GMT

Published in 1930 by Methuen and never out of print since, this isn’t (as everyone has always supposed) just an innocent laugh at kids’ mistakes. It is a laugh, and we explore many of the jokes. But 1066 And All That is suffused with subversive subtexts. Our original research reveals its origins back in the academic infighting and socialism young authors Sellar and Yeatman experienced studying history in 1919 Oxford. Both had fought and been wounded in the war.

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#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Slavery

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 08:09:32 GMT

By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.

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#58 The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Slavery

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:59:04 GMT

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#56 The Empire Strikes Back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 09:37:01 GMT

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#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Slavery

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:49:57 GMT

Before we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to an enormous number of people who aren’t much remembered now. Not just William Wilberforce. We're thinking in particular about Margaret Middleton. The campaign of course stretches from the 1780s to the 1830s.

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#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not morality ended British Enslavement

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 22:34:12 GMT

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#81 Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 08:35:30 GMT

The coronation of King Charles III has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the first world war. It was then that British royals turned into a strange mix of an oddly middle-class family that was given to stagey, mock-historical popular pageants, with an increasing display of military uniforms to boost Britain’s failing international image. Thespian imperialist Lord Esher, who headed the coronation planning committee in 1902, had very little time for the ordinary British people he called ‘millions of drudges’. He insisted that everyone in royal ceremonies – not just the military – had to wear a uniform. It was meant to distinguish them from the mere mortals who could watch from the sidelines. Ultimately these events were always about international politics. The coronation of Charles III occurs in the context of Brexit and deep economic crisis and carries as much international weight as anything that has gone before.

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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 08:57:15 GMT

Were Scottish clan tartans nothing more than clever marketing? With an eye on the forthcoming coronation of King Charles III we re-release this wry look at the invention of tradition in Scotland – which had a whole lot to do with the hunting, shooting, fishing Royals at their Scottish castle, Balmoral. There they famously adopt a Scottish style of dress complete with royal tartans, kilts for all, pipers and Scottish dancing. Indeed the fashion for all things Scottish has been termed ‘Balmoralisation.’ But we reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction.

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#39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 09:23:28 GMT

Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin. Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very English strand of occult philosophy. In fact it was only because Newton worked in this tradition that he was able to think of gravity as an unseen and mysterious force. Europeans like Leibnitz wrote the idea off as magic. More striking, like other English philosophers, Newton believed that all this had been known to ancient thinkers going back to Noah, and spent much of his life trying to decode the myths and symbols they left behind. He was, he believed, the only man in his generation privileged to understand them. The last of magicians? Maybe.

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#38 Newton the alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:35:28 GMT

The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practice alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.

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#09 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:11:14 GMT

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#08 I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:45:28 GMT

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#07 That Dress - Ep 1 '2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:35:37 GMT

If you enjoyed #BBCRadio4 drama #NazisTheRoadToPower by #JonathanMyerson you will love this series of 3 podcasts: '2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Nazi Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people?

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#80 Nazis: The Road to Power - conversation with author Jonathan Myerson

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 08:18:35 GMT

#80 Nazis: The Road to Power. Conversation with Jonathan Myerson, playwright and author of BBC Radio 4’s new drama series Nazis: The Road to PowerThe story of how in just 13 years, Hitler led a fringe sect with less than a hundred members and outlandish ideas to be the dominant force in German politics.Jonathan talks to us at History Café about the challenges of bringing this extraordinary and shocking story to life through the eyes of the people closest to him. He tells us how every scene in a long series of 8 plays was based on a real event and that much of the dialogue including Hitler’s speeches comes from contemporary sources.“Extracts from Nazis: The Road to Power by kind permission of Promenade Productions and BBC Radio4 (and BBC Sounds)”

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#48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:59:26 GMT

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#47 The Law-less frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 10:08:14 GMT

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#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:27:58 GMT

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#31 ‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November’ - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 13:01:13 GMT

Christmas podcast coming next week. We have yet to record it!! In the meantime, here's the last in this series which began on 5 November: At the time, London gossip accused Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more?

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#30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:48:08 GMT

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#29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:53:24 GMT

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#28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:32:07 GMT

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#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 08:47:21 GMT

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#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 08:59:37 GMT

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#78 Remembrance Day - Aren't We Forgetting Something?

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 06:22:19 GMT

We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for Remembrance Day 2020. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again.At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them?

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#25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:27:06 GMT

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (Rpt)

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#24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:07:16 GMT

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#77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 09:04:19 GMT

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#76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:48:23 GMT

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#75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:58:20 GMT

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#74 Smoke that Thunders Ep 2 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 10:30:03 GMT

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#73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 08:33:45 GMT

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#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 05 Slavery

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 09:10:42 GMT

By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the rector George Wilson Bridges and his white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.

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#58 The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Slavery

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 18:23:47 GMT

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#56 The Empire Strikes Back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 14:37:48 GMT

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#55 The woman behind the abolition movement - Ep 2 Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 09:33:42 GMT

Before we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to Margaret Middleton and an enormous number of people who aren’t much remembered now. Not just William Wilberforce. The campaign of course stretches from the 1780s to the 1830s.

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#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 10:42:50 GMT

We repeat this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807, the enslaved were 'emancipated' in 1833.

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#52 Anne Boleyn – Henry's MacGuffin

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 08:45:33 GMT

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#51 Marrying Anne Boleyn, the best of a bad job - Ep 6 Henry VIII

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 10:55:48 GMT

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#50 No more ménage à trois - Ep 5 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 18:43:33 GMT

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#49 'Like an episode of the Borgias' - Ep 4 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 09:04:43 GMT

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#46 Missions impossible - Ep 3 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:47:51 GMT

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#45 The jilting of Princess Mary - Ep 2 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 07:18:07 GMT

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#44 Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - Ep 1 Henry VIII, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:13:32 GMT

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#40 Henry VIII: his pope, Katherine, Anne and FLORENCE

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 12:26:58 GMT

Having looked at the role of the pope in Philip and Mary's burnings, we take a look at the pope Henry had to deal with.After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing. Pope Clement was trapped between a rock and a hard place: the only way to save his Medici family’s city of Florence was to refuse Henry his divorce and split Christendom.

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#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 07:26:39 GMT

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#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 07:21:03 GMT

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#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:02:44 GMT

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#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 25 May 2022 07:01:38 GMT

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#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 of Bloody Mary Tudor?

Wed, 18 May 2022 07:53:37 GMT

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#33 Sex, Hollywood and Fashion

Wed, 11 May 2022 07:19:18 GMT

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#09 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Wed, 04 May 2022 12:26:00 GMT

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#08 I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 07:33:08 GMT

RE-RELEASING UPON POPULAR DEMAND. As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason?

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#07 That Dress - Ep 1 '2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 07:32:29 GMT

RE-RELEASING AT PUBLIC REQUEST: 2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people?

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#60 After 1918 - the Secrets are Out - Ep 8 Secret History of Suffragettes

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 07:26:25 GMT

RE-RELEASED FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?

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#43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote - Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 07:15:26 GMT

Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Their massive peaceful Pilgrimage of 1913 - from 6 corners of the UK - is great PR. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 election all three parties would have been vying to give women the vote. But then… war breaks out.

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#42 Their violence backfired - Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:42:00 GMT

RE-RELEASING FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.

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#41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn't admit to - Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 10:06:08 GMT

RE-RELEASING FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.

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#37 Hunger strikes and force feeding - Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 08:46:44 GMT

RE-RELEASING FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say but Emmeline Pankhurst tears it up and manoeuvres anyone with a socialist agenda out. Who exactly is this organisation for?

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#36 The Pankhursts didn’t want the poor to get the vote - Ep 3 The Suffragettes

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 20:40:59 GMT

RE-RELEASING FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.

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#35 Most women didn’t want the vote - Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:34:58 GMT

RE-RELEASE for Women's History Month. We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.

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#34 Getting the vote in 1918: the secret strategy - Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:17:19 GMT

RE-RELEASE for Women's History Month. Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her.

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#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:31:02 GMT

On 14 July 1916 senior officers finally decided to ignore Haig. At the Battle of Bazentin Ridge they put to use everything that was good practice and broke in to the German lines. But because junior officers at the front were not permitted to take a decision, and their commanders in their chateaux were hopelessly out of touch, it was never converted into a ‘break through.’ Another 9,000 lives lost for very little gain. After the disaster of the Somme, whitewash was elevated to a new military art form. Haig and other senior officers lied in their accounts. Haig ultimately blamed the French. Haig was even promoted by his friend the King. But he got his comeuppance on 26 March 1918 when command of the British army was handed to the French. The defeat of the Germans would be masterminded not by Haig but by Ferdinand Foch.

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#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 09:51:23 GMT

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#65 Haig's war crime on The Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:44:37 GMT

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#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 21:02:40 GMT

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#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 08:36:47 GMT

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#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 12:39:44 GMT

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#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 12:17:53 GMT

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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 10:18:24 GMT

Hogmanay Special.Synopsis: In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper wrote a famous paper that claimed that Scottishness had been invented. Actually, what the Professor meant by ‘Scottishness’ was mainly just Scottish highland dress – tartan kilts. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction.

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#23 the last million men? - Ep7 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 17:00:03 GMT

Rereleasing series on why Britain went to war in 1914 ahead of new series in New Year on the Battle of the Somme 1916. On first day 57,000 casualties. We have a new story to tell.Synopsis: One day after Britain goes to war - ‘at sea’ - on 4 August 1914 the first War Council unceremoniously throws out the army’s secret plan to send a few divisions to meet the Germans head on and win quick, painless glory fighting alongside the French. Only then do the four men who had single-handedly thrown away the chance of avoiding a general European war, understand what Britain’s most prestigious soldier, Kitchener, has been warning since 1911. That a war with Germany would last at least 3 years and it would come down to ‘the last million men’ Britain could send.

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#22 The bullying of Edward Grey - Ep 6. WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 15:30:17 GMT

Rereleasing why we went to war in 1914, ahead of new series in New Year on The Battle of the Somme, 1916. Extraordinary stories to tell.Synopsis: A right-wing anti-German contingent call their campaign for war, the weekend of 31 July-2 August 1914 a ‘pogrom’. All talks of peace are, in their words, a German-Jewish plot to keep Britain out of the war for financial reasons. They have the support of the Conservative party, the British and French military, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the press. But how on earth does Grey persuade the anti-war Liberal Cabinet and Parliament? And WHY?

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#21 8pm 1 August 1914 war in Belgium and France is off - Ep 5 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 17:21:52 GMT

Rereleasing ahead of new series in New Year on The Battle of the Somme. New story to tell.Synopsis: 8pm German time the Kaiser orders champagne, halts the German advance towards Belgium, and sends a telegram of congratulations to his cousin George V at Buckingham Palace. The Liberal British Cabinet had voted to remain neutral on 31 July. Earlier on 1 August Foreign Secretary Grey met the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky (one of a string of meetings that week) to tell him that France might also remain neutral. A few hours later they met again and Grey added that even if France went to war Britain would not. So what went so catastrophically wrong in the next 72 hours?

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#20 Hanging on Russia's apron strings - Ep 4 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:19:01 GMT

Rerelease of this series, ahead of new series on The Battle of the Somme, 1916, to be released in the New Year. NEW story to tell.Synopsis:In 1912 a deal between War Secretary Haldane and the German chancellor Bethmann-Holweg to allow Britain to retain naval supremacy if they both remained neutral (if neither side had started the war), was rudely sabotaged. It involved lying to Cabinet that the Germans were demanding a full-scale Anglo-German alliance, which they weren’t. It meant throwing away what the majority of the Cabinet saw as the best chance to contain Russian expansion, by making common cause with Germany. Russia, allied to the French, could now call all the shots.

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#19 Bicycling holidays along the French-Belgian border - Ep 3 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:05:59 GMT

Rerelease ahead of new series on The Battle of the Somme 1 July 1916 after New Year. A new story to tell...Synopsis: How did what friendly chats between British and French generals since 1905 turn into a commitment to send a small British Expeditionary Force to France at the start of a war with Germany? A commitment that had not been agreed by Cabinet, Parliament or the Navy?

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#18 ‘Spies of the Kaiser’ - Ep 2 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 19:28:18 GMT

Rereleasing why we got into the First World War ahead of our new series on the Battle of the Somme to be released in New Year - losses on the first day 1 July 1916 were largest in British history. We have a new story to tell.Synopsis: We look at anti-German hysteria in Britain 1906-1909. The British publishing phenomena of 1906 was The Invasion of 1910 (by Germans), serialised in the Daily Mail and marketed by men walking around London in Prussian uniforms. This chimed perfectly with the anti-German clique at the foreign office.

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#17 The elephant in the room - Ep 1 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 15:08:03 GMT

Rereleasing ahead of our New Year series on the Battle of the Somme, and for those whose podcast platforms don't show our playlists per series.Synopsis: Britain’s main problem by 1910 was Russian expansion towards its Persian oil and India, the jewel in Britain’s crown. So why did Britain go to war to SUPPORT Russia and AGAINST Germany which was its closest European friend and trading partner?

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#16 The men behind the myth - Ep 7 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 15:24:07 GMT

Rereleasing series with greatest international following: Final stand-alone epSynopsis: Within days of 28 October 1962 two journalists publish the official but untruthful White House account, as instructed and edited by the President. They also call-out a political enemy for daring to consider a humiliating missile swap with the Soviets. But we show how the Kennedys had already suggested this very missile swap to Khrushchev via private backchannels, on condition he kept it secret. Which he did.

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#15 ‘The Fourteenth Day’ - Ep 6 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 14:09:51 GMT

Rereleasing series with greatest international following for those whose podcast platforms don't show playlists per seriesSynopsis: 28 October 1962: by holding his nerve Kennedy defuses the crisis in just 13 days. He says it’s over although he’s unable to verify whether Khrushchev ever withdraws his missiles or not. The last missiles do indeed leave Cuba on day 48 of the crisis but for very different reasons.

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#14 ‘Eyeball to eyeball’ - ep 5 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 10:07:39 GMT

Rereleasing our series with greatest international interest for those whose podcast platforms don't do playlists per seriesSynopsis: 22 October 1962: President Kennedy goes on prime-time TV and announces a blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet missiles reaching the island. But US sailors call the so-called ‘quarantine’ nothing but ‘grand theatrics.’ Not a single Soviet ship is stopped by the US Navy. What was going on?

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#13 ‘Russian roulette’ - Ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 14:53:23 GMT

Rereleasing our series with the largest number of international fans, to help those whose podcast platforms don't provide playlists per series:Synopsis: 15 October 1962. Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at the polls; as would ignoring them which is what his allies advise him to do. So, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the President chooses ‘to play Russian Roulette with nuclear missiles.’

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#12 ‘The only way to save Cuba’ - Ep 3 of Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 10:25:52 GMT

Rereleasing our series with greatest international following for those whose podcast platforms don't do series playlists:Synopsis: The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet.

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#11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - Ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 14:27:48 GMT

Rereleasing our series with the greatest international following for those whose podcast platforms don't enable playlists per series. Do contact us on @historycafepod if you are enjoying our broadcasts:Synopsis: 1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba?

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#10 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - Ep 1 Cuba Missile Crisis

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 16:14:51 GMT

Re-releasing our series with widest international appeal in order for those podcast platforms that don't enable series playlists.Synopsis: We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power.' So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war?

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#06 London fires were visible from France - Ep 6 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 14:26:41 GMT

Rereleasing our most popular series for those who can't find our playlists for each series on their podcast platforms:Synopsis: Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended.

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#05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - Ep 5 Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 12:30:14 GMT

Re-releasing our most popular series for those who struggle to find it without playlist functions on their podcast platforms:Synopsis: The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason?

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#04 More than a double bluff - Ep 4 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 18:10:52 GMT

Our most popular series being re-released in broadcast order for those who can't find it!Synopsis: Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who?

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#03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - Ep 3 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:31:57 GMT

Our most popular series re-released here in order, especially but not exclusively (!) for Apple podcast listeners because Apple don't do playlists:Synopsis: Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight.’ So why in private is Churchill saying he doubts the invasion would ever take place?

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#02 A Battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 Who won the Battle of Britain?

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:08:11 GMT

Our second ever podcast. Re-released for our new audience who haven't found it yet. Each episode in the series is an enjoyable listen on its own.Synopsis: Head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, was jealous of the man who was pushing for an invasion of Britain - former British ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. If the Luftwaffe could bomb Britain out of the war, there'd be no need for a risky invasion, and he could get back into favour with Herr Hitler.

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#01 Waterworld Flotilla - Ep 1 Who won the Battle of Britain?

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 16:08:58 GMT

We're putting this podcast out again because it's by far our most popular and yet if you've found us recently you may never have discovered it.Synopsis: The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible?

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Remembrance Day 2021 - Aren't We Forgetting Something 211110

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 14:32:29 GMT

We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for last year's Remembrance Day. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again.At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do the military remember them?

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Gunpowder? The Plot that never was

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 18:05:47 GMT

BEFORE you light your bonfire and set off your fireworks on November 5, why not ‘spare a thought’ for Guy Fawkes, who we’re still sending up in flames, more than 400 years after the crime he’s SUPPOSED to have committed. Look for our playlist here with 7 episodes, called Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot. It's a grisly story with shady characters, state torture, spies including Shakespeare's rival Ben Jonson, and a network of men skilled at framing enemies particularly Catholics who sent Mary Queen of Scots to her death - this was called practicing or entrapment. Here is the soundtrack from a short YouTube promo. We recorded in one take in our study so we've left the hesitations in for you here. We wouldn't usually!

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1st Anniversary Promo

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 10:00:52 GMT

Celebrating our 60th episode of well-researched reinterpretations of history using the latest academic research but brought to you in an accessible format.

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#60 After 1918 - the Secrets are Out - Ep 8 Secret History of Suffragettes

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 07:19:54 GMT

The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?

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#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Slavery

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 07:00:51 GMT

By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.

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#58 The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Slavery

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 07:04:53 GMT

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#57 From mayor to meat market. Getting elected in the 18th Century.

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:43:43 GMT

An accessible podcast on Jon’s academic book Partisan Politics – looking for consensus in Eighteenth-Century Towns (Exeter University Press 2021). See Publications page on this website for 45% discount.It is still wrongly but commonly thought that in the 18th Century the gentry bought their way into a parliamentary seat, mainly by purchasing land, or by gaining the approval of some unrepresentative local patron who had the borough in his pocket. You've heard of pocket boroughs, and rotten boroughs? Well, Jon's 1985 doctoral thesis, researched entirely from local documents rescued from mouldy parish chests and corporation vaults, contradicted so many of the leading historians of the day so baldly that although Jon was awarded his doctorate he could never publish. But NOW that the old orthodoxy has collapsed and everyone agrees with Jon, he’s been able to bring out his book updated with all the latest scholarship. It’s a world of lively – not to say riotous, overheated, rumbustious, often embittered, endlessly partisan, endlessly changing and challenging - local politics. What reading the local records tells us is that it was a world of lively local democracy. Enjoy!

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#56 The Empire Strikes Back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 07:10:04 GMT

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#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Slavery

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:41:43 GMT

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#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not morality ended British Enslavement

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 06:57:53 GMT

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#53 '1066 And All That' - really serious nonsense

Tue, 25 May 2021 20:00:29 GMT

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#52 Anne Boleyn – Henry's MacGuffin

Tue, 18 May 2021 21:05:24 GMT

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#51 Marrying Anne Boleyn, the best of a bad job - Ep 6 Henry VIII

Wed, 12 May 2021 07:05:43 GMT

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#50 No more ménage à trois - Ep 5 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 05 May 2021 07:34:51 GMT

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#49 'Like an episode of the Borgias' - Ep 4 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 06:47:32 GMT

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#48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:25:26 GMT

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#47 The Law-less frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 07:14:44 GMT

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#46 Missions impossible - Ep 3 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 07:21:57 GMT

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#45 The jilting of Princess Mary - Ep 2 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 07:03:27 GMT

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#44 Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - Ep 1 Henry VIII, his wife, his lover, the French

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:19:23 GMT

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#43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote - Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 07:51:37 GMT

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#42 The violence backfired - Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 07:59:32 GMT

November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.

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#41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn't admit to - Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 08:20:46 GMT

From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.

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#40 Henry VIII: the pope, Katherine, Anne and Florence

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 08:15:52 GMT

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#39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:28:35 GMT

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#38 Newton the alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 08:16:24 GMT

Newton the alchemist. Ep 1. The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practice alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.

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#37 Hunger strikes and force feeding - Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 08:06:52 GMT

The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say but Emmeline Pankhurst tears it up and manoeuvres anyone with a socialist agenda out. Who exactly is this organisation for?WE'RE TAKING A BREAK FROM SUFFRAGETTES FOR 3 WEEKS AND WILL BE BACK WITH EP 5 ON 3 MARCH 2021

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#36 The Pankhursts didn't want the poor to get the vote - Ep 3 Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 08:13:48 GMT

The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.

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#35 Most women didn't want the vote - Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 08:14:05 GMT

We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.

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#34 Getting the vote in 1918 - the secret strategy - Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 07:33:16 GMT

Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her.

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#33 Sex, Hollywood and Fashion

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 08:24:15 GMT

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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 08:28:03 GMT

In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper wrote a famous paper that claimed that Scottishness had been invented. Actually, what the Professor meant by ‘Scottishness’ was mainly just Scottish highland dress – tartan kilts. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction.

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#31 ‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November’ - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 08:08:12 GMT

At the time, London gossip accused Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more?

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#30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 08:22:14 GMT

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#29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 04:54:19 GMT

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#28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 08:05:40 GMT

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#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:03:50 GMT

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#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 08:55:59 GMT

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#25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 08:31:52 GMT

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything.

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#24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 10:26:14 GMT

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Café Bite: What was great about the Great Reform Act of 1832?

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:31:33 GMT

Was Britain any more democratic after 1832? Is it any more democratic now?

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Café Bite : Why the US lost the Vietnam war

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:26:23 GMT

In May 1967 US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara reported that the war was un-winnable because of the strategy of the North Vietnamese army and not because of the Vietcong in the South. That was two years after they got involved and before the serious escalation of the war which dragged on for another 6 years before the US withdrew. What was going on?

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#23 the last million men? - Ep7 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:19:49 GMT

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#22 The bullying of Edward Grey - Ep 6. WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 06:22:21 GMT

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#21 8pm 1 August 1914 war in Belgium and France is off - Ep 5 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 13:02:45 GMT

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#20 Hanging on Russia's apron strings - Ep 4 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 07:24:11 GMT

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#19 Bicycling holidays along the French-Belgian border - Ep 3 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 07:30:25 GMT

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#18 ‘Spies of the Kaiser’ - Ep 2 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 06:37:25 GMT

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#17 The elephant in the room - Ep 1 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 05:04:57 GMT

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Café Bite: The Last of the Magicians?

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 06:05:27 GMT

Café Bite: The Last of the Magicians? by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

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#16 The men behind the myth - ep 7 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 05:55:15 GMT

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#15 ‘The Fourteenth Day’ - ep 6 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:16:36 GMT

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#14 ‘Eyeball to eyeball’ - ep 5 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 07:08:23 GMT

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#13 ‘Russian roulette’ - ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 07:24:57 GMT

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#12 ‘The only way to save Cuba’ - ep 3 of Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 07:55:17 GMT

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#11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 10:06:04 GMT

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#10 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - ep 1 Cuba Missile Crisis

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 08:56:22 GMT

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#09 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 11:08:55 GMT

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#08 I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler - ep 2 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 08:52:41 GMT

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#07 That Dress - ep 1 of 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:43:51 GMT

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#06 London fires were visible from France - ep 6 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:19:03 GMT

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#05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - ep 5 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:18:48 GMT

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#04 More than a double bluff - ep 4 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:18:09 GMT

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#03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - ep 3 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:12 GMT

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#02 A battle for air superiority? - ep 2 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:12 GMT

Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether.

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#01 Waterworld Flotilla - ep 1 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:12 GMT

The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible?

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Podcast promo trailer

Thu, 21 May 2020 16:27:05 GMT

New podcast from Oxford, England. Historical investigations into British and a few American stories – well known episodes that are stuck in our collective memory but in one way or another don’t look quite right to us. We ask what we don’t know, how we know what we do, who told us and why. We explore the discourses of the time and end up telling these stories in a completely new way.

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