Travels Through Time

Today the archaeologist and executive director of World Monuments Fund, John Darlington, takes us on a dramatic trip back to the 1690s to witness a devastating earthquake in the Caribbean. Scroll down, too, for news of a special discount code.

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After its capture by the English in 1655, Port Royal, Jamaica, became a place of great significance. Home to around 6,500 people by the 1690s, it was known variously as 'the fairest town of all the English plantations' and the ‘richest and wickedest city in the New World’.

Everything, though, changed on the morning of 7 June 1692 when an earthquake struck the town. Two thirds of Port Royal sunk immediately into the sea. Sand liquefied. Ships capsized and one was lifted over rooftops by the subsequent tsunami.

It was a blow from which the town would never recover. Today Port Royal is a small fishing village. The ruined remains of its heyday survive under the sea.  

Our guide on this dangerous journey back in time is the celebrated archaeologist John Darlington whose ‘obsession with ruinous and abandoned places’ began as a baby being pushed around the ruins of Leptis Magna in his pram.

Darlington currently works for the World Monuments Fund, and his new book Amongst The Ruins, Why Civilisations Collapse and Communities Disappear is published today by Yale University Press. In it, he tells the stories of lost places as diverse as ancient Assyria and twentieth century St Kilda, grouping them around five themes, before offering some ideas for how this kind of destruction can be avoided in the future.

*** SPECIAL OFFER for listeners: to get 20% off John Darlington's Amongst The Ruins, Why Civilisations Collapse and Communities Disappear (just £20 with free postage and packing) head to the Yale website and enter the code RUINS . Valid from 11 April to 30 June and for UK orders only.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 6 June 1692. Merchants, slaves, pirates and priests throng the heady streets of Port Royal, where there is one alehouse for every ten people. Huge ships arrive leaden with luxuries, docking in the deep-water harbour of the town, which is built on a fragile series of coral islands.

Scene Two: 7 June 1692. The Reverend Emmanuel Heath sits down with his friend John White, acting Governor of Jamaica, to enjoy a glass of wormwood wine. An earthquake strikes the city followed by a tsunami, sucking entire streets into the liquified sand, throwing ships over the collapsing buildings and ejecting corpses from graves.

Scene Three: 8 June 1692. The survivors survey the hellish remains of their city, most of which has disappeared under the sea or lies in ruins. A series of aftershocks cause more destruction and death, meanwhile diseases like Cholera begin to take hold, killing thousands more in the days to come.

Memento: A French pocket watch excavated from the under-sea ruins of the city, stopped at 11.40am on 7 June, the moment the earthquake struck.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: John Darlington

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Yale University Press

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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‘I have so often wondered’, the historian Katja Hoyer says, ‘what I would have made of the state that I was born into had I been born a few years earlier and lived through it in the way that other people did.’

That state was East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This was a nation that emerged out of the ashes of World War II and existed until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990. The GDR is remembered today in the West as a neurotic, oppressive nation, synonymous with its Ministry for State Security or Stasi.

But in her new book Beyond The Wall, Hoyer attempts to present a fresh image. What was life really like for the citizens of the GDR, especially its youth? How did the ideals of the time impact them? Why were young leftists - among them Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn - so drawn to visit?

In this revealing episode, Hoyer takes Artemis Irvine back on a trip to 1973 to find out. 

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and. A visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the podcast The New Germany. Her new book, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, is out this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 29 March 1973, the Kosmos cinema, for the premiere of the film The Legend of Paul and Paula.

Scene Two: 2 July 1973, East Berlin in the Alexanderplatz, for the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Scene Three: 7 August 1973, the death of Walter Ulbricht, the man at the top of the GDR’s political framework.

Memento: A silk scarf bearing the inscripted hopes and dreams of anyone the guest may have met at the Youth Festival.

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Katja Hoyer

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner:

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

See where 1973 fits on our Timeline

In this episode we talk to the game designer David Milne about his historical work on the hugely popular real time strategy game Company of Heroes 3. Milne takes us back to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, from Tobruk in North Africa to Anzio in Italy, as we learn how games developers faithfully evoke the past.

Company of Heroes 3 is the latest instalment in the multi-million selling Company of Heroes franchise. Developed by Relic Entertainment in Vancouver, the game has been enthusiastically critically received. Gaming Trend called it ‘a masterpiece’. The reviewer for the NME described it as ‘fiercely intelligent.’

To accompany the title’s launch SEGA have developed a supporting content hub  called The Briefing Room. Filled with interactive maps, biographies of significant military figures and featuring analysis by leading academic authorities, it shows how faithfully SEGA have confronted the history that informs the game. Click here to explore The Briefing Room.

David Milne is a senior game designer at Relic Entertainment.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: June 1942, Second Battle of Tobruk

Scene Two: December 1943, Battle of Ortona

Scene Three: March 1944, Anzio Beachhead

Memento: As many soldiers’ memoirs as he can carry

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: David Milne

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: SEGA

Theme music: Anvil Main Theme, Company of Heroes

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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Today the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe. But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary work. In doing so they became, as Bakewell explains, ‘the first of the great literary humanists’.

This is the starting point of Sarah Bakewell’s new book, Humanly Possible, a broad and sweeping history of humanism. In this episode she takes us back to these uncertain first moments, when first Petrarch and then Boccaccio started to hunt for ancient manuscripts and to distil their learning into ambitious literary works of their own.

Sarah Bakewell’s new book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking*, Enquiry and Hope. It will be published next week.

*In homage to this freethinking, we’ve given Sarah a little more leeway (three years instead of the usual one) than usual this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 1348. Parma.  The Black Death spreads around the Italian peninsula as well as much of the rest of Europe. The writer Francesco Petrarch, living in Parma, does not catch it, but many of his friends die, including "Laura", the woman who inspired many of his most beautiful love sonnets.

Scene Two: 1349. Parma, Padua and Florence.  This first outbreak of the disease recedes (though not for long).  Driven by a pervasive sense of loss, Petrarch - now mostly living in Padua - starts gathering copies of the letters he had written to friends over the years. 

Scene Three: 1350. Florence. Petrarch and Boccaccio meet. Petrarch is passing through Florence, visiting the city of his exiled family's origins for the first time in his life.

Memento: A cutting from one of Petrarch experiments with one his laurel bushes.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Sarah Bakewell

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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The relationship between England and India is a deep and complex one. In this episode the academic and author of Courting India, Nandini Das, takes us back to a significant moment at the very beginning of this relationship. She tells us all about Sir Thomas Roe, the courtier who led the first English embassy to India.

Roe's mission was an exciting and a daunting one. Stories about the riches of India had long been exchanged in England and, when he stepped ashore in Surat in 1615, he was able to see the might of the great Mughal Empire for himself. In contrast, England was regarded by many as an island of little consequence.

But, as Das explains, there was one figure that Roe was desperate to impress. This was the richest man in the world, the fourth Mughal emperor, Jahangir. In early 1616, after arriving in Ajmer, he would get his chance.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Brought up in India, she was educated at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, before moving to England for further study. Her book, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire is out this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 10 January 1616, Mughal imperial court (durbar), Ajmer. The first meeting between Roe and the emperor, Jahangir.

Scene Two: 24 May 1616, imperial private audience chambers, Ajmer. Roe desperately clings on to his English identity and has a problem with a runaway Englishman who wants to enter Mughal service.

Scene Three: 18 December 1616. In the Mughal imperial procession (lashkar) across Rajasthan, following the emperor Jahangir. Roe

Memento: A miniature portrait, belonging to Thomas Roe.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Nandini Das

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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In this deeply moving episode from 2020 the New York Times bestselling author Ariana Neuman told her father's extraordinary story for the very first time. Hans Neumann was a young Jewish man from Prague who managed to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust.

Ariana Neumann grew up in the Venezuela of the 1970s and 1980s. This was a land of possibility and progress. Her father Hans Neumann - a hugely successful industrialist and patron of the arts – epitomised both these characteristics.

But while Hans was outwardly a paragon of success and strength, there were parts of his private self that were unsettling to his close family. He would wake at night screaming in a language his daughter did not understand. He hardly ever mentioned his childhood in central Europe. He never said that he was Jewish. ‘Life,’ he would tell his daughter, ‘was to be lived in the present.’

On his death in September 2001, Ariana discovered a box of papers and photographs that her father had left her. They became the starting point for a personal investigation into her father’s European family and an unspoken history of horrific persecution and enthralling survival during the Holocaust.

This episode of Travels Through Time was recorded on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. During the course of this conversation Ariana guides us back to the drama and tragedy of the year 1944: a defining year for the Neumann family of Prague.

To see Hans’s doll, Zdenka ring and the Jan’s identity card – some of the objects discussed during the course of this conversation – please visit our website.

When Time Stopped was published internationally in February 2020. It was an instant New York Times Bestseller.

Scene One: June 23 1944, Red Cross Visit to the Camp of Terezín, CZ. The place is beautified. Thousands are sent to Auschwitz to ease overcrowding and a charade is enacted to fool the International Red Cross inspectors.

Scene Two: September 29/30 1944, The arrival of transport EI in Auschwitz, Poland.

Scene Three: October 9 1944, Berlin Germany. Hans Neumann has been hiding in plain sight and using a fictitious identity. He receives a summons (issued October 5th) to appear in the Nazi District Court in Prague. Going back to Prague and appearing in court would, almost certainly, mean death.

Memento: The sound of Otto Neumann humming the folk song Golem.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Ariana Neumann

Producer: Maria Nolan

This week we tackle the fascinating and complex relationship between science and religion, in the company of the academic and writer Nicholas Spencer.

Spencer takes us back to a dramatic moment of conflict that began at the end of the 1850s with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. This book ignited a fierce debate about his new theory of natural selection and of humanity’s place in the world.

The feud would become increasingly bitter over the year that followed. It would ultimately lead to the famous Oxford debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) and Bishop “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce in June 1860.

Spencer guides us through all this history, taking us back to meet Darwin himself. He gives us an insight into Darwin's personal life, his relationships with his wife and family and the effect losing his beloved daughter Annie had on his faith in God.

Nicholas Spencer is a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London and director of the think tank Theos, which investigates the place of faith in society. His new book is, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Charles Darwin receiving a letter from clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, in November 1859, congratulating him on The Origin of Species, an advance copy of which he has just read.

Scene Two: The publication of the most controversial book of the age – not On The Origin of Species but Essays and Reviews, in March 1860, igniting a passionate debate about Biblical texts.

Scene Three: The famous Oxford debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) and Bishop “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce in late June 1860.

Memento: One of Charles Darwin’s notebooks, written when he returned from his voyage on the Beagle, as his theory of evolution began to take shape in his mind.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Nicholas Spencer

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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Nothing symbolises the might of imperial Rome like their roads. Expertly engineered and perfectly cambered, they were the arteries of the great empire through which merchants, armies and information flowed.

In this episode we will follow one of those lost roads back in time to the very beginning of the Roman occupation of Britain, in the company of the writer Christopher Hadley. He takes us back to 51 AD, a turning point in the invasion, when Caratacus, King of the Catuvellauni Tribe and leader of the British resistance, was defeated and capitulated to his Roman adversaries.

Christopher Hadley is a journalist and author. His acclaimed first book, Hollow Places, was a Times Book of the Year. The Road, A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past was published recently.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Somewhere on the English/Welsh border - Caratacus’ last stand.

Scene Two: Somewhere in northern England - Cartumandua hands Caratacus over to the Romans.

Scene Three: Somewhere in Rome - Caratacus appears before the Emperor Claudius who grants him clemency.

Memento: A rare Caratacus coin.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Christopher Hadley

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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1066 was the year that England’s destiny was decided. In this superbly analysed episode, the author Don Hollway takes us back to the scenes of the three great battles that changed the course of history: Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings.

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The drama of 1066 began in its very first week, with the death of the old king, Edward the Confessor, on 5 January. The following day the powerful earl Harold Godwinson was crowned in Westminster Abbey and the dynamic was set for the clash that followed.

Harold’s claim to the throne was famously put down to a deathbed wish from Edward. But this was complicated by an earlier promise Edward had seemingly to Duke William of Normandy. While King Harold looked nervously towards the Channel that summer, for signs of a Norman invasion, another grave threat was developing in the north.

In September 1066 the news reached London that Harald ‘Hardrada’ the Viking king had landed with a great army of invasion near York. The month that followed would be one of the most dramatic and decisive in English history as a trio of battles were fought in the north and south.

In this episode, Don Hollway, the author of The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada takes us back to these three battles. While they were fought on different terrain and in different parts of the country, he points out, they all had one key point in common: the failure of a shield wall.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 20 September 1066. The Battle of Fulford, just south of York in the north of England.

Scene Two: 25 September 25 1066. Stamford Bridge, east of York.

Scene Three: 14 October 1066. Hastings on the south coast, or more precisely Senlac Hill, a few miles inland.

Memento: Harald Hardrada’s raven flag or Harold Godwinson’s ‘fighting man’ flag.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Don Hollway

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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Here is another gem from our archive. In this fascinating episode the archaeologist and writer Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes takes us back further than we’ve ever been before, 125,000 years, to meet our extinct kindred: the Neanderthals.

We visit the vibrant wild woodlands of Britain, a hornbeam forest on the European continent and a German lakeshore. Rebecca describes the world as it was in the interglacial age known as the Eemian and tell us how the Neanderthals lived, worked and loved in this warm woodland environment.

The subject matter and scenes that feature in this episode come from Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.

For much much more visit: tttpodcast.com

Show Notes:

Scene One: Britain, 123,000 years ago. A catastrophic flood breaks the ridge connecting Britain to the rest of Europe. The island becomes a wasteland for many thousands of years.

Scene Two: A hornbeam forest in Germany, during the Eemian. We meet the weird and wonderful animals that populated the continent at the time.

Scene Three: Neumark lakeshore, also during the Eemian. Tiny remains of organic material provide insight into the kinds of tools the Neanderthals were making and using.

Memento: One of the spears used to kill deer at the Neumark lakeshore.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Producers: Maria Nolan

Titles: Jon O

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

Podcast Partner: ColorGraph

In the early sixteenth century, some of the world’s most famous works of art were being created, many of them in Florence and Rome. In this episode, the acclaimed art historian James Hall takes us back to 1504, just as Michelangelo was finishing his monumental statue of David, the first of its size in the modern era.

His great rival, Leonardo da Vinci, also in Florence at this time, was on the committee to decide where the statue should be placed. The original idea of hoisting it hundreds of feet into the air to the top of the cathedral was sensibly shelved, and discussions got underway to find a less complicated location.

For more about this episode, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

James Hall is a research Professor at Southampton University and has published widely on an eclectic range of art history subjects. His stunningly illustrated new book The Artist’s Studio, A Cultural History is available now.

Scene One: 1504. Michelangelo completes his monumental sculpture of David.

Scene Two: 1504. Leonardo da Vinci sits on a committee to decide where to locate the marble David. He and Michelangelo bump into each other in the street and have an argument about Dante.

Scene Three: 1504. Leonardo and Michelangelo are commissioned to paint large battle murals in the Great Council Hall of Florence. They are given separate workplaces but never finish the commissions.

Memento: Michelangelo’s bronze life-sized statue of David which disappeared sometime after 1504.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: James Hall

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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In this episode the Guardian journalist Tania Branigan takes us back to the opening phases of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Mao Zedong’s attempt to purge Chinese society of its impurities.

Over the course of a few fraught months in the summer of 1966, the transformational movement that would last for an anguished decade, began.

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In Britain 1966 is remembered as a glittering time. It was the year of the World Cup, of Pet Sounds, Revolver and Andy Warhol. But as Western culture flowered, far away in China something very different was happening.

All these years on, today’s guest, Tania Branigan points out, the Cultural Revolution remains a difficult event to properly comprehend. It moved through different stages. It was riven by contradictions. Its range was vast, touching people from all parts of society, from top to bottom, east to west.

And yet at the heart of much of the action lay the figure of Mao Zedong. By the mid-1960s Mao was regarded as an aging figure. Despite his glorious revolutionary past, it was not certain just what his future would be. But during the spring and summer of 1966 it became increasingly clear that Mao’s political ambitions were not at an end.

Tania Branigan is the author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, which has recently been released by Faber.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: April 16-24. Politburo standing committee (ie China’s top political body) meets in Hangzhou.

Scene Two: 16 July. Chairman Mao swims the Yangtze near Wuhan.

Scene Three: 18 August. Song Binbin pins the red armband on Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Memento: The first big character poster, painted in Beijing, that set off the Cultural Revolution.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Tania Branigan

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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It is difficult to hear the stories of medieval women, but one voice rings down the ages, clear as a bell. Alison, the Wife of Bath, is Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous creation: irrepressible, hilarious, insightful. She is the star of The Canterbury Tales with her outrageous stories and touching honesty.

An inspiration for a huge range of writers – from William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith – she is the sparkling subject at the heart of Marion Turner’s new book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography.

In this episode Turner takes us back to 1397. We visit Chaucer’s world in London and Oxfordshire. We hear the extraordinary story of John of Gaunt and his beloved mistress Katherine Swynford. Along the way we meet some real-life Alisons. These were women who ran businesses, travelled extensively, and lived independently, including one who was mayoress of London, not once, but twice.

Marion Turner is the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Her books include the prize-winning biography Chaucer: A European Life.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: January 1397. The English Parliament and the legitimatisation of John of Gaunt's children with Katherine Swynford.

Scene Two: End of 1397. Chaucer has been gifted a new grant of a yearly ton of wine from the King.

Scene Three: Summer. Margaret Stodeye heads off to St Paul's Cathedral to declare a vow of chastity.

Memento: Chaucer's handwritten draft of the Canterbury Tales.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Marion Turner

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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This week we’re heading back to the fourth century BC to take a look at one of the world’s greatest ever philosophers. Indeed, according to today’s guest, John Sellars, Aristotle may be even more than that. He might well be the single most important human ever to have lived.

Aristotle’s philosophical work transformed the people thought about the world around them. During his magnificent career he laid the foundation for science; he pioneered new methods for understanding drama and literature; he founded a new way of thinking about politics, and he invented formal logic.

But how did Aristotle do this? How was he shaped by the intellectual culture of Ancient Greece? What did he owe to his famous forebears, Plato and Socrates?

In this episode John Sellars engages with these questions as he describes the life of this hugely significant philosopher.

John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author of a sleek and stylish new short book, Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 347 BC. Aristotle leaves Plato’s Academy after twenty years.

Scene Two: 344 BC. Aristotle arrives on Lesbos and begins to study animals.

Scene Three: 335 BC. Aristotle returns to Athens, founds the Lyceum and embarks on a dizzying array of philosophical work.

Memento: A papyrus scroll containing one of Aristotle’s lost dialogues.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: John Sellars

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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The British Army can trace its origins back to the Acts of Union of 1707 and its rich history involves conflicts both large and small in all corners of the globe.

But as the twenty-first century dawned, the organisation found itself in a transitional phase and with something of an identity crisis. What exactly was its culture? What, with its resources, could it really be expected to achieve? What was its relevance to modern Britain?

Today’s guest, Simon Akam, sought to confront questions like these in his book Changing the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11. Grounded in his own first-hand experience and supported by hundreds of interviews, in this episode Akam explains the conclusions that he reached and the incredible resistance he experienced as he sought to bring his book to publication.

Simon Akam is a journalist and author. Born in Cambridge, he held a Gap Year Commission in the British Army before studying at the University of Oxford and Columbia Journalism School. He has worked for the New York Times, Reuters and Newsweek. Changing the Guard, published in 2021, is his first book.

Scene One: A tent in Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Jamie Loden edits a video.

Scene Two: Autumn 2006. Downing Street with Major-General Jonathan Shaw and Nigel Sheinwald.

Scene Three: 28 March 2006. The creation of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

Memento: A copy of a tabloid newspaper from 2006.

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Simon Akam

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

See where 2006 fits on our Timeline

It’s midwinter, we’re midway through our sixth season and we thought it was time to revisit a favourite old episode. Today we have for you a recording made at Buxton Literary Festival in 2019. It is with the Oxford professor and prize-winning historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. Our destination is the year 1536 and our subject is one of the most complex and fascinating in English political history: Thomas Cromwell.

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Thomas Cromwell, a self-described “ruffian”, was King Henry VIII’s chief minister in the 1530s. He was clever, driven and ruthless, qualities that have captivated novelists and historians for generations as they have attempted to capture his mysterious essence.

The year 1536 saw Cromwell at the peak of his career. As chief administrator of the realm he had vast and wide-ranging powers, but he also had enemies. Prominent among these, as we hear in this episode, was the King’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Thomas Cromwell by Diarmaid MacCulloch is now available in paperback from Penguin.

Scene One: 24 May 1536. Ambassador Eustache Chapuys and Thomas Cromwell debriefing after the execution of Anne Boleyn.

Scene Two: Around 3 October 1536 when King Henry VIII was told of the Lincolnshire Rising.

Scene Three: 22 December 1536. Thomas Cromwell sits in his house at the Rolls listening to the sounds of the magnificent procession of the King from Whitehall to Greenwich down Fleet Street.

Memento: The keyboard that Mark Smeaton played for Anne Boleyn

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch

Recording/Live Mix: Hannah Griffiths

Post production: Maria Nolan

As today’s guest Tim Clayton explains, 'the late eighteenth-century mixed the extremely crude with the extremely fine in a fascinating sort of way.’ The grand master of this potent concoction was the greatest political caricaturist of modern times: James Gillray.

Gillray worked in raucous, restless times. He began in the wake of the American War of Independence and, having charted each twist and turn of the French Revolution, he died a short time before the Battle of Waterloo.

In this time he pioneered a fearless new brand of political satire. No one was spared. He lampooned King George III; his son the Prince of W(h)ales; the prime minister William Pitt the Younger, and all the prominent cultural and political figures in London life.

But how did he get away with it? What was his true motivation? How clever really was James Gillray? In this episode the historian Tim Clayton takes us back to 1792, a testing year in Gillray's career, to find out.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Clayton’s latest book. James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire is out now.

Scene One: February/March 1792 London and Hannah Humphrey’s house at 18 Old Bond Street.

Scene Two: 21 May 1792. The Royal Proclamation against seditious writing.

Scene Three: December 1792. The French King is on trial and Gillray releases his series of ‘pro bono publico’ prints.

Memento: A fire screen, painted on both sides by Gillray, as presented by the artist to Hannah Humphrey.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Tim Clayton

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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We have our fair share of bizarre rulers in the twenty-first century, but the subject of today’s episode makes Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Il seem rather tame. According to the Oxford academic and bestselling novelist Harry Sidebottom, our guide this week, the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus was the maddest and baddest of them all.

Heliogabalus turned Rome upside down as he rampaged over political and religious tradition during his lust-fuelled, four-year reign, contributing to the instability and chaos of the later third century AD.

In this special end of year episode, we get into the spirit of Heliogabalus by allowing Harry Sidebottom to trample on our own tradition of choosing just one year in history to travel back to.

Today we visit three separate years, 218, 220 and 222 so we can hear the full extraordinary story he tells in his new book on the maddest emperor of them all.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Sidebottom’s latest book. The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome is out now.

Scene One: 1 May 218. Heliogabalus’ grandmother sneaks him out of Emesa (modern day Homs) in Syria to start the revolt that will elevate him to the position of Emperor of Rome.

Scene Two: Midsummer’s Day 220. Heliogabalus holds a huge parade in Rome to demonstrate his new religion.

Scene Three: March 222. Heliogabalus is murdered on the orders of his grandmother.

Memento: Heliogabalus’ horn.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Harry Sidebottom

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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The rivalry between Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger is one of the most intense in political history. Both were high-ranking figures of great gifts, but their personal feud was a powerful factor in the downfall of the Roman Republic.

Joining us in this episode to tell us more about Cato and Caesar’s contrasting characters and the dramatic historical events they lived through is the award-winning author and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, Josiah Osgood.

Osgood takes us back to the year 46BC. Here we see Caesar at his peerless best on the battlefield and then, shortly afterwards, we analyse Cato’s shocking and defiant response.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Osgood’s latest book. Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic is out now.

Show notes

Scene One: April 6, 46 BC, the Battle of Thapsus, North Africa.

Scene Two: April 10, 46 BC, Utica, North Africa: Cato’s suicide.

Scene Three: September, 46 BC, Rome, Caesar’s Egyptian triumph.

Memento: The sign that was paraded through the streets of Rome during Caesar’s Asia Minor Triumph with the words ‘Veni, vidi, vici’.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Josiah Osgood

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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In this episode Philip Mansel takes us inside the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, probably the most lavish, extraordinary royal palace ever built.

Versailles was a place where the fun never stopped. There were parties, plays, banquets, firework displays and concerts. Life at court was a giddy carousel of extravagance, culture, beauty, wit, sophistication and intrigue.

As the decorated historian Philip Mansel tells us in this sparkling episode, Versailles was the centre of power, politics and pleasure. It was the home of the royal family and the nobility, a hotbed of conspiracy and scandal.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Mansel’s award-winning book, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV.

Scene One: 17 November 1700. Louis XIV presents his seventeen-year-old grandson to assembled diplomats and courtiers as Philip V King of Spain, by the will of God and the will of the nation.

Scene Two: 1700. Military review of Louis XIV’s guards, the special regiment of cavalry nobles whom he loved and who formed the foundation of his power.

Scene Three: 1700. A procession in front of Louis at the Palace of Versailles of freed white French slaves, who had been captured by Algerian pirates in the Mediterranean.

Memento: One of the magnificent books from the Royal Printing Press.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Philip Mansel

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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As the English football team prepare for one of the most important games in their recent history at the Qatar World Cup, one of the nation’s finest sports writers takes us back to the year Gareth Southgate’s players are trying to emulate: 1966.

***

England’s performance in the first World Cups was underwhelming. For a nation that prided themselves on having invented the game, on successive occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s the English players were left to watch as West Germany and Brazil lifted the trophy.

1966 brought a chance to change all this. With the tournament being played at home, with a disciplined managed in Alf Ramsey and a fine crop of players including the Charlton brothers, as the summer progressed the supporters’ hopes rose. Here was the opportunity to realise Ramsey's bold prediction from 1963 that England were going to win.

Paul Hayward, who for many years was the Chief Sports Writer at the Daily Telegraph, takes us back to that fabled summer in English sporting history. In doing so he describes what football meant to the English, and how the English had forged a national identity around their beloved sport.

Paul Hayward is the author of England Football: The Biography

Scene One: Early summer 1966. England training camp at Hendon.

Scene Two: 30 June 1966. The cusp of the World Cup final.

Scene Three: July. Ashington, Northumberland. Jack and Bobby Charlton return to their home town after the historic victory.

Memento: A vinyl pressing of Revolver signed by The Beatles

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Paul Hayward

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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In this special episode the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan take us back into Australian history in three enchanting pieces of music. Each track features on their acclaimed album, This Is Us, which arose out of a collaborative project with the National Museum of Australia.

***

Over the past two decades the Grigoryan Brothers have established themselves as among the finest Australian musicians of their generation. Several years ago, following a chance meeting at a concert in Adelaide, they were invited to begin an unusual collaboration with the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

To mark its twentieth birthday the museum invited the brothers to select a series of objects from its collections and to use them as the inspiration for a series of original compositions. The project went forward during the Covid 19 Pandemic and in 2021 the resulting album, This Is Us, was published.

The music engages with a broad range of fascinating Australian histories, from ones connected with the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Strait peoples, to the cricketing feats of Donald Bradman, and those of the nineteenth-century astronomers who first scoured the southern skies.

In a departure from our usual format, we did not ask Slava and Leonard to pick one calendar year. Instead we invited them to play three songs and to tell us about the objects that inspired them. 

This Is Us by the Grigoryan Brothers is streaming now. Read more about the project at the National Museum of Australia’s website.

Song One: ‘Love Token’ – inspired by the convicts’ love tokens.

Song Two: ‘Stolen’ – inspired by a gate salvaged from a children’s home.

Song Three: ‘Fortunate Wind’ – inspired by an anchor belonging to HMS Investigator

Years: c.1932 / 1950s.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Production: Matt Hiley in Sydney / Maria Nolan in London

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

This week, the performer and author Elizabeth Wilson speaks to Artemis from the offices of Yale University Press in Bedford Square. Elizabeth tells us about the early life of a remarkable pianist, Maria Yudina, who rose to fame in Stalin’s Russia.

Maria Yudina was born in 1899 to a Jewish family in Nevel, a small town which now sits close to Russia’s border with Belarus. Legend has it that Maria was Stalin’s favourite pianist. Those who have seen Armando Iannucci’s satirical film The Death of Stalin may remember the opening scene in which a pianist is forced to repeat her live performance so that a recording can be made of it and sent to Stalin. As Elizabeth explains in her new biography of the musician, Playing with Fire, the provenance of this story and whether it is about Maria is unclear. However, there is no shortage of fascinating and true stories about Maria, as Elizabeth shows us in this conversation.

Maria came of age as the February revolution broke out in St Petersburg, where she was studying music. She took part briefly – even accidentally firing a rifle through a ceiling – before being questioned by a teacher from the conservatoire where she was studying. For most of her life though, Maria wasn’t a revolutionary but an intellectual. Her social circle was made up of the leading figures of Russia’s intelligentsia, including Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. 

In this episode we visit Maria in 1921, the year she graduated from the conservatoire and was appointed as a member of staff aged just 21. It was also a year in which the relationship between Russia’s new revolutionary state and the country’s artists and intellectuals felt uneasy and, at times, destructive. 

Show notes:

Scene One: Maria’s graduation ceremony.

Scene Two: Maria’s debut performance in Petrograd, which coincides with the poet Alexander Blok’s death and funeral. 

Scene Three: The end of the civil war and the introduction of NEP.

Memento: A chess set which shows pieces representing 2 sides of the Russian Civil War.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Elizabeth Wilson

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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On 2 November 1967 Winnie Ewing shocked the political establishment when she won the Scottish seat of Hamilton for the Scottish National Party. As today’s guest, Professor Murray Pittock explains, so began a month that would radically re-shape modern British politics.

***

For British politics the 1960s was a testing time. While the country experienced its fabled cultural flowering, it simultaneously had to come to terms with its reduced place in the world. Decolonisation was going ahead at pace. Sterling was losing its power as a currency. In geo-politics Britain did not know where to turn: to the United States, or towards Europe and the EEC.

In this episode Murray Pittock shows how Britain was forced to confront all of these issues within the space of one single month. November 1967 opened with a political shock, when the young politician Winnie Ewing won a bi-election for the Scottish National Party. During her campaign she made use of a gripping slogan: ‘Stop the World: Scotland Wants to Get On.’

Here was an early sign of something to come. And as the SNP rose north of the border, more trouble was simmering to the south in Westminster. Soon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, would be obliged to resign. And in Europe, too, Charles de Gaulle was poised to make matters still worse.

Professor Murray Pittock is one of Scotland’s foremost living historians. He is the Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Pro-Vice Principal. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which is Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present.

Scene One: 2 November 1967: Winnie Ewing wins the Hamilton by-election a total surprise, with the victory slogan ‘Stop the World: Scotland wants to get on’.

Scene Two: 18 November 1967: sterling devalued against the US $ by 14%; Chancellor of the Exchequer resigns.

Scene Three: 27 November 1967: UK application to join EEC vetoed for a second time by de Gaulle.

Memento: $1 Silver Certificate banknote

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Professor Murray Pittock

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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This week the Roman historian and archaeologist Jane Draycott takes us to meet one of history’s most glamorous and infamous couples, Antony and Cleopatra. 

We join them in a crucial year in the history of Ancient Rome, around 31/30 BCE, when the Roman republic fell away and Octavian – later Emperor Augustus – seized power and founded the Roman Empire, with disastrous consequences for Antony, Cleopatra and their children.

This dramatic piece of history forms the origin story of Cleopatra Selene, Antony and Cleopatra’s only daughter and the subject of Jane’s fascinating new book, Cleopatra’s Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen.

In this episode we explore the years leading up to the Battle of Actium as well as the battle itself and Antony and Cleopatra’s subsequent suicides. We unravel the truth behind some of the most famous stories about the couple, and explore the nature of female political power in the ancient world. 

Show notes

Scene One: 2nd September 31 BCE. The Battle of Actium.

Scene Two: 1st August 30 BCE. Octavian captures Alexandria and the suicide of Mark Antony. 

Scene Three: 10th August 30 BCE. The suicide of Cleopatra. 

Momento: Cleopatra’s long-lost mausoleum.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Jane Draycott

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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This Remembrance Week the best-selling historian James Holland takes us back to a crucial year in the Second World War. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers.

*

On the damp and blustery morning of 6 June 1944 the Sherwood Rangers fought their way onto Gold Beach. An armoured regiment, filled with Sherman tanks, the Sherwood Rangers had already had an exhausting war. From Palestine to North Africa, the young men in its ranks had been involved in much bitter fighting. Now, as D-Day began, the regiment began its bloodiest campaign yet.

This week’s guest, James Holland, takes us back to that time. He tells us about some of the Sherwood Rangers’ memorable individuals – men like the charismatic Stanley Christopherson and the awe-inspiring John Semken.

He explains the dilemma that confronted the Rangers as they tried to establish a beachhead on D-Day and he takes us back to a moment of huge personal bravery several weeks later as the Battle for Normandy played out.

Last of all, we see the Rangers on Christmas Day – exhausted, depleted but still with their humour and humanity.

The stories that feature in this week’s episode come from James Holland’s latest book. Brothers in Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment's Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day .

Scene One: Tuesday, 6 June - Gold Beach, Normandy

Scene Two: Monday, 26 June - Rauray Ridge, Normandy

Scene Three: Monday, 25 December - Schinnen, Netherlands

Memento: Sgt. George Dring’s tank Akilla

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: James Holland

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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As 1945 began the greatest conflict in human history was drawing to a close. But with the war in the west almost over, a new question was increasingly being asked. It was one to which Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt all had different answers. What was going to happen next?

In this episode the million-copy bestselling author Giles Milton takes us back to some key moments in 1945. At Yalta on the Crimean peninsula and later in the ruins of Berlin, the shape of the post war world – the world we know today – was beginning to take shape.

What is clear now was not so then. Were the Allies really friends or were, as Churchil worried to Anthony Eden, they hurtling towards a third world war? Arriving in Berlin at the start of July 1945, the US army colonel Frank Howley feared much the same. As Milton explains, it was Howley who saw before almost anyone else that the Germans had ceased to be enemies and the Russians had ceased to be friends.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Milton’s latest book. Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World.

Show notes

Scene One: 4 February 1945. Yalta. Opening of the Crimea Conference

Scene Two: 2 May 1945. Berlin. Yevgeny Khaldei takes a photograph of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag

Scene Three: 1 July 1945. Berlin. Colonel Howley arrives

Memento: A little of the Schliemann Gold

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Giles Milton

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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Walking around a cathedral today can be a solemn and an awe-inspiring experience, but what if we could stand inside the same building and travel back 800 years or so? In this episode we do exactly that.

Our guide is Dr Emma J. Wells, a historian, broadcaster and author of Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern powerhouse” of York Minster. She describes their origins, the striking and unusual stories attached to them and the people central to their history. 

In this episode, Emma takes me to the high medieval period, when European architecture was falling in love with the gothic style and cathedral-building was at its height. 

Dr Emma J. Wells’s new book Heaven on Earth is out now from Head of Zeus. 

Scene One: Canterbury cathedral, trinity chapel, the scene of St Thomas Becket’s elevation and translation into his new shrine.

Scene Two: Salisbury, the ceremonial laying of the first five foundation stones of the new cathedral after its move from Old Sarum.  

Scene Three: Chartres, France, William de Breton described the growing cathedral’s vaults as bringing to ‘look like the shell of a tortoise’ referring to the higher vaults and a longer and wider nave than any other in Christendom.

Memento: To restore the “super-shrine” of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Dr Emma J. Wells

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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In the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, his multi-award winning study of the Russian Revolution, Orlando Figes wrote ominously that, ‘the ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’

This year, as Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has played out, we have been able to glimpse some of these ghosts: fear, paranoia, grievance. All these emotions have arisen out of a long, complicated and contested history that Figes has attempted to explain for a Western readership in his illuminating new book: The Story of Russia.

In this episode we talk about Vladimir Putin’s use and misuse of history today and we look back to a particularly significant year in Russia’s past. 1917 brought revolution to Russia. ‘It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly’, Figes writes.

The Russian Revolution is an event that began in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in Feburary 1917 and thereafter was driven forward by Vladimir Lenin's singular character. We scruitinise this event, as ever, in three telling scenes.

Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia is out now from Bloomsbury.

Scene One: March 1917. Tauride Palace in Petrograd (St Petersburg).

Scene Two: 3-4 July 1917. Kshesinskaya Mansion in Petrograd.

Scene Three: 25 October 1917. Smolnyi Institute in Petrograd.

Memento: Grand Duke Michael's abdication manifesto

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Orlando Figes

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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Having watched the second Elizabethan era draw to a close in recent weeks, it is fitting that in this episode we are going back to the beginning of the first Elizabethan era – the moment when Mary Tudor died leaving the throne to her younger half-sister.

These two queens, the first women to rule England in their own right, were divided by their faith. The greatest challenge facing Elizabeth on her accession was to unite a country which was polarised by religion, having passed from hard-line Protestantism under Edward VI back to Catholicism with Mary.

Our learned guide on this journey is Dr Lucy Wooding whose masterful new book, Tudor England, gives a rich, detailed vision of the period. Wooding's book is not simply limited to the big political moments but takes the reader right into the lives of ordinary people as well.

Dr Lucy Wooding is Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is an expert on Reformation England, its politics, religion and culture, and the author of Henry VIII.

Tudor England by Lucy Wooding is out now.

Scene One: 17 November 1558, London. In the early morning, Mary I lies dying at St James's Palace. By evening, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, has also died – a momentous day for Catholicism in England.

Scene Two: November 1558, a few days earlier. Princess Elizabeth is at a dinner party at Brocket Hall, with the Count of Feria who has been sent by Philip II (Mary’s husband) to sound out the heir to the throne. He concludes that she is, ‘'She is a very vain and clever woman’, who is, ‘determined to be governed by no one'.

Scene Three: Late 1557, The Works of Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chauncellor, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge are published by the printer William Rastell, who was also More’s nephew.

Memento: The reliquary known as the ‘Tablet de Bourbon’, made by one of the great Parisian goldsmiths and acquired as part of a ransom during the Hundred Years War. Worn by Mary I in the portrait by Hans Eworth.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Dr Lucy Wooding

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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This week we are off to see some of the Renaissance masters at work with the acclaimed novelist Damian Dibben.

*

In the early years of the sixteenth century Venice was not only a place of great power it was a site of huge cultural splendour. In particular a new generation of artists were animating the buildings like never before. And unlike many of the other Renaissance painters, the Venetians were not solely obsessed by line and form; they were equally interested in the allure and possibility of colour. 

In this episode (with a short detour to the Sistine Chapel) we set our gaze on a place that is still affectionately known as the Queen of the Adriatic. In doing so we look at two of its great artists as they work with their cobalts and ultramarines. One of them, Titian, is well known to us. The other, Giorgione, or ‘Big George’, is a more elusive character.

Only a small number of Giorgione’s paintings survive today, but they convey his strange and brilliant originality. Art historians have spent centuries trying to make sense of his enigmatic depictions, which are suffused with a misty light that seems to have drifted straight off the lagoon.

Damian Dibben’s novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages and published in over forty countries. His series The History Keepers was an international publishing phenomenon. His new book is The Colour Storm.

Scene One: 1510. Titian, the 22 year old Venetian painter paints his 'Man with a Quilted Sleeve.

Scene Two: 1510. Michelangelo paints the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was an incredible feat of artistic brilliance and physical endurance, achieved by a someone who was a true genius but personally difficult and far from pleasant.

Scene Three: October 1510. The death of Giorgione. One of the greatest painters, a vital link in the history of art who would have produced stunning masterpieces had he not died at 33, probably of plague.

Memento: Giorgione’s painting of a knight and his squire, or groom, c.1507

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Damian Dibben

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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We start our sixth season with Robert Harris, one of Britain's great contemporary novelists. He takes us back to a tremendously important year in English (and world) history. 1660.

In England the mid seventeenth century was a dramatic and bloody time. It was a age when important questions about the nature of power were posed and the traditions of monarchy were challenged. In 1649 this led to the execution of King Charles I on a cold January day in Whitehall. Almost a century and a half before the French removed Louis XVI, England pioneered a new form of republican society.

This was not destined to last. Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658 left the country with a power vacuum. After various alternatives were tested, the decision was finally taken to invite the dead king’s eldest surviving son, Charles, back from Europe to regain the throne for the Stuart family.

Charles II’s entry into London on his birthday, 29 May 1660, was a emotional occasion. But for all the excitement and all the glamour of the year John Evelyn called an ‘Annus Miribilis’, some knotty questions remained. One of the greatest of these was what should be done with the surviving ‘regicides’ – the scores of people who had signed the death warrant of the new king’s father.

This history forms the background to Robert Harris’s exhilarating new novel. In Act of Oblivion he tells the story of a transatlantic manhunt for two of the regicides: the colonels Edward Whalley and William Goffe.

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris is available now.

Show notes

Scene One: 29 May 1660. Charles II returns to London after being exiled and is proclaimed lawful monarch.

Scene Two: 29 August 1660. The Act of Oblivion is passed in Parliament.

Scene Three: 27 July 1660. Colonels Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two regicides, arrive in Boston

Memento: Charles I’s death warrant

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Robert Harris

Production: Maria Nolan

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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Hello everyone, we're back!

Season Six of Travels Through Time begins with an episode with the Number One Bestselling novelist Robert Harris tomorrow. 

Music: “Love Token” from the album “This Is Us” By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

This week we meet an extraordinary couple, whose life-long partnership and dual creativity changed the face of Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement. 

If it’s ever been possible to come up with a philosophy for how to live, William Morris came pretty close. He once said that “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment and it’s one that makes even more sense when you learn more about his family and the home he created with his wife, Jane. 

Their marriage was complicated and painful at times, but Jane and William Morris built a life together that valued things that were beautiful and useful, people who were generous and creative.

The story of their relationship is told vividly in my guest today, Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s new book How We Might Live: At Home With Jane and William Morris. Suzanne Fagence Cooper is a writer, lecturer and curator, working on 19th and 20th century British art, design and culture. How We Might Live, is published by Quercus. 

As ever, for more about this episode, head over to our website: www.tttpodcast.com

Show Notes

Scene One: 1862. The birth of May Morris.

Scene Two: 1862. First exhibition for Morris & Co.

Scene Three: 1862. The death of Elizabeth Siddall.

Momento: Gabriel Rossetti's book of poems.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Suzanne Fagence Cooper

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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Welcome to a very special live recording of Travels Through Time, made at the Chalke Valley History Festival.

Under the sun of a midsummer day in southern England, Violet Moller sat down for a chat, and a song, with a fascinating young historian. Oskar Jensen took Violet back to the year 1815 and introduced her to several characters from his new book, Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth Century London.

Oskar Jensen completed a doctorate at Christ Church, Oxford before being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. He is currently teaching at the University of East Anglia as a Senior Research Associate and is about to take up a NUAcT Fellowship at Newcastle University

Jensen has appeared on BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are? and regularly contributes to Radio 3 and 4. He is also one of the BBC New Generation Thinkers 2022 and is a co-founder of the Romantic National Song Network.

Vagabonds is his first popular history book.

As ever, for more about this episode, head over to our website: www.tttpodcast.com

Scene One: Kennington in South London, as 22-year-old servant Mary Bailey, who has just been fired, hears an execution ballad about Eliza Fenning.

Scene Two: Torbay harbour, as a certain Corsican gentleman sets off total mania and hysteria in Britons across the land, inspiring a number of songs in the process.

Scene Three: Tower Hill, as Joseph Johnson tries to come to terms with alienation, disappointment, and disability - partly through appropriating songs of both hope and protest.

Memento: Napoleon’s tricorn

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Oskar Jensen

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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With thanks to everyone at the wonderful Chalke Valley History Festival.

This week we are travelling back to the ninth century to witness one of the major turning points in English history.

Winston Churchill regularly tops ‘the greatest Briton of all time’ charts, but his own vote for this accolade apparently went to the man we are going to discuss today.

Alfred 'the Great' is the only English monarch to enjoy such an admiring epithet. Æthelred, the later monarch, is remembered as ‘the Unready’ (although this meant poorly advised rather than unprepared), William I is either ‘the conqueror’ or ‘the bastard’ depending on your point of view – no other monarch’s reputation has survived with a rosy glow.

Our time travel today in the company of the world-renowned historian Michael Wood reveals exactly why Alfred is so well thought of. He takes us back to 878, a pivotal year in our history when, against all the odds, the Viking invaders were defeated, pushed out of Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex and the geopolitics were set for the following centuries.

Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages: a History of Anglo-Saxon England 40th anniversary edition, is newly published by BBC Books.

As ever, for more about this episode, head over to our website: www.tttpodcast.com

Scene One: March 23rd Easter at Athelney, after Alfred’s desperate guerrilla war in the Somerset marshes.

Scene Two: 9th May, the Battle of Edington, Alfred defeats the Viking forces against all odds.

Scene Three: 26th June Treaty at Wedmore which changed the course of the Viking wars and resulted in their leader, Guthrum converting to Christianity with Alfred as his godfather.

Memento: Alfred’s little commonplace book that he carried around with him, and perhaps had with him in the marshes.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Michael Wood

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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Almost exactly a century ago, on 22 June 1922, a series of gunshots rang out in Belgravia, London. Out of this polite neighbourhood, home to powerful politicians and wealthy financiers, a shocking news story quickly spread. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, MP, one of the great heroes of the Great War had been assassinated.

Who was responsible, why it mattered, and what happened next is the subject of an incisive, absorbing new book called Great Hatred, by the Irish Times journalist Ronan McGreevy. As McGreevy explains in this episode of Travels Through Time, the bullets that were fired that day in Belgravia did not just cause one death. They led very soon afterwards to an equally significant other.

Ronan McGreevy’s Great Hatred: the Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, MP, is newly issued in hardback by Faber.

As ever, for more about this episode, head over to our website: www.tttpodcast.com

Show notes

Scene One: Liverpool Street Station at 12.50pm on June 22nd, 1922: Henry Wilson unveils a war memorial.

Scene Two: 36 Eaton Place at 2.30pm on June 22nd 1922:  Henry Wilson is murdered on his own doorstep.

Scene Three: Béal na Bláth (the Mouth of the Flowers), Co Cork August 22nd, 1922: Michael Collins is shot dead by anti-Treaty forces in an ambush.

Momento: Henry Wilson’s sword.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Ronan McGreevy

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1922 fits on our Timeline

In this episode we’re heading to the 1960s to meet a man who tried to uncover the difference between fate and coincidence.

Have you ever had a feeling that something would happen before it did? Or seen something you couldn’t make sense of? In 1967 the psychiatrist John Barker set up a bureau in the offices of the London Evening Standard where members of the public could phone in and report their premonitions.

A strange dream. A headache and an overwhelming feeling of dread. A vision without any clear meaning. Over the courses of its two year existence the Premonitions Bureau collected countless sinking feelings and strange suspicions. They were categorised, logged and when a disaster occurred, they were cross-referenced to see how accurate they had been.

The premonitions bureau was so much more than a curious oddity. As our guest today, Sam Knight, shows in his new book, the bureau not only gives us insight into this moment in British social history, but also into the human condition.

Sam Knight is the author of The Premonitions Bureau.

Scene One: January 4, 8:50am in the newsroom of the Evening Standard newspaper, just off Fleet Street.

Scene Two: April 21, 10am in the office of John Barker on the first floor of Shelton Hospital, outside Shrewsbury.

Scene Three: November 5, 9.16pm, Hither Green railway station, south London.

Memento: The files containing all the premonitions recorded at the bureau.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Sam Knight

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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See where 1967 fits on our Timeline

On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter gazed into the darkness of a newly-discovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Can you see anything? Lord Carnarvon, his companion and sponsor asked him. ‘Yes,’ Carter replied, ‘wonderful things.’

*

This year marks the centenary of perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery in history. At the end of 1922, the world was astonished by the news from Thebes in Egypt. After years of searching, a discovery of the most extraordinary nature was made in the Valley of the Kings.

In this episode, the renowned Egyptologist and scholar Toby Wilkinson takes us back to a story that is still as magnetic and magical as ever: the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb.

As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com

Toby Wilkinson’s new book, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet: the story of Ancient Egypt in 100 Objects has just been released in hardback by Picador.

Scene One: The summer of 1922, Highclere Castle. Howard Carter visits Lord Carnarvon.

Scene Two: 4 November 1922. The Valley of the Kings. The discovery of the first step.

Scene Three: 26 November 1922. The Valley of the Kings. The opening of the tomb.

Memento: The water jug that Hussein Abdel Rasoul set down in the sand of the Valley of the Kings on the morning of 4 November 1922.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Toby Wilkinson

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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See where 1922 fits on our Timeline

In this episode we strap on our armour and brace ourselves for battle! From the monumental ruins of strongholds like Conwy and Dover to the fantastical turrets of Hogwarts, castles are an important element in our vision of the past. They played a vital role in history, as centres of defence and political power, the physical foundation of royal and noble authority. 

This week, we are travelling through time with the acclaimed architectural historian John Goodall. His new book The Castle: A History tells the stories of these influential buildings through riveting snapshots at various moments in their history.

John takes us to visit several important castles in the year 1217, a turbulent moment in English history when rebel barons had asked the French king Louis for help in their struggle against the notoriously bad King John. In the ensuing civil war, castles played a vital role as centres of defence – so much so that John demanded his knights to destroy them rather than see them falling into French hands. Fortunately for posterity, they ignored his orders.

John Goodall is the architectural editor of Country Life magazine. He is the author of The Castle: A History (Yale University Press).

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Scene One: 20 May 1217. Lincoln Henry III’s forces brutally sack the city of Lincoln in the aftermath of the battle because the citizens sided with Louis and the French, an event known sardonically as ‘Lincoln Fair’.

Scene Two: 24 August 1217. The Battle of Sandwich, a decisive moment in the war when the English royalist army defeats Louis and pushes the French back across the Channel.

Scene Three: 12 September 1217. On an island on the Thames near Kingston, the Treaty of Lambeth is signed by both sides in which Louis formally gives up his claim to the English throne, wearing just his underwear and a cloak.

Memento: The coronet Henry III wore at his coronation aged 9, made of his mother’s jewels especially for the event.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: John Goodall

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1217 fits on our Timeline 

1492 famously brought Columbus’s discovery of a route to America. This was, as today’s guest Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out, ‘a world-changing event if ever there was one.’ But what else was happening in that fateful year? Far beyond the courts of Europe, what was life like in China? In Africa?

In this week’s brilliantly insightful episode we set out on a journey of our own to glimpse 1492 in three telling scenes. Our guest is one of the finest imaginable. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an eminent and hugely decorated author who had written extensively about maritime and world history. In this episode he guides us from the tranquil hills of China to the rivers of Africa and the smouldering shores of the Caribbean in the year 1492.

But before all of that, he begins by telling us about another figure from this opening phase of the Age of Exploration, the character at the centre of his latest ‘myth-busting’ biography: Ferdinand Magellan.

As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com

Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s new book is called Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

Show notes

Scene One: 15th day of 7th month (August 7th), Xiangcheng, China. The poet Shen Zhou paints a mystical experience.

Scene Two: November or December, death scene of Sonni Ali, perhaps in a crossing of the River Niger in the vicinity of Gao.

Scene Three: 12th October, somewhere in the West Indies, probably Watling Island. Columbus meets Indigenous Americans for the first time.

Memento: One of Shen Zhou’s paintings.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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In this episode we head to Victorian Britain, where leaps in technology were making the world seem smaller and faster than ever before. Our guide is the author and film-maker Paul Fischer whose new book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, charts the incredible race to invent the first film camera and projector. 

The late nineteenth century was a world full of contradictions. Categorically Victorian but also undeniably modern. Technological developments were exhilarating and anxiety-inducing. For the first time in history, it was possible to speak to people miles away using a telephone. You could sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a week. But this was also a world where the fastest mode of individual transport was still a horse, where the electric lightbulb was barely ten years old and where the idea of motion pictures was still a beautiful idea waiting to be made a reality.

In this episode we meet Louis Le Prince, the enigmatic hero at the heart of The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures. We join him as he becomes the first person to successfully capture and replay moving images, as well as visiting two other telling scenes in the rise of modern Britain.

Paul Fischer was born in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION, the true story of the kidnapping of two South Korean filmmakers to Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea, which was translated into fourteen languages, nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and chosen as one of the best books of 2015 by NPR and Library Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Independent, among others.

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Scene One: 30-31 August 1888, the Frying Pan public house, Whitechapel, London. Mary Ann Nichols is drinking in the pub in Spitalfields. By morning, she will be found dead — the first victim of the killer who will come to be known as Jack the Ripper.

Scene Two: 8 September 1888, Pikes Lane Football Ground, Bolton. Kenny Davenport scores the first-ever goal in the first match in the newly-formed Football League.

Scene Three: 14 October 1888, Roundhay Gardens, Yorkshire. Louis Le Prince assembles his family on the lawn of their home — to film the world’s first ever motion picture.

Momento: Some of the missing negatives from Le Prince's early films. 

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Paul Fischer

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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In this episode, we are donning our lab coats and gaining access to the secrets of particle physics. We visit 1932, an astonishing year in the history of science across the world, from Carl Anderson’s rooftop cloud chamber in California, to Marietta Blau’s mountaintop experiments in Austria, via the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge.

Our guest is Dr Suzie Sheehy. Dr Sheehy is unusual for Travels Through Time – she is a scientist rather than a historian – but she is also quite unusual within her own field of accelerator physics. Firstly, because she is a woman, and secondly because she is a brilliant communicator, able to beautifully articulate the wonder and complexity of Physics.

In her new book, The Matter of Everything, Twelve Experiments that Changed Our World she tells the major discovery stories of the past century: the cathode ray tube that brought us television, splitting the atom, finding new particles and, of course, the Large Hadron Collider and Higgs Boson. Behind each of these breakthroughs are the brilliant scientists whose curiosity and persistence made them possible. 

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Show Notes

Scene One: 2nd August 1932. The discovery of the positron, Carl Anderson, at Caltech in America.

Scene Two: 14th April 1932. Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, the splitting of the atom Ernest Rutherford (at almost the same time James Chadwick discovers the neutron in the same lab!).

Scene Three: 1932. Hafelekar observatory, Marietta Blau and her assistant Hertha Wambacher place 'emulsion plates' 7,500 feet above sea level, near Innsbruck, Austria. They would go on to have a huge impact scientifically, but as women their work was undervalued and overlooked at the time.

Momento: Marietta Blau’s diaries so Dr Sheehy could write about her and fully reveal her genius and achievements to the world.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Dr Suzie Sheehy

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

Or on Facebook

See where 1932 fits on our Timeline 

In the spring of 1815, as all Europe fretted about the return of Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible massacre was perpetrated by British militiamen against American inmates at Dartmoor Prison in England.

This episode has been very nearly forgotten by history. Today the historian Nicholas Guyatt takes us back to the early nineteenth-century, to the days of the very last war between Great Britain and the United States of America, to explain just what happened.

Nicolas Guyatt is Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge. His new book, The Hated Cage, is a forensic, erudite and absorbing account of the Dartmoor Massacre.

Today’s episode comes along with a few fabulous extras. Along with the usual episode page on our website, you can also read a beautifully-illustrated and introduced extract from The Hated Cage on Unseen Histories. And, for those of you who are very interested in this story, we added the full, uncut video of the conversation between Peter and Nicolas on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!

Show notes

Scene One: Ghent, 24 December 1814 – the signing of the treaty that would end the War of 1812.

Scene Two:  Dartmoor, England. 26 March 1815. A mock trial is held by the inmates.

Scene Three: Dartmoor, 6 April 1815. The day of the massacre.

Memento: The effigy of Reuben Beasley

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Nicholas Guyatt

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1815 fits on our Timeline

This week we are setting sail for the Roman province of Britannia to traverse the empire's north-western frontier – Hadrian's Wall. 

Hadrian’s Wall is the largest archaeological feature remaining from Roman Britain, a 73-mile line of fortifications stretching from the River Tyne on the east coast to the Solway Firth on the west. Building was begun by the Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD, during a visit to this remote, unruly corner of his empire. Astonishingly, only five percent has been excavated to date, so new finds and evidence are unearthed surprisingly often.

In this episode we follow in the footsteps of a brilliant young general making his way from Rome to Britain to take up his post as governor of this outpost of the empire in 130AD. Our navigator is Bronwen Riley, a historian who traced this journey in her rigorously researched yet highly readable book, Journey to Britannia. She brings life in the second century into vivid focus by taking us to the dodgy quayside bars of Antica Ostia where the snacks were questionable and the wine was liberally watered down and into the private thoughts of Dutch soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall desperate for a taste of home.

Bronwen Riley is a writer, editor and deviser of historical and literary journeys in Britain, Byzantium and beyond. She has a special interest in the Classical world and in Romania, both life-long passions. She is a director of the Transylvanian Book Festival (transylvanianbookfestival.com). Read more about her creative writing project with the Romanians on Hadrian’s Wall at bronwenriley.co.uk/dacians-on-the-wall. Her latest book Journey to Britannia from the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall AD130 (Head of Zeus) is now out in paperback.

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Show Notes

Scene One: July 130 AD. Severus and Minicius Natalis prepare to leave Rome, they visit relatives and plan for the long months ahead on the road and in their new lives in Britain. 

Scene Two: October 130 AD. On one of his many peregrinations around the empire, Hadrian visits Egypt (holiday hotspot of the ancient world) with a vast entourage including both his wife and his lover, travelling in unparalleled style and luxury on a ship with purple sails (probably).

Scene Three: 130 AD. Severus reaches Britain and begins his journey northwards taking in the major cities and camps along the way, meeting officials and inspecting his soldiers. 

Momento: A souvenir cup from Hadrian’s Wall in all its enamelled glory but also would love to visit a bookshop to see if some Greek antiquary/interpreter has transcribed any British poetry or Druidic philosophy!

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Bronwen Riley

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 130 AD fits on our Timeline 

This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets. We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work. 

John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England. In particular, the tragic death of his younger brother who, aged just nineteen, was thrown into prison for hiding a Jesuit priest and subsequently caught the plague. 

However Donne’s poetry isn’t defeatist – he was famous in his time for his unusual, intelligent and imaginative work, which used fleas to talk about sex and violence to talk about God. And in the view of our guest today, Katherine Rundell, Donne should be considered alongside William Shakespeare as one of the finest wordsmiths this country has ever produced. That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. 

Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. She has written for, amongst others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night climbing, tightrope walking, and animals.

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Show Notes

Scene One: 1601. John Donne composing rakish poetry as a man about town - including almost certainly Love’s Growth - attending bear baiting 

Scene Two: 1601. The first performance of Hamlet - which Donne would, perhaps, as a great attender of plays, have gone to see

Scene Three: 1601. John Donne marries the 17 year old Anne and is thrown in the Fleet prison by her father, amid ice-cold winds and lice

Momento: John Donne’s Commonplace book. 

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Katherine Rundell

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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This week we head to fifteenth-century Norwich to meet two of the most extraordinary women in medieval England: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. 

Manuscripts are one of the most tangible sources of evidence we have about the distant past and our guest this week, Mary Wellesley, has dedicated her professional life to studying them and persuading them to give up their secrets. In her spellbinding book, Hidden Hands: the Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers, she reveals traces left by the people who made these vital artefacts. As she explains, manuscripts are ‘the only connection we have with these people in the past who would otherwise remain completely anonymous and unknown.' 

In this episode Mary takes us to the early fifteenth century, a period of unease in religion when reformist ideas were circulating and the Church reacted violently against anything that appeared to challenge its orthodoxy.

Mary Wellesley is a research affiliate at the British Library and Medieval Language and Literature course tutor for the library's adult learning programme. She's a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the TLS, amongst others. Hidden Hands is her first book.

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Show Notes

Scene One: Early 1413. The boisterous mystic and serial pilgrim visited the cell of the anchoress, Julian of Norwich. 

Scene Two: Late 1413. Margery sets off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Scene Three: 1413. The exemplar of the Short Text of Julian’s Revelations was copied.

Momento: Julian of Norwich's autograph copy of the Long Text. 

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Mary Wellesley

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

Or on Facebook

See where 1413 fits on our Timeline 

This week we head to nineteenth-century London, when the city's infrastructure was groaning under the strain of its exponential growth and the question of how to get a clean, reliable water supply was of upmost importance. 

We take running water in big cities like London for granted now, but for most of our history we’ve not had access to it. When did we first start pumping water up from the Thames? How did people wash themselves when they didn’t have bathrooms? Why has water been privatised or nationalised at different stages in its history?

These are all questions that my guest today, Nick Higham, answers in his new book The Mercenary River. 

Stretching from the medieval period to the modern, The Mercenary River charts the technological and scientific breakthroughs that made London’s water what it is today. Nick dives into the murky politics of this most essential of resources, and offers vivid glimpses into how water was used in daily routines. 

This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.

Scene One: 1837. A few yards back from the banks of the river at Kew Bridge near Brentford, where the Grand Junction Waterworks is building a new pumping station well upriver from its original Thames intake in Chelsea, which was at the mouth of a major sewer. 

Scene Two: 1837. Cornwall, where the talented young engineer of the East London Waterworks, Thomas Wicksteed, has gone to buy a second-hand steam-driven pumping engine for the East London's intake on the River Lea at Old Ford. 

Scene Three: 1837. Buckingham Palace, where the newly-crowned Queen Victoria is taking up residence and is (presumably) unamused to discover there is no bathroom. 

Momento: One of the minute books of the water companies. 

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Nick Higham

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we revisit one of the most dangerous and dramatic moments in London's history through the prism of one of its most iconic buildings: St. Paul's Cathedral. 

When we think of modern London, the places that spring to mind are Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Piccadilly Circus, but the true heart of the city lies far to the east, on Ludgate Hill. St Paul’s Cathedral has been at the centre of London for over a millennium, a hub of religion, politics, news, education, publishing, and of course, shopping. In her beautiful new book, In the Shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, Margaret Willes looks back on the long and lively history of this extraordinary corner of our capital.

As we discover in this episode, Old St Paul’s, as it came to be known, was a major casualty of the great fire that destroyed most of the city in 1666, paving the way for Christopher Wren’s redevelopment and the magnificent building we know today.

Margaret Willes, formerly publisher at the National Trust, is author of several books, including The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Reading Matters, and The Gardens of the British Working Class. She lives in London.

Show Notes

Scene One: 7 January. The shops are at last opening following the pandemic of the Great Plague, which had died down with the cold weather, unlike the current Covid pandemic. Pepys visits a draper's shop in Paternoster Row and buys himself velvet for a coat and camelot for a cloak. He also looks at fabrics to furnish his wife Elizabeth's closet.

Scene Two: 2 September. Pepys' maid, rising early to prepare the Sabbath dinner, wakes him to tell him a fire had broken out in a bakery on Pudding Lane, just at the north end of London Bridge. What seemed at first a small fire, took hold with very strong winds and spread fast. Pepys crosses the river to an alehouse in Southwark and watches with horror the fire taking hold of the whole of the City. 

Scene Three: 12 November. The aftermath of the Great Fire has become a source of fascination to Londoners. Pepys visits the Churchyard to view the corpse of a medieval bishop which had fallen out of his tomb in the Cathedral. 

Memento: Pepys’ parmesan cheese which he buried in his garden to ensure its survival during the great fire.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Margaret Willes

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1666 fits on our Timeline 

There is nowhere on earth quite like New York City. In this episode the writer and journalist Daniel Levy takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and to a dramatic, catalytic moment in his home town’s development: the Great Fire of 1835.

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‘It is only necessary to sit down with a minute map of the country,’ observed the novelist James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, ‘to perceive at a glance, that Nature herself has intended the island of Manhattan for the site of one of the greatest commercial towns in the world.’

Fenimore Cooper was writing as New York entered a crucial moment in its development. It was a time, as Daniel Levy explains, when New York was beginning its magical transformation from being a large unruly community to being a large unruly metropolis. One catalytic event that happened during this time was the Great Fire of 1835.

A fierce conflagration that destroyed almost 700 houses and could be seen from great distances, the fire was a powerfully destructive force. But it also ushered in a new phase in New York’s history, as it finally broke out of its old boundaries on the southern rim of Manhattan Island and started to grow.

As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com

Daniel Levy’s book, Manhattan Phoenix is recently published by Oxford University Press.

Scene One: May 12, 1835, 10 am at a church on Houston St. Lewis Tappan and others of the American Anti-Slavery Society set off the Postal campaign.

Scene Two: Late in the day October 5, 1835, 15 year old George Templeton Strong made his first entry in his diary, a journal he would write in until his death in 1875.

Scene Three: December 16, 1835 9pm. The start of the Great Fire.

Memento: One of the old NYC wooden water pipes.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Daniel Levy

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1835 fits on our Timeline 

This week we witness the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley, a devastating event which galvanised the Welsh nationalist cause. 

It’s easy to think of history as a gradual accumulation of events, buildings and people – but we don’t spend as much time thinking about its dead ends. That’s exactly what my guest today, Dr Matthew Green, does in his evocative new book Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. In it, Matthew visits eight villages, settlements and towns stretching from the neolithic period to the twentieth century that fell victim to one form of obliteration or another.

For today’s episode, Matthew chose to travel through time to the beautiful Welsh valley of Tryweryn. Up until the 1960s, the valley was home to the village of Capel Celyn, one of the few predominantly Welsh-speaking communities left in Wales. But in 1955 the inhabitants of Capel Celyn became aware, via an article in their local paper, that their village was to be drowned.

This episode is supported by Faber and recorded at Soho Radio Studios. 

Scene One: 15 August 1965. The Tryweryn Valley, freshly scoured of streets, houses, school, post office, church, farms, graveyards and trees, is filled to capacity after the Capel Celyn Defence committee loses its monumental struggle against Liverpool Corporation and English MPs.

Scene Two: 10 October 1965. The publication of a lurid newspaper interview in which the leader of the Free Wales Army says his organisation fully intends to prevent the opening of Llyn Celyn.

Scene Three: 21 October 1965. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen of Liverpool Corporation attend the grossly insensitive opening ceremony of Llyn Celyn at a tea party in a marquee overlooking the new reservoir. All hell breaks loose.

Momento: The trampled Union jack flag that the Free Wales Army through into the new reservoir.

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Dr Matthew Green

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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See where 1965 fits on our Timeline 

In this episode we venture on a journey of scientific discovery and meet one of the most important figures in English medieval science.

Geoffrey Chaucer has gone down in history as the ‘father of English literature’ and his Canterbury Tales are celebrated across the globe as the earliest work of fiction in that language. Less well known, but equally important, is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, the first technical manual written in English, in which he describes how to make and use these extraordinary instruments. Astrolabes were calculating devices, the smartphones of their day, which enabled scholars to make accurate observations of the stars and planets, and to calculate a huge range. 

In this period, scholars were almost always monks, their interest in astronomy and use of astrolabes were partially motivated by the need for accurate timekeeping and working out church dates like Easter. Seb Falk, our guide this week, reveals the wonders of scientific discovery in late medival England in his absorbing book, The Light Ages, A Medieval Journey of Discovery.

In this episode he takes us back to the early fourteenth century to a seminal year in the life of Richard of Wallingford, one of the best-known scholars of his day: a gifted astronomer, inventor, Abbot and ultimately, victim of leprosy.

Scene One: Summer 1327, Oxford University.  Richard of Wallingford is just finishing up his time at Oxford and composing two of his most important scientific works.

Scene Two: Autumn 1327, St Albans to Avignon, via London. Richard has been elected abbot and is making his way to have his appointment confirmed by the pope in Avignon. 

Scene Three: Winter 1327/Spring 1328, St Albans. Richard returns to St Albans and begins work on his marvellous astronomical clock. 

Memento: The abbot’s Albion instrument, which he invented but which is long since lost. We know exactly how it worked because the instructions for it are one of those important works he wrote in 1326-7 at Oxford.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Seb Falk

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In Women’s History Month we take a look back at a figure who has been misrepresented by successive generations of historians. Elizabeth Stuart, was the goddaughter of Elizabeth I and sister of the ill-starred Charles I of England. She was someone who played an active part on the times in which she lived. In this episode the Dutch historian Nadine Akkerman takes us back to meet a woman who was known as ‘The Queen of Hearts.’

In her riveting new book, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts, Nadine Akkerman draws back the curtain on centuries of hearsay and prejudice to reveal Elizabeth’s life in its full, extraordinary glory. This was a woman of great courage and intelligence, who ruled alongside her husband, guided their children after his death, played a vital role in contemporary politics, travelled extensively, wrote letters voraciously and hunted wild boar while eight months’ pregnant.

Who knows how the seventeenth century would have turned out if she had acceded to the throne of England in 1625 instead of her hapless brother Charles I. She was, in so many ways, the true successor of her namesake and godmother, Queen Elizabeth I.  

Show Notes

Scene One: Elizabeth all alone in Prague, refusing to abandon her subjects, while her husband is with the army.

Scene Two: The lunch before the battle of White Mountain. Her husband is in Prague and Elizabeth wants to visit the troops. They realize they are too late – battle has already begun.

Scene Three: Heavily pregnant, Elizabeth flees from Prague in search of a safe haven where she can give birth. 

Memento: Elizabeth’s ‘pacquet de nuit’; the one item the enemy (i.e. the Duke of Bavaria) managed to take from her during the flight. Ambassadors later try to get it back, so it must have been important to her. Previous biographers have translated it as ‘nightclothes’. I can’t imagine that to be correct, but I don’t know what it is either! 

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Nadine Akkerman

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this episode the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones shares his latest research on one of the great figures in British history: Winston Churchill. To get a close look at Churchill’s personality and his modus operandi, he takes us back to the year 1943 – a pivotal year at the heart of the Second World War.

*

The fall of Tunis in May 1943 marked the first liberation of an occupied city by the Allies. It was a significant moment, the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones argues, as important at the time as the victory at Stalingrad.

Winston Churchill was one who relished the news when it arrived in London. Always keen to be in the thick of the action, Churchill was soon climbing aboard a plane bound for Tunisia where he would address the victorious troops in person in the ancient surrounds of Carthage.

Churchill’s idiosyncratic manner is something that has long interested Tucker-Jones. In this episode he describes Churchill’s personality, his faults and his peculiar strengths through the prism of events in 1943. This was a time when his wartime popularity was at its height and a time when the fate of the Second World War swung firmly in the Allies’ favour.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 7 May 1943. The Allied liberation of the Tunisian capital Tunis.

Scene Two: 1 June 1943. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s visit to the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage, to congratulate 3,000 men of the British 1st Army on their victory.

Scene Three: 17 August 1943. The Liberation of Messina.

Memento: Churchill’s sun helmet from his trip to Carthage

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Anthony Tucker-Jones

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we travel back to the Islamic year 941 which straddles 1534/5 of our own calendar, a particularly deadly year in the reign of the Ottoman Emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent. 

There was no shortage of extraordinary rulers in the sixteenth century: Ivan the Terrible towered over Russia, England had its own Gloriana, Elizabeth I, Charles V governed the vast Holy Roman Empire, while in India, the Emperor Akbar transformed Mughal culture. But every one of these mighty potentates cowered in the shadow of the man who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566 - Suleyman the Magnificent.

In his compelling new book, The Lion House, the award-winning writer and expert on the Islamic world, Christopher de Ballaigue takes us deep inside the Ottoman corridors of power in this dramatic period of their history.

Show Notes

Scene One: Transylvania. The death of Alvise Gritti, son of the Venetian Doge, merchant, millionaire and chief procurer of everything from guns to parmesan at the Ottoman Court, at the hands of the Hungarians.

Scene Two: Baghdad. Having recently taken the city, Suleyman awakes from a nightmare in which his treasurer Iskender Celebi, who has recently been hung on the Sultan’s order, tries to strangle him. 

Scene Three: Baghdad. Suleyman receives a letter from his beloved wife Hurrem, back in Istanbul, reminding him of the delights of home.

Memento: the extraordinary solid gold quadruple crown made in Venice for the Sultan, valued at 144,000 ducats and dripping with unimaginable jewels. 

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Christopher de Ballaigue

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Of all the accomplishments of human civilisation, the creation of libraries, making the preservation and transmission of knowledge possible, is surely the greatest. In this episode the academics Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen take us back to 1850, a pivotal moment in the history of public libraries. 

Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen’s new book, The Library, A Fragile History, takes on the ‘long and tumultuous history’ of these noble institutions, from the clay tablets of ancient Nineveh to the problematic Google Books project (inspired, like so many other attempts to ‘encompass the world’s knowledge’, by the library of Alexandria). This is an unflinching look at library history, one that does not shy away from the neglect, the destruction and the moments when knowledge was lost.

Scene One: London, The House of Commons. The debate surrounding the Public Libraries Act is in full swing, giving us the chance to understand what this act meant to the development of libraries, and why it failed to gain so little support outside Parliament. 

Scene Two: Bordeaux, France. The great municipal library of Bordeaux, one of the finest public collections in France, and one of many similar Bibliotheques municipales. Although France had a system of public libraries that were, on paper, the envy of the world (due to the size and reputation of their collections), in reality they were tombs of books: rarely used, badly funded and frequently looted. 

Scene Three: New York, USA. The famous public library building was still decades in the future, but New York had a highly diverse system of different libraries, for different publics, that explain why a great central collection was so long in the making. 

Mementos: Arthur, One of the books stolen by Count Libri that went missing in the mists of time in order to return it to its rightful bibliothèque municipale. Andrew, mid 19th century ‘triple-decker’ edition of The History of Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we meet a misunderstood king who resisted colonial rule. 

History is full of kings and queens with bad reputations. And yet, on closer inspection, we often find these reputations weren’t always entirely justified. That’s the argument that my guest today, Lulu Jemimah, makes for King Mwanga II – the last pre-colonial king of Buganda before British colonial rule.

King Mwanga is known mostly for his part in killing 45 young pages who were Christian converts between 1885 and 1887, later known as the Uganda martyrs. Some scholars have argued that Mwanga was bisexual and that he had the pages killed after they refused his sexual advances in court. 

But what if Mwanga’s reign and reputation were more complicated than the picture this story paints? Mwanga came to the throne aged sixteen and inherited a kingdom which was under threat from European powers engaged in a “Scramble for Africa”.

Our guest is the writer, producer, and media consultant Lulu Jemimah. With over ten years’ experience she has worked across different platforms from print to radio, stage, and screen. She has also been involved in communicating research to broader audiences across topics like health, economics, history and politics.

Show Notes

Scene One: September, 1855. A meeting is held between Mwanga and his chiefs to discuss European influence on the continent.

Scene Two: October, 1885. The execution of Bishop Hannington

Scene Three: 15th November 1885. The execution of king’s close friend and confidante Joseph Mukasa Balikudembe by the Prime minister. 

Momento: The snake that tried to kill King Mutesa.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Lulu Jemimah

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this episode of Travels Through Time we meet two extraordinarily brave people who formed an unlikely friendship in Hitler's Berlin. 

Their names were Dr Mohammed Helmy – a Muslim Egyptian doctor who had been living in Berlin since coming to study there in 1922 – and Anna Boros, a sixteen year old Jewish girl. When the Nazi regime's persecution of Jewish people started to escalate, Anna's mother approached Dr Helmy to ask for his help. His solution was to form a unique and daring plan that would fool the Gestapo just enough times to save Anna's life. 

Anna and Dr Helmy's story is the subject of a new book by our guest today, the journalist and author Ronen Steinke. Ronen is also a political commentator for Süddeutsche Zeitung,  Germany's leading broadsheet newspaper and has published a number of works in Germany on the Nazi period. His most recent book Anna & Dr Helmy: How an Arab Doctor Saved a Jewish Girl in Hitler's Berlin is published by Oxford University Press. 

Scene One: 1943. The Berlin mosque. A place that had fascinated Berliners and inspired the imagination of intellectuals and artists, a place that had been open to visitors and had attracted visitors like Albert Einstein - and a place where a particular friendship with the city's Jews had been visible since the mid-1920s. Now in 1943, this mosque was forcibly placed under the control of the Nazi-friendly Mufti of Jerusalem, a guest of honour of the SS.

Scene Two: 1943. The doctor's practice of Dr Mohammed Helmy in the well-to-do Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The Gestapo barge in, they are looking for a Jewish girl who has gone to ground in order to escape deportation: Anna. They don't find her however, they are met only by the doctor and his Arab assistant, and so they leave empty-handed. The beauty of this scene is: They have been duped.

Scene Three: 10 June 1943. The appartment of Dr Mohammed Helmy in the rough Moabit neighbourhood of Berlin. Nighttime. A secret meeting. Along with a fellow Egyptian, Dr Helmy helps the Jewish girl Anna whom he is hiding to convert to Islam. The idea is to save her life.

Momento: An instrument from one of Berlin’s jazz clubs.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Ronen Steinke

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this episode of Travels Through Time we attend a magnificent Sikh royal wedding which was as much carefully orchestrated political theatre as it was the union of two people before god.

Indian weddings are famous for their exuberance and that of Prince Nau Nihal Singh, who married Bibi Nanaki Kaur Atariwala in 1837, may well have been the most extravagant of all time.

This lavish month-long celebration was an emotional moment for the young Prince’s grandparents, Ranjit Singh, ‘the lion of Punjab’, Maharajah and founder of the splendid Sikh dynasty that ruled northern India from 1799-1849, and his beloved wife, Maharani Datar Kaur. They oversaw the wedding preparations and presided over the whole extravaganza.

But while the guests feasted and the dancing girls performed, Ranjit Singh and his advisors were busy negotiating with representatives of the East India Company over the division of power in the Punjab and beyond.

Click here to order Dr Priya Atwal’s book Royals and Rebels, the Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire from an independent bookshop near you.

Scene One: March 6th, 1837. The 'vatna' ceremony performed by his family (particularly his grandmother and the senior queens) where the couple are smeared with a paste made of turmeric as part of his pre-wedding celebrations.

Scene Two: Early April, 1837. The wedding ceremony at the home of Sham Singh Attariwala, local warlord and father of the bride.

Scene Three: End of March, 1837. The military parade performed by the groom in front of Maharajah Ranjit Singh's British guests at the end of the month-long celebrations.

Memento: One of the Maharani’s incredible outfits, including the jewels!

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Dr Priya Atwal

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this delightfully modern episode of Travels Through Time we are setting sail for an adventure on the high seas.

Our guest is David Bosco, author of The Poseidon Project, The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans, in which he charts the efforts of international organisations to create consensus and establish a structure of globally recognised rules for the oceans.

In this episode David takes us back to 1982, a fraught year on the high seas when Britain was battling Argentina in the South Atlantic for control of the Falkland Islands and the waters around them. In the Arctic, a British adventurer had just completed the famous Northwest Passage. He did so just as disagreement between Canada and the United States over the legal status of the Passage became acute. Meanwhile, final preparations were underway for the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. But there was a cloud over the celebrations—the world’s leading maritime power, the United States, had decided not to sign.

Click here to order David Bosco's book The Poseidon Project, The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans from an independent bookseller. 

Show Notes

Scene One: January 1, 1982, The North Pole. Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his wife Virginia Fiennes celebrated the New Year with the rest of their expedition at a snow-covered base camp. 

Scene Two: June 8, 1982, the South Atlantic Ocean, approximately 500 miles northeast of the Falkland Islands. An aircraft bombs the tanker Hercules during the war between Argentina and the United Kingdom for control of the Falklands. 

Scene Three: December 10, 1982: Rose Hall Hotel, Montego Bay, Jamaica. The site for the signing of the new United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. 

Memento: The signed treaty from the convention in Montego Bay. 

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: David Bosco

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Today we’re off to the nineteenth century to examine an event that Karl Marx called ‘One of the most monstrous enterprises in the annals of international history.’

Edward Shawcross takes us back to meet Maximilian, the Last Emperor of Mexico.

*

The 1860s were a decisive decade in the emergence of the modern world. As Britain’s empire expanded, and the United States emerged entire from a debilitating Civil War, an audacious French scheme to place an Austrian archduke on an invented throne in Mexico played tragically out.

One of the chief architects of this plan was the daring French leader, Napoleon III. In Napoleon’s mind the effort to insert a Catholic emperor into a contested part of the world was an inspired piece of statecraft. Yet to many others the enterprise was quite different. It was hubristic, high-flown, destined to fail.

Today’s guest tells us about this whole astonishing story. The Last Emperor of Mexico is Edward Shawcross’s debut book. Widely praised, it tells the extraordinary true story of Maximilian of Mexico.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com. For more about The Last Emperor of Mexico look here.

"A superbly entertaining and well-researched account that sets a new standard for histories of the doomed escapade."--Financial Times

Scene One: 13 February 1867, Mexico City (and its outskirts). Ferdinand Maximilian, so-called emperor of Mexico, rides out to confront his enemies.

Scene Two: Querétaro. Early morning of May 15 1867, Maximilian is cornered in a shell-shattered former convent.

Scene Three: 19 June 1867, Querétaro another convent, this one is Maximilian’s prison cell. This is the day of his death.

Memento: Maximilian’s silver crucifix.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Edward Shawcross

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we are going back to witness the birth of history
as a written discipline.

Our guide on this long journey into the ancient world has spent his life
studying and teaching Greek language and culture, but it was when he retired from academia that Professor Roderick Beaton found the time to write the book he had been dreaming about since he first visited Greece as a teenager. The Greeks, A Global History is a masterful, sweeping journey through 3500 years of history that tells the stories of Greek people, their language and their culture.

In this episode, Roderick takes us back to the year 447BCE and the moment when Herodotus of Halicarnassus, newly arrived in Athens, sat down and began to write his Histories and in doing so, laid the foundations of the discipline of History itself.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks: A Global History from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Show Notes

Scene One: Herodotus of Halicarnassus arrives in Athens and begins writing his monumental Histories.

Scene Two: Pericles, the many-times elected statesman of the Athenian democracy, persuades his fellow-citizens to embark on a huge and
controversial building programme on the Acropolis of Athens.

Scene Three: Outside the small town of Coronea, an Athenian expeditionary force is defeated by the city’s neighbours, the Boeotians. The defeat marks the beginning of division of the ancient Greek world into blocs led by Athens and Sparta, and is the harbinger of the Peloponnesian War in which the Greek city-states fought themselves to exhaustion and stalemate.

Memento: One of the rolled scrolls on which Herodotus wrote his Histories.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Roderick Beaton

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In our first episode of 2022, we’re travelling back exactly a hundred years.

We visit three self-contained moments – the trial of Hollywood’s much-loved comedian ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle for the murder of Virginia Rappe, the assassination of the Weimer Republic politician Walther Rathenau and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Each one sheds light on a different facet of the modern world that was 1922. 

Our guest is Nick Rennison, whose most recent book 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year charts this extraordinary year in world history month by month. Nick is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in modern history and crime fiction. His other works include Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography and The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction. He is a regular reviewer for both the Sunday Times and Daily Mail. 

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year.

Scene One: November, 1922. Valley of the Kings, the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

Scene Two: June, 1922. Berlin, the assassination of Walther Rathenau by right wing extremists

Scene Three: January, 1922. Hollywood, scandals such as the 'Fatty' Arbuckle trial and the murder of William Desmond Taylor which ultimately shaped the kind of films produced in America over the next four decades

Memento: A first edition copy of James Joyce's Ulysses

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Nick Rennison

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this Christmas special of Travels Through Time our three wise presenters Peter, Violet and Artemis get together to remember some of their favourite books and episodes from the last year on the podcast. 

Thank you so much to all of our listeners for joining us over the course of the year and happy Christmas!

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order the books discussed in this episode from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Show Notes

Peter's choices: The Ruin of all Witches by Malcolm Gaskill, Surviving Katyn by Jane Rogoyska

Violet's choices: Albert & the Whale by Philip Hoare; Alexandria by Edmund Richardson

Artemis's choices: The City of Tears by Kate Mosse, Blood Legacy by Alex Renton

People/Social

Presenters: Peter Moore, Violet Moller, Artemis Irvine

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In this episode we visit London in 62 AD, barely twenty years after it was first established by the Romans, to traverse its lost landscape and hidden waterways.

When we think of London, we usually think of a sprawling urban metropolis: glass and steel, terraced houses, every imaginable form of transport and noise. We don’t often think about the natural landscape that lies beneath it all. And yet, our guest today argues, it is London’s geology that has been a crucial force in the shaping of the city over the last two thousand years. 

Tom Chivers is a writer, publisher and arts producer from south London. He is also an award-winning poet who has published two pamphlets and two full collections of his poetry. London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City is his non-fiction debut and it’s been described by critics as “entertaining, enlightening and deeply moving.”

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City.

Scene One: 62 AD. The river Walbrook.

Scene Two: 62 AD. The Westminster Delta.

Scene Three: 62 AD. The Rockingham Anomaly, in Southwark, to meet Harper Road Woman.

Memento: A shoe. “I like the idea of the wearer’s footprint being retained in the soft leather, and also to imagine what kind of ground the sole has stood on/walked across.”

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Tom Chivers

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we head to Granada in southern Spain to witness one of the most important years in the history of not only Europe, but the whole world.

In 711 a band of Berber tribesmen made the short voyage from North Africa to Southern Spain, landing near Gibraltar. The land they found mesmerised them with its beauty and natural abundance, they settled down, built cities and were joined by Arabs from across the vast Muslim Empire who made al-Andalus their home.

Towards the end of the eleventh century, Christian Europeans began the long process of Reconquista, reclaiming the lands they saw as being rightfully theirs. By the late fifteenth century, only Granada remained in Arab hands and in 1492, Boabdil, the last Sultan of Granada, handed over the keys of the city to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella – the joint Catholic rulers of Spain.

We are visiting this watershed moment in the company of Professor Elizabeth Drayson, Emeritus Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Her new book, Lost Paradise, The Story of Granada, she reveals the full wonder of this city’s history, highlighting the experiences of some of its minority populations including Jews, Gypsies, women.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Elizabeth Drayson's book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Show Notes

Scene One: 2 January 1492, in Granada. Christian and Muslim royalty have assembled for the official surrender of the city to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

Scene Two: Mid-July, 1492, on the road to Cádiz, the route to one of Spain’s biggest seaports, as Jewish families prepare to sail into permanent exile from their
homeland.

Scene Three: September 1492, in the old wood-panelled library of the University of Salamanca. Queen Isabella I of Castile meets Spain’s most renowned Humanist, Antonio de Nebrija, to accept his newly published grammar of the Spanish language.

Memento: the gold ring set with a turquoise owned by the last Muslim sultan of Granada.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Elizabeth Drayson

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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On the morning of 6 May 1682, in unremarkable weather, the Gloucester, a 50-gun frigate of the Royal Navy, collided with a sandbank off the Norfolk coast. The wreck that followed was no ordinary one. For aboard was James, Duke of York, heir to the English throne and a glittering array of fellow travellers. Within hours of the collision, two hundred people were dead.

Today we travel back to the late seventeenth century and to the Norfolk coast to witness that dramatic shipwreck. It was an event that very nearly changed the course of English history.

Guiding us through this enthralling historical story is the author Nigel Pickford, the author of Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester. Pickford not only tell us about this story but he also gives us a peek into his unusual career, searching the oceans of the world for valuable shipwrecks.

This episode of Travels Through Time is supported by The History Press. To read a beautifully illustrated, exclusive extract from Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester, head over to Unseen Histories.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Nigel Pickfords book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: Early Morning, Wednesday 3 May 1682. James, Duke of York, embarks on a royal barge at Putney.

Scene Two: 5am on the morning of 6 May 1682. The wrecking of the Gloucester.

Scene Three: 6 June 1682. Aboard the Charlotte yacht for the court martial of the pilot James Ayres.

Memento: A seventeenth-century wine bottle.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Nigel Pickford

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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This week we uncover a fascinating legal case that had major implications for transgender rights in the U.K., but that has been hidden for the last fifty years.

Ewan Forbes was born in 1912 into an aristocratic Scottish family. He grew up in Aberdeenshire, studied medicine, started practising as a doctor in his local community and married. His patients and neighbours were aware that Ewan had been christened Elisabeth, but that, apart from a few exceptions, he had been viewed as a boy by himself and others since he was a child. In 1952, Ewan had successfully corrected the sex on his birth certificate from “female” to “male”.

In this episode we hear the story of what happened to Ewan some fifteen years later, when his older brother died and the question of who was the rightful heir of the family’s baronetcy sparked a legal battle which was to be of huge significance to the history of LGBTI rights.

Our guest is the academic Zoë Playdon. Zoë is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London. She holds five degrees, including two doctorates. For over thirty years Zoë has worked pro bono in the front lines of LGBTI human rights. She is a former co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists, and in 1994 she co-founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity with Dr Lynne Jones MP.

As ever, maps, images and much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Zoë Playdon's book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

This week we are sweeping through Sicily and Southern Italy in the company of the original revolutionary hero, Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi.

In the mid nineteenth century, change was in the air as new political movements began questioning the status quo. Powerful ideas like socialism, republicanism, liberalism and nationalism were spreading through Europe, harnessed by charismatic leaders determined to bring about dramatic social change. None were more charismatic than Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Our guide on this epoch-making trip is Jamie Mackay, a writer who is based in the beautiful town of Fiesole just north of Florence. This episode relates to his book The Invention of Sicily which tells the story of this fascinating island, fought over and coveted by almost every civilisation in history, a romantic melting pot where cruelty and disaster were never far away.

As ever, maps, images and much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Jamie MacKay's book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Flinging off her heels under shellfire in Civil War Spain. Taking tea with Hitler after a Nuremberg rally. Gossipping with Churchill by his goldfish pond. The pioneering 1930s female war correspondent Virginia Cowles did all of these things.

In this special episode, we’re joined by not one, but two experts to discuss the life of the trailblazing Virginia Cowles.

The first is the author Judith Mackrell, whose most recent book, Going with the Boys, follows six women journalists, including Virginia, who reported on the Second World War. The second is multi-award winning journalist and senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, Christina Lamb, who has written the foreword to the re-issue of Virginia’s memoir. 

We join Virginia in 1938 as she reports from a Europe on the brink of the Second World War. 

As ever, maps, images and much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Virginia Cowles' and Judith Mackrell's book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: September, Nuremberg. Virginia attends a Nuremberg Rally and afterwards has a mind boggling conversation with Unity Mitford, a close friend of Hitler’s.

Scene Two: August, Prague. Virginia speaks to Czech citizens who fear imminent German aggression. 

Scene Three: October, London. Virginia has a conversation with Neville Chamberlain in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement. 

Memento: Christina chooses Virginia’s high heels, and Judith chooses one of the Nazi government’s traditional new year posters depicting an image of a helmeted German soldier with the caption “1939”.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Christina Lamb and Judith Mackrell

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Historians often refer to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as being England’s Golden Age. And of all the forty-five years in which she was the monarch, the year 1588 stands out as the most dramatic. It was a year of peril, a year of valour and a year of heartbreak.

In this episode bestselling historian and novelist Tracy Borman takes us back to the anxiety-ridden days of 1588. We watch on as the queen makes a speech that will pass into legend. We hover close by as one of her most famous portraits is painted. And we see the end of a tragic tale, as Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, dies.

While various events compete for attention throughout that summer – the arrival of the Armada, Leicester’s health - Elizabeth remains at the heart of everything. As Tracy Borman argues (and Violet Moller agrees), she was a queen to outrank all of the others.

As ever, maps, images and much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Tracy Borman’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: 9 August, 1588. Tilbury. As Philip II’s Armada is blown up the English Channel by a decidedly Protestant wind, Elizabeth rallies her troops at Tilbury, dressed in a breastplate and plumed helmet.

Scene Two: August/September, 1588. The painting of the Armada portrait. Elizabeth celebrates victory over Philip of Spain by ordering a pearl-spangled dress to wear for a glittering new portrait, filled with symbolism and hidden meaning.

Scene Three: 4 September, 1588, Oxfordshire. Elizabeth’s closest friend and love of her life Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, dies in Oxfordshire leaving her heartbroken.

Memento: The plumed helmet that Elizabeth wore when she delivered her Tilbury Speech.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Tracy Borman

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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On this Remembrance Day the eminent historian Robert Lyman takes us to Burma, a country that was the crucible of action for a range of competing powers in the Second World War. In Burma the invading Japanese confronted the British, India, Chinese and Americans in a story that really became, as Lyman makes plain, ‘a war of empires.’

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For thirty years Robert Lyman has been studying the war in the Far East. While not as well-known as the conflict with the Nazis in Europe, events in south east Asia were crucial. The fortunes of the allied armies there did not only lead to VJ Day in 1945, they also had a powerful effect in shaping the post-war world that followed.

In this episode Lyman takes us back to the Indian/Burman border on the cusp of 1944. He explains how a revitalised Indian army and an incredibly talented British general, Bill Slim, were about to combine to tremendous effect.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Robert Lyman is the author of the new book, A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma and Britain. Click here to order Robert’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

This episode is supported by Osprey Publishing.

Scene One: The Chindwin River, December 1943, on the border between India and Burma. Men of the Madras Regiment, Indian Army

Scene Two: 1st June 1944, Chief of Imperial General Staff’s office (General Sir Alan Brooke), War Office, Whitehall, London

Scene Three: 10 September 1944, Sittaung, Chindwin River. Men of the 11th East African Brigade, 14th Army.

Memento: A katana (a Japanese samurai sword)

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Robert Lyman

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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The Armistice in 1918 might have brought an end to the violence. But for many families it did not mean the end of the story. In 1918 the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers alone remained unknown. These were often very young people, drawn from all walks of life, right across Britain.

They were people who had simply vanished into the battlefields.

In this episode Robert Sackville-West takes us back to the desperate days of the First World War a century ago. He shows us how Britons – from Rudyard Kipling to E.M. Forster – confronted the distressing situations they found themselves in, and how the bereaved attempted to come to terms with their loss.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Robert Sackville-West is a writer and he runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole, the house in Kent where his family have lived for the past 400 years.

Click here to order Robert’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: 2 October 1915, a distressing telegram arrives at Bateman’s, the home of Rudyard Kipling.

Scene Two: 15 September 1915, Sir Oliver Lodge is playing golf at Gullane, on the east coast of Scotland.

Scene Three: November 1915, The novelist E.M. Forster arrives in Egypt as a Red Cross ‘searcher’.

Memento: An identity tag.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Robert Sackville-West

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Long into the sixteenth century monasteries remained a familiar and vital part of English society. Wherever you were in the kingdom – Yorkshire, Cornwall, London, the Lakes – it was almost certain that there was a monastery just a short walk away. 

And yet within a few short years in the 1530s, 850 of these institutions vanished for good. The dissolution of the monasteries really was, today's guest, James Clark argues, ‘the great drama of Henry VIII’s Reformation’. It was the process that had 'the most immediate impact on the largest number of people.'

In this episode Clark takes us back to 1540, a year at the very heart of this dramatic, contentious, violent story.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

James Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of the recently published book, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History.

Click here to order Clark’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: Just before Easter. Canterbury Cathedral

Scene Two: 7 May, 1540 Clerkenwell Priory.

Scene Three: 4 August, 1540. Newgate Gaol, London

Memento: Epsam’s habit

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: James Clark

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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On a cold midwinter’s day in 1649, King Charles I stepped onto a platform in Whitehall. He knelt down and said a prayer. Then he stretched his arms forward to signal that he was ready to die. As the axe swung down, the crowd that had gathered emitted a sound that was later recalled as a ‘collective groan.’

The killing of a king, an unheard of act, brought a shocking end to a destructive decade of civil war in England. In this episode of the historian Malcolm Gaskill explains how that act was seen in its own time and what fears it generated for the future.

London might have been the centre of people’s interest in 1649, but elsewhere other tantalising events were taking place. Gaskill takes us from Whitehall to Surrey, where we see the founding of a radical new movement called The Diggers. Then we travel across the Atlantic Ocean to see the frontier community of Springfield in Massachusetts. This is the setting, as Gaskill explains, for a curious case of witchcraft.

Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is one of Britain’s leading experts in the history of witchcraft, and he is the author of the captivating new micro-history, The Ruin of all Witches: life and death in the New World.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Malcolm’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: Tuesday 30 January: Whitehall, London. The execution of King Charles I.

Scene Two: Sunday 1 April: St George’s Hill, Walton, Surrey. The Start of the Diggers

Scene Three: Wednesday 30 May: Springfield, Massachusetts. The Slander Trial of Mary Parsons

Memento: The top of King Charles I’s silver cane

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Malcolm Gaskill

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Colorgraph

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Writer and journalist Justine Picardie takes us back to 1947 to meet resistance fighter Catherine Dior. The youngest sister of the renowned French designer, Catherine’s story of survival during World War 2 is one of great courage and it is being told at last.

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In 1947, Christian Dior launched his debut collection in Paris and became a sensation. His designs were characterised by enormous, fairy-tale-like skirts and hyper-feminine silhouettes. It was christened the ‘New Look’ by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow, because it stood in such stark contrast to the sober women’s fashion of recent years.

Yet what makes the glamour of Dior’s collection even more compelling to us today is the dark backdrop it was set against. Few knew then that just eighteen months before, Dior’s youngest sister, Catherine, had been liberated from the German concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

Justine Picardie explores Catherine’s story in 1947 – the year that her brother made his break in a Paris still haunted by the war.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Justine’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: 3 February, 1947, the War Crimes Court in Hamburg, Germany: the last day of the trial of 16 defendants (nine men and seven women) accused of crimes committed at Ravensbrück concentration camp. 

Scene Two: 12 February, 1947, 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris: in his newly established couture house, Christian Dior is making his debut, with a collection that will revolutionise the world of fashion.

Scene Three: Late May, Provence, 1947: at the family farm that Catherine Dior inherited from her father, she is undertaking the annual harvest of rose de Mai, that will be used as a vital ingredient in her brother’s perfumes.

Memento: A very small bottle of the original Miss Dior.

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Justine Picardie

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Tutankhamun. That one word is enough to conjure up enticing images of Ancient Egypt: dashing chariots, mighty temples, little skiffs sailing on the Nile and, most of all, the king's own transfixing Golden Mask.

But who really was Tutankhamun, this figure who has come to represent so much?

In this episode we are joined by the Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw who takes us back to the age of Tutankhamun in the second millennium BC. This was, Shaw explains, an exhilarating time to be alive. Great temples were being built. Money was flowing into the kingdom in tribute. Egypt was recognised as a strong regional power.

This was the world that Tutankhamun was born into. He became king, Shaw explains, at about the age of nine. His short reign was significant and the manner of his death was mysterious. Did he die in a chariot accident? Was he bludgeoned about the head?

And did this king really, Shaw ponders, really use a walking stick?

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Garry J Shaw is the author of Egyptian Mythology: A Traveller’s Guide.

Show Notes

Scene One: c. 1343 BC. Tutankhamun is in Memphis, in the old palace of Tuthmosis I.

Scene Two: c. 1333 BC. Tutankhamun dies and is buried in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes.

Scene Three: c. 1328 BC. The coronation of Horemheb in Thebes

Memento: Tutankhamun’s walking stick

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Garry J Shaw

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Today we speak to the archeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, a figure familiar to millions in the UK. While Oliver's television work has taken him around the world, he retains a special connection to his Scottish homeland. One historical site, in particular, continues to enchant him: Skara Brae.

Skara Brae on the wind scoured Orkney Islands is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in all of western Europe. Embedded inside its stone houses and in the surviving monuments are tantalising clues to how our ancient ancestors lived and how they died.

In this episode Oliver takes us back four and a half millennia to around 2,500BC to see Skara Brae as a dynamic, living community. He then explains the mysteries that surround its abandoment and considers the significance of the settlement to us today.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Neil Oliver's new book, A History of the World in 100 Moments is available now.

Scene One: A day in the life of Skara Brae

Scene Two: The great mystery of the settlement's abandonment

Scene Three: Where did the people go?

Memento: A sharp stone knife

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Neil Oliver

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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In the sixteenth-century there was nowhere quite like Antwerp. Tolerant, energetic, independent, vibrant; Antwerp sat at the heart of a busy and growing trading network. After the Portuguese moved the spice trade to Antwerp it became a fierce rival to Venice.

It was a place that many came to call. 'the city at the hub of the world.'

Today’s guest is the historian, columnist and broadcaster Michael Pye. For many years Pye has been investigating Antwerp’s distinctive culture and unique place in European history. In this episode he guides us back into the rowdy streets of Europe’s busiest port.

Antwerp was, he points out, a haven for Jews and hard-line Protestants, and a playground for just about everyone else.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Michael Pye’s book from our friends at John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Scene One: September, Charles V’s ceremonial entry into Antwerp with his son Philip.

Scene Two: The King of Sweden sends Jacob Binck to Antwerp to check on the progress of a tomb he had commissioned.

Scene Three: Italian merchant and conman Simone Turchi’s luck begins to run out as his past catches up with him, ending with his public execution.

Memento: A baboon

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Michael Pye

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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Today’s exhilarating episode takes us on a trip to the fifteenth-century, to see one of the greatest of all technological inventions at the moment of its creation: the Gutenberg Press.

Until the mid-fifteenth century European society had had a predominantly oral culture. The books that did exist were expensive manuscripts, produced by scribes in scriptoriums, each of them taking weeks or months to complete.

At the Frankfurt Trade Fair in 1454 something appeared that would change this. Among the English wool and French wine, one tradesman was selling a new kind of regularly printed manuscript, produced by a mysterious machine in the nearby town of Mainz.

The flutter of interest these pages generated was more than warranted. In fact, fair-goers were the first people to get a glimpse of Johannes Gutenberg’s magnificent Bible.

This was a book that would catalyse the shift from script to print, changing the world as it went.

Guiding us through this enchanting historical story is the author Susan Denham Wade. The author of A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions, Denham Wade explains the brilliance of Gutenberg’s invention and why it appeared at the time it did.

This episode of Travels Through Time is supported by The History Press. To read a beautifully illustrated, exclusive extract from A History of Seeing, head over to the newly launched Unseen Histories.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our own website tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Mainz, Spring 1454. A middle-aged man delivers a parcel to an office in the Church of St Martin, wrapped in cloth. Inside are 200 printed indulgences. The man making the delivery is Johann Gutenberg.

Scene Two: Summer 1454.  A workshop near a riverbank in Mainz, Germany.  Gutenberg’s printing presses are working frantically on producing the monumental Bible project.

Scene Three: October 1454. Frankfurt’s famous trade fair. The Italian cardinal Piccolomini – future Pope Pius II, but at this point Bishop of Siena – catches a first glimpse of Gutenberg’s Bible. He is amazed at the beauty, accuracy and clarity.

Memento: A handful of original Gutenberg type.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Susan Denham Wade

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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