Travels Through Time: Recent Episodes
Travels Through Time
In each episode we ask a leading historian, novelist or public figure the tantalising question, ”If you could travel back through time, which year would you visit?” Once they have made their choice, then they guide us through that year in three telling scenes. We have visited Pompeii in 79AD, Jerusalem in 1187, the Tower of London in 1483, Colonial America in 1776, 10 Downing Street in 1940 and the Moon in 1969. Chosen as one of the Evening Standard’s Best History Podcasts of 2020. Presented weekly by Sunday Times bestselling writer Peter Moore, award-winning historian Violet Moller and Artemis Irvine.
After a short break at TTT, enter the world’s largest flying machine.
‘R101’ was one of the most ambitious creations of the airship era. Plans for it began about a century ago in the 1920s. The vision of engineers and politicians was that the 1930s were to mark the start of a new epoch in air travel. R101 was to lead the way. Huge airships were going to glide through the imperial skies, binding together the distant outposts of the British Empire.
In 1930 R101’s story reached its tragic climax when, seven hours into a flight from its base in Bedfordshire, it crashed to the north of Paris. Of the fifty or so on board, only a handful survived the hydrogen fireball.
R101’s story, and the history of the era that created it, are the subject of a new book by the New York Time bestselling author S.C. ‘Sam’ Gwynne. His Majesty’s Airship tells the story of ‘the life and death of the world’s largest flying machine’.
In this episode Sam takes Peter back to see R101 as the moment of disaster nears.
To be in with winning one of two hardback copies of His Majesty’s Airship, just head to the Unseen Histories Instagram page and follow/like this post.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com. To read an extract and see images from His Majesty’s Airship, visit unseenhistories.com
Show notes
Scene One: 30 June 1930. Royal Airship Works, Cardington. R101 is beset with problems.
Scene Two: 4 October 1930. The departure of R101 from Cardington, Bedfordshire.
Scene Three: 5 October 1930. Near Beauvais, France. The crash, and aftermath.
Memento: R101’s Control Car
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: S.C. Gwynne
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 1930 fits on our Timeline
Join Peter Moore and Sarah Bakewell for a little walking tour of Fleet Street in London. Instead of three scenes, in this episode they stop off at three locations, as Peter tells Sarah about three of the characters who appear in his new book: the printer William Strahan, the writer Samuel Johnson and the politician John Wilkes.
Peter Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling historian. His new book is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream. Sarah Bakewell is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, most recently of the history of humanism: Humanly Possible.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Location One: The Old Cheshire Cheese (William Strahan)
Location Two: 17 Gough Square (Dr Johnson's House)
Location Three: Near John Wilkes's Statue on Fetter Lane
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Asking questions: 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_
In 1520 the artist Albrecht Dürer was on the run from the Plague and on the look-out for distraction when he heard that a huge whale had been beached on the coast of Zeeland. So he set off to see the astonishing creature for himself.
In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520. We catch sight of Dürer, the great master of the Northern Renaissance, as he searches for the whale. This, he realises, is his chance to make his greatest ever print.
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, and the studies, Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden. Spike Island was chosen by W.G. Sebald as his book of the year for 2001. In 2009, Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside, and in 2017 by RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR.
His new book, Albert & the Whale led the New York Times to call the author a 'forceful weather system' of his own. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, and co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the digital projects http://www.mobydickbigread.com/ and https://www.ancientmarinerbigread.com/
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Nuremberg, home of Albrecht Dürer, at the height of its power as an imperial city, of art and technology.
Scene Two: The Low Countries. Driven out of Nuremberg by the plague and a city in lockdown, Dürer escapes to the seaside.
Scene Three: Halfway through his year away, Dürer hears a whale has been stranded in Zeeland. This is his chance to make his greatest print, a follow up to his hit woodcut of a rhinoceros. What follows next is near disaster, a mortal act. It changes his life.
Memento: Memento: A lock of Dürer’s hair (which Hoare would use to regenerate him and then get him to paint his portrait)
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Philip Hoare
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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See where 1520 fits on our Timeline
It's time to revisit our archives. In this episode one of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo.
Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Over the course of twelve or so hours on a Sunday at the start of summer, these two commanders met on a battle in modern-day Belgium, to settle the future of Europe.
For a battle so vast is size and significance, it still has some elusive elements. Historians cannot agree on when it started. The movement of the troops is still subject to debate. Wellington, who might have been best qualified to answer these riddles, preferred not to speak of Waterloo. His famously laconic verdict was simply that it was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.’
Few people are as qualified to analyse this tangled history as Bernard Cornwall. For forty years he has been writing about this period of history through his ‘Sharpe’ series of books.
As Cornwall publishes his first new Sharpe novel for fifteen years, we take the opportunity to ask him about the battle that was central to all. Over a brilliantly analytical hour, he walks us through the battlefield, in three telling scenes.
Show Notes
Scene One: Sunday June 18th, 11.10 am. Napoleon orders his grand battery to start firing
Scene Two: Sunday June 18th, 8.00 pm. Napoleon sends the Imperial Guard to save the battle.
Scene Three: Sunday June 18th, 10.00 pm. Wellington weeps over the casualties.
Memento: A heavy cavalry sword, carried in an attack at Waterloo
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Bernard Cornwell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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See where 1815 fits on our Timeline
Our guest today is one of the greatest of Britons. Lady Hale was, until her retirement three years ago, the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – the most senior judge in the country.
Peter sat down with Lady Hale at her London home for a conversation about her life, her love of history and memoir Spider Woman. After this she took him back to 1925, a pivotal year for the law and women’s rights.
For women, the 1920s were a progressive time. Figures like Eleanor Rathbone and Viscountess Rhonda led movements such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and the Six Point Group. In 1925 three particularly important pieces of legislation passed through Parliament. Here she tells us about each of them.
Lady Hale is the author of Spider Woman.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Administration of Estates Act 1925 (Royal Assent 9 April 1925)
Scene Two: Guardianship of Infants Act 1925 (Royal Assent 31 July 1925)
Scene Three: Widows, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act (Royal Assent 7 August 1925)
Memento: Her mother’s tennis racquet.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Lady Hale
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 1925 fits on our Timeline
In this special live episode, recorded at the Buckingham Literary Festival last weekend, the award-winning writer Flora Fraser takes us to one of the most remote places in the British Isles to witness the dramatic story of how her namesake Flora Macdonald helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after his failed attempt to take the throne from George II.
Their adventure is one of the most romantic and romanticised episodes in our history, sighed over and depicted by succeeding generations seduced by Flora’s bravery and charm.
Flora Fraser is the author of several acclaimed works of history including Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton; Venus of Empire, The Life of Pauline Bonaparte, and The Washingtons. Her book Pretty Young Rebel, The Life of Flora MacDonald is out now in hardback.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: The Prince comes to Flora at midnight in South Uist in June 1746 and asks for help.
Scene Two: September 1746. Flora is a captive on a Royal Navy warship in Leith harbour and a celebrity.
Scene Three: December 1746. The ship bringing Flora South from Leith reaches London.
Memento: The handsomely bound Bible in two volumes that Flora carried down to London, where she was kept a state prisoner into the following year.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Flora Fraser
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 1746 fits on our Timeline
In this episode the cultural historian Mike Jay takes Peter back to the high Victorian Age to see how a pioneering group of scholars and artists experimented with mind altering drugs.
Jay labels these characters 'psychonauts'. These were daring, romantic figures like Sigmund Freud who championed cocaine as a stimulant, and William James whose experiments with nitrous oxide brought new insights into human consciousness.
Others at this time used drugs more informally. One such person was Robert Louis Stevenson. Suffering from poor health in the mid-1880s he took advantage of the powerful drugs that were easily accessible. A result of this, Jay explains, is Dr Jeykill and Mr Hyde, one of the great short stories in English literature.
Mike Jay is the author of Psychnauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: January 1885, Vienna - Sigmund Freud publishes his self-experiments with cocaine.
Scene Two: March 31st 1885, Cambridge, Mass - William James in his study, corresponding with Benjamin Blood and Edmund Gurney about nitrous oxide.
Scene Three: September 1885, Bournemouth - RL Stevenson writes Jekyll & Hyde in three days.
Memento: A branded Merck vial of cocaine
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Mike Jay
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 1885 fits on our Timeline
In this lively episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr David Veevers takes us to the heart of the seventeenth century to visit three key locations in which the British Empire was being formed, challenged and resisted.
First, we head to the Deccan Plateau of the Indian Subcontinent to witness a dramatic stand off between the Mughal and Maratha Empires. It would set off a series of events which would eventually lead to the English East India Company acquiring a colony of its own in the region. Next, we cross continents and oceans to meet the Indigenous Kalinago of the Eastern Caribbean as they sign a treaty with the English and French. And finally, David takes us to the west coast of Africa where the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa is launched – an operation that would soon gain a monopoly over the trade in enslaved people in West Africa.
These stories represent just a select few from David’s brilliant new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire. It’s a work of history that challenges our idea of the empire as one in which the British came, saw and conquered.
Dr David Veevers is an award-winning historian and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bangor, and was formerly a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London.
Show Notes
Scene One: January, 1660, Deccan. The Mughal Empire invade the emerging Maratha Empire, setting off a series of events that lead to the sack of Surat and the quest of the English East India Company to acquire a colony of its own in India.
Scene Two: March, 1660, Guadeloupe. An Anglo-French delegation conclude a treaty with the Indigenous Kalinago of the Eastern Caribbean to partition the region between them.
Scene Three: December, 1660, London and West Africa. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa is launched, eventually gaining a monopoly over the trade in enslaved people in West Africa.
Momemto: A silver cup that the British allege is stolen by Powhatan people.
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine Guest: David Veevers
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 1660 fits on our Timeline
This week we head to the turbulent world of sixteenth century France to meet three fascinating queens whose lives were inextricably linked – Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots. They are the subject of our guest today, Leah Redmond Chang's, new book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power.
'The royal body exists to be looked at,' Hilary Mantel wrote in her essay "Royal Bodies". For a royal woman especially, this has meant that the most intimate parts of her biology have been closely observed and occasionally used to alter the course of her country's history. Whether she had started menstruating, was fertile, was able to sexually satisfy her husband or provide him with a son and heir could all be details on which massive political decisions were based. As Leah Redmond Chang shows in her wonderful new book, these details of women's lives aren't a sideshow to the main event but, in fact, central to the action.
In this episode we visit 1559 to witness the unexpected and violent death of Henry II of France in a jousting competition. It was a tragic accident that would forever change the lives of his wife, Catherine de' Medici, his daughter, Elisabeth de Valois and his daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots.
Show notes
Scene One: June 30-July 10, 1559, Paris. The tragic and violent death of Henry II of France in a jousting accident after the wedding of his daughter, Elisabeth de Valois.
Scene Two: Mid-July 1559, the Louvre. The Spanish Duke of Alba visits the mourning chambers of Catherine de’ Medici.
Scene Three: Late November, 1559, Châtelleraut. The Departure of Catherine’s daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, for Spain.
Momento: Henry II's faulty jousting helmet, and/or the first letter Catherine de' Medici sent to her daughter as she was on her journey to Spain to meet her husband.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis IrvineGuest: Leah Redmond ChangProduction: 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 1559 fits on our Timeline
The Renaissance was stirred into life by many figures of genius. In this episode Peter meets up with the art historian, Andrew Spira, to talk about three of the great masters in one of the most captivating of years.
In different ways Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer were finding new stories to tell in their paintings. Spira evaluates all of this for us and he detects the emergence of something else that would be of central importance in the emerging Western society. This was a revolutionary new conception: 'the self'.
Andrew Spira is the author of The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art, among other works. He is also one of the esteemed tour directors at Ace Culutral Tours.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: Sandro Botticelli's Mystic Nativity
Scene Two: Pietro Perugino's Resurrection
Scene Three: Albrecht Dürer's Self-portrait
Memento: A Dürer print
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Andrew Spira
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 1500 fits on our Timeline
For this week's episode Peter headed in to Penguin's offices in London to meet Serhii Plokhy and talk to him about his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War. They discussed how a culture of secrecy continues to define Russian society as it did before with the Soviets. They looked at the progress of the war and Putin's failed attempt to found a 'Eurasian Union'.
Following this Serhii revisits the dramatic events of 1991, when he watched on as the Soviet Union collapsed in the most unexpected of ways.
Serhii Plokhy has been described as 'The world's foremost historian of Ukraine' by the Financial Times. His new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, is available in hardback now.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: August 1991. Moscow during the attempted coup
Scene Two: Late August. Edmonton, Canada. The Canadian prime minister pledges to recognize Ukrainian independence
Scene Three: 25 December. Mikhail Gorbachev's Resignation Address
Memento: Serhii Plokhy's aeroplane ticket from 1991
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Serhii Plokhy
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 1991 fits on our Timeline
It's time to delve into our archive. In this brilliantly descriptive and entertaining episode, the award-winning writer and satirist Craig Brown takes us on a cultural tour of 1963. We discuss the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles meteoric rise to fame and the assassination of JFK.
For much, much more about all this and to be the first to see the amazing new colourised photograph of the Beatles in Washington DC at their first US concert – head to our website.
Show Notes:Scene One: August 1963, lingering with the robbers in their hide-out at Leatherslade Farm.
Scene Two: Second half of 1963, Jane Asher's family home, Wimpole Street, to see/be Paul McCartney, living with the Ashers, at the time of the first flush of the Beatles’ success.
Scene Three: November 23 1963. In the Texas School Book depository with Lee Harvey Oswald as he shoots President Kennedy.
Memento: Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Yesterday’
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Craig Brown
Producer: Maria Nolan
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
Craig Brown’s book One, Two, Three Four: The Beatles in Timeis available now from 4th Estate books.
In this episode of Travels Through Time the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin takes Artemis on a tour of the debauched and dangerous world of Roman politics. We meet Messalina, one of the Rome's most notorious women, and follow her through the events of 48 AD that would lead to her eventual downfall and execution.
For over two thousand years Messalina has been characterised as the scheming and sexually rapacious wife of Emperor Claudius. In one famous story she attends a brothel to take part in a twenty four hour sex competition. But now, in her wonderful new biography, Messalina: A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery, Honor Cargill-Martin challenges this version of the empress's life. In particular, Honor seeks to rescue Messalina's reputation from some of the more egregiously sexist stereotypes that powerful women throughout history have often borne the brunt of.
As Honor shows us in this episode, Messalina certainly wasn't a saint, but she was a serious political operator who had survived and thrived in the volatile world of the first century Roman Empire.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: Autumn 48 AD, Imperial Palace, Palatine Hill. The emperor Claudius is out of Rome. Messalina, the handsome Gaius Silius, and their friends are partying in celebration of the wine harvest. This, her enemies will argue, is actually a bigamous wedding party.
Scene Two: A few days later in autumn 48 AD, From the Via Ostiensis to the Praetorian Camp. Messalina stands accused of adultery, bigamy, and treason. She tries to beg Claudius to spare her life but is blocked. The freedman Narcissus shows Claudius evidence of her adulteries before taking him to the Praetorian Camp where he executes a string of her alleged lovers.
Scene Three: New Years Day 49 AD, Claudius marries Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero. Lucius Silanus – Messalina’s daughter’s fiancé, now accused of incest to clear the way for her to marry Nero – commits suicide as the morning of the wedding dawns.
Memento: Nero's golden snakeskin bracelet.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Honor Cargill-MartinProduction: 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 48 AD fits on our Timeline
Today Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two.
Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands.
The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believe that it was true. But, as Churchill learned at a dramatic meeting in Whitehall in June 1940, the beams were scientifically plausible. The man who told him this was an extraordinary 28-year-old physicist. His name was RV Jones.
RV Jones is the central character in Tom Whipple’s enthralling new book. The Battle of the Beams: The Secret Science of Radar That Turned the Tide of WW2 is out this week.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 21 June 1940. RV Jones attends a meeting at the cabinet room in Whitehall
Scene Two: June 1940. With Flight Lieutenant Bufton/Corporal Mackie on a mission to find Jones’s ‘beams’ over Britain
Scene Three: 6 November 1940. At the crash site of a Heinkel III bomber at Chesil Beach in Dorset
Memento: Vera Cain’s (RV Jones’s wife) diary
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Tom Whipple
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 1940 fits on our Timeline
It has been said that the past is another country, but the events we discuss in this episode feel all too familiar. Media interference in elections, Russian influence on Western politics, controversial immigration policy and the technology industry are all as close to the top of the agenda today as there were in 1924.
Today Violet is joined on a tour back to 1924 by the celebrated writer Simon Winchester. Simon is one of the great literary figures of his generation. His career as a journalist and an author spans the past half century, from reports on the Troubles in Northern Ireland to pioneering works of creative non-fiction like Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Born in Britain, in this episode he joins Violet from his home in rural Massachusetts.
Simon’s latest book, which has just been published, Knowing What We Know, The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic takes us from ancient Babylon to Chat GPT, analysing many of the subjects that are discussed here.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Also, if you want to have a look - here's the Sandisfield Times!
Show notesScene One: 25 October 1924, the Zinoviev Letter is published in the British press, setting Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour Party up for election disaster.
Scene Two: 1924. In New York City, the creation of IBM – International Business Machines.
Scene Three: 1924. In Washington, the Asian Exclusion Act passes through Congress, enshrining anti-immigration policy and racism into law.
Memento: IBM ‘golf ball’ font attachment for typewriter.
People/SocialPresenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Simon Winchester
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 1924 fits on our Timeline
England in the mid sixteenth century was filled with drama and novelty. As conspiracies played out and a new queen sought to established herself on the throne, a glamorous new technology was emerging in the fashionable world.
In this fascinating episode, Rebecca Struthers, the author of Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time, takes us back to the high Elizabethan Age to tell us all about the early days of watchmaking.
The stories that feature in this episode are covered in much more depth in Rebecca’s acclaimed new book. Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time is published this week.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 1572. With Mary Queen of Scots in Sheffield Castle.
Scene Two: 1572. With Queen Elizabeth I in Whitehall.
Scene Three: 24/5 August 1572. Paris. St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
Memento: Queen Elizabeth’s watch.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Rebecca Struthers
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Hodder & Stoughton
Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1572 fits on our Timeline
In today’s beautifully described episode the author and journalist Luke Turner takes us back to 1943 to present us with a refreshingly different view of World War 2.
The war, Turner reminds us, was a cultural experience as well as a military contest. One feature of this cultural environment has been largely neglected by generations of scholars. This is the unusual degree of freedom some members of the British armed forces had to explore issues of sexuality and gender.
The stories that feature in this episode are covered in much more depth in Luke’s fascinating new book. Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945 is published this week.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 3-4 April 1943. RAF Lissett, Bridlington, East Yorkshire.
Scene Two: 16 April 1943. Off the coast of North Africa with Wing Commander Ian Gleed of the RAF.
Scene Three. November 1943. A couple of hundred miles north of the Allied line with Lieutenant Dan Billany.
Memento: The cockpit door from Ian Gleed’s hurricane.
People/SocialPresenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Luke Turner
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 1943 fits on our Timeline
This week we have an extra Friday episode for you. It’s with the multi-talented artist, historian and musician Dr Amy Jeffs. She takes us back to 1327, a year of high political drama when King Edward II of England was deposed by his wife, Isabella, and his teenage son, Edward III was crowned and began his fifty-year reign.
Jeffs spent her university years deep in the Middle Ages, studying palaeography, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Middle Welsh, alongside more traditional art history courses.
Her fascination with words and images in manuscripts has led her to create two books, Storyland and Wild which explore enigmatic early Medieval stories and are beautifully illustrated with her own linocut prints, while the audiobook versions feature her songs and compositions.
Wild, which is just out in paperback, explores the mysterious, riddling tales in The Exeter Book, a rare tenth century manuscript of old English literature which has been in Exeter Cathedral since 1072.
In this episode Jeffs tells Violet more about all of this and together they set off for 1327 to examine the year’s politics through the prism of two compelling manuscripts.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 1327. A disaster in the scriptorium. A group of manuscript makers, including a scribe and a painter, have been working on producing a book containing a series of portraits of English kings from William the Conqueror to Edward II, surmounting a poem that builds up to an exhortation for Edward II to conquer the Scots.
Scene Two: A mother’s gift. Sometime between 15-year-old Edward III’s knighting on 31st January and his coronation on 1st Feb 1327, his mother gives him a lavishly illuminated manuscript containing a treatise on kingship.
Scene Three. A funeral. Edward III’s father died/was killed at Berkeley Castle, on the 21st September 1327, but his funeral did not take place until 21st October. His body was borne to Gloucester Abbey, not in state, but with a wooden effigy.
Memento: Edward II’s crown, as displayed on his effigy.
People/SocialPresenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Dr Amy Jeffs
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 1327 fits on our Timeline
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Amy’s linocut images can be ordered from https://www.amyjeffshistoria.com
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/historia_prints/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2DrP4TiFqjZHAaWeLdQEGB
In the last decades of the fifteenth century, life in England was finally starting to settle down after years of upheaval and conflict during the Wars of the Roses which had riven society since the mid 1450s.
Waves of Plague had decimated the population, causing widespread distress but providing unexpected opportunities for those who survived. The cultural and political landscape were ripe for change.
This week’s guest, the distinguished historian Nicholas Orme, takes us back to this time. He guides us back to 1480, a year he describes as being ‘on the cusp’. ‘It is not exactly a year of great achievement’, he argues, but in England it was ‘a year of great promise.’
Nicholas Orme is Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, he has written more than thirty books. Tudor Children, his latest, takes the reader from birth to adulthood through the themes of work, play, religion and education.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: Westminster. William Caxton's shop, where he is selling books, 80% of them in English, including his printed edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which helps to develop the 'King's English', based on the Midlands dialect.
Scene Two: Oxford. William Waynflete is opening his new grammar school, Magdalen College School, which for the first time is going to teach classical, rather than medieval, Latin and bring England into the Renaissance.
Scene Three. Bristol. William Worcester is measuring and describing the streets of the city: the first ever historical survey of an English town.
Memento: Second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published by William Caxton.
People/SocialPresenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Nicholas Orme
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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This month marks 80 years since the government of Nazi Germany announced the shocking discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest in the occupied USSR. Thus began one of the most tangled and disturbing of WW2 stories. Just what had happened?
In this episode from our archive, the writer Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyń, takes us back to the year 1940 to find out.
In April 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War.
The identity of the victims was clear enough. They were the Polish military elite and significant figures – academics, writers, industrials, doctors - from wider Polish society.
But who was responsible? The Germans instantly blamed the Soviets. The Soviets retaliated that the accusation was a ‘vile slander’, intended to mask yet another instance of Nazi wickedness.
In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.
Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: March 1940, Starobelsk camp, Soviet Ukraine. Bronisław Młynarski and his friends find a mysterious message tied to the collar of a stray dog.
Scene Two: April 1940, Starobelsk camp. NKVD Commissar Kirshin stands on the steps of the ruined church watching the transports of men depart: ‘You are leaving,’ he says, ‘for a place where I would like to go myself.’
Scene Three: July 1940, Griazovets camp near Vologda in the far north of Russia. The artist Józef Czapski gives an informal lecture about Marcel Proust, delivered entirely from memory, to a group of friends lying on the grass in the sun.
Memento: One of the Christmas decorations created by graphic artist Edward Manteuffel while he was a prisoner in Starobelsk camp.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Jane Rogoyska
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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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.
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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Katja Hoyer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner:
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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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.
Show notesScene 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
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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
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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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notes: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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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 a decade, begun.
In Britain 1966 is remembered as a glittering year. 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Tania Branigan
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1966 fits on our Timeline
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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: John Sellars
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Simon Akam
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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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.
Show notesScene 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
PeoplePresenter: 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 for Gillray, 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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
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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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notesScene 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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
Show notesScene 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
People/SocialPresenter: 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
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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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.
Show notesSong 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.
People/SocialPresenter: 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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
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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 .
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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 me 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.
Show notes 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.
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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.
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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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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
Show notes 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
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Oskar Jensen
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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, his brother Athelstan 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
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Ronan McGreevy
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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.
Show Notes 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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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.’
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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.
Show notes 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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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.
Show Notes 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
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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.
Momento: One of Shen Zhou’s paintings.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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.
Show Notes 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.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Paul Fischer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Dr Suzie Sheehy
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Nicholas Guyatt
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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!
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Bronwen Riley
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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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.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Katherine Rundell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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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.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Mary Wellesley
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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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.
Show Notes 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.
People/Social 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.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Margaret Willes
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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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.
Show notes 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.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Daniel Levy
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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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.
Show Notes 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.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Dr Matthew Green
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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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.
Show Notes 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.
People/Social 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!
People/Social 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.
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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
People/Social 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.
Show Notes 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.
Show Notes 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.
Show Notes 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.
People/Social 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.
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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
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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.
Show Notes 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.
Show Notes 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
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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.
Show notes 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.
Show notes 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.
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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)
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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.
People/Social 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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
People/Social 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.
Show notes 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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One of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo.
Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Over the course of twelve or so hours on a Sunday at the start of summer, these two commanders met on a battle in modern-day Belgium, to settle the future of Europe.
For a battle so vast is size and significance, it still has some elusive elements. Historians cannot agree on when it started. The movement of the troops is still subject to debate. Wellington, who might have been best qualified to answer these riddles, preferred not to speak of Waterloo. His famously laconic verdict was simply that it was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.’
Few people are as qualified to analyse this tangled history as Bernard Cornwall. For forty years he has been writing about this period of history through his ‘Sharpe’ series of books.
As Cornwall publishes his first new Sharpe novel for fifteen years, we take the opportunity to ask him about the battle that was central to all. Over a brilliantly analytical hour, he walks us through the battlefield, in three telling scenes.
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Click here to order Bernard Cornwell’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
Show Notes
Scene One: Sunday June 18th, 11.10 am. Napoleon orders his grand battery to start firing
Scene Two: Sunday June 18th, 8.00 pm. Napoleon sends the Imperial Guard to save the battle.
Scene Three: Sunday June 18th, 10.00 pm. Wellington weeps over the casualties.
Memento: A heavy cavalry sword, carried in an attack at Waterloo
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Bernard Cornwell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Welcome to Season Five! In this first episode we sit down with one of the world’s finest historians. Stephen Greenblatt takes us back to the late sixteenth century to witness the death of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
In 1593 Marlowe was the toast of London. Thousands flocked to the theatres that lined the River Thames to see his hit plays, The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus and Tamberlaine. Then, one spring afternoon, Marlowe was killed in an altercation at the home of Dame Eleanor Bull house in Deptford.
The facts of what happened that day have been contested ever since. Today Marlowe’s death is considered one of the great mysteries in literary history. In this episode of Travels Through Time, Greenblatt takes us back to a time of religious fervour, spies and suspicion, to weigh the evidence.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: 30 May 1593. Marlowe meets three others at a house belonging to Eleanor Bull in Deptford, a busy port to the east of the city of London.
Scene Two: 5 May 1593. A placard is found pinned to a church used by Dutch immigrants threatening them with death if they did not leave the country and signed ‘Tamburlaine’.
Scene Three: New Year 1593/4. The Earl of Essex accuses the Queen’s personal physician, Rodrigo Lopez, of plotting to poison her, resulting in his trial and death.
Memento: The political climate of 1593 as a warning today.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Stephen Greenblatt
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Hello to one and all! Almost two months has whizzed by since we rounded off our fourth season with Maximilien Robespierre’s execution in Revolutionary Paris. In that time we’ve had a good rest, spent lots of time reading and now we’re back to start all over again.
Our new season of recordings will begin this coming Tuesday with a fascinating conversation between Violet Moller and one of the world’s greatest living scholars: the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Professor Stephen Greenblatt.
Thereafter we’ll be off to the Battle of Waterloo, to Sicily and Australia, Ancient Egypt and Modern London, and many other places besides.
New episodes will be released on Tuesdays and to get the first news of them make sure you subscribe to our feeds on Apple Podcasts (UK, US, AU), Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you get your podcasts.
We hope you enjoy this little trailer. See you soon!
227 years to the day since Maximilien Robespierre went to the guillotine we investigate the circumstances of his downfall.
In this brilliantly analytical episode, Professor Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, takes us back to one of the most dramatic episodes in all political history: 9-10 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27-28 July in ours.
As Jones explains, Robespierre began 9 Thermidor feeling relatively secure as he went to sleep in his austere lodgings near the Place de la Révolution. By the time the sun set into the summer horizon, his position was parlous. The next day he would be dead.
The story and characters that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time are drawn from Jones’s forthcoming book, The Fall of Robespierre: twenty four hours in Revolutionary Paris, which will soon be published by Oxford University Press.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: 12 midnight 8-9 Thermidor: Robespierre in his lodgings.
Scene Two: Some time in the evening – maybe around 9 pm – in the Place de la Maison Commune (Place de l’Hotel de Ville), a National Guard company discussing what is going on and what decision they should make over who to support.
Scene Three: Robespierre at midnight 9-10 Thermidor: reflecting on the day and his and the Revolution’s future.
Memento: Robespierre’s last letter.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Professor Colin Jones
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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How does a person reckon with a disturbing episode in their family’s past? For the journalist and historian Alex Renton, this question became acute five years ago when he realised the extent of his family’s involvement with slavery. In his book, Blood Legacy, Renton decided to confront this history head-on.
As Renton describes in this episode, his approach is unusual in a British society that either avoids the subject of slavery, or prefers to recast the story in the celebratory terms of William Wilberforce and the Abolition Movement.
The reality, however, is not so comfortable. Renton takes us back to the 1830s, to the very moment slavery was abolished across the British Empire. He explains that during this time pragmatism was at play as well as principle, and that while very many families lost their slaves, they also became spectacularly rich.
Alex Renton is a campaigning journalist working on poverty, development, the environment, food culture and food policy. He has won awards for investigative journalism, war reporting and food writing.
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery is an account of his own family’s involvement in slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries.
More about this episode and the subject matter it engages with will be shortly be available on website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: August 1st 1838, Falmouth, Jamaica. William Knibb and his congregation meet to bury a coffin containing a whip, chains and an iron punishment collar. An inscription by the burial reads: 'Colonial Slavery died 31st July 1838, aged 276.'
Scene Two: August 28th 1839, Ayrshire, Scotland. The Eglinton Tournament begins.
Scene Three: 1839, Rochdale. The founders of the Anti-Corn Law League, Richard Cobden and John Bright deliver their first speeches in what would become one of the most successful campaigns of the 19th century. The trade reforms they campaigned for would destroy the sugar island economies and put most of the newly liberated people out of work and into desperate poverty for the next 50 years.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Alex Renton
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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According to one critic, the world the novelist Ellen Alpsten conjures in her book The Tsarina's Daughter makes Game of Thrones 'look like a nursery rhyme.'
This world - the Russia of Peter the Great - is our destination in this week's episode. Peter the Great is known as the man who struggled in the early eighteenth-century to transform his country into a modern, West-facing nation by defeating the Swedes, founding St Petersburg, and creating a navy.
Yet his much-celebrated achievements should be considered alongside the conditions of the Russian people at this time. Russia was a land whose greatest natural resource were its beleaguered inhabitants. Here were millions of serfs whose disposable lives made anything possible for its omnipotent ruler, the Tsar.
Everything that belonged to a Russian belonged first and foremost to him. And with a nation of slaves at his beck and call, pretty much anything could be achieved through ruthlessness and ambition.
For the women around him, however, the world was quite different. Kept as private possessions, hidden away in the great palaces and stately homes of the aristocracy, they were seen only by their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Uneducated, isolated, and entirely dependent on the will of the men around them.
Even so, many did manage to lead astonishing lives. It is these women whose stories Ellen Alpsten tells us all about, as we venture back to the year 1709.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: The battlefield outside the Ukrainian city of Poltava
Scene Two: The Red Square outside the Kremlin fortress
Scene Three: A bedchamber in the magical timber palace of Kolomenskoye
Memento: Elisabeth’s St Nicholas amulet, studded with diamonds, which she wore around her neck for protection.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Ellen Alpsten
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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This week marks the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain. In that perilous moment of the Second World War, with the Nazi forces gathered just across the English Channel, the British people put their faith in the pilots of the RAF and that most captivating of aeroplanes: the Spitfire.
The Spitfire is widely known as a masterpiece of British engineering. It could fly at speeds of around 400mph and it had enormous dexterity, making it a formidable foe in a dogfight. But where did these qualities come from? In today’s episode the writer and radio producer Alasdair Cross takes us back to 1925’s Schneider Trophy to show us the genesis of this fabled aeroplane.
Alasdair Cross is a successful radio and TV producer and the co-author of The Spitfire Kids: The generation who built, supported and flew Britain's most beloved fighter.
Brought up in the Orkney Islands, an annual summer treat was Britain’s smallest air show, once memorably visited by a powder pink Spitfire. He has worked on many BBC programmes as well as the popular BBC World Service podcast Spitfire: The People’s Plane.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: 3 January 1925 - Chamber of Deputies in Rome, Italy- Mussolini makes a speech which effectively makes him dictator of Italy. So begins the new age of the dictators, but also a time of glamour and speed.
Scene Two: 10 March 1925, Supermarine factory, Southampton, UK. Henri Biard flies the Southampton flying boat for the first time. This is the aircraft that establishes the reputation of RJ Mitchell and ensures the longevity and prosperity of the Supermarine company.
Scene Three: 23 October 1925. Baltimore, USA. This is the location for the Schneider Trophy race of 1925. Mitchell’s revolutionary S4, the precursor of the Spitfire, crashes. Mitchell has stretched too far but will learn an enormous amount from the experience.
Memento: Henri Biard’s flying suit.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Alasdair Cross
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In 1520 the artist Albrecht Dürer was on the run from the Plague and on the look-out for distraction when he heard that a huge whale had been beached on the coast of Zeeland. So he set off to see the astonishing creature for himself.
In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520. We catch sight of Dürer, the great master of the Northern Renaissance, as he searches for the whale. This, he realises, is his chance to make his greatest ever print.
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, and the studies, Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden. Spike Island was chosen by W.G. Sebald as his book of the year for 2001. In 2009, Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside, and in 2017 by RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR.
His new book, Albert & the Whale led the New York Times to call the author a 'forceful weather system' of his own. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, and co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the digital projects http://www.mobydickbigread.com/ and https://www.ancientmarinerbigread.com/
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Nuremberg, home of Albrecht Dürer, at the height of its power as an imperial city, of art and technology.
Scene Two: The Low Countries. Driven out of Nuremberg by the plague and a city in lockdown, Dürer escapes to the seaside.
Scene Three: Halfway through his year away, Dürer hears a whale has been stranded in Zeeland. This is his chance to make his greatest print, a follow up to his hit woodcut of a rhinoceros. What follows next is near disaster, a mortal act. It changes his life.
Memento: Memento: A lock of Dürer’s hair (which Hoare would use to regenerate him and then get him to paint his portrait)
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Philip Hoare
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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The 1530s were a decade of huge administrative and religious reform in England. While the policies were driven by Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s chief minister, from Whitehall in London, the effects were felt in many parts of the country.
The most visible and ruthless of Cromwell’s changes came in his dissolution of many centuries-old monasteries. These were more than religious houses. They were places of community and repositories of culture. Their loss was traumatic and much of what was destroyed could never be recovered.
In this episode we journey back to 1539 and the site of one such story. Our guest, the historian, academic and librarian, Richard Ovenden, takes us back to witness the fall of Glastonbury Abbey.
Richard Ovenden is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian (since the post was set up in 1600) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. His book, Burning the Books, A History of Knowledge Under Attack, is out now and was recently shortlisted for prestigious the Wolfson History Prize.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Summer, 1539. The last of the halcyon days at Glastonbury Abbey.
Scene Two: Early Autumn, 1539. The visit of the Commissioners and the trial of Abbot Whiting.
Scene Three: Late Autumn, 1539. The formal dissolution of the Abbey and the beginning of the dispersal of the library.
Memento: St Dunstan’s Classbook
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Richard Ovenden
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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From the tides to lightning, the movement of the planets to the workings of the human body, the Enlightenment was an age of problem solving. In this episode we head back to 1739 to talk about efforts to combat one of these great puzzles: calculating the precise measurement of a degree of latitude.
Trying to solve this problem were the members of the very first international scientific expedition – an enterprise planned by the Académie des Sciences) in Paris. The expedition’s destination was the little-known equatorial region of South America, around the location of modern-day Ecuador.
Today’s guest Nicholas Crane takes us back to join this expedition at a crucial moment. Nicholas Crane is a writer, broadcaster and adventurer. He has presented the BAFA winning BBC show, Coast, as well as many others.
Crane’s new book, Latitude, tells the broader story of the history we engage with in this episode. To be in with a chance of winning a copy of Latitude, make sure you sign up to our newsletter list at our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: April 17, 1739. peak of Sinasaguan: Four years after leaving Europe, survey is almost complete, when mountaintop camp is struck by terrible storm that smashes tents. Local helpers abandon the scientists. All seems lost. Yet the scientists persevere and descend the mountain with their observations.
Scene Two: May 20 1739. Ingapirca. During a bout of bad weather on the peak of Bueran, La Condamine seizes opportunity to ride across valley and complete first detailed survey of an Inca site. It is one of a long list of episodes that show how the scientists spread their interest beyond geodesy.
Scene Three: August 29, 1739. Cuenca. The murder in a fiesta bullring of the expedition’s surgeon. Just as the science was nearing completion, a tragedy intervenes.
Memento: La Condamine's quadrant.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Nicholas Crane
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In this playful episode with the novelist Edward Rutherfurd, we venture east and back to the mid-nineteenth-century.
By 1839 Chinese patience with the British-run opium trade was running thin. Rutherfurd explains how a confrontation between the ancient, proud and insular Chinese and the merchant adventurers of the West had become inevitable and how, had he the chance, he would have tried to stop it.
Edward Rutherfurd is one of Britain’s great authors. Over the past 40 years he has written eight bestsellers, including his epic novel Sarum, which spent 23 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Rutherfurd's latest book, China, engages with the historical context we explore in this episode.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: June, 1839. Chinese Commissioner Lin burns thousands of chests of opium confiscated from British (and also American) merchants. This sets off the famous Opium Wars that so profoundly affect the attitude of China towards the West to this day.
Scene Two: October, 1839. The engagement of Victoria and Albert at Windsor Castle.
Scene Three: The following morning, October, 1839. Windsor Castle with all the newly-purchased equipment to make a Daguerrotype photograph.
Memento: An egg boiled by Warren Delano during the siege of the 'factories' at Canton.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Edward Rutherfurd
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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St Paul’s Cathedral. The West End. The Houses of Parliament. London is one of the great cities of the world and we’re instantly familiar with its famous buildings and neighbourhoods. But rarely do we consider the simple question: ‘who owns it?’
This question is at the heart of a new book by the historian Leo Hollis. His research into the ownership of Britain’s capital took him on a journey deep into the personal history of a remarkable woman called Mary Davies, an heiress of enormous consequence who lived four hundred years ago.
In this episode Leo Hollis guides us back to 1701 and to an important year in Mary’s life and in the life of a city that was discovering its new, modern identity.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Leo Hollis is the author of three books including the international bestseller, Cities are Good for You. His new book, published in May, is called, Inheritance, The Lost History of Mary Davies.
Show notes Scene One: March 1701, The still incomplete St Paul's cathedral, centrepiece of the huge rebuilding project that began as a result of the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Scene Two: 12-18 June 1701, Hotel Castille, Paris. Mary Davies arrives from Rome, suffering from serious mental illness and accompanied by the Fenwick brothers, whose actions during these few days form the basis of the ensuing court cases. What really did happen?
Scene Three: 13 August 1701. A lawyer for the supposed husband pins a court summons onto the railings of the home of Mrs Tregonwell in Millbank, Mary's mother. Mary is inside but refuses to come out.
Memento: The only contract that Mary Grosvenor signed, from October 1700.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Leo Hollis
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In 1915, D.H. Lawrence published his ‘big and beautiful book’, The Rainbow. Despite being considered one of his finest novels today, within a year of its publication it was censured by the state for obscenity and the remaining 1,011 copies of it were burnt by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.
So begins the biographer Frances Wilson’s tour of 1915, which would turn out to be dark and turbulent year in the life of one of Britain’s most controversial writers.
Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and critic. Her latest book, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury) focuses on the middle period of the writer’s life between 1915 and 1925.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show Notes
Scene One: November - Bow Street Magistrates Court, where D H Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, is tried for obscenity and the remaining 1.011 copies burnt by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Lawrence is not present at either event, but the destruction of his ‘big and beautiful book’ will impact dramatically on the direction of his writing.
Scene Two: November - The Vale of Health at the top of Hampstead Heath, where Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, are living in house in a row called Byron Villas. Lawrence now decides that he will become, like Byron himself, a literary outlaw: ‘I will retire out of the herd and throw bombs into it.’
Scene Three: March - Trinity College, Cambridge, where Lawrence, the son of a coal miner, is invited to High Table by Bertrand Russell. This is his first visit to the ancient university. After being paraded around like a pet, he gets a taste of Bloomsbury homosexuality and is horrified. A ‘little madness’ passes into him and for the next few weeks he loses his mind.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Frances Wilson
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In the early nineteenth-century a hitherto unremarkable man called James Lewis who was serving as a private in the East India Company decided to reinvent himself. He deserted and ran away to the little-known but beautiful city of Kabul in Afghanistan. Once there he came to dedicate himself to a strange and quixotic quest. He sought to find one of the great lost cities of the ancient world: Alexandria Under the Mountains.
In this evocative and beautifully-described episode of Travels Through Time, the academic historian Edmund Richardson takes us back to the year 1833. This was, he argued, the year when James Lewis transformed from an ordinary soldier into a man called Charles Masson – a figure who would change history.
The characters and storylines that feature in this episode arise from Edmund Richardson’s sparkling new book, Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City which has recently been published in hardback by Bloomsbury.
Edmund Richardson is Associate Professor of Classics at Durham University. In 2016, he was named one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Kabul, winter 1833. In the bazaars of Kabul - a warren of stalls and camels and shouting merchants from all over Asia - a bedraggled-looking man, dressed in shabby clothes, is listening to a storyteller.
Scene Two: Bagram, summer 1833. Masson rides out of Kabul in search of Alexander's city. It was called Alexandria beneath the Mountains, and was founded two and a half thousand years earlier.
Scene Three: Ludhiana, northern India, autumn 1833. In the sleepy, dusty town of Ludhiana, the British East India Company's spymaster is looking over reports from his informants in Kabul. He reads about a ragged stranger, who calls himself Charles Masson, and has spent the year hunting for Alexander's lost city.
Memento: Charles Masson’s drinking cup, symbolic of a different way of encountering Afghanistan.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Edmund Richardson
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War.
The identity of the victims was clear enough. They were the Polish military elite and significant figures – academics, writers, industrials, doctors - from wider Polish society.
But who was responsible? The Germans instantly blamed the Soviets. The Soviets retaliated that the accusation was a ‘vile slander’, intended to mask yet another instance of Nazi wickedness.
In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.
Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: March 1940, Starobelsk camp, Soviet Ukraine. Bronisław Młynarski and his friends find a mysterious message tied to the collar of a stray dog.
Scene Two: April 1940, Starobelsk camp. NKVD Commissar Kirshin stands on the steps of the ruined church watching the transports of men depart: ‘You are leaving,’ he says, ‘for a place where I would like to go myself.’
Scene Three: July 1940, Griazovets camp near Vologda in the far north of Russia. The artist Józef Czapski gives an informal lecture about Marcel Proust, delivered entirely from memory, to a group of friends lying on the grass in the sun.
Memento: One of the Christmas decorations created by graphic artist Edward Manteuffel while he was a prisoner in Starobelsk camp.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Jane Rogoyska
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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After the political drama of the first century BC came the magnificence of the Augustan Age. This was a peaceful time of great cultural expression – Livy, Virgil, Horace and, the focus of today’s episode, the poet Ovid.
Our guest, the scholar Llewelyn Morgan, takes us back to the very end of this glorious age in Roman history. We see how the people coped with the death of a long-lived emperor and we catch a glimpse of Ovid, the banished poet, who was desperate to seize his chance for a return home.
Professor Llewelyn Morgan is a scholar of Roman literature at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is the author of Ovid: A Very Short Introduction
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Rome. The funeral of Augustus, an extraordinary spectacle that he had planned to the last t himself. It was effectively an embodied history of Rome with all the major figures played by people wearing specially designed wax masks.
Scene Two: Tomi. Ovid off in exile on the Black Sea, melancholic and desperate to return to his beloved Rome. He writes poetic letters to a bunch of people he hopes can help him out, including one of the consuls for AD14 and Germanicus, the heir to the throne.
Scene Three: The Rhine. Germanicus dealing with army mutinies that break out on the critical Rhine frontier after Augustus' death. This revealed the real character of the Empire, where power really lay, and also provided insight into the lives of the ordinary people who filled the army ranks.
Memento: A wax mask worn by official mourners at the funeral of the Emperor Augustus.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Llewelyn Morgan
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Today we head back two thousand years to the rich, rowdy, ruthless Roman world of the Emperor Domitian. Our guide is the much-loved novelist Lindsey Davis.
For years Lindsey Davis has been captivating readers with her series of detective novels set in the first century AD. Her great protagonists, Falco and Flavia Albia, are names that are probably already familiar to you and enough in themselves to conjure memories of thrilling, twisting tales in Ancient Britain or in the Eternal City itself.
This spring Davis has published the latest book in her Flavia Albia series, A Comedy of Terrors, which is set in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, and more specifically during the week running up to the Festival of Saturnalia.
For us this means the perfect guide and the perfect setting for a trip into the past. We’ll be giving a hardback copy of A Comedy of Terrors away to one of our newsletter subscribers this week – so to be in with a chance of winning it, make sure you visit our site and sign up.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: Bay of Naples, ten years after Vesuvius.
Scene Two: Syria, to witness – the (third) Falso Nero episode.
Scene Three: The Black Banquet where senators and others were terrorised and Domitian’s big ‘friendly’ banquet for the entire Roman people.
Memento: A giant Roman measure of Falernian Wine from the slopes of Vesuvius
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Lindsey Davis
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Civil unrest, a deadly sickness and trouble in the north? We’re visiting the year 1381 in this episode to examine a dramatic moment in ‘the calamitous fourteenth century.’ Our guide is the historian Helen Carr, author of a newly released biography of John of Gaunt - The Red Prince, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
John of Gaunt is a compelling figure. He was the son of Edward III, uncle of Richard II, Father of Henry IV and progenitor of the Tudor dynasty. Gaunt lived his life, as Carr explains, against some of the most challenging circumstances in English history.
Helen Carr is an historian of the Fourteenth Century and author of The Red Prince: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (April 2021) and What is History, Now? (September 2021).
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes Scene One: June London, Wat Tyler and thousands of rebels arrive in London, where they are joined by disgruntled locals and go on a rampage through they city. Their main target is John of Gaunt’s sumptuous home, the Savoy Palace, which they break into and annihilate – theft is not part of their plan, just destruction.
Scene Two: June Berwick on Tweed. Fortunately for him, John of Gaunt, was far away in Berwick on the Scottish border at this time, negotiating a truce. When he heard the terrible news from London, and the rumours that a huge peasant army was on its way north to find him, he ordered his numerous castles to be stocked up.
Scene Three: August the Scottish Borders. John of Gaunt is left hanging for weeks by his young nephew Richard II, awaiting word that he can return to his lands in the south and regain his authority. Percy, the most powerful northern Earl, takes advantage of John’s vulnerability and refuses to give him shelter.
Memento: One of John of Gaunt’s luxurious tapestries that hung in the Savoy Palace before it was destroyed by the rebels.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Helen Carr
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Roland Philipps takes us to France on the eve of occupation. We follow the shifting fortunes of an extraordinary female double agent - Mathilde Carré, ‘La Chatte’ - whose life embodies the moral ambiguity of this period of French history.
Mathilde story – as told in our guest today’s latest book, Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal – illustrates the dark complexities of life in Vichy France. She was neither a perfect French patriot, nor a heartless traitor. What she was, however, was a survivor.
Roland Philipps was a leading publisher for many years. His first book, A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean, was published in 2018.
As ever, much, much more about this episode – including contemporary photographs of Vichy France and Mathilde - is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: 17th June 1940. The Loire. France is collapsing in the face of the Wehrmacht’s lightning war, millions are fleeing Paris and the north in ‘the Exodus’, amongst them Mathilde Carré, who has left her nursing station and is following the war south, outraged at what she sees as the cowardice of her country.
Scene Two: Mid-September 1940. Toulouse. The Vichy government is in place and France is divided between the occupied and non-occupied zones. Despair of Mathilde, about to commit suicide when she decides to become ‘a second Joan of Arc’.
Scene Three: 14th November 1940. Paris. Mathilde Carré arrives in Paris to found the Interallié intelligence network with Roman Czerniawski.
Memento: Mathilde’s ‘Spy’s Handbook’
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Roland Philipps
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Even in their own time the people of fifteenth-century Florence realised that they were living in a ‘Golden Age.’ In this episode we travel back to the year 1434 to meet some of the magical city’s most fascinating characters – among them, the young bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci.
Our guide for this episode is the New York Times bestselling historian Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling.
Vespasiano da Bisticci is the hero of King’s latest book, The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the manuscripts that illuminated the Renaissance.
As ever, much, much more about this episode – including a contemporary map of Florence and images of the key characters - is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: February, Vespasiano da Bisticci begins work in the bookshop of Michele Guardini.
Scene Two: June Pope Eugenius IV arrives in the city having fled Rome in terror for his life.
Scene Three: Cosimo de’Medici returns to Florence after a year-long exile in Venice.
Memento: The manuscript copy of Cicero’s Letters to Friends produced in Vespasiano’s workshop for the Hungarian scholar Janus Pannonius.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Ross King
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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The Fall of France in the summer of 1940 upended many lives. One of those who lost their status and safety was the wealthy Jewish heiress, Béatrice de Camondo.
In this episode James McAuley tells Béatrice's tragic story, a story that ultimately ended with her deportation east to Auschwitz. Along the way he explains the early twentieth century world that Béatrice came from: a world of art, style and grace.
Looking back at the art collections that once belonged to Jewish families like the de Camondo, McAuley questions the meaning of them. What were these collections for? What do they tell us about the people that assembled them now that they have gone?
As ever, much, much more about this episode – including a fascinating colourised image of Nissim de Camondo, Béatrice's elder brother - is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
James McAuley is the Paris Correspondent of the Washington Post. His debut book, The House of Fragile Things, is newly published by Yale University Press.
Show Notes Scene One: 16 July, 1942. Paris. The Vel d’Hiv roundup of Parisian Jews.
Scene Two: 5 September, 1942. The forest of Ermonville. Béatrice de Camondo writes a letter to a childhood friend.
Scene Three: The night of December 5, 1942. Neuilly-sur-Seine. Béatrice de Camondo arrested with her daughter, Fanny.
Memento: The library of Theodore Reinach at the Villa Kerylos, ransacked by the Gestapo during the War.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: James McAuley
Reading: Nadia Fontaine
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
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In Berlin the winter of 1939/40 was bitterly cold. People were full of anxiety for what the future held. In this episode the Number One Bestselling novelist Simon Scarrow takes us on a fascinating walking tour of the Nazi capital to see three of its most revealing buildings.
We have two hardback copies of Simon Scarrow’s Blackout to give away to our listeners. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning one of these is "like" our Facebook page. (deadline Sun 28 March 2021 - winner notified by message)
As ever, much, much more about this episode – including a period map of Berlin that shows the three locations, and a range of contemporary photographs - is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com
Show notes
Scene One: Anhalter station – December 1939 – Dusk
Scene Two: Reich Main Security Office – December - Day
Scene Three: Hotel Adlon -December - Evening
Memento: A propaganda poster
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Simon Scarrow
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
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Few crimes can be said to be as sinister and perplexing as the ‘Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer.’ In this episode the journalist and Sunday Times bestselling author, Shrabani Basu, takes us back to the dramatic plot of a crime that captivated Edwardian Britain and involved the creator of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
To WIN a hardback copy of Shrabani Basu's The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, all you have to do is "like" our Facebook page. (deadline Sun 21 March 2021 - winner notified by message)
As ever, much, much more about this episode - including photographs of the Edaljis, a colourised image of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a map of the location of Great Wyrley - is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: January 1907: Arthur Conan Doyle makes a trip to Great Wyrley and visits the scene of crime. He visits the vicarage, the locals and his last stop is at the house of Captain Anson.
Scene Two: Shortly after. George Edalji gets a free pardon after ACD's piece is published in the Daily Telegraph. But he is not given any compensation, which leaves ACD incensed. He decides to reveal the true identity of the Wyrley Ripper. The game is afoot.
Scene Three: September 1907. ACD is on his honeymoon. A crucial lead comes through. He feels he has solved the mystery and has the final proof. But does he?
Memento: George Edjali’s coat.
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Shrabani Basu
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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The historian Margarette Lincoln takes us back to 1688 - an oddly neglected year in English history - to see the Glorious Revolution play out in three telling scenes.
In London there's tension, riots, a royal escape and a surprise invasion. Brought together, they combine change the political and religious character of the nation.
The storylines and characters that appear in this episode feature in Lincoln's new book, London and the Seventeenth Century, which is recently issued in hardback by Yale University Press.
For much, much more, as ever, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 29 June Westminster Hall, a packed courtroom as seven bishops are put on trial for refusing to carry out the King’s demands.
Scene Two: 10 December, James II flees London leaving chaotic scenes of anti-Catholic rioting and fires behind him.
Scene Three: 18 December, the forces of William of Orange enter London, as part of the peaceful transfer of power.
Memento: One of King William III’s spurs – because it is ambiguous, it could symbolize progress – spurring the nation into a new phase, but could also suggest cruelty – the new regime would be imposed by military force in Ireland and Scotland.
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Margarette Lincoln
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In this sweeping tour of Renaissance century Italy, Mary Hollingsworth takes us to see the most powerful figure of the age: the King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, the Lord of the Netherlands and the soon-to-be-crowned Holy Roman Emperor - Charles V.
To WIN a hardback copy of Mary Hollingsworth's beautifully designed and written new book, Princes of the Renaissance, just 'like' our new Facebook page.
For much, much more, as ever, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: Bologna, 24 February 1530, Pope Clement VII crowns Charles V as the Holy Roman Emperor, the last Pope to do so, marking the end of an 800-year tradition that stretched back to Charlemagne.
Scene Two: Mantua, 2 April 1530. Charles V is staying with Federigo Gonzaga at his beautiful court, they play a game of real tennis before sitting down in the great dining hall surrounded by Guilio Romano’s erotic frescos to enjoy an elaborate banquet.
Scene Three: Florence, 15 April 1530 (Good Friday). Imperial forces surround the city of Florence, leaving just one access point into the city at Empoli. Inside the gates, the situation is getting more desperate, food supplies are very low, but the spirit of the Florentine Republicans remains undimmed.
Memento: A piece of Florentine plaster daubed with the words “Poor but Free!”
Further reading: Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, 2019 (Yale University Press)
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Mary Hollingsworth
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In this episode the author and journalist Philip Stephens takes us back to a crucial month in post-war British politics. December 1962, he explains, set Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world for the next half century.
Featuring in this episode is the elderly British prime minister, Harold Macmillan; the charismatic US president John F Kennedy; and the trenchant French statesman Charles de Gaulle. In this one month these three men would set out their contrasting visions of what kind of country Britain would be.
The scenes, characters and storylines in this episode of Travels Through Time all feature in Philip Stephen’s new book, Britain Alone: the path from Suez to Brexit (Faber)
For much, much more, including the chance to win a hardback copy of Britain Alone and to see a fascinating colourised picture of JFK, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show Notes Scene One: 5 December 1962. Dean Acheson’s speech to the cadets of the Military Academy at West Point, New York.
Scene Two: 15 December. Macmillan's visit to Rambouillet to meet with Charles de Gaulle.
Scene Three: 19 December 1962. Macmillan travels to the Bahamas to meet President John F Kennedy.
Memento: The text for Dean Acheson’s ‘West Point Speech.’
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Philip Stephens
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
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In Britain the winter of 1962/3 was astonishingly cold. The snow began to fall on Boxing Day and it did not thaw until Easter. In this episode the writer Juliet Nicolson takes us back to this white, frosty world.
Against a backdrop of snow and ice Nicolson describes the personal stories that were playing out at that time. There was the desperation of Sylvia Plath in London, the magical music of the Beatles in Liverpool and the political shock of the Profumo Affair.
In this episode Nicolson evokes all these stories and she also takes us back inside her primary school, where she was being taught by the most wonderful English literature teacher imaginable.
The scenes, characters and themes discussed in this episode all feature in Juliet Nicolson's new book, Frostquake, which is newly-published in hardback.
For much, much more, including a fascinating colourised picture of the snow in 1963, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show Notes Scene One: January 1963. Juliet Nicolson’s school in London
Scene Two: 12th February, 1963. The McCann’s sitting room in Oldham after the Beatles concert at the Astoria ballroom
Scene Three: 22nd March 1963. Public Gallery in the House of Commons
Memento: The contemporary notes made by Penelope Fitzgerald for her novel ‘Offshore’
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Juliet Nicolson
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
See where 1963 fits on our Timeline
In this Valentine’s Day special of Travels Through Time we find out how women’s love lives were being transformed in the year 1966.
Our guest is Professor Carol Dyhouse, a social and cultural historian and emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. Dyhouse takes us on a fascinating, uplifting tour of the sixties that ends with us sniffing fine perfume in a Scottish department store.
Dyhouse is the author of several books about women’s history from education and feminism to glamour and consumerism. Her most recent work Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen is soon to be published by Oxford University Press.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: A visit to Gretna Green
Scene Two: Sitting in on deliberations of the Latey Committee on Age of Majority
Scene Three: Witnessing the opening of Brook Advisory Centre in Birmingham
Memento: Two bottles of scent from the perfume department at Jenners in Edinburgh.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Professor Carol Dyhouse
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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This week we're heading to 1643 - a year of conflict and strife in the English Civil War.
Our guest is the distinguished historian of science, Professor John Heilbron. Heilbron opted to travel back to Royalist Oxford, a university city teeming with action.
Amid it all he finds a stranglely unstudied history lurking in the colleges. It's a story that is captured in a painting of a young scholar and his tutor, who sits beside a copy of Galileo's Dialogues.
See the painting discussed in this episode here.
The characters and stories in this episode feature in JL Heilbron's new book, The Ghost of Galileo, which has been recently published by Oxford University Press.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: Sir John Bankes arrives in Oxford, probably in February of 1643
Scene Two: Summer 1643. Young John Bankes arrives in Oxford to begin his studies at Oriol College
Scene Three: The painter Francis Cleyn comes to Oxford on business.
Memento: Three copies of the original edition of Galileo’s Dialogue (current market value $1m each)
People/Social Presenter: John Hillman
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor John Heilbron
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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The bestselling novelist Kate Mosse kicks off our new season of recordings with this dramatic trip back to sixteenth-century Paris.
The summer of 1572 was supposed to be a joyous one for Parisians. After years of strife a wedding was planned and the best was expected. The events of that August, though, would be remembered for quite different reasons.
Find out more with this conversation between Kate and Artemis.
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Kate Mosse's new novel, The City of Tears, which is recently published in hardback by Macmillan
For much, much more, including a full transcript, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: Hôtel de Bourbon, Paris, June 1572, where the Queen of Navarre is lodging.
Scene Two: Catherdal de Notre Dame, Paris, 18th August, for the wedding of Maguerite de Valois to Henry de Navarre.
Scene Three: Rue de Béthisy in the early hours of 24th August, St Bartholomew’s Day, as the massacre begins.
Momento: A steel Huguenot cross.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Kate Mosse
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
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We're very excited to let you know that the fourth season of Travels Through Time begins on Tuesday 26 January.
Our first episode will be with the bestselling novelist Kate Mosse. Following Kate will be a brilliant range of historians, novelists, poets and others - all of them full of expertise and enthusiasm for the past.
For more, check out tttpodcast.com. // See you soon!
In this indulgent Christmas Special with the author Pen Vogler, we forego the tradition of our usual format and opt to roam freely across the centuries.
Instead of looking at one year in isolation, we examine one single day. That, of course, is the brightest, bonniest, most edacious date in all the Christian calendar: 25 December.
Pen Vogler is the author of the expertly researched, Scoff, A History of Food and Class in Britain, A multiple book of the year, Scoff has been described by Jay Rayner as 'A brilliant romp of a book that gets to the very heart of who we think we are, one delicious dish at a time.'
For much, much more (and the chance to win some books!), head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: Christmas, 1524
Scene Two: Christmas, 1660s
Scene Three: Christmas, 1843
Memento: Samuel Pepys’s Venison Pasty
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Pen Vogler
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Charles Spencer takes us back exactly nine centuries to one of the most shocking maritime disasters in English history: the sinking of the White Ship.
Down with the White Ship on 25 November went King Henry I's legitimate son, William Ætheling, and many leading nobles. The fallout was both immediate and long-lasting. For decades afterwards England would be lost to civil war.
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Charles Spencer's latest book, The White Ship, Conquest, Anarchy and The Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 1120, Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. Henry I grants Geoffrey de Clinton land to build a castle
Scene Two: 25 November 1120. The White Ship sinks at Barfleur
Scene Three: Late November. The New Forest. King Henry learns of the disaster
Memento: The figurehead of the doomed White Ship
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Charles Spencer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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We meet the perfect guest for our format: the Sunday Times bestselling author of the Time Travellers Guide series, Ian Mortimer.
Ian guides us back to 1825 for a tour of the concert halls, stately homes and new industrial beginnings of one of the best-loved eras in British history: the Regency Period.
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Ian Mortimer’s latest book in his time traveller series, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show Notes Scene One: 21 December 1825, collapse of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire.
Scene Two: 7 September 1825 (Stockton to Darlington Railway)
Scene Three: 21 March 1825, The Argyll Rooms, Regent Street, London (first British performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony)
Memento: Byron's skull cap
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Interview: John Hillman
Guest: Ian Mortimer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
See where 1825 fits on our Timeline
Today the historian and literary scholar Dr Joseph Hone takes us back to the dangerous, scheming politics of the reign of Queen Anne.
We talk about the long legacy of the fraught seventeenth-century. We follow the twists and turns of a mystery about a scandalous pamphlet, and we meet the brilliant man who many consider Britain’s first prime minister: Robert Harley.
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Joseph Hone’s new book, The Paper Chase: The Printer, The Spymaster & the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers, published by Chatto & Windus.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 7 February 1711, the Bell Tavern, Westminster. A club of disgruntled Tory backbenchers are plotting against Robert Harley.
Scene Two: 8 March 1711, the Cockpit in Whitehall. A suspected French spy is being interrogated by members of the cabinet when he attempts to assassinate Harley.
Scene Three: 26 April 1711, the floor of the House of Commons. Harley makes a grand reappearance in Parliament.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Dr Joseph Hone
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
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Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
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In this episode the distinguished historian Professor Judith Herrin takes us back to the year 500 AD. We visit Constantinople in the east, the old crumbliing capital at Rome and then we head to the enchanting city of Ravenna.
As Rome's importance waned, Ravenna's was set on a steep upward trajectory. By the year 500 the Ostrogoth King Theoderic had made it his capital and had employed hundreds of specialist craftsmen to build churches that glorified his Arian Christian faith.
The characters and scenes that feature in this episode are described in much more detail in Judith Herrin's acclaimed new book: Ravenna, Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
For much, much more, including a series of fabulous images of Ravenna, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: Constantinople. The Emperor Anastasius rules over a large and expanding capital city.
Scene Two: Rome. Theoderic arrives in Rome, his first and only visit to the city.
Scene Three: Ravenna: Theoderic returns to his capital city, now the most important centre of government in Italy from which he rules a much larger kingdom.
Memento: A leaf of the Gothic Bible, written in silver and gold ink on special purple dyed parchment
People/Social Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Judith Herrin
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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See where 500 fits on our Timeline
On the eve of Remembrance Day the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author Damien Lewis takes us back to 1944 and to a series of audacious operations deep behind enemy lines in the aftermath of D-Day.
The characters and scenes that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time arise out of Damien Lewis's new book, SAS: Band of Brothers, which in newly published in hardback.
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: June 1944, France, a drop-zone twenty miles to the south of Paris.
Scene Two: Paris, July 1944, France, La Ferte Alais drop zone, just east of Etampes Airbase, south of Paris.
Scene Three: August 1944: Noailles, a dark patch of remote woodland to the north of Paris.
Memento: Lt K. Weihe’s SAS beret
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Damien Lewis
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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In the 1930s, 35,000 men and women from 61 different countries travelled to Spain to defend democracy against General Franco’s army. Collectively, they are remembered as the International Brigades.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the journalist and historian Giles Tremlett takes us back to the year 1936 to learn more about the International Brigades. How important were they? Who were the leaders? How do we remember them today?
For much, much more, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War is recently published in hrdback by Bloomsbury.
Show notes Scene One: Barcelona on July 19, 1936 - The day that the (failed) coup launched by General Franco and others reaches Barcelona
Scene Two: Paris, Quai d'Orsay - October 10 1936 - Groups of young men hang around the platform for the night-train to Marseilles. They include Cambridge poet John Cornford, future Harvard Classics professor Bernard Knox, communist writer John Sommerfield and British-based German exile painter Jan Kurzke.
Scene Three: Madrid - November 8 1936 - The same people who arrived just four weeks earlier are now in uniform marching up the Gran Via in Madrid to the University City, which will soon become the front line.
Memento: A varsity-style team jacket worn by the USA team for the People's Olympiad
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: John Hillman
Guest: Giles Tremlett
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1936 fits on our Timeline
Most people know the story of Appeasement: of Chamberlain and Churchill. But very few people know the history of the 'Glamour Boys.'
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the MP Chris Bryant takes us back to 1939 and a time of huge tension in Europe. For years a group of MPs, derided by the establishment as the 'Glamour Boys', had been warning about the threat posed by Hitler and his expansionist policies.
They faced a stubborn government and an often shockingly antisemitic press. But these politicians were used to being outsiders, Chris Bryant explains, because of their sexuality.
The scenes and characters discussed in this episode feature in Chris Bryant's new book, The Glamour Boys: The Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler which will be published by Bloomsbury on 12 November.
Much more at our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 19th July 1939, Ronnie Tree’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster. The Glamour Boys gather at Ronnie’s house to plot their opposition to Chamberlain.
Scene Two: The evening of 2nd August 1939, Chamber of the House of Commons. A debate about whether parliament should break for summer recess becomes unexpectedly heated.
Scene Three: Any day in October 1939, Victor Cazalet’s Anti-Aircraft Battalion in Sevenoaks, known as ‘the monstrous regiment of gentlemen’ or ‘the buggers’ battalion’.
Memento: The shield commemorating the death of MP Jack Macnamara that currently resides in the House of Commons Chamber.
People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Chris Bryant
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
See where 1939 fits on our Timeline
In this episode of Travels Through Time, British ancient historian and academic Professor Paul Cartledge, takes us back to the 'Graeco-Persian Wars' to visit a major event in the history of western civilisation and culture.
The mighty Persian empire - based in Iran, founded by Cyrus II in the mid-6th century BCE - launches a massive amphibious expedition in the spring of 480 led by Persian King-Emperor Xerxes. Their aim is to punish Persia's Greek subjects, who together with Eretria and Athens, have risen up in armed rebellion.
This forces all the many Greek cities of the mainland to make a choice: cave in without a fight, try to stay neutral, or resist. The latter was the choice of some 30-plus cities, led by the legendary Sparta King, Leonidas.
Show notes
Scene One: Sparta - King Leonidas chooses 'the 300' for Thermopylae
Scene Two: Thermopylae - a 1-kilometre long E-W pass in northern Greece, where Thessaly (a region whose rulers were already on the Persian side) gives way to (resisting, loyalist) Phocis.
Scene Three: The morning of the final day of the Battle
Memento: A bronze Persian arrowhead
People
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Paul Cartledge
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 and the Space Age began. In this episode of Travels Through Time the astronomer and science writer Stuart Clark takes us back to the dramatic heart of this story.
We look at Sputnik’s brilliant engineer Sergei Korolev, witness the reaction to the launch in the United States, and then we head to the office of the American journalist Alexander Marshack, whose fascination with the night sky was about to propel him into the depths of time.
The scenes and characters mentioned in this episode feature in Stuart Clark’s new book, Beneath the Sky. To win a copy of this book as well as a striking colourised print from Jordan Lloyd of Colorgraph, sign up to our newsletter at tttpodcast.com
Stuart Clark's Beneath the Night: How the stars have shaped the history of humankind (Faber) is out now and available on Amazon.
Show notes
Scene One: 4 October, 1957, with Korolev for the launch of the first satellite Sputnik 1
Scene Two: October 1957, with future NASA engineer Homer Hickam in West Virginia as he looked up into the night sky, saw Sputnik and felt awe-struck inspiration
Scene Three: Late 1957, To be in the office of American journalist Alexander Marshack in the aftermath of the launch, as he tried to put things together and make sense of why humans wanted to ’touch’ the night sky
Memento: Korolev’s radio receiver
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Stuart Clark
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1957 fits on our Timeline
We have a very powerful image of Oscar Wilde today. He is remembered as a master of wit and style, and champion of the beautiful. But how was this identity constructed? How was he viewed by his contemporaries?
In this episode the author and academic Michèle Mendelssohn takes us back to 1882 and Wilde's lecture tour of the United States of America to find out. This year marked, she explains, ‘the beginning of Wilde’s ascent into the great character that we now know.’
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Michèle Mendelssohn’s latest book, Making Oscar Wilde, which was a book of the year in the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement and a semi-finalist for the 2019 PEN America Biography Prize.
For much, much more, head to https://www.tttpodcast.com/
Show notes Scene One: 9 January 1882, Wilde’s first lecture, The Chickering Hall, New York
Scene Two: 18 January 1882, Camden, New Jersey: Wilde visits the poet Walt Whitman
Scene Three: 27 June, Biloxi, Mississippi. Wilde visits the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis
Memento: Oscar Wilde’s fur coat
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Michèle Mendelssohn
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1882 fits on our Timeline
In this episode Professor Catherine Fletcher takes us back to 1492 and the heart of the Renaissance. She takes us to the deathbed of one of the most powerful figures in Italy; to the Conclave of cardinals that was gathering to elect a new pope; and across the Atlantic to see Christopher Columbus approaching a New World.
Catherine Fletcher is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The discussion in this episode of Travels Through Time is drawn from the events described in Catherine's new book, The Beauty and the Terror recently published in hardback by the Bodley Head in the UK and by Oxford University Press in the USA.
For much, much more, head to https://www.tttpodcast.com/
Show notes Scene One: In an ornate villa in Careggi on the outskirts of Florence Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ de’ Medici lies dying.
Scene Two: The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Pope Innocent VIII, whose territories spanned a swathe of the peninsula from Rome to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, has died so the traditional process of conclave begins in the Sistine Chapel
Scene Three: Friday 12th October, the Bahamas in the West Indies. Christopher Columbus sights land and arrives on the coast of an island called Guanahaní with his crew of explorers.
Memento: A handful of Lorenzo’s extraordinary collection of antique jewellery.
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Catherine Fletcher
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1492 fits on our Timeline
Welcome to a different and very special episode of Travels Through Time. Today’s interviewee is the extraordinary Holocaust survivor and resistance fighter Selma van de Perre. At the age of ninety-eight, three quarters of a century after she was liberated from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Selma tells us her remarkable story and takes us back to the events of 1945.
This interview took place on the eve of the British publication of Selma's memoir, My Name is Selma. We're very grateful to Selma and to Ariana Neumann, the New York Times Bestselling author of When Time Stopped, who conducted this interview on our behalf.
As ever, much much more about this episode can be found at www.tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 23 April 1945. A man from the Swedish Red Cross arrives at Ravensbrück. He offers the imprisoned women chocolate and cigarettes.
Scene Two: Late April 1945, After leaving Ravensbrück for Sweden, the aid convoy is mistakenly attacked by the British.
Scene Three: Late May/early June 1945. At a refugee “holiday”camp in Sweden. Selma is in the dining room and hears someone call her by her real name for the first time in years.
Memento: A dressing gown, specially made by the Swedish family that Selma stayed with after being liberated
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Ariana Neumann
Guest: Selma van de Perre
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1945 fits on our Timeline
In this episode of Travels Through Time the author and journalist Hugh Aldersey-Williams takes us back to 1655 and the vibrant heart of the Dutch Golden Age to meet Christiaan Huygens, a figure oddly forgotten by us today but who was once venerated as the greatest mathematician, astronomer and physicist of his age.
Hugh guides us back to the year 1655 to see Christiaan make his thrilling discovery of one of Saturn's moons; to watch him struggle with the mathematical problem of pendular motion, and to follow him as he enters Paris - the city he would come to love - for the very first time.
Much much more about the scenes, characters and materials discussed in this conversation can be found at www.tttpodcast.com
The discussion in this episode of Travels Through Time arises from the characters and events described by Hugh Aldersey-Williams in his new book, Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the making of science in Europe which is recently published in hardback by Picador
Show notes Scene One: 25 March 1655. With Christiaan and his telescope in the garden of the Huygens’s house in The Hague. The discovery of Saturn’s moon later to be called Titan.
Scene Two: 4 March 1655, Huygens recommends a Polish inventor’s clock for Dutch patent, demonstrating that he is already thinking about the problem of pendular motion.
Scene Three: 23 July 1655, Huygens arrives in Paris - the city that he would grow to love - for the very first time
Memento: One of Huygens’s magic lanterns
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1655 fits on our Timeline
How close did we come to a world without the USSR? A world with no Stalin, no KGB, or even Putin today? In this episode of Travels Through Time we head back to 1918 and the scene of the audacious, thrilling Lockhart Plot to find out.
Our guide in this episode is the American historian Jonathan Schneer. He takes us back to revolutionary Russia to visit the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, the American Consulate and the scene of the final showdown in Grain Alley.
He explains just who Bruce Lockhart was and what his plot set out to achieve.
The subject matter and scenes that feature in this episode come from Jonathan Schneer's book, The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia
For much much more visit: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: February 15, 1918: Bruce Lockhart’s first appointment with Leon Trotsky at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd.
Scene Two: August 25, 1918: secret meeting at the American Consulate in Moscow, hosted by American Consul General, DeWitt Clinton Poole, but presided over by French Consul General Josef Fernand Grenard.
Scene Three: Earliest hours of September 1, 1918: #24 Khlebnyi pereulok (Grain Alley), Cheka agents arrive to arrest Lockhart, George Hicks, and Moura von Benckendorff .
Memento: Sidney Reilly’s full report on the status of the plot for British Intelligence
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: John Hillman
Guest: Jonathan Schneer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Who were the Ottomans? Why have they been so neglected in the traditional Western approach to history? What precisely was their influence on the fabled events of the sixteenth century? In this episode of Travels Through Time, the historian Alan Mikhail takes us back to the monumental events of the year 1517 to find out.
We look at the conquest of Cairo, the start of the Reformation and the arrival of the Europeans in Mexico. Everywhere, the influence of the Ottomans was felt. In particular, Mikhail tells us about the life of Sultan Selim I.
The subject matter and scenes that feature in this episode come from Alan Mikhail's new book, God’s Shadow: The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped the Modern World.
Alan Mikhail is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University.
For much much more visit: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: February 1517, Ottoman Sultan Selim captures Cairo
Scene Two: October 1517, Wittenberg, Germany. Disaffected Professor of Theology Martin Luther writes the 95 Theses
Scene Three: Early 1517, The first Europeans land on the coast of Mexico
Memento: The Map of Piri Reis
People Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Alan Mikhail
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
In this fascinating and unusual episode of Travels Through Time 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 this politically-charged episode of Travels Through Time, Professor Simon Hall takes us on a fascinating tour of the United States in 1960.
We watch on as 'the Greensboro Four’ ignite a nation-wide series of sit-ins. We take a visit to see Fidel Castro and his swashbuckling entourage at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. And we watch as Nixon and Kennedy go head to head in the most famous presidential debate of them all.
The subject matter, the scenes and characters that feature in this episode come from Simon Hall's new book, Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s. To be in with a chance of winning a hardback copy of this book and a superb colourised image of Fidel Castro, visit: tttpodcast.com
Simon Hall is Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds.
Show notes Scene One: 1 February 1960; the lunch counter at the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Scene Two: Evening of Thursday 22 September; the Skyline Lounge, Hotel Theresa, Harlem.
Scene Three: 26 September, CBS’s McClurg Court studios, Chicago.
Memento: One of Fidel Castro’s cigars
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Simon Hall
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
So much more at: tttpodcast.com
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the writer Thomas Levenson guides us back to the scene of one the first and most devastating of all stock market crashes, an event that traumatised Georgian Britain: the South Sea Bubble.
The subject matter, the scenes and characters that feature in this episode come from Levenson's new book, Money for Nothing. Much more information is to be found at tttpodcast.com
Thomas Levenson is Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Show notes Scene One: 22 January, 1720: John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, rises in the House of Commons to present the South Sea deal to the members.
Scene Two: A Sunday in May, 1720. Daniel Defoe goes to church and witnesses the ‘South Sea’ hysteria.
Scene Three: 20 December, 1720, the House of Commons. Robert Walpole decides the fate of the speculators.
Memento: A pocket watch made in the year 1720
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Thomas Levenson
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
So much more at: tttpodcast.com
In this fascinating episode of Travels Through Time, Ken Follett, one of the world’s best loved historical novelists, guides us back to the beginning of the last millennium. The year we visit, 1002, comes at a time of change when, after centuries of stagnation, English society was beginning to emerge from that gloomy period we call ‘The Dark Ages.’
The subject matter, the scenes and the characters that feature in this episode come from the world depicted by Follett in his hugely-anticipated new novel The Evening and the Morning, the prequel to his bestselling masterpiece, The Pillars of the Earth.
For a chance to win a first edition hardback copy of The Evening and the Morning, to read more about the scenes discussed in this episode and to see images and show notes, please head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: 1002, The Slave Market, Bristol
Scene Two: 1002, The Viking seige of Exeter
Scene Three: 1002, The wedding of King Æthelred II & Emma of Normandy
Memento: A four-legged chair
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Ken Follett
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
So much more at: tttpodcast.com
In this episode of Travels Through Time we are taken on an invigorating tour of the ports, coasts and oceans of the world with Professor David Abulafia, winner of the prestigious 2020 Wolfson Prize for History for his book, The Boundless Sea.
For much more information about this episode, including images of the people and places involved, head to our website, tttpodcast.com
The scenes discussed in this episode come from The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (Allen Lane).
Show notes:
Scene One: 21 August 1415, The Portuguese attack on Ceuta, North Africa
Scene Two: 1415, The Eastern Settlement Greenland
Scene Three: 1415 Nanjing, east coast of central China
Memento: A piece of Chinese porcelain from Nanjing
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Professor David Abulafia
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Check out the amazing colourised images made by our podcast partner, ColorGraph!
In this swashbuckling episode of Travels Through Time we head back to the year 1453. We watch on as the brilliant, ruthless young sultan, Mehmet II, makes use of terrifying modern weaponry as he seeks to capture the prize of his heart’s desire: the ancient city of Constantinople.
Our guest this week is the award-winning and bestselling writer Justin Marozzi. Marozzi has lived for much of his professional life in the Middle East and North Africa and is known for books like The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (2008) and Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood.
The events described and the characters involved in this episode are taken from Marozzi’s latest book, Islamic Empires Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization. That book is published in paperback on 6 August by Penguin Press.
For much, much more about this episode, including battle plans and portraits of Mehmed and Constantine, head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show notes
Scene One: January 1453. A Hungarian siege engineer called Orban offers the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the most powerful new weapon in the world.
Scene Two: 22 April 1453, Mehmet displays an astonishing example of his military genius to seize control of the Golden Horn, Constantinople
Scene Three: 1:30am on 29th May, the battle for Constantinople reaches its dramatic climax
Memento: The magnificent cannon cast for the seige in 1453 by the Hungarian engineer Orban
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Justin Marozzi
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
In this episode Professor Greg Woolf takes us to 146 BCE – the point at which Roman domination of the Mediterranean became inevitable.
In the West, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage, ending the decades of military struggle known as the Punic Wars and finally defeating the Phoenicians.
In the East, Roman forces seized control of the important city of Corinth on mainland Greece, giving them a strategic foothold that they would go on to use in building their empire.
At the same time, the glittering intellectual capital of the ancient world, Alexandria, was beset by internal power struggles and so began the period of decline that would eventually lead to it, too, being absorbed into the Roman Empire.
For much, much more about this episode, head to tttpodcast.com
Show notes Scene One: The demolition of Carthage in Spring of 146
Scene Two: At the sack of the ancient city of Corinth in Greece in 146
Scene Three: The decline of Alexandria and the death of Ptolemy VI in 145
Memento: A painting from the Ancient world
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Greg Woolf
Production: Maria Nolan
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Partner: Colorgraph
The conversation in this episode of Travels Through Time revolves around Woolf’s most recent book, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities.
In this brilliantly descriptive and entertaining episode of Travels Through Time the award-winning writer and satirist Craig Brown takes us on a cultural tour of 1963. We discuss the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles meteoric rise to fame and the assassination of JFK.
For much, much more about the episode and to be the first to see the amazing new colourised photograph of the Beatles in Washington DC at their first US concert – head to our website: tttpodcast.com
Show Notes:
Scene One: August 1963, lingering with the robbers in their hide-out at Leatherslade Farm.
Scene Two: Second half of 1963, Jane Asher's family home, Wimpole Street, to see/be Paul McCartney, living with the Ashers, at the time of the first flush of the Beatles’ success.
Scene Three: November 23 1963. In the Texas School Book depository with Lee Harvey Oswald as he shoots President Kennedy.
Memento: Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Yesterday’
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Craig Brown
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Podcast Partner: ColorGraph
Craig Brown’s book One, Two, Three Four: The Beatles in Time is available now from 4th Estate books.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the writer and broadcaster Luke Pepera introduces us to Mansa Musa, a dazzling figure in African history. Mansa Musa was the Emperor of Mali in the fourteenth century. We follow him as he embarks on his spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325.
It was a journey of epic proportions, involving a procession of tens of thousands of people and the transport of extraordinary amounts of gold, the precious metal on which Mali had built its wealth.
For much more information about this episode - including illustrations of the places and people featured - head to our website, tttpodcast.com
To hear more stories from African history, you can follow Luke on Twitter at @LukePepera and read along with his blog.
Show notes: Scene One: Early 1325, as Mansa Musa sets off on his extravagant pilgrimage to Mecca.
Scene Two: Mid-to-late 1325, in the court of al-Nasir, the Egyptian sultan, to witness the meeting between the two great leaders.
Scene Three: Late 1325, as a scholar in the Djingeureber Mosque at Timbuktu, which was established by the architects and scholars whom Mansa Musa brought back from his pilgrimage.
Memento: A book of poetry from the University of Timbuktu
People/Social Interview: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Luke Pepera
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Check out the amazing colourised images made by our podcast partner, ColorGraph!
In our fascinating season three opener, Peter talks to Professor James Shapiro, one of the world’s leading scholars of the life and work of William Shakespeare. He tells Peter about the origin of the concept of 'Manifest Destiny'. He takes us to meet a young Ulysses S. Grant, and he evokes the life of the greatest Romeo of the age: Charlotte Cushman. The year is 1845.
For much more information about this episode, including images of the people and places involved, head to our website, tttpodcast.com
The conversation in this podcast revolves around James Shapiro's most recent book, Shakespeare in a Divided America. It is available now from Faber in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA.
Show notes:
Scene One: August, 1845. John O’Sullivan, in an essay called “Annexation” introduces the phrase “Manifest Destiny” into the American vocabulary, capturing America’s shift from republic to empire, the repercussions of which are being felt to this day.
Scene Two: November, 1845. Corpus Christi, Texas. Four thousand US troops are awaiting orders in Corpus Christi, Texas to cross the Rio Grande and invade Mexico.
Scene Three: December 1845. In a revealing act of cross-dressing that speaks to the anxieties about manliness at the time, the star American actress Charlotte Cushman debuts as Romeo - a role that no man at the time was able to perform successfully - at London’s Haymarket Theatre.
Memento: A recording of Ulysses S. Grant speaking Desdomona’s lines in Othello:
People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Professor James Shapiro
Producers: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
Check out the amazing colourised images made by our podcast partner, ColorGraph!
We're really excited to let you know that the third season of Travels Through Time begins on Tuesday 21 July.
Our first guest will be with the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and world-leading Shakespeare scholar, Professor James Shapiro. Following him will be a brilliant range of historians, novelists, poets and others - all of them people with a passion for the past.
For more, check out tttpodcast.com. // See you soon!
In this thrilling episode of Travels Through Time, Owen Matthews takes us back to 1941 to see Richard Sorge, the ‘spy to end all spies’, operating at the highest level in the most dangerous months of the Second World War.
~
Two events in 1941 did more than anything else to settle the shape and outcome of the Second World War. The first was the most fateful decision of Adolf Hitler’s life: the launching of Operation Barbarossa against the USSR on 22 June. The second was the surprise Japanese aerial attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbour, six months later on 7 December.
These events appear crystal clear to us in retrospect, but for many living at that time they came like a flash out of the blue. A few people, though, did know what was coming. One of them was one of the most extraordinary communist underground operatives of the twentieth century: Richard Sorge. Sorge ran a Soviet spy group in Tokyo from the 1930s onwards that achieved astonishing access into the Nazi war machine.
A drinker, a womaniser, a risk-taker, all on a breath-taking scale, one journalist has classified Sorge ‘as an example of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not worth living.’
Our guest on Travels Through Time today is Owen Matthews, author of a new biography of Sorge. Owen studied Modern History at Oxford. His book, Stalin's Children, was translated into twenty-eight languages and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
The scenes and subjects described in this episode feature in Owen Matthews biography of Richard Sorge, An Impeccable Spy. The book is available in paperback from Bloomsbury now.
Show notes:
Scene One: 31 May 1941, The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Richard Sorge receives final confirmation that Operation Barbarossa will shortly be launched.
Scene Two: 22 June 1941. The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Sorge’s bitter fury when he hears news of the German invasion.
Scene Three: One night in August, 1941. The Embassy Ballroom with Sorge and Eta Harich-Schneider
Memento: Richard Sorge’s lighter
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest; Owen Matthews
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O
==
Follow us on Twitter @tttpodcast_
Check out the best colourised images from our new partner, Dynamichrome.
In this thought-provoking episode of Travels Through Time, historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee takes us to the court of the English King Edward I in 1297 to meet his daughters at a dramatic moment in their lives.
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King Edward I’s daughters did not conform to the modern stereotype of medieval princesses. They weren’t delicate, wistful girls, passively waiting to be rescued by a handsome prince. Eleanora and her sisters were true Plantagenets. They were headstrong, passionate characters who spent as much time hunting, managing estates and travelling around England and the Continent as they did doing needlework in their chambers.
Their lives reveal the breadth of experience of royal women in the medieval period through the various roles they played. They represented their country and championed the needy. They promoted monastic houses, were brides in strategic alliances, rebellious daughters, landowners, patrons of culture, mothers, wives and most important of all in this story, sisters.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee takes Violet Moller to meet Eleanora, Joanna, Mary, Margaret and Elizabeth in the year 1297.
Kelcey Wilson-Lee’s Daughters of Chivalry: the forgotten children of Edward I is published by MacMillan
Show notes:
Scene One: January, 1297, and the royal family has gathered in Ipswich for Elizabeth's wedding to Johan, Count of Holland, after which she is supposed to sail for her new husband’s lands.
Scene Two: July 1297, King Edward I’s court at St Albans. Joanna comes to plead her case after having eloped and secretly remarried a nobody without her father's permission. She makes a dramatic speech that is (very unusually) recorded and is forgiven by her Father.
Scene Three: Christmas 1297, in Ghent where Elizabeth (who eventually went to Holland) is reunited with her sisters who have married into Europe in years before.
Memento: A gold ring presented to Margaret by Edward I at Harwich.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Kelcey Wilson-Lee
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O
Made in partnership with the brilliant photo colourists at Dynamichrome
In this invigorating episode of Travels Through Time, the award-winning Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah takes us in pursuit of the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone in the year 1871.
~
David Livingstone was one of the towering figures of Victorian Britain. He was a missionary who became an explorer, who believed that he was divinely appointed to solve the puzzle of the geography of Africa.
Livingstone made his name in the 1850s when he became the first recorded Briton to set eyes on Victoria Falls. In 1855 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and the next year he published his huge bestseller, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.
Victorian Britons grew used to consuming stories of Livingstone’s travels as heroic adventure narratives. He was portrayed as a dynamo of energy and an oracle of vision who chased after the loftiest prizes: mysterious lakes or hidden rivers in a vast continent.
But what of the African people who travelled with Livingstone? What did they think of this peculiar wandering mzungu? What kind of lives were living at that time? What did Livingstone’s intervention in their societies mean for them?
The Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah raises these questions during the course of this episode as she takes us back to the year 1871. She tells us how glamorous Livingstone’s adventures were for his contemporaries. She shows us the magic and peril of strangers encountering one another for a first time. She explains how Livingstone’s expeditions worked as logistical enterprises. Then she depicts some of the more disturbing aspects of the period: the east African slave trade, and the massacres it generated.
The scenes and subjects described in this episode feature in Petina Gappah’s new novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, which tells the story of Dr Livingstone’s final journey. The book is available in hardback from Faber.
Show notes:
Scene One: 21 March 1871, Bagamoio, a port on the east coast of what is now Tanzania. The American journalist Henry Morton Stanley sets out from Bagamoio for a daring mission into the African interior.
Scene Two: 15 July 1871, A day market in Nyangwe, a village in Manyema, on the right bank of the Lualaba River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Livingstone witnesses a massacre.
Scene Three: October 1871, Ujiji in present day Tanzania. Stanley finally meets Livingstone, having marched 700 miles to reach him.
Memento: The instruments that David Livingstone used, later ‘purloined’ by Lt Cameron
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest; Petina Gappah
Producer: Maria Nolan
Reading: Makomborero Kasipo
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O
==
Follow us on Twitter @tttpodcast_
Check out the best colourised images from our new partner, Dynamichrome.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Marcus du Sautoy The Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford takes us back to the 1830s to meet one of his heroes: the brilliant and tragic Évariste Galois.
~
Évariste Galois is a fascinating figure in the history of mathematics. An unpromising and secretive student who became embroiled in the revolutionary politics of the 1830s, Galois was dead at the age of twenty. Yet the work he completed in his few active years of study has influenced the subject of mathematics ever since.
Galois was born on the outskirts of Paris during the period of Napoleon’s rule in 1811. From the beginning he was known for his unusual, ‘bizarre’, character that led him into time and again into dangerous situations.
At some point during Galois’s undistinguished school career he fell, ‘under the spell of the excitement of mathematics’. Here he found a realm of certainty and fascination, where he could feel safe and escape the perils of human interaction and everyday life.
During his teenage years Galois’s fascination for his subject became ever deeper. He began to conceive entirely new ways of approaching an age-old mathematical problem – that of solving the quintic. So begins one of the thrilling stories in the history of mathematics.
Marcus du Sautoy takes us back to see Galois as his young life reached its intellectual peak and tragic conclusion in the early 1830s. It's a story of beguiling genius in tumultuous times.
The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy is out now.
Show Notes:
Scene One: 9 May 1831, Paris. At a banquet to celebrate the acquittal of 19 members of the revolutionary Société des Amis du Peuple, a young Galois gets carried away by the atmosphere and the alcohol.
Scene Two: 23 October 1831 , Sainte-Pelagie Prison, southern Paris. Galois is thrown in jail, having been found guilty of wearing a banned National Guard uniform, carrying weapons – and graffitiing his holding cell with political cartoons.
Scene Three: 30 May 1832, Paris: Early one morning a peasant on his way to work finds a young man lying beside a pond bleeding from a gunshot wound.
People
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Marcus du Sautoy
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O
==
We've set up a Twitter account at long last! Please say hello @tttpodcast_
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Catherine Nixey, author of the international bestseller The Darkening Age, guides Violet Moller back to the ancient city of Alexandria in the year 415. They talk about the simmering tensions between Christians, Jews and Pagans at that time. Among the characters they meet is the gifted, beautiful and powerful Hypatia of Alexandria.
~
Hypatia of Alexandria has always been a compelling figure. Her glittering life and brutal death have inspired writers, poets and film makers for centuries. But what lies behind the myth and speculation?
Hypatia’s murder was a particularly horrific episode in the gradual triumph of Christianity over classical culture, a slow and painful process that was played out across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In this episode Catherine Nixey isolates and analyses 415, one dramatic year in this complex story.
Catherine Nixey is a journalist and author. The Darkening Age won an award from the Royal Society of Literature and was an international bestseller. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, The Financial Times, The Times and The New York Times.
The Darkening Age is available from MacMillan now.
Show notes:
Scene 1: Cyril becomes Bishop of Alexandria and begins to impose his policy on the city. He regulates theatrical entertainment and the Jews react, killing a Christian in the process.
Scene 2: Cyril orders his followers to attack the synagogues and seize Jewish property. Orestes, secular ruler of the city, is attacked by Christians (even though he is one himself) but manages to escape.
Scene 3: The violence escalates. Hypatia is rumoured to have cast a spell on Orestes, public feeling against her is stirred up. She is pulled from her coach and murdered.
Memento: One of Hypatia's astrolabes.
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Interview: Violet Moller
Guest: Catherine Nixey
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
For our Valentine’s Day Special episode of Travels Through Time, we visit Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to talk to Dr Sophie Ratcliffe about Anna Karenina, Kate Field, Sofia Tolstoy and the year 1876.
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Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is one of the dazzling achievements of nineteenth century literature. It is a story of power, ambition, fidelity and lust, ‘a warning against the myth and cult of love’, with the ill-starred relationship between the Russian socialites Anna and Count Vronsky at its centre.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Sophie Ratcliffe shows how Anna was very much a child of the 1870s. Various historical figures can be found in her character. A well-known inspiration is Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a jealous lover who threw herself under a freight train. A lesser-known one is the American journalist, lecturer and early telephone pioneer Kate Field.
Field was hugely charismatic and popular. The Chicago Tribune judged her ‘perhaps the most unique woman the present century has produced.’ She was among the first celebrity journalists. She was acquainted with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. For a time in the 1870s, she was employed as the first public relations manager for Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention, the telephone.
Here Ratcliffe explains how Field’s legacy stretched further still. As she explains in her new book, The Lost Properties of Love: ‘Parts of Kate Field live on in Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is part Kate Field. That’s what writers do. They change lives.’
In this conversation, Ratcliffe guides us back to 1876 and to a historical past suspended between fact and fiction. She describes how trains were viewed as an invasive new technology; how time operates in intriguing ways in Tolstoy’s fiction, and she speculates about what was hidden in Anna’s red handbag as she stepped off the railway platform.
Dr Sophie Ratcliffe's The Lost Properties of Love is published by William Collins.
Show notes:
Scene One: A warm Sunday evening in late May 1876 (probably Sunday 30 May by the Russian calendar), the platform of Obiralovka Train Station, Russia.
Scene Two: The Gaiety Theatre, London, late April 1876, to watch Kate Field in a play called The Honeymoon by John Tobin
Scene Three: 17 March, 1876, Sofia Tolstoy’s bedside, Yasnaya Polyana Russia.
Memento: The front page of the Times (with the classified ads) for Tuesday 13 June, 1876
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Sophie Ratcliffe
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Artemis takes us inside Durham University in a fascinating conversation with one of her tutors, Professor Giles Gasper. Together they reflect on the year 1215, and attempt to understand some of the most significant political, religious and intellectual developments of the medieval period.
Gasper is Professor of High Medieval History at Durham University, and a specialist in intellectual culture. He chose to explore this year through three, era-defining documents: Magna Carta, the Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, and an astronomical treatise written by Robert Grosseteste.
Grosseteste is the most intriguing figure to emerge in this episode. A polymath and scholar whose influence on the development of scientific knowledge in the West has continued to impress modern scholars even today, although little is known about him.
Grosseteste was the first person that we know to correctly identify refraction as the phenomenon that produces a rainbow, rather than it being reflection, as Aristotle thought. The Ordered Universe Project has also been able to show how Grosseteste’s writings illustrate a nascent understanding of the theory of a multiverse, and also of the Big Bang.
Giles exploration of this lesser known figure, alongside his analysis of such famous historical events, such as the creation of Magna Carta and the meeting of the Fourth Council of the Lateran, is what makes this episode so illuminating in understanding medieval history.
Show notes:
Scene One: June 1215, the Magna Carta is drawn up and sealed (not signed!) by King John after a dispute between his nobles over the rights of the King.
Scene Two: November 1215, The Lateran Palace, Rome. 71 patriarchs and metropolitan bishops, 412 bishops, 900 abbots and priors as well as the representatives of various monarchs meet for the Fourth Council of the Lateran where, amongst many issues, the doctrine of transubstantiation is made official.
Scene Three: 1215, somewhere in England. Robert Grosseteste composes his On The Sphere, an astronomical treatise which seeks to understand the movement of the stars.
Memento: The lost annotated copy of Abu Maʿshar’s writing on astrology which Robert Grosseteste glossed.
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Professor Giles Gasper
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O.
For this insightful and evocative episode of Travels Through Time, Peter Moore heads to the historian Sarah Wise’s flat in central London, to talk about left wing politics, life and labour in the imperial capital in the year 1889.
*
London in 1889 lay at the heart of the most extensive empire the world had ever seen. But though there was fabulous wealth in many areas of the capital, it was unequally distributed. Many were worried that those who lived and worked in the East End and docklands were being pushed increasingly into chronic poverty and further towards revolution.
Among those to be concerned were the businessman turned social reformer, Charles Booth. Following a series of breakdowns, in the 1880s Booth began his series of social investigations into the East End which would result in his pioneering series of colour-coded poverty maps.
As Booth trod the East End streets, assigning each one a social status, other reformers were at work. In one of the most deprived parishes in the country, the Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay re-modelled his church so it included a boxing ring and a music hall platform, so there was a positive outlet for the energies of his congregation.
For the last twenty five years the award-winning social historian Sarah Wise has been researching histories like these. Inspired by passionate, thoughtful leftish politicians like Henry Hyndman and William Morris, in this episode of Travels Through Time Sarah guides us into the turbulent East End streets in search of ‘moralised capitalism.’
The nineteenth-century, Wise says, ‘was an era in which there were lots of secrets and lots of mystery and lots of drama.’ Here she takes us to meet figures like Booth and Rev. Jay, who were trying to make sense of the riddles, as well as showing us how close the country came to complete social breakdown.
This episode of Travels Through Time was recorded on location at Sarah flat. If you want to see some of Booth’s poverty maps, along with other photographs and archives that we spoke about during the course of the conversation, please visit our website at www.tttpodcast.com
The Blackest Streets is available in paperback from Vintage Books.
Show notes:
Scene One: Charles Booth walking around the market of Slater Street, Club Row and Brick Lane, one Sunday morning in 1889.
Scene Two: 14 August 1889, Wapping and Limehouse, by the River Thames
Scene Three: 25 February, 1889, a boxing match at Reverend Jay’s Holy Trinity Church, Bethnal Green.
Memento: The entire Charles Booth Map of London
People/Social
Presenter: John Hillman
Interview: Peter Moore
Guest: Sarah Wise
Producers: Maria Nolan
This deeply moving episode of Travels Through Time tells for the very first time the absolutely extraordinary story of Hans Neumann, 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. It 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 the epitome 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 at tttpodcast.com
When Time Stopped will be published in the UK and internationally in February 2020.
Show notes:
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.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Ariana Neumann
Producers: Maria Nolan/John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
In this fascinating episode of Travels Through Time, the ‘queen of food historians’ Dr Annie Gray takes us inside Number Ten Downing Street, as the bombs fell in 1940, to meet Winston Churchill’s magnificent cook: Georgina Landemare.
We know so much about Winston Churchill’s life during that fateful year, 1940. We know the letters he wrote, the speeches he gave, the meetings he held and the telephone calls he made – all of them in exhaustive detail.
But one aspect of Churchill’s wartime life has received very little historical scrutiny until now. That is his relationship with his cook, Georgina Landemare.
Hugely-talented and utterly-dependable, Georgina was embedded right at the heart of the Downing Street machine during the Second World War. According to a document drawn up in 1940, she was one of only two members of Churchill’s domestic staff who were to be evacuated with him in the event of a successful NAZI invasion.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Dr Annie Gray takes us in pursuit of the elusive Georgina. We catch sight of her at work in a British country house, cooking old English classics like Boodle’s Orange Fool. We follow her to the Admiralty at the outbreak of war. And then we see her behind Number Ten’s green baize door, creating the enticing menus – roasts and cakes and sponges - that lay at the heart of Winston’s dinner table diplomacy.
Dr Annie Gray specialises in the history of British food and dining from c. 1650 to 1950. She's the author of several books, including The Greedy Queen: eating with Victoria, and the bestselling The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook. She's the resident food historian on BBC Radio 4's culinary panel show, The Kitchen Cabinet.
Her new book is a biography of Winston Churchill's beloved family cook, Georgina Landemare. Victory in the Kitchen: the life of Churchill's Cook is published by Profile books in Feb 2020.
Show notes:
Year: 1940 (with a little bit of 1939)
Scene One: Summer 1939, Exning House Newmarket. The summer before the war.
Scene Two: 2 Feb 1940, Admiralty House. Georgina now working for the Churchills.
Scene Three: 14 October, Number Ten at the heart of the Blitz.
Memento: Georgina’s menu books.
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Dr Annie Gray
Producers: Maria Nolan/John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
In this episode of Travels Through Time the biographer Francesca Wade takes us to the fringes of London’s Bloomsbury, to explore a fascinating generation of poets, writers and publishers who passed through Mecklenburgh Square.
In the early decades of the twentieth century the streets and squares of Bloomsbury in inner London were home to a pioneering and provocative generation of writers, poets and artists. Many of these figures would later be celebrated and cherished, but at the time their fortunes were not quite so settled. The transience and fragility of Bloomsbury was captured in a quote by the English novelist Margery Allingham. She called the area, ‘a sort of halfway house. If you lived here you were either going up or coming down.’
This description was particularly appropriate for Mecklenburgh Square, a large residential square on the north eastern edge of inner London. Here, at various important junctures in their lives, lodged five great women: Hilda Doolittle (H.D), Dorothy L Sayers, Jayne Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf.
These women and this square are at the heart of Francesca Wade’s new book Square Haunting. In this episode she guides us to Mecklenburgh Square in the year 1917 to meet the poet H.D, the writer Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. They were all busy with projects and all contending with the fevered atmosphere of the wartime capital, a 'ghastly inferno which thinks and breathes and lives air raids, nothing else.'
As DH Lawrence put it, London had ‘perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors.’
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber)
Scene One: 44 Mecklenburgh Square, November 1917 - H. D. and D. H. Lawrence in the room while others are out. Or perhaps an evening with them while they're playing charades.
Scene Two: Hogarth House, Richmond, April 1917 - to watch the Woolfs bring home their printing press.
Scene Three: 4 Gerrard Street, Soho, December 1917. The inaugural meeting of the 1917 Club, founded by Leonard Woolf.
Memento: The suitcase of letters from Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence to H. D. during the war that was left in the cellar of 44 Mecklenburgh Square and then destroyed
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Francesca Wade
Producers: Maria Nolan/John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
This panoramic episode of Travels Through Time is set in the year 1920. In it the historian Charles Emmerson guides us from the Free State of Fiume to Moscow and the boisterous beer halls of Munich. He shows us a world of volatile post-war politics and introduces us to three unforgettable figures: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler.
In the neat and tidy chronology of the classroom, 1920 is often seen as the end of a period of conflict and the start of an entirely new era. But that, argues the historian Charles Emmerson, is a misreading of history.
The Great War might have ended. The Treaty of Versailles might have been signed. But right across Europe the old conflicts continued. In 1920, for instance, there was gorilla war in Ireland, civil war in Russia, a putsch in Germany and there were troops on the Rhineland.
‘The war was not over,’ Emmerson says, ‘it had only fragmented into a million different conflicts and upheavals, cultural and political.’
In this episode Emmerson guides us through the tangled politics of this complex year.
Charles Emmerson is the author of Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924.
Show notes:
- The Golden Platypus restaurant (or The Golden Stag) in Fiume. Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Fiume adventure.
- The Second Congress of The Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in the summer of 1920, shortly after the war against Warsaw had begun.
- The first floor of Hofbräuhaus beer hall in Munich, which the German Workers Party have hired out for the launch of their new manifesto and where a young Adolf Hitler gives a speech.
Memento: Lenin’s hunting rifle wrapped in a tablecloth once owned by Gabriele D'Annunzio
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Charles Emmerson
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O.
Discover more fascinating episodes at tttpodcast.com
It's Christmas and TTT is one year-old! For this episode of Travels Through Time we went to the pub for a pint to celebrate.
One year, twenty six brilliant time travels, the best historians and tens of thousands of downloads from all corners of the world! We thought that all of this was worth celebrating with something a little different to usual. So we decided to toast TTT's first birthday with a drink.
In this episode you'll hear Peter and Artemis chatting about the idea for the format, revealing a little bit more about themselves and picking some favourite moments from the last year. At the very end we have some lines of wintry poetry from Sir Michael Palin.
Thank you to all of our wonderful interviewees over the past year and to History Today for partnering with us. We'll be back with the usual format on Tuesday 7 January, 2020.
Till then, a Merry Christmas to you all from us.
Show notes:
In the pub; Peter Moore and Artemis Irvine
Not speaking but in the pub too: Maria the Producer
In this captivating episode of Travels Through Time, we venture back to the year 1199 to see Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the great operators of the High Middle Ages, at the peak of her powers.
Eleanor is a remarkable character. She was queen of France and England and the mother of two English kings. One chronicler, describing her in late life, asserted that she was, “a matchless woman, beautiful yet chaste, powerful and modest, meek yet eloquent … whose power was the admiration of her age.”
But how much of this was reputation and what was the reality?
Our quest to answer this riddle begins in early spring 1199 when Eleanor’s son King Richard I, “the Lionheart”, is struck in the shoulder by a stray shotgun arrow. Richard’s wound swiftly becomes gangrenous. With death imminent, and the fate of his kingdom uncertain, Richard sends for his mother.
Today’s guest Sara Cockerill guides us, in three scenes, through the dramatic and uncertain sequence of events that follows.
Show notes:
Scene one: 6 April 1199, near Limousin, France. Deathbed of Richard the Lionheart
Scene two: 20 July 1199 Tours. Eleanor at the age of 65 performing homage to Philip Augustus.
Scene three: Autumn 1199. Fontevraud, Aquitaine. Eleanor burying her daughter Joanna.
Memento: A gold ring with a sapphire inset, inscribed with the letters R A.
Sara Cockerill’s book, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England, Mother of Empires is available in hardback now.
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Sara Cockerill
Producer: Maria Nolan
Digital Production: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
In this episode of Travels Through Time we join one of the world’s leading historians, William Dalrymple, who takes us on a tour of 1764 to try and explain how the East India Company became “An empire within an empire”
The history of the East India Company is astonishing.
Leo Tolstoy once wondered: How could a commercial company from London manage to enslave a nation comprising 200 million people on the other side of the world?
With the battlefields of the Seven Years War still smouldering across the globe, we journey to the edges of the Moghul Empire along the banks of the Ganges to visit 1764, a year of bloodshed and confusion; a year that would change the history of India forever.
William Dalrymple is a British historian and writer, as well as an award-winning broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and Wolfson Prizes.
He has been five times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
His latest work, discussed here, has been described by the Guardian as:
“…not just informative but as colourful as a Maratha army in full battle array, as boisterous as a Calcutta boarding house in 1750, and as entertaining as an evening of poetry and music in a Delhi palace.”
Show notes:
Scenes:
- February, 1764, Avadh. After years of being played against each other and picked off by the East India Company, Mir Qasim, Shah Alam and Shuja ud-Daula meet in Avadh to unite forces against the Company.
- 3 May, 1764. The combined forces of the army reach the fortified walls of Patna, an ancient city on the banks of the Ganges. The army of 150,000 warriors comes face to face with 19,000 East India Sepoys.
- 22 October 1764: The Battle of Buxar, a pivotal moment in history, between the forces under the command of the British East India Company, led by Hector Munro, and the combined armies.
Memento: One of Mir Qasim’s treasure chests, abandoned on the fields of Buxar.
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: William Dalrymple
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Digital Production: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
The passage of knowledge between the Ancient World and today’s modern one, has not been smooth. In many cases only a fraction of what was once known has reached us today. Just seven out of around eighty plays by Aeschylus survive, seven out of the hundred and twenty written by Sophocles and a similar proportion of those by Euripides.
Often knowledge was lost at specific moments of conflict or tumult in the human story. In this episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr Violet Moller takes us back to one of the most crucial years of all: 529, when the Roman Empire was in its latter days and a new Christian world was emerging.
Violet’s travels through the past takes us on a picaresque tour of this significant year. In Constantinople we see the last great Roman emperor. In Athens a “Golden Chain” of learning is about to be severed after many centuries. And on a rocky hill in central Italy, a new monastic order that will have a spectacular future, is founded.
Dr Violet Moller is the author of The Map of Knowledge, winner of the Royal Society for Literature’s Jerwood Prize. The Daily Telegraph called it “popular intellectual history at its best.”
Show notes:
Scenes:
- Constantinople where Justinian is rebuilding the city, rewriting the legal code and issuing proclamations limiting the practice of Pagan faiths and philosophy.
- Athens, the Neoplatonist Academy is closing thanks to Justinian’s proclamation, breaking a tradition of learning stretching back hundreds of years. The philosophers pack up their books and leave for Persia where they would be protected by the Sassanid King Khosrow I.
- Montecassino where St Benedict is building a monastery on the site of an ancient Temple of Apollo, establishing the most important religious order of the Middle Ages.
Memento: A crate of books, saved from the Neoplatonic Academy
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Violet Moller
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Digital Production: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
This poignant episode of Travels Through Time takes us back to 1916, a year of strife and stoicism at the heart of World War One.
The mood across Britain at the end of 1915 was one of disbelief. A war that many had predicted would be over in months was only intensifying. There was stalemate on the Western Front. Newspaper columns were filled with examples of German “frightfulness”, such as the execution of Edith Cavell, and there was growing doubts in Westminster about Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s ability to lead the country.
This was the backdrop to 1916, a year that brought debates over conscription, fears of a general strike and the military fiasco at the Battle of the Somme. The year ended in December with David Lloyd George replacing Asquith in Downing Street and with Britain having embraced entirely the policy of Total War.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, the journalist and historian Simon Heffer guides us through the events of this traumatic year. He shows us a Britain on the brink of crisis, yet still oddly resilient to the trials it faces.
Show notes:
Scene One: 27 January 1916, Labour Conference in Bristol for the vote on the party’s conscription policy.
Scene Two: 12 July 1916, Belfast. The first news of the Battle of the Somme reaches Belfast on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.
Scene Three: 5 December 1914, Cynthia Asquith dining with her father in-law the prime minister at 10 Downing Street.
Memento: A Tommy
Staring at God: Britain in the Great War by Simon Heffer is published by Random House books
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Simon Heffer
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Jon O.
Witches, spells, black magic and shape-shifting combine in unsettling ways for this special Halloween episode of Travels Through Time.
Britain, 1862. An age of modernity characterised by pioneering projects like the world’s first underground railway in London; hot air balloons soaring to the top of the troposphere; scientists engaging in the new fad for weather “forecasting”. And in the Midlands a new football club, Notts County, are formed – later to become the oldest of all the association football clubs in the world.
Yet running in tandem with this thrilling new world was an older, persistent belief in hidden supernatural forces. It was more than a century since Parliament had repealed the laws against witchcraft but, rather than being eradicated by the Enlightenment, folklore remained an active and potent force in everyday life.
This is where we join Dr Thomas Waters, who takes us on a tour through 1862 to see examples of all of this: from the isolated Scottish islands, to the heart of Imperial London. In doing so he provides a striking and memorable portrait of a lesser-known side to the Victorian world.
Show notes:
Scene One: Spring, 1862. On the tiny Scottish Western Isle of Gigha. James Smith watches as Catherine McGougan “shapeshifts” Scene Two: 13th April 1862, 31 Charles Street, Westminster. 74-year-old Mary King is attacked by her grandson. Scene Three: A little terrace house in Ancoats, Manchester, 1862. A fortune-teller named Alice is doing a consultation for a client, waxing lyrical about mystical things
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore Guest: Dr Thomas Waters Editorial: Paul Lay / Artemis Irvine Production: Maria Nolan / John Hillman
Ruthlessness and Richard III: Thomas Penn (1483)
In this haunting episode of Travels Through Time, Thomas Penn guides us back to the blackest year of them all, 1483.
Richard Duke of Gloucester, has seized power. His rivals, the Woodville faction, have fled for their lives. And the uncrowned child Edward V has disappeared into the Tower of London, along with his younger brother. The two would never be seen again.
This was the year that Richard Duke of Gloucester conceived a ruthless plan to seize the throne for himself. His actions would make his reputation for cunning, opportunism and recklessness. In retrospect, Penn argues, this was the year that the powerful House of York began to consume itself.
The ‘Wars of the Roses’ saw the House of York ranged against their rivals in the House of Lancaster. The complex, long-running conflict played out in a succession of battles, betrayals and beheadings. It was a time when, as the historian Thomas Penn puts it, ‘necessity knew no law.’
So begins the final tragic act in the story of the House of York.
Show notes:
Scene One: Northampton, the night of April 29/30, Richard and Buckingham’s plot
Scene Two: Council chamber, Tower of London, morning of Friday 13 June, Richard’s accusation/Hastings’ execution
Scene Three: Lincoln, Sunday 12 October, Richard’s response to news of Buckingham’s rebellion
Memento: Edward IV’s will.
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Thomas Penn
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Paul Lay / Artemis Irvine
Digital Production: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
Our latest episode of Travels Through Time explores a little-studied but revolutionary group of women at the heart of Dr Patricia Fara’s latest book, A Lab of One’s Own.
Patricia takes us back to 1918 where we find them working with great skill, energy and success, against the backdrop of one of the most brutal wars in world history.
They were aircraft designers, surgeons, chemical researchers, military commanders and surveillance operatives. Their work contributed significantly to the British war effort.
Patricia is a Fellow of Clare College Cambridge, a prize-winning author and has recently served as President for the British Society for the History of Science.
Scene One: 10th Jan 1918, House of Lords. The suffragist Ray Strachey watches them approve the 1918 Representation of the People Act
Scene Two: 26 March. Marie Stopes’s Married Love is published and she meets her future husband after he returns from the War with a broken ankle
Scene Three: 1 November, Vranje, Serbia. Dr Isabel Emslie takes over a military hospital. She stays there long after the Armistice
Memento: Dr Isabel Emslie’s Diary
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Patricia Fara
Producers: Maria Nolan & John Hillman
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O.
Discover more fascinating episodes at Travels Through Time
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