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. Featured in the Guardian, Times and Evening Standard. Presented weekly by Sunday Times bestselling writer Peter Moore, award-winning historian Violet Moller and Artemis Irvine.

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Episodes

Christmas with the Three Wise Historians (2021)

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 t...

Dec 24, 2021•55 min•Season 5Ep. 19

Tom Chivers: Journeys into Deep London (62 AD)

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 c...

Dec 21, 2021•59 min•Season 5Ep. 18

Elizabeth Drayson: The Last Muslim Sultan of Granada (1492)

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 centur...

Dec 14, 2021•55 min•Season 5Ep. 17

Nigel Pickford: Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester (1682)

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 ...

Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 16

Zoë Playdon: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes (1967)

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 ...

Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 15

Jamie Mackay: Garibaldi and the Birth of Italy (1860)

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 ...

Nov 30, 2021•50 min•Season 5Ep. 14

Christina Lamb and Judith Mackrell: Looking for Trouble with Virginia Cowles (1938)

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 Virgini...

Nov 23, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 13

Tracy Borman: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada (1588)

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 ...

Nov 16, 2021•48 min•Season 5Ep. 12

Robert Lyman: A War of Empires (1944)

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.’ * 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...

Nov 11, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 11

Robert Sackville-West: The Missing of the First World War (1915)

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 Br...

Nov 09, 2021•57 min•Season 5Ep. 10

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