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 w...
Jul 12, 2022•59 min•Season 5Ep. 48
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 ...
Jul 05, 2022•59 min•Season 5Ep. 47
This week we are travelling back to the ninth century to witness one of the major turning points in English history. Winston Churchill regularly tops ‘the greatest Briton of all time’ charts, but his own vote for this accolade apparently went to the man we are going to discuss today. Alfred 'the Great' is the only English monarch to enjoy such an admiring epithet. Æthelred, the later monarch, is remembered as ‘the Unready’ (although this meant poorly advised rather than unprepared), William I is...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 46
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 McGree...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 45
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 ...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 44
On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter gazed into the darkness of a newly-discovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Can you see anything? Lord Carnarvon, his companion and sponsor asked him. ‘Yes,’ Carter replied, ‘wonderful things.’ * This year marks the centenary of perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery in history. At the end of 1922, the world was astonished by the news from Thebes in Egypt. After years of searching, a discovery of the most extraordinary nature was made in the V...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 43
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...
May 31, 2022•43 min•Ep. 42
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 emi...
May 24, 2022•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 41
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. ...
May 17, 2022•58 min•Ep. 40
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 T ravels Through Time – she is a scientist rather than a historian – but she is also quite unusual...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 39
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 Ameri...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 38
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 da...
May 03, 2022•50 min•Season 5Ep. 37
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...
Apr 26, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 36
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 peop...
Apr 19, 2022•52 min•Season 5Ep. 35
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 n...
Apr 12, 2022•59 min•Season 5Ep. 34
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, publishin...
Apr 05, 2022•48 min•Season 5Ep. 33
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. * ‘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 commerci...
Mar 29, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 32
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 per...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 31
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 extraor...
Mar 15, 2022•56 min•Season 5Ep. 30
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 Akk...
Mar 11, 2022•48 min•Season 5Ep. 29
In this episode the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones shares his latest research on one of the great figures in British history: Winston Churchill. To get a close look at Churchill’s personality and his modus operandi , he takes us back to the year 1943 – a pivotal year at the heart of the Second World War. * The fall of Tunis in May 1943 marked the first liberation of an occupied city by the Allies. It was a significant moment, the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones argues, as import...
Mar 08, 2022•55 min•Season 5Ep. 28
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 th...
Mar 01, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 27
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 ...
Feb 22, 2022•54 min•Season 5Ep. 26
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 kno...
Feb 15, 2022•43 min•Season 5Ep. 25
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 woul...
Feb 08, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 24
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 Punj...
Feb 01, 2022•50 min•Season 5Ep. 24
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 Atla...
Jan 25, 2022•53 min•Season 5Ep. 23
Today we’re off to the nineteenth century to examine an event that Karl Marx called ‘One of the most monstrous enterprises in the annals of international history.’ Edward Shawcross takes us back to meet Maximilian, the Last Emperor of Mexico. * The 1860s were a decisive decade in the emergence of the modern world. As Britain’s empire expanded, and the United States emerged entire from a debilitating Civil War, an audacious French scheme to place an Austrian archduke on an invented throne in Mexi...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 22
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 ...
Jan 11, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 21
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 ex...
Jan 04, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 20
