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 fee...
Feb 14, 2023•55 min•Season 6Ep. 21
In this episode the Guardian journalist Tania Branigan takes us back to the opening phases of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Mao Zedong’s attempt to purge Chinese society of its impurities. Over the course of a few fraught months in the summer of 1966, the transformational movement that would last for an anguished decade, began. *** In Britain 1966 is remembered as a glittering time. It was the year of the World Cup, of Pet Sounds, Revolver and Andy Warhol. But as Western culture flowered, far away ...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 20
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:...
Jan 31, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 19
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...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 18
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 th...
Jan 17, 2023•59 min•Season 6Ep. 17
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. == Thomas Cromwell, a self-described “ruffian”, was King Henry VIII’s chief minister in...
Jan 10, 2023•55 min•Season 6Ep. 16
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 pi...
Jan 03, 2023•57 min•Season 6Ep. 15
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 chao...
Dec 27, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 14
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 t...
Dec 20, 2022•57 min•Season 6Ep. 13
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 ...
Dec 13, 2022•59 min•Season 6Ep. 12
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 li...
Dec 09, 2022•52 min•Season 6Ep. 12
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 conce...
Dec 05, 2022•59 min•Season 6Ep. 11
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 St...
Nov 29, 2022•55 min•Season 6Ep. 10
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....
Nov 22, 2022•49 min•Season 6Ep. 9
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, A...
Nov 15, 2022•58 min•Season 6Ep. 8
This Remembrance Week the best-selling historian James Holland takes us back to a crucial year in the Second World War. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers. * On the damp and blustery morning of 6 June 1944 the Sherwood Rangers fought their way onto Gold Beach. An armoured regiment, filled with Sherman tanks, the Sherwood Rangers had already had an exhausting war. From Palestine to North Africa, the young men in its ra...
Nov 10, 2022•56 min•Season 6Ep. 7
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 wa...
Nov 03, 2022•59 min•Season 6Ep. 6
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”...
Oct 25, 2022•57 min•Season 6Ep. 5
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 illumi...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 4
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 Prot...
Oct 11, 2022•52 min•Season 6Ep. 3
This week we are off to see some of the Renaissance masters at work with the acclaimed novelist Damian Dibben. * In the early years of the sixteenth century Venice was not only a place of great power it was a site of huge cultural splendour. In particular a new generation of artists were animating the buildings like never before. And unlike many of the other Renaissance painters, the Venetians were not solely obsessed by line and form; they were equally interested in the allure and possibility o...
Oct 06, 2022•44 min•Season 6Ep. 2
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 th...
Sep 29, 2022•55 min•Season 6Ep. 1
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
Sep 28, 2022•2 min
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 Le...
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 McGreev...
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
