In this brilliantly analytical episode of Travels Through Time, Professor Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, takes us back to one of the most dramatic days in all political history. Exactly 227 years ago today, on 9 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27 July in ours, Maximilian Robespierre fell from power in Paris.

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 discovered the extent of his family’s involvement with slavery in the Caribbean islands of Tobago and Jamaica. In his book, Blood Legacy, Renton decided to confront this history head-on.

Russian history is full of larger-than-life characters and moments of high drama. This vast country has experienced political extremes, huge suffering, and glittering success, often all at the same time. However, to understand modern Russia, we need look back no further than to Peter the Great and the revolutionary times he unleashed. This age is our destination in today’s episode.

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.

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 fascinating creature for himself. In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520.

In this episode with Bodley's Librarian Richard Ovenden, we head back to a dramatic event in Tudor history. It came in the year 1539 when the focus of Thomas Cromwell’s religious reforms was turned on Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset.

In this episode we head back to the 1730s with the writer and adventurer Nicholas Crane, to catch sight of the very first international scientific expedition. It was French-led and it aimed to gather a precise mathematical understanding of the size of a single degree of latitude.

In this playful episode with the novelist Edward Rutherfurd, we venture east and back to the mid-nineteenth-century. For Great Britain this was an age of lusty global trade and nowhere were their presence causing more alarm than in China.

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?’ In this episode, we find out.

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 a dark and turbulent year in the life of one of Britain’s most controversial writers.

In this evocative and beautifully-described episode, the academic historian Edmund Richardson takes us back to the year 1833. This was, he argued, the year when an unremarkable man called James Lewis transformed himself from an ordinary soldier into a man called Charles Masson – a figure who would change history.

In 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War. The identity of the victims was clear enough. But who was responsible? In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.

In this episode we return to Ancient Rome and to one of the most glittering moments in its history. After the political drama of the first century BC – the days of Caesar and Pompey the Great, and the fall of the Republic – came the long, rich and expressive Augustan Age. Our guide to this time is the scholar Professor Llewelyn Morgan.

Today we head back almost two thousand years to the rich, rowdy, ruthless Roman world of the Emperor Domitian. This was a time when people were still coming to terms with the devastating eruption at Vesuvius and when political intrigue kept those who lived in the Eternal City in a constant state of excitement and unease.

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 what has been called ‘the calamitous fourteenth century.’

In this episode the author Roland Philipps takes us to France on the eve of occupation. We follow one extraordinary female double agent whose life embodies the moral ambiguity of this period of French history.

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 1434 to see a character who was at once fascinating and ubiquitous: the fabled ‘Bookseller of Florence’, Vespasiano da Bisticci

James McAuley takes us back to a moment of dilemma in the Second World War. For years Jewish families like that of Béatrice de Camondo had tried to fully embrace a French national identity. But after the Nazi conquest of France in 1940 and the establishment of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime, their status in Paris was gone. As round ups became a disquieting feature of daily life, just who could consider themselves safe?

In this enthralling episode, the Number One Bestselling novelist Simon Scarrow takes us on a walking tour of Berlin in the winter of 1939.

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.