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.

There was no shortage of extraordinary rulers in the sixteenth century, but they all cowered in the shadow of the man who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566 - Suleyman the Magnificent, ‘lord of lords, master of the celestial conjunction’ and territories that stretched from Baghdad to Bulgaria.

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. 

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 rule.

In this episode of Travels Through Time we meet two extraordinarily brave people who formed an unlikely friendship in Hitler's Berlin.

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. Our guide is Dr Priya Atwal.

In this episode we discuss one significant year in the history of humanity's attempt to create rules for the ocean. Our guest is the journalist and academic David Bosco, author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans.

In this episode 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.

In this episode, Professor Roderick Beaton 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.

In our first episode of 2022, we’re travelling back exactly a hundred years ago to visit 1920s Hollywood, the Weimer Republic and the tomb of Tutenkhamun.

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.

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. Our tour guide is the author Tom Chivers, whose book London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City uses the city’s geology to understand its rich history.

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 – 1492.

On Sunday 2 September, between one and two in the morning, a baker called Thomas Farriner woke to find his house on Pudding Lane thick with smoke. The oven in his bakehouse had not been raked out properly the night before, and now his lower storey was on fire.

So began one of the most infamous events in English history: the Great Fire of London.

On the morning of 6 May 1682, in unremarkable weather, the Gloucester, a frigate of the Royal Navy, collided with a sandbank off the Norfolk coast. In this episode we travel back to witness that dramatic shipwreck. It was an event that very nearly changed the course of English history.

In this episode 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. Our guide is the academic Professor Zoë Playdon.

In this episode we sweep through Sicily and Southern Italy in the company of the original revolutionary hero, Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi. Our guide is Jamie Mackay, a writer and translator based in Florence.

Flinging off her heels under shellfire in Civil War Spain. Gossiping with Churchill by his goldfish pond. Taking tea with Hitler after a Nuremberg rally. In this episode we meet the pioneering female war correspondent Virginia Cowles who did all of these things. Introducing us to the remarkable Cowles is the author Judith Mackrell and the award-winning journalist Christina Lamb.

In this episode bestselling historian and novelist Tracy Borman takes us back to the most dramatic days of 1588. While various events compete for attention – the fate of the Armada, the health of Leicester – Elizabeth remains at the heart of it all. As Tracy Borman argues (and Violet Moller agrees), she was a queen to outrank all of the others.

In today’s episode the eminent historian Robert Lyman takes us to Burma, the country that was the crucible of action for a range of competing powers. In Burma the invading Japanese confronted the British, India, Chinese and Americans in a story that really was, as Lyman points out, ‘a war of empires.’