Legacy

How do six men in three vans outside a Cotswolds air base end with America flying its bombers home? What can 300,000 tonnes of Russian diesel actually do for American drivers? And, are a quiet corner of England, an airport in Riyadh and the war in Ukraine all part of the same story? In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch try to work out how the week's biggest stories fit...

If almost every early migration out of Africa failed, how did any of us get here? Why does an Akan word that once meant "person from beyond the cornfields" now mean a white person? And, when British politicians talk about net migration, who are they leaving out? Peter Frankopan takes Afua Hirsch through 50,000 years of people on the move, using the new illustrated edition of The Earth Tr...

What happens when an author gets rejected eight times, writes a ninth novel in hand-written letters, and ends up at number one on the New York Times bestseller list? Why are we so drawn to storytellers, tradwives, and 73-year-old law clerks who reject email in favor of pen and paper? And, what does a 73-year-old fictional letter-writer have in common with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the pol...

Why does the ancient Greek word for bravery come from the word for man, and what did bronze spears have to do with it? How does one of the coldest decades in 2,000 years end with around 100,000 women on trial for meddling with the weather? And, what links a woman blamed for a hailstorm in the 1590s to ten young protesters superglued to an oil company's headquarters in London? Afua Hirsch reads...

Why did the cod in your fish fingers go to China and back before it reached your freezer? What does a medieval king blocking English wool from Flanders have to do with Xi Jinping's grip on rare earths? And, if China can now build cars far more cheaply than Europe or America, could the West lose its car industry altogether? Ed Conway, Sky News economics and data editor and Times columnist, take...

What were the taxi drivers of 1990s Accra playing on repeat? How does a woman who swore she was "not a bit political" write a hit about being used up and spat out by the system? And, what does it take for the most unmistakably white icon in American country music to become the unproblematic queen of a Nigerian girl growing up in Peckham? Afua Hirsch hands the Dolly Parton question to her...

Why are a million people about to queue at the British Museum for a strip of embroidered linen? What if the most famous picture of 1066 isn't a tapestry, was probably stitched in England, and treats the losing king as a hero? And, if the arrow in Harold's eye was stitched back in by 19th-century restorers, how sure are we of the one thing everyone knows about 1066? With the Bayeux Tapestry...

Who says no to Elvis Presley — and is proved right eighteen years later? How does a girl from a one-room cabin with no electricity work out the economics of music publishing before most of Nashville has? And, in an age that agrees on almost nothing, how did Dolly Parton end up claimed by drag queens, evangelicals and everyone in between? Peter Frankopan opens on the phone call that cost Dolly Part...

Why is a war fought 44 years ago back on the front pages? What happens when a combative president in Buenos Aires, a friend in the White House and an oil field due online in 2028 all point at the same islands? And, when 99.8% of the people who live there have already voted, whose islands are they to argue over? Fresh from Sir Lawrence Freedman's two-volume official history of the Falklands campaig...

Content warning: this episode describes torture, civilian deaths and the 2021 Kabul airport attack. Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is shattered, and there was never another 9/11 — so who won? What does a war cost once you count the hospitals that closed and the food that never arrived? And what does it mean that the United States signed an agreement with the people it went to war to destroy? Twenty-f...

What happens to a trad wife influencer when she wakes up in 1855 and has to actually do it? Why were film producers bidding on this novel four years before it was finished? And when a story about white homesteaders in pre-Civil War America contains no Black people at all, what is it quietly telling you? Peter asks Afua what she read over the summer and gets a debut novel, a four-year-old email she...

Content warning: this episode describes the aftermath of 11 September 2001, including torture and civilian deaths. How does a country go from the sympathy of the entire world to invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attack? What does a blank cheque from the UN Security Council actually buy? And if torture only counts as torture when the pain is equivalent to organ failure, what exactly...

Who taught you that the Mongols only destroyed things? What if the empire that sacked Baghdad also invented blue and white porcelain, elected its leaders, and let the Khan's first wife decide on war? And why do the Mongols still have a worse reputation than any other empire in history — including the ones that lasted longer and killed more? In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter is joined by Marie Fa...

Content warning: this episode describes the events of 11 September 2001 in detail. What if the deadliest terror attack in history began with an American chequebook? What if the men who carried it out had once been armed, trained and celebrated by the West as freedom fighters? And what if the whole thing was set in motion more than twenty years earlier, on Christmas Eve? Afua Hirsch and Peter Frank...

How does a man go from calling Donald Trump a kook and a jackass to becoming his closest ally in the Senate? What do you give up to keep a seat at the table, and what do you actually get for it? And when the obituaries settle on calling you a pilot fish, has anything you did survived you? Lindsey Graham flew home from Kyiv on a Friday and was dead by Saturday evening, aged 71 — Peter Frankopan and...

Who decided that the thing stopping people travelling was not money, but choice? What happens to a country when the holiday is designed so that the visitor never has to leave the compound? And of every hundred dollars you spend at an all-inclusive, how much do you think actually stays there? Gerard Blitz opened his first holiday village on a Majorcan beach in 1950 on the theory that what people wa...

Why does a kettle cost less than ten pounds? What kind of official refuses to send the army against protesters in one decade, then puts thirty million people out of work in the next? And when the man who built modern China spent his last twenty years saying nothing at all, what was he saying? Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch disagree, at length and on the record, about whether the architect of the...

When did flying stop being the most glamorous thing a person could possibly do? What kind of industry fixes its own prices by law, and then competes on how much champagne it can pour? And what happened to the man who broke it? Sir Freddie Laker swept floors at an aircraft factory, worked out that the entire airline business was upside down, and got taken apart for it — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hir...

What happens to a person when the country they were born in decides they were never really from there? What does a play about the women of a sacked city, written 2,400 years ago, have to say to an actress walking out of Syria on foot? And how do you stand on a stage in Edinburgh and make an audience laugh about the worst thing that ever happened to you? At the Edinburgh Fringe, Peter Frankopan mee...

Who decided that the sea — cold, dangerous and full of smugglers — was somewhere you went for fun? What kind of doctor prescribes plunging into the Channel naked in the dead of winter, and then drinking it? And how did the towns Britain built to enjoy itself end up among the most deprived places in the country? The holiday — the whole idea that ordinary people are owed one — starts with a Brighton...

Why does every dictator, sooner or later, want to host the World Cup? What did a military junta that never wanted the tournament discover once the goals started going in? And when a hundred thousand people are dancing in the street, who is that actually working for? Peter Frankopan sits down with investigative journalist Karim Zidan, who has spent a decade tracking how autocrats turn football into...

What happened when the people written out of the Grand Tour wrote their own account of it? What did an eighteenth-century Bengali diplomat see in London that made him call the British a conceited race? And how did a man from Bihar end up as shampooing surgeon to the King of England? Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan follow the travellers the Grand Tour left out — enslaved servants, Black abolitionis...

What's a garnet mined in Sri Lanka two and a half thousand years ago doing in a silver hairpin dug up near Bruges? Why are the Duke of Burgundy and the conqueror of Constantinople staring each other down for the first time in history? And, how did most of Belgium forget that its own counts once sat on the throne of Constantinople? Afua turns interviewer as Peter opens the doors on Bigger Picture,...

What actually turned a teenage aristocrat into a "finished" gentleman in the 1700s? Why did one incredibly long, incredibly expensive holiday end up inventing the whole idea of "the West"? And why can you still trace a straight line from that holiday to Frankenstein, the contents of half of Britain's country houses, and this year's tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote? Send a nineteen-year-old ari...

What does it take to get a room of ex-military festival-goers in rural Wiltshire to agree Britain should return its stolen gold? And why does an obsolete Victorian law still make it a criminal offence for the British Museum to give any of it back? Afua Hirsch just spent a week testing both — with a Buckingham Palace thought experiment, a courtroom-style cross-examination, and a verdict on two cent...