Travels Through Time

After a short break at TTT, enter the world’s largest flying machine. ‘R101’ was one of the most ambitious creations of the airship era. Plans for it began about a century ago in the 1920s. The vision of engineers and politicians was that the 1930s were to mark the start of a new epoch in air travel. R101 was to lead the way. Huge airships were going to glide through the imperial skies, binding to...

Join Peter Moore and Sarah Bakewell for a little walking tour of Fleet Street in London. Instead of three scenes, in this episode they stop off at three locations, as Peter tells Sarah about three of the characters who appear in his new book: the printer William Strahan, the writer Samuel Johnson and the politician John Wilkes. Peter Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling historian. His new book is ...

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 astonishing creature for himself. In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520. We catch sight of Dürer, the great master...

It's time to revisit our archives. In this episode one of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo. Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Ove...

Our guest today is one of the greatest of Britons. Lady Hale was, until her retirement three years ago, the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – the most senior judge in the country. Peter sat down with Lady Hale at her London home for a conversation about her life, her love of history and memoir Spider Woman. After this she took him back to 1925, a pivotal year for the law and w...

In this special live episode, recorded at the Buckingham Literary Festival last weekend, the award-winning writer Flora Fraser takes us to one of the most remote places in the British Isles to witness the dramatic story of how her namesake Flora Macdonald helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after his failed attempt to take the throne from George II. Their adventure is one of the most romantic and...

In this episode the cultural historian Mike Jay takes Peter back to the high Victorian Age to see how a pioneering group of scholars and artists experimented with mind altering drugs. Jay labels these characters 'psychonauts'. These were daring, romantic figures like Sigmund Freud who championed cocaine as a stimulant, and William James whose experiments with nitrous oxide brought new insights int...

In this lively episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr David Veevers takes us to the heart of the seventeenth century to visit three key locations in which the British Empire was being formed, challenged and resisted.  First, we head to the Deccan Plateau of the Indian Subcontinent to witness a dramatic stand off between the Mughal and Maratha Empires. It would set off a series of events...

This week we head to the turbulent world of sixteenth century France to meet three fascinating queens whose lives were inextricably linked – Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots. They are the subject of our guest today, Leah Redmond Chang's, new book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power. 'The royal body exists to be looked at,' Hilary Mantel wr...

The Renaissance was stirred into life by many figures of genius. In this episode Peter meets up with the art historian, Andrew Spira, to talk about three of the great masters in one of the most captivating of years. In different ways Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer were finding new stories to tell in their paintings. Spira evaluates all of this for us and he detects the emergence of something else...

For this week's episode Peter headed in to Penguin's offices in London to meet Serhii Plokhy and talk to him about his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War. They discussed how a culture of secrecy continues to define Russian society as it did before with the Soviets. They looked at the progress of the war and Putin's failed attempt to found a 'Eurasian Union'. Following this Serhii revisits the drama...

It's time to delve into our archive. In this brilliantly descriptive and entertaining episode, the award-winning writer and satirist Craig Brown takes us on a cultural tour of 1963. We discuss the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles meteoric rise to fame and the assassination of JFK. For much, much more about all this and to be the first to see the amazing new colourised photograph of the Beatles in...

In this episode of Travels Through Time the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin takes Artemis on a tour of the debauched and dangerous world of Roman politics. We meet Messalina, one of the Rome's most notorious women, and follow her through the events of 48 AD that would lead to her eventual downfall and execution. For over two thousand years Messalina has been characterised as the scheming and sexua...

Today Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two. Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands. The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believ...

It has been said that the past is another country, but the events we discuss in this episode feel all too familiar. Media interference in elections, Russian influence on Western politics, controversial immigration policy and the technology industry are all as close to the top of the agenda today as there were in 1924. Today Violet is joined on a tour back to 1924 by the celebrated writer Simon Win...

England in the mid sixteenth century was filled with drama and novelty. As conspiracies played out and a new queen sought to established herself on the throne, a glamorous new technology was emerging in the fashionable world. In this fascinating episode, Rebecca Struthers, the author of Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time, takes us back to the high Elizabethan Age to tell us all about th...

In today’s beautifully described episode the author and journalist Luke Turner takes us back to 1943 to present us with a refreshingly different view of World War 2. The war, Turner reminds us, was a cultural experience as well as a military contest. One feature of this cultural environment has been largely neglected by generations of scholars. This is the unusual degree of freedom some members of...

This week we have an extra Friday episode for you. It’s with the multi-talented artist, historian and musician Dr Amy Jeffs. She takes us back to 1327, a year of high political drama when King Edward II of England was deposed by his wife, Isabella, and his teenage son, Edward III was crowned and began his fifty-year reign. Jeffs spent her university years deep in the Middle Ages, studying palaeogr...

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, life in England was finally starting to settle down after years of upheaval and conflict during the Wars of the Roses which had riven society since the mid 1450s. Waves of Plague had decimated the population, causing widespread distress but providing unexpected opportunities for those who survived. The cultural and political landscape were ripe for cha...

This month marks 80 years since the government of Nazi Germany announced the shocking discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest in the occupied USSR. Thus began one of the most tangled and disturbing of WW2 stories. Just what had happened? In this episode from our archive, the writer Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyń, takes us back to the year 1940 to find out. *** In April 1...

Today the archaeologist and executive director of World Monuments Fund, John Darlington, takes us on a dramatic trip back to the 1690s to witness a devastating earthquake in the Caribbean. Scroll down, too, for news of a special discount code. *** After its capture by the English in 1655, Port Royal, Jamaica, became a place of great significance. Home to around 6,500 people by the 1690s, it was kn...

‘I have so often wondered’, the historian Katja Hoyer says, ‘what I would have made of the state that I was born into had I been born a few years earlier and lived through it in the way that other people did.’ That state was East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This was a nation that emerged out of the ashes of World War II and existed until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 199...

In this episode we talk to the game designer David Milne about his historical work on the hugely popular real time strategy game Company of Heroes 3. Milne takes us back to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, from Tobruk in North Africa to Anzio in Italy, as we learn how games developers faithfully evoke the past. Company of Heroes 3 is the latest instalment in the multi-million selling Com...

Today the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe. But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary work. In doing so they became, as Bakewell exp...

The relationship between England and India is a deep and complex one. In this episode the academic and author of Courting India, Nandini Das, takes us back to a significant moment at the very beginning of this relationship. She tells us all about Sir Thomas Roe, the courtier who led the first English embassy to India. Roe's mission was an exciting and a daunting one. Stories about the riches of In...