Travels Through Time

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...

In this deeply moving episode from 2020 the New York Times bestselling author Ariana Neuman told her father's extraordinary story for the very first time. Hans Neumann was a young Jewish man from Prague who managed to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust. Ariana Neumann grew up in the Venezuela of the 1970s and 1980s. This was a land of possibility and progress. Her father Hans Neumann - a h...

This week we tackle the fascinating and complex relationship between science and religion, in the company of the academic and writer Nicholas Spencer. Spencer takes us back to a dramatic moment of conflict that began at the end of the 1850s with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. This book ignited a fierce debate about his new theory of natural selection and of human...

Nothing symbolises the might of imperial Rome like their roads. Expertly engineered and perfectly cambered, they were the arteries of the great empire through which merchants, armies and information flowed. In this episode we will follow one of those lost roads back in time to the very beginning of the Roman occupation of Britain, in the company of the writer Christopher Hadley. He takes us back t...

1066 was the year that England’s destiny was decided. In this superbly analysed episode, the author Don Hollway takes us back to the scenes of the three great battles that changed the course of history: Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings. *** The drama of 1066 began in its very first week, with the death of the old king, Edward the Confessor, on 5 January. The following day the powerful earl Ha...

Here is another gem from our archive. In this fascinating episode the archaeologist and writer Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes takes us back further than we’ve ever been before, 125,000 years, to meet our extinct kindred: the Neanderthals. We visit the vibrant wild woodlands of Britain, a hornbeam forest on the European continent and a German lakeshore. Rebecca describes the world as it was in the intergla...

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 com...

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 o...

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 Za...

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...

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...

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: Thom...

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 t...

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 re...

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...

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 histo...

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 occasio...

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 fines...

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 w...

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 simultaneous...

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, Cleop...