Travels Through Time

In this episode we venture into the Scottish mountains with the author Ed Douglas. After seeing the Battle of Falkirk Muir, we follow Bonnie Prince Charlie on his flight towards Skye after Culloden. We end our travels with a view of Lord Lovat – the most infamous of the Jacobite rebels – before his execution in London. Our guest, Ed Douglas, is an author and a climber who has spent much of his car...

May 1940 is one of the critical months in British history. As the Nazis tore across Europe and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, our guest Sinclair McKay explains that this was also the month in which the Home Guard was founded. Originally known as the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) and affectionately recalled in the BBC sitcom as 'Dad's Army', the Home Guard was a colourful military force...

On today's episode Don Hollway takes us back to see 'the Viking's Viking', King Olaf I, in the year when his dramatic story reached its mysterious climax. Olaf is a heavyweight figure in Norse history. Rising out of obscurity, he travelled widely before experiencing a profound Christian rebirth on the Isles of Scilly. From thereon one of his central motives in life was the conversion of the Norse...

Ranking only behind Churchill in the pantheon of Britain's WW2 heroes is Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery or 'Monty'. In this episode the biographer Gary Mead takes us back to 1914 to catch a glimpse of Monty as a young soldier at the start of his first war. Montgomery, Mead explains, was a complicated character. While admired by his men and celebrated for his great victory at El Alamein in 1942,...

In this episode we head back to the Anglo Saxon Age with Edoardo Albert to meet the 'Father of English History' – the Venerable Bede. Bede is a beguiling character. He lived just a few generations after the arrival of Christianity in Britain in remote Northumbria, a place that Pope Gregory regarded as being on the very edge of the known world. But from these outer limits, Bede redefined the world...

In this episode prize-winning author Nandini Das takes us back to 1630s England to see a country still grappling with the legacies of the Reformation. Elsewhere we see the beginnings of Enlightenment and watch as questions about citizenship and belonging are raised in new and intriguing ways. The Stuart Age, like the Tudor one that preceded it, is among England's most cherished. In her new book, T...

Alexander the Great is one of the most famous figures in history. Today our guest, Edmund Richardson, takes us back to see him in the year 331 BCE – the remarkable year when Alexander's story transformed from the impressive into the truly spectacular. At the beginning of 331, many of those in Alexander's army might have supposed that it was time to return to Macedon after a successful campaign on...

In the autumn of 1983 the world came very close to nuclear disaster without even knowing about it. US President Ronald Reagan would later recall the 'really scary' events of that year, which, as our guest Taylor Downing explains, were among the most dangerous of the Cold War Era. The nuclear scare of 1983 was generated by a series of factors that coalesced in terrifying style. There was the bellic...

Live from Dr Johnson's House off Fleet Street in London, in this episode the biographer and historian Paul O'Keeffe takes us on an immersive dive into the year 1806. This was a time when both the British and the French attempted to come to terms with the fall out of the Battle of Trafalgar. News of Trafalgar was received in Britain with great ambivalence. The sheer scale of the victory was thrilli...

In this episode we talk to the journalist and author Jim Windolf about a 'testy, interesting and weird' month in the mid-1960s when Bob Dylan and The Beatles came into close and sometimes volatile contact. May 1966 would be recalled by Neil Aspinall, The Beatles' road manager, as 'Dylan Month'. This month came at a loaded moment for each of the acts. Both of them were, by this point in the Sixties...

Few parties in history can match the Georgian 'Masquerade'. And among Georgian masquerades the one given by the King of Denmark in London in 1768 was particularly enchanting. It brought those of the greatest means and highest rank together in London theatre that was filled with artful costumes and glittering jewels. This week's guest, Meghan Kobza, tells us all about the Georgian masquerade – who...

This week the Cambridge professor Rory Naismith takes us back to the eighth century to glimpse what we can of Offa King of the Mercians. Offa was a mighty figure in this early moment in the history of Britain and he is remembered chiefly for the extraordinary earthwork – Offa's Dyke. But what more can be said about Offa's life? In this episode Naismith explains that he was a ruler of considerable...

This week's episode takes us to Paris in La Belle Époque. There, among all the splendour and sophistication, we watch the great Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painting one of his great portraits. But there is more to this history than first meets the eye. As our guest Catherine Ostler explains, the year 1881 was a critical one in Jewish history. By that point in time Jewish communities were...

As Britain's 'special relationship' with the USA falters, we look back at a very relevant epislode from our archive. In this the author and journalist Philip Stephens takes us back to a crucial month in post-war British politics. December 1962, he explains, set Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world for the next half century. Featuring in this episode is the elderly British prime minist...

The Netherlands is a small nation with a big history. But in the 1940s it suffered a series of disastrous events. First came the invasion of the Nazis in 1940. Then the very next year the Japanese attacked their old empire in the east. The horrors of World War Two were then followed by the Indonesian National Revolution and, by 1950, the Dutch were a 'pocket superpower' no longer. In this episode...

The late eighteenth century history was a time in Europe when a brilliant old world collapsed and raucous new one rose to replace it. In this episode the biographer Veronica Buckley explains how the Hapsburgs, one of the great European families, responded to this revolutionary change. It was a stern challenge but inspired by one of the great matriarchs in European history, Empress Maria Theresia,...

Most people know Daniel Defoe as one of the great writers in the history of English literature. But the author of Robinson Crusoe was much more than that. A rabble rousing pamphleteer and erratic entrepreneur, in the early years of the eighteenth century Defoe also became an undercover political operative. Defoe's career as a spy intersected with a huge moment in British history when the Act of Un...

Today’s guest, Sean Cunningham, takes us back to a particularly perilous year in the eventful reign of King Henry VII. He explains that 1497 was a year of brinkmanship, battles, plots and disasters that very nearly resulted in the fall of the House of Tudor. Sean Cunningham is Head of Collections, Medieval, Early Modern and Legal, at the National Archives in Kew. He is one of the leading authoriti...

Given the scandal surrounding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, we thought we'd examine an eerily familiar moment in British history. In January 1809 the Duke of York became the subject of a huge and embarrassing news story. It was a story of sex, power, money and corruption right at the heart of British politics. One of the stars of the affair was a woman of no rank, title or fortune. Her name was Mary...

Our guest today is the New York Times bestselling historian Charles King, the author of Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah. The Messiah is one of the best known pieces of all classical music and, as King suggests at the beginning of this conversation, it 'may be the world's greatest monument to the possibility of hope'. To tell us more about how such an...

Our guest today is Tharik Hussain, a travel writer turned historian who has recently produced  an enchanting study of Europe's Islamic history. To investigate this at close quarters, in this episode he takes us back to Córdoba in the year 929 – the greatest city in Europe at the time, a place of wealth and splendour with a population of around 100,000. By 929 Córdoba was emerging as a rival power...

Our guest today is Sarah Wise, an author known for her incisive social studies of nineteenth century history. In this episode Wise takes us back to a more recent year, 1947, so she can investigate the moment when the British public began to turn against the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. The Mental Deficiency Act was a terrifying piece of legislation that resulted in the imprisonment of tens of th...

In this episode from our archive we spoke to the archeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, a figure familiar to millions in the UK. While Oliver's television work has taken him around the world, he retains a special connection to his Scottish homeland. One historical site, in particular, continues to enchant him: Skara Brae. Skara Brae on the wind scoured Orkney Islands is the best-preserved Neoli...

There's no more familiar piece of classical music than Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. But for all the recordings and broadcasts and interpretations of it that there has been over the past three centuries, there is still some mystery about the music. Why did Vivaldi write it? What were his inspirations? Where and when did The Four Seasons burst into life. The broadcaster and author Dr Hannah F...

After some time away, we've decided that now's the moment for some new forays into the past. Keep an eye on this feed – new episodes on the way! In the meantime we thought we'd post one of our favourite ever interviews here. It's with the author Nikolai Tolstoy on his stepfather, the novelist Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian was a writer of great gifts. His depiction of the late Georgian world is regarded...