Travels Through Time

This week we are off to see some of the Renaissance masters at work with the acclaimed novelist Damian Dibben. * In the early years of the sixteenth century Venice was not only a place of great power it was a site of huge cultural splendour. In particular a new generation of artists were animating the buildings like never before. And unlike many of the other Renaissance painters, the Venetians wer...

We start our sixth season with Robert Harris, one of Britain's great contemporary novelists. He takes us back to a tremendously important year in English (and world) history. 1660. In England the mid seventeenth century was a dramatic and bloody time. It was a age when important questions about the nature of power were posed and the traditions of monarchy were challenged. In 1649 this led to the e...

Hello everyone, we're back! Season Six of Travels Through Time begins with an episode with the Number One Bestselling novelist Robert Harris tomorrow.  Music: “Love Token” from the album “This Is Us” By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan  

This week we meet an extraordinary couple, whose life-long partnership and dual creativity changed the face of Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement.  If it’s ever been possible to come up with a philosophy for how to live, William Morris came pretty close. He once said that “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” It’s a beautiful sentiment a...

Welcome to a very special live recording of Travels Through Time, made at the Chalke Valley History Festival. Under the sun of a midsummer day in southern England, Violet Moller sat down for a chat, and a song, with a fascinating young historian. Oskar Jensen took Violet back to the year 1815 and introduced her to several characters from his new book, Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth C...

This week we are travelling back to the ninth century to witness one of the major turning points in English history. Winston Churchill regularly tops ‘the greatest Briton of all time’ charts, but his own vote for this accolade apparently went to the man we are going to discuss today. Alfred 'the Great' is the only English monarch to enjoy such an admiring epithet. Æthelred, the later monarch, is r...

Almost exactly a century ago, on 22 June 1922, a series of gunshots rang out in Belgravia, London. Out of this polite neighbourhood, home to powerful politicians and wealthy financiers, a shocking news story quickly spread. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, MP, one of the great heroes of the Great War had been assassinated. Who was responsible, why it mattered, and what happened next is the subject...

In this episode we’re heading to the 1960s to meet a man who tried to uncover the difference between fate and coincidence. Have you ever had a feeling that something would happen before it did? Or seen something you couldn’t make sense of? In 1967 the psychiatrist John Barker set up a bureau in the offices of the London Evening Standard where members of the public could phone in and report their p...

On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter gazed into the darkness of a newly-discovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Can you see anything? Lord Carnarvon, his companion and sponsor asked him. ‘Yes,’ Carter replied, ‘wonderful things.’ * This year marks the centenary of perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery in history. At the end of 1922, the world was astonished by the news from Thebe...

In this episode we strap on our armour and brace ourselves for battle! From the monumental ruins of strongholds like Conwy and Dover to the fantastical turrets of Hogwarts, castles are an important element in our vision of the past. They played a vital role in history, as centres of defence and political power, the physical foundation of royal and noble authority.  This week, we are travelling thr...

1492 famously brought Columbus’s discovery of a route to America. This was, as today’s guest Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out, ‘a world-changing event if ever there was one.’ But what else was happening in that fateful year? Far beyond the courts of Europe, what was life like in China? In Africa? In this week’s brilliantly insightful episode we set out on a journey of our own to glimpse 1492 in...

In this episode we head to Victorian Britain, where leaps in technology were making the world seem smaller and faster than ever before. Our guide is the author and film-maker Paul Fischer whose new book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, charts the incredible race to invent the first film camera and projector.  The late nineteenth century was a world full of contradictions. Categorically Victo...

In this episode, we are donning our lab coats and gaining access to the secrets of particle physics. We visit 1932, an astonishing year in the history of science across the world, from Carl Anderson’s rooftop cloud chamber in California, to Marietta Blau’s mountaintop experiments in Austria, via the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge. Our guest is Dr Suzie Sheehy. Dr Sheehy is unusual fo...

In the spring of 1815, as all Europe fretted about the return of Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible massacre was perpetrated by British militiamen against American inmates at Dartmoor Prison in England. This episode has been very nearly forgotten by history. Today the historian Nicholas Guyatt takes us back to the early nineteenth-century, to the days of the very last war between Great Britain and the...

This week we are setting sail for the Roman province of Britannia to traverse the empire's north-western frontier – Hadrian's Wall.  Hadrian’s Wall is the largest archaeological feature remaining from Roman Britain, a 73-mile line of fortifications stretching from the River Tyne on the east coast to the Solway Firth on the west. Building was begun by the Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD, during a visit t...

This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets. We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work.  John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffe...

This week we head to fifteenth-century Norwich to meet two of the most extraordinary women in medieval England: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.  Manuscripts are one of the most tangible sources of evidence we have about the distant past and our guest this week, Mary Wellesley, has dedicated her professional life to studying them and persuading them to give up their secrets. In her spellbindin...

This week we head to nineteenth-century London, when the city's infrastructure was groaning under the strain of its exponential growth and the question of how to get a clean, reliable water supply was of upmost importance.  We take running water in big cities like London for granted now, but for most of our history we’ve not had access to it. When did we first start pumping water up from the Thame...

This week we revisit one of the most dangerous and dramatic moments in London's history through the prism of one of its most iconic buildings: St. Paul's Cathedral.  When we think of modern London, the places that spring to mind are Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Piccadilly Circus, but the true heart of the city lies far to the east, on Ludgate Hill. St Paul’s Cathedral has been a...

There is nowhere on earth quite like New York City. In this episode the writer and journalist Daniel Levy takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and to a dramatic, catalytic moment in his home town’s development: the Great Fire of 1835. * ‘It is only necessary to sit down with a minute map of the country,’ observed the novelist James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, ‘to perceive at a glance, t...

This week we witness the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley, a devastating event which galvanised the Welsh nationalist cause.  It’s easy to think of history as a gradual accumulation of events, buildings and people – but we don’t spend as much time thinking about its dead ends. That’s exactly what my guest today, Dr Matthew Green, does in his evocative new book Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Br...

In this episode we venture on a journey of scientific discovery and meet one of the most important figures in English medieval science. Geoffrey Chaucer has gone down in history as the ‘father of English literature’ and his Canterbury Tales are celebrated across the globe as the earliest work of fiction in that language. Less well known, but equally important, is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, the...

In Women’s History Month we take a look back at a figure who has been misrepresented by successive generations of historians. Elizabeth Stuart, was the goddaughter of Elizabeth I and sister of the ill-starred Charles I of England. She was someone who played an active part on the times in which she lived. In this episode the Dutch historian Nadine Akkerman takes us back to meet a woman who was know...

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. * The fall of Tunis in May 1943 marked the first liberation of an occupied city by the...

This week we travel back to the Islamic year 941 which straddles 1534/5 of our own calendar, a particularly deadly year in the reign of the Ottoman Emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent.  There was no shortage of extraordinary rulers in the sixteenth century: Ivan the Terrible towered over Russia, England had its own Gloriana, Elizabeth I, Charles V governed the vast Holy Roman Empire, while in India,...