Travels Through Time

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,...