The creation of man-made underground tunnels played a huge role in the outcome of the First World War. They were first dug to mine under enemy positions and detonate bombs or attack in desperate and fierce fights. As the war dragged on, nevertheless, they developed another purpose: providing sold...

By 1944, a third of the civilian population in Britain was engaged in war work, including over 7 million women. From compiling weather reports, maintaining aircraft, serving on airfields or working in intelligence, the work of women was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. Alice Loxton trac...

In February 1942, the Second World War came to Australia. The same Japanese fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor only ten weeks before had set its sights on a new target. The harbour town of Darwin. In two separate attacks on February 19 1942, nearly 250 Japanese aircraft wreaked havoc on the lig...

100 years ago today, the Unknown Warrior, a common soldier and an unidentified casualty of war, was buried in Westminster Abbey with all the pomp and ceremony of an empire at its zenith. King George V looked on as 100 Victoria Cross bearers formed a guard of honour and the unknown solider was lai...

In the winter of 1941 an alien-seeming object was spotted by an RAF reconnaissance pilot flying a lone unarmed Spitfire across the French coast. Balanced upon the cliffs near Le Havre was what appeared to be a giant convex dish, directed across the Channel at the war-torn British coastline. With ...

Just after midnight on 30th 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sailing alone in the Philippine Sea when she was struck by two Japanese torpedoes, almost three hundred miles from land. She sank in 12 minutes. For the next five nights, nearly nine hundred men struggled with battle injuries, shark attac...

Francine Hirsch joined me on the pod to discuss the full story of the Nuremberg Trials, one in which the Soviet Union was a defining player.

At the end of World War One, the Allies seized the German fleet and held it at Scapa Flow, in Orkney, until the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced. At least, that was the plan. The German navy covertly scuttled their own boats under the noses of their captors, rendering the fleet us...

Jill Lepore joined me on the podcast to discuss The Simulmatics Corporation. Founded in 1959, it mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica.

James Hawes @jameshawes2 is a former professional archaeologist and university lecturer in German, Doctor of German literature in the lead-up to WW1, novelist and Kafka biographer.

Jean and Patricia Owtram were teenagers when the Second World War broke out. They both served in secret roles, one on the coast intercepting German naval signals, the other running intelligence agents from Cairo. Neither told the other what they had been up to until the 1970s! Now, in their late ...

The 1960s were an exciting time. The pill was invented in 1961, and for women everywhere it meant a newfound set of sexual freedoms;no longer did sex have to remain within the confines of marriage. However, the 1960s have for too long been characterised wrongfully by a surface layer of glamour an...

Christian Lamb has had a remarkable life. The daughter of an admiral, she served in the navy during the war and went on to become an expert in horticultural history. Dan visited her the day after her 100th birthday to learn about her wartime experiences.

Henry Hemming talks to Dan about the life of William Stevenson, a British operative who worked hard to pressure Roosevelt into declaring war on Nazi Germany, and ensuring that American troops were directed against German forces in mainland Europe. The tactics adopted were akin to those used today...

Dr Helen McCarthy, lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan to discuss the complicated past of working motherhood. They consider how women have been excluded from the world of work as well as attempts to break into it, and how these developments have informed o...

Professor Frank McDonough has just written a monumental history of the Third Reich. He is a world leading expert on the domestic side of Hitler's Germany. In this podcast Dan asks Frank why and how Hitler was able to establish and sustain his rule within Germany.

Clare Balding is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist and author. She currently presents for BBC Sport, Channel 4, BT Sport and the religious/spiritual programme Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2.

Simon Hall joined me on the pod to talk about Fidel Castro’s trip to New York in September 1960. Based at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, Castro met with a succession of political and cultural luminaries, including Malcolm X, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nikita Khrushchev, Amiri Baraka, and Allen Ginsberg. We dis...

Dan talks to Frank Dikötter, an eminent professor on Chinese history, who has written a new book about dictators around the world. They discuss what dictators need to do to control power and whether there is anything different about the people who become dictators. Producer: Peter Curry

In September 1918 David Lloyd George, the charismatic wartime Prime Minister, visited the city of Manchester, attended a vast public gathering and then collapsed. He spent the next week and a half confined to the Manchester Town Hall in a hastily assembled private hospital ward. He needed assista...

In the second half of the twentieth century, western Europe was shaped by a revolutionary political force: democracy. Or at least that's what Martin Conway has argued in his major new history. On this podcast, Martin - a teacher from my university days - interrogated the years following the Secon...

Jonathan Fennell has written a new book discussing the 'citizen armies' that made up the core of the British and Commonwealth armies, and Dan talks to him to find out more.

Margaret MacMillan joined me on the podcast to discuss the ways in which war has influenced human society. We discussed how, in turn, changes in political organisation, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight.

Patricia Clavin, Niamh Gallagher and Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid joined me on the pod to discuss the history of the partition of Ireland.