November 30 2021, Bridgetown, fifty-five years since Barbados’ 1966 Independence, the Royal Standard flag representing the Queen was lowered and Dame Sandra Mason was sworn in as the president of Barbados. The handover ceremony marked the birth of the world’s newest republic.

The most easterly o...

HBO's Band of Brothers remains one of the greatest mini-series ever made. 20 years after the award-winning series debuted, Dan speaks to Robin Laing who played Edward 'Babe' Heffron about life on set, how they created an entire frozen forest inside an air hanger during a sweltering August and his...

In a special episode of the podcast, Dan and his team hit the road after receiving a call about the discovery of a hoard of rare Iron Age coins, at a secret location in the New Forest. At the St Barbe Museum in Lymington, Dan speaks to the detectorists who made the discovery of a lifetime and to ...

Please note that this episode contains the use of explicit language right from the very beginning.

Ridley Scott, a prolific director and producer, is responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed films of all time. While "Alien" (1979) and "Blade Runner" (1982), are regarded as signifi...

Actor and former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger joins Dan in conversation on today's podcast about Winston Churchill, who was born on this day in 1874. They talk about Arnie's admiration for the former British Prime Minister as a leader and a thinker, how he modelled his own governo...

Winston Churchill was many things a writer, politician, journalist, painter but the defining aspect of his career was as a war leader. Warfare infused his life from its very beginning due to his relation to the Duke of Marlborough and a childhood re-enacting the Battle of Waterloo in the ground o...

The result of his complicated legacy, the death of South Africa's last apartheid president, F W de Klerk, on November 11 2021 generated a flood of differing assessments. De Klerk wrote himself into the history of South Africa on February 2 1990, when he announced the unbanning of the African Nati...

Thomas Kendrick was at the very centre of British Intelligence operations throughout the first half of the twentieth century. He combined a public face of an English gentleman whilst privately masterminding MI6's spy networks throughout Europe. Perhaps his finest hour came in the run-up to the Se...

Over a million Indian soldiers served during the First World War, but many of the records of the soldiers who fought valiantly for the Allied cause had been lost - hiding their stories from history. Until now. Discovered in a basement of a museum in Lahore, Pakistan, where they had been left unre...

The British Monarchy is a thread that has run throughout the history of Britain but over the centuries it has been a constantly evolving institution. From the warrior kings of early England steeped in violence to the largely symbolic constitutional monarch of today, Tracy Borman helps Dan chart h...

Everyone who was alive at the time remembers the day President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas on the 22 November 1963. On this anniversary Dan gives a moment-by-moment account of the day that shocked the world and speaks to Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist and...

When and why did we start keeping hamsters as pets? When was sign language first used in the UK? If you were planning a bank heist, which historical figures would you call on? These are just some of the burning historical questions that public historian and podcaster, Greg Jenner, is tackling in ...

Hoaxes and magic were widespread in 18th century Britain. From a woman who claimed to birth rabbits, to a man who said he’d climb into a bottle in front of a live audience, many of the claims sound laughably unbelievable to us today. But at the time, these sorts of hoaxes were widely influential,...

During World War One, Britain and its empire mobilised soldiers on a hitherto unprecedented scale. That required a huge logistical effort to feed, equip, house and train them. No place reflects these efforts better than Salisbury Plains. Now mainly sleepy villages and farm land, these plains were...

This episode of the podcast comes from a show called ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ which is a modern history podcast inspired by the lyrics of the legend that is Billy Joel. In this episode, Dan chats with the wonderful Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which took plac...

From the great battles such as Dunkirk, historical titans such Alexander the Great and historical oddities such as Henry VIII's enemas Dan speaks to author and historian Dominic Sandbrook about what it is that sparks a passion for history. They also discuss the challenges of writing and podcastin...

As the country remembers the sacrifice made by those men and women who have given their lives and health in serving the nation Dan is joined by Sir Max Hastings to examine the ever-changing face of warfare. His new book Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace examines not just the heroism of tho...

Sebastian Faulks is a novelist who really needs no introduction, perhaps most famous for his novel Birdsong, he has written powerfully and poignantly about the impact of war on the human spirit. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Dan to talk about his newest novel Snow Country. Set in Austr...

Boris Johnson recently stated that the fall of Rome was caused by 'uncontrolled migration' and the image of a mighty empire bought to its knees by hordes of barbarians from the east is certainly a powerful one. It is, however, not true and for many historians, even the idea of the "fall" of the e...

The Berlin Wall was an icon of the Cold War and a physical embodiment of the divide between East and West. Its rise and fall was a microcosm of the conflict and its fall marked the beginning of a new post-Cold War world.

Today on the podcast Dan is joined by two eyewitnesses to the wall to hear ...

Even after his overthrow and bloody death in 2011, Colonel Gaddafi still looms large over Lybia but there is much more to the history of this important and often misunderstood country. It is the 16th largest country on Earth, its capital Tripoli is closer to London than Athens is and Britain's re...

In AD132 began the bloody struggle over who would rule a nation. The clash of two ancient cultures was fought between two strong-willed leaders, Hadrian, the cosmopolitan ruler of the vast Roman Empire, and Shim’on, a Jewish military leader who some believed to be the ‘King Messiah’.

During the ...

On 5 November 1605, an audacious plan to decapitate the British state was foiled when Guy Fawkes and nearly a ton of gunpowder were discovered in an undercroft beneath the House of Lords. The plan was to blow up King James I and the majority of the nation's religious and political leadership duri...

Five centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot in America, the Vikings had already crossed the Atlantic. Using new dating techniques, scientists studying timber buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Canada’s Newfoundland, have established the Norse settled in AD 1021, 471 ye...