The Magna Carta is a charter agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons fr...

Cunk On Britain made fun of the grammar and language of history documentaries, and gave some of our best historians the chance to educate Philomena Cunk. Dan talks to two of the writers, Joel Morris & Jason Hazeley of Great Big Owl podcasts, about how and why they parodied history documentaries.

Malcolm Gladwell has sold millions of books and more recently become a podcasting titan and he joins Dan to talk about his most recent project The Bomber Mafia. The Bomber Mafia is about a group of military officers who came up with and transformed the concept of strategic bombing during the Seco...

Malta is located in the Mediterranean sea just beyond Sicily, between Europe and Africa; its warm climate and beautiful islands make it a perfect holiday destination. But in World War Two, the Islands’ strategic location made it centre stage in the theatre of war in the Mediterranean: a key stron...

Nicola Tallis joins Dan to talk about Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII and matriarch of the Tudor dynasty.

Much of Medieval history focuses on the kings, queens, bishops, and the nobility of the period, but what do we know about those people on the margins of society? Like today the elite made up only a small percentage of the population and the vast majority of the population of medieval Europe were ...

Marissa Roth, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, joins me on the podcast to talk about her pictures of the 1992 LA riots and lifetime of war photography, especially dealing with women in war.

On 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr delivered his 'I have a dream' speech stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. The speech and King's life have been an inspiration to millions of people both in the United States and around...

Martin Luther is one of the most extraordinary and consequential men of the last 500 years but was also a man keenly aware of his image and went to considerable efforts to craft how the world saw him. This affected how he was viewed both in his own life and centuries later in ours. Dan is joined ...

Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector whose story continues to inspire so many scientists to this day. The Jurassic Coast on the south coast of England is one of the richest locations for fossil hunting in the UK, if not in the world. During...

This is the story of the incredible rise and fall of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was queen of Scotland, she was queen of France, and she could have been queen of England. She led armies, lived as a fugitive, became embroiled in love affairs and spent nearly two decades in jail.

Dan is joined by th...

Dan Snow and Kate Williams talk about the rise and fall of Mary Queen of Scots.

Born Mary Jane Grant in the colony of Kingston, Jamaica, in November 1805, Mary would later become a businesswoman, traveller and healer. Posthumously, Mary is best known as a Black British nurse who tended the wounded of the Crimean War.

Gretchen Gerzina is an author and academic who has writte...

Dan talks to Robert Icke, whose new adaptation of Mary Stuart is at the Duke of York's Theatre. He also discusses the play and its historical context with Anna Whitelock.

Dan talks to Bee Rowlatt about the life and death of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft.

More than 70 years after her death, Mata Hari is still a household name throughout the Western world. So who was this daughter of a Dutch hat-maker, who was executed for espionage after a secret trial during the darkest days of World War One? Julie Wheelwright joined me on the pod to guide me thr...

Maud West, operated her own detective agency during the Golden Age of crime in the period after World War One. She used all manner of disguises and tactics to gather information for her clients and to subvert the expected roles for women in this period. Producer: Peter Curry

Dr Maurice Hilleman was a leading American microbiologist who specialised in vaccinology and immunology. He discovered nine vaccines that are routinely recommended for children today, rendering formerly devastating diseases practically forgotten. Considered by many to be the father of modern vacc...

Max Eisen was only 15 when he and his family were taken from their Hungarian home to the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Second World War. All of his relatives were killed;only Max survived to see VE Day and eventual liberation. 75 years on from being liberated, he talks about th...

Dan sits down with Max Hastings to talk about the humanity behind warfare, and other wide ranging topics.

Dan talks to Jack Hartnell about how people in the Middle Ages saw their own (and other people's) bodies.

Today we find ourselves in 9th-century Baghdad, the beating heart of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate. This was a vast empire that stretched from North Africa through the Middle East, and all the way to Central Asia. At the height of the Islamic Golden Age, it hosted profound cultural and intellectu...

Art and cultural historian Dr Janina Ramirez joins Dan on today's episode to tell the stories of three incredible medieval women: Aethelfled, a warrior queen who crushed the Vikings, Jadwiga, the first Queen Regent of Poland and Hildegard of Bingen, an 11th century polymath abbess who became a 20...

Various legends, characters and myths are associated with the medieval period. The British Isles is filled with prehistoric monuments - from Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall, Snowdon and Loch Etive, and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and ...