The Covid crisis has seen a huge deployment of UK armed forces personnel to assist the civilian government. Named Operation RESCRIPT it has seen soldiers, sailors and aviators fulfil a wide range of tasks. I wanted to get a sense of the different challenges that the forces face when operating on ...

In this episode, Dan talks to David Gilmour about the British in India. David Gilmour's new book is a vast exploration of the social history of India. David Gilmour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Frederick Taylor's work looks at the outbreak of World War Two, and he discusses whether the British people were ready for war. This discussion moves away from traditional debates over Chamberlain to the people of Britain and Germany, and their attitudes to war. Producer: Peter Curry

Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has written a great book about the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate (1653–1659), England's sole experiment in republican government – and one of the most extraordinary but neglected periods in British history. Having won two civil wars, conquered ...

In this podcast I was joined by Emma Butcher, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English Literature at the University of Leicester. Emma took me on a fascinating journey through the Brontë siblings' reactions and interactions with the tumult of the early 19th century. We discussed the trauma exp...

Many Burmese people resisted the Japanese occupation of their country in World War Two. Filmmaker Alex Bescoby has made a new film celebrating those who the Empire left behind, despite the hardships they endured to serve Britain during the war. Producer: Peter Curry

Dr Chris Smith has written a fascinating new book about John Cairncross, one of the famous five Cambridge spies who infiltrated high positions in the British intelligence service and reported back to Russia. Kim Philby, the most famous of the spies, was almost in charge of MI6 before his associat...

The Channel Dash or Unternehmen Zerberus (Operation Cerberus) was a German naval operation during World War II. A Kriegsmarine (German navy) squadron consisting of both Scharnhorst-class battleships and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen along with escorts, ran a British blockade from Brest in Brittan...

Wolfe Frank, who was the Chief Interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, translating over a third of the six million words spoken, was one of the most interesting characters in the courtroom. Historian Paul Hooley speaks to Dan about this man, who hated Hitler and had an idiosyncratic relationship wit...

In this live recording from 1 Oct 2018, Marina Amaral and Dan Jones talk to Dan Snow about their new book: The Colour of Time.

In October 1942 the British launched a small raid on the Channel Island of Sark. A cast of characters who gave their colleague Ian Fleming ideas for a new secret agent character, James Bond, crept ashore and captured German prisoners. A scuffle broke out and two of them were killed. The commandos...

Fernando Cervantes joined me on the podcast to reframe the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, set against the political and intellectual landscape from which its main actors emerged.

The Crown has been a highly successful series, watched with intense interest across the globe. The settings and costumes are of high quality, the acting is superb, and it all looks convincing. However writer and broadcaster Hugo Vickers has several historical reservations. He comes on the show to...

Roger Crowley is the author of the new book, Accursed Tower: The Crusaders' Last Battle for the Holy Land. The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and richly provisioned, was the last crusader stronghold. When it fell in 1291, two hundred years of Christian crusading in the Holy Land came to a blo...

Catherine Nixey @catherinenixey is a classicist, radio critic of The Times and author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.

Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker, or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? There have been innumerable documentaries, newspaper articles and twitter threads written by conspiracy theorists to back up the case for escape. Luke Daly Groves has made it his mission to ...

Archaeologists in Norway have discovered an intact Viking ship. Dan chatted to Erich Nau about this momentous discovery and what it could mean for our understanding of the Norsemen.

The universe has always been there, kind of, but it took intelligent life on earth billions of years to start to grapple with its nature. Carolyn Collins Peterson is a science writer who charts the progress of astronomy through the observatories used throughout history, from the earliest such as ...

Today, we're talking about one of the great stories of American military history; The Doolittle Raid. In 1942 after the humiliation assault on Pearl Harbour and determined to show that America still had offensive capabilities the charismatic figure of James Doolittle came to President Rosevelt wi...

Duncan Weldon's new Radio 4 Series looks at the economics of the Second World War, and crucial they were in determining the outcome of the war. He joins Dan to talk about why no participants expected France to fall so quickly, and why Norway mattered economically. Producer: Peter Curry

In this emergency podcast, Dan talks to Dr Andrew Blick about Boris Johnson's accession to the role of Prime Minister, the history of the UK's electoral system, and the role the monarchy has to play in the constitutional system. Producer: Peter Curry

The crisis in the Home Office about the treatment of citizens who arrived on the Windrush and their families has consumed British politics for months. Dan talks to Alex Von Tunzelmann about empires, immigration, and how the current situation arose.

Dan talks to Daisy Dunn, a historian and classicist, about the lives of the two Plinys in the shadow of Vesuvius. The younger Pliny witnessed the eruption and would later write an account of the eruption. The elder Pliny, actually the uncle of the younger Pliny, would die in the blaze. Producer: ...

What happened on the last morning of the First World War, in the hours before the guns fell silent at 11:00? Dan talks to Paul Reed about how exactly you go about ending a four-year war, and the young men who didn't survive that last morning.