Roger Moorhouse discusses the Polish campaign of 1939 comprehensively, separating the myths from reality and outlining the abject horrors that the Poles suffered under the twin occupation of the Nazis and the Soviets. Producer: Peter Curry

Dan and Professor Marie Coleman get into the details of the border between Ireland and North Ireland. How did it come to be, how has it changed and why has it proved such a sticking point in Brexit negotiations? Discover more history interviews and documentaries at History Hit TV. Producer: Natt ...

Dan made a stupid comment on twitter. Irish history twitter melted down. So we did a pod on why. 100 years ago the Irish War of Independence was being fought in Ireland as the UK government sought to keep Ireland within the Union while the Irish independence fighters seized control of much of the...

Dan sits down with Tom Holland to discuss Rome's first five emperors - the Julio-Claudian dynasty. From Augustus to Nero, they are some of the most colourful characters in history. But how much of what we know of these figures is actually true? Beware this podcast contains very strong language.

The Kindertransport was a rescue effort, where the United Kingdom took in around 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Eastern Europe, and in many cases they were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. Herman Rothman and Henry Glanz are two survivors of the Kindertransport, ...

Simon Winder's eclectic histories have ranged all over the Germanic countries, and he has concluded his Germania trilogy with Lotharingia, a book about the kingdom of Lothair, which was located mainly in the modern low countries, and stretched all the way to the Roman borderlands. Lothair I, a gr...

The Japanese term Kirishitan, referred to Roman Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used in Japanese texts as a historiographic term for Roman Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries.;Stephen Turnbull is a British academic, historian and writer. He is a specialist in eastern military...

The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes), or simply the Knight's Cross (Ritterkreuz), and its variants were the highest awards in the military and paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany during World War II.;The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross was awarded for a...

I was thrilled to be joined by H. W. Brands. He's authored 30 books on American history and his works have twice been selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. On the 70 year anniversary since the start of the Korean War, he took me through the remarkable course of events which saw an immense...

I was thrilled to be joined again by one of our most popular guests, John Nichol. John shot to international prominence when he served in the first Gulf War. When his Tornado was shot down in 1991 he was captured, tortured and paraded on television provoking worldwide condemnation and leaving one...

Sarah Fraser @sarah_fraseruk won the 2012 Saltire First Scottish Book of the Year for her acclaimed debut The Last Highlander, which in 2016 also became a New York Times ebook bestseller. A writer and regular contributor on TV and radio, she has a PhD in obscene Gaelic poetry and lives in the Sco...

Dan visits one of the greatest objects on planet Earth: USS Texas, the only dreadnought of its kind anywhere in the world. The dreadnought was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. USS Texas was a second-class battleship built by the United States in the early 1890s, the f...

Dr. Anna Keay is the Director of the Landmark Trust and author of 'The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth'. James, Duke of Monmouth, the adored illegitimate son of Charles II, was born in exile the very year that his grandfather was executed and the English monarchy a...

Dan talks to Ross Barnett, a scientist who has studied the extinction of megafauna across Britain and the world. They discuss the killing of the last wolf in Britain, whether that mosquito in Jurassic park could have really held dinosaur DNA and the ecological impact of the loss of British megafa...

Arthur Spencer was a navigator during World War Two, completing two tours of operations with 97 Squadron at RAF Woodhall Spa and RAF Bourn. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for providing air support for the Resistance in Italy. Dan met him in his house to discuss the life during the war, the h...

Seb Falk joined me to discuss the science in the Middle Ages, or, according to his new book, 'The Light Ages'. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons...

Dan talks to the producers of a new documentary about a battalion cut off during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Mark Fastoso and John King.

David Grann @davidgrann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and a best-selling author. His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was published in 2009.

Just off the British coast is a sunken world that was once the hub of mesolithic Europe. Simon Fitch, a specialist in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Bradbury, joins Dan to talk about the discovery and the part he played in making them. Producer: Peter Curry

In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in a place that even by that stage of the war had an evil reputation. Historian Jack Fairweather tells the story of Witold Pilecki the Pole who volun...

Dan talks to contributors in two different continents, Olivia Windham-Stewart from the Museum of British Colonialism with contributors Susan Kibaara and Mary Njoroge in Kenya. They discuss the caesuras in British colonial history, and what can be done to correct them.

Alexander Betts is the Leopold Muller Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, and the Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. His research is on the politics and political economy of refugees, migration and humanitarianism, with a geographical focus on...

80 years ago, ships were gathering in Kent to begin the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force. Britain faced the prospect of the worst defeat in British military history and the loss of her entire military forces in Western Europe. Churchill called it "a colossal military disaster", admitting...

Ed Caesar joined me on the podcast to tell the story of World War I veteran Maurice Wilson, Britain's most mysterious mountaineering legend.