Today's guest Kitty Baxter was aged just nine when World War II broke out in 1939. One of five children born to a road sweeper and a cleaner, Kitty joined thousands of children being evacuated to the countryside as German bombing raids loomed.
This would be the first of three times that she was ...
Was Rasputin really Russia’s greatest love machine? Did he have any healing powers? And why might his penis be pickling in a jar?
In this episode, we are drawing this mystical man out of his cloud of green smoke to find out which of the things we know about him might actually be true.
Kate is j...
"If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire." That was the prophecy the Oracle of Delphi delivered to the Lydian King - she just left out that fact it was his own empire that would be destroyed.
Known as the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi was the High Priestess of the Temple of Apollo a...
The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for nearly four thousand years…until it was beaten by Lincoln Cathedral.
This week Dallas is joined by Egyptologist and friend Chris Naunton for a crash course in pyramid construction and the mysteries that surround them.
Discover ...
The summer of 1911 was a hot one. Massive strikes took place across the country, including seamen, railwaymen, coal miners, women working in food processing and garment-making and even school children. That, combined with record-breaking temperatures made Britain a constitutional, industrial and ...
Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me - but what is a pirate’s life, and what was it like for women?
This is the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, a pair of reputably vicious pirates, and their journeys onto and across the seas.
With the help of Julie Walker, author of 'Bonny & Read', find out whet...
Early Medieval Britain was more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources, not least roads, walls and bridges.
Why have they survived so well? And what did the people who lived here immediately after the Romans think of them and do with them?
In this episode of Go...
Warning: The events recounted in this episode may be distressing to some listeners
At 11.02 am on August 9 1945, America dropped the world's most powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese port city was flattened to the ground 'as if it had been swept aside by a broom', with over 70,000 peop...
The great diarist Samuel Pepys was an avid collector of books, news and gossip, and reading was a major part of his life and the lives of his contemporaries.
In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb delves into Pepys’s life and wide-ranging interests with Dr. Kate Lovem...
One of the most famous, and sophisticated, cultures of Mesoamerica, why are the Maya known only for predicting the end of the world?
In the first episode of our new mini series 'The Ancient Americas', Tristan is joined by Professor Matthew Restall from Penn State University to help debunk the id...
The transistor; solar panels; the first telecommunications satellite; cell phone networks; UNIX code; information theory. All these and more were invented in one place: Bell Labs.
Bell Labs was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed. It was ...
On August 6 and 9, 1945, US B-29 bombers, dropped their nuclear bombs on the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands and consigning millions to disease and genetic defects. The accepted wisdom in the U.S. since has been that dropping the bombs on these Japanese cities ...
For millennia, people have obsessed over questions about the nature of matter in our universe. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, we believed we had answered everything. Our understanding of matter was finally complete. But an unprecedented outburst of scientific discovery was about to c...
The Cambridgeshire village of Warboys was the scene of one of the most famous English witch trials of the sixteenth century. There, the privileged daughters of the respected Squire Throckmorton accused a cantankerous elderly neighbour of witchcraft, sending the impoverished Alice Samuel to her de...
Warning: The events recounted in this episode may be distressing to some listeners
Keiko Ogura was just eight years old on August 6 1945 when her home city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the US in the first atomic bomb attack in history.
Almost 150,000 people lost their lives in that first bombi...
As the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy is challenged on the other side of the Atlantic, today Betwixt the Sheets we are looking at the history of abortions here in Britain.
This is the second episode in our two-part series on abortion in the US and the UK.
In this episode, Kate...
2/2. Eva Schloss remembers her days as a girl in Amsterdam playing in the street with the other children including Anne Frank who, for a time, took a particular interest in her older brother Heinz. Eva also remembers the day the Dutch resistance worker exposed her family to the Nazis and they wer...
1/2. On the morning of the 4th of August 1944, exactly 78 years ago today, the Frank family cowered behind a bookshelf in Amsterdam, listening to heavy boots and German voices on the other side. Anne Frank and her family were discovered and taken to the Nazi concentration camps where they all per...
One of the most studied military victories in history, and arguably one of the worst Roman defeats - what went wrong for the Romans at Cannae?
In our final episode in the Hannibal mini-series, Dr Louis Rawlings explains just what happened at Cannae in 216BCE, and why that battle is still so impo...
The New Model Army was one of the most formidable fighting forces ever assembled. It played a crucial role in overthrowing King Charles I, propelling one of its most brilliant generals, Oliver Cromwell, to power during the English Revolution. As a fighting force it engineered regicide, pioneered ...
90% of everything you own arrived by sea.
And there’s one invention to thank above all else – the humble shipping container.
Today on Patented we’re joined by Rose George - journalist and author of the book Deep Sea and Foreign Going about her experience of spending five weeks on board a contai...
From luring in unicorns to protecting the Roman Empire, myths have surrounded virginity for centuries. But is virginity itself a myth?
In this episode, Kate speaks to Anke Bernau about where the so-called cherry comes from, what it stands for and why it has been important throughout history.
*W...
Archaeology has a lot to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the so-called Dark Ages, and every now and then new sites are found in places where we previously knew nothing about the people who once lived there.
In today’s Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman goes to the Ministry of Defence...
Located just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, the nation of Taiwan sits in the so-called 'first island chain' - a number of US-friendly territories deemed crucial to American foreign policy.
Yet China's president Xi Jinping maintains that Chinese reunification with Taiwan must be fulfi...
