How can nature help us deal with grief? In today's day and age, it can feel like we're detactched from the natural world around us - but how do we find the way, and time, to reconnect with it?
This week Jimmy is joined by Charlie Corbett to talk about his book '12 Birds to Save Your Life'. After...
The Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the world’s most famous poems. But who was their author, Homer, and how have his name and poems survived so long, preserved for almost 3 millennia?
In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan is joined once again by author, classicist, and cultural critic, Daisy...
There are so many myths about Anne Boleyn - among them that she had six fingers, that she was a murderess, even that she was Henry VIII's own daughter. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, released on 19 May to mark the anniversary of the day of Anne Boleyn's execution in 1536, Professor Suzan...
On 17 December 1903 the Wright Brothers successful completed the first manned, controlled and sustained flight in human history.
They made it 'just' 120 feet in that first attempt. From there, aeroplane technology took off at a pace. Only 16 years later came the first non-stop transatlantic flig...
Please note that this episode contains frank discussions of conflict, mental health and suicide.
Admiral Lord West is the former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. In 1982, West commanded the frigate HMS Ardent which was deployed to the South Atlantic for the Falklands War. During the ...
Connect with other history fans and join the Book Club! The June/July read will be The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream by Charles Spencer: https://shop.historyhit.com/product/book-club/
During the night of the 25 November in 1120, a routine crossing of the Engli...
Why did kings and queens have spectators on their wedding night? Was sex always just for the love of their country and the want of an heir, or were some of them into different kinks?
And what about outside marriage? From an official mistress who does not have sex with the king, to one who put la...
Early medieval royals ate mostly meat, right? Wrong! A new study that’s made headlines around the world has shown that medieval kings were largely vegetarian! To help shed light on this exciting new discovery, today Cat is joined by Dr Sam Leggett of the University of Edinburgh, a bio-archaeologi...
Robert ‘Bob’ Binzer wanted to be a pilot from a young age, and during the Second World War he got his wish. Bob was an aviator with the United States Air Force in the China, Burma and India (CBI) theatre of the war; carrying critical supplies, weapons and even soldiers over the Himalayan mountain...
What do we know about the earliest homonyms to exist? With a story spanning one million years and counting, we're discovering more about how we came to be every day. In this episode of The Ancients, we're on location in the Natural History Museum in London as Tristan covers a huge topic; the hist...
The Civil War was the most traumatic conflict in British history, pitting friends and family members against each other, tearing down the old order.
Award-winning historian Jessie Childs plunges the reader into the shock of the struggle through one of its most dramatic episodes: the siege of Bas...
On the night of February 23 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner. The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since Gu...
Invented in the mid-1800s, bicycles have had enduring popularity. Across cultures, they have been embraced, promising freedom and mobility at a low price point.
Today on the show we are joined by Tim Harford, host of the podcasts Cautionary Tales and The BBC’s 50 Objects That Defined The Modern...
Please note that this episode contains mentions of racial trauma, slavery and violence.
The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of globa...
Hidden in bedside tables or proudly displayed on mantelpieces, wherever you keep them (if you do), sex toys have come a long way since the first phallic-shaped object was found around 30,000 years ago.
But before they were arriving through our post boxes in unmarked, tracked packages, what did s...
Whether talking about shell shock, war neurosis, combat trauma or PTSD; the impacts of war zones on those who fight in them or encounter them have long been discussed. With increasing understanding, however, definitions and treatments continue to change.
In this episode, James is joined by Dr He...
Part one of this comprehensive trilogy covering the Wars of the Roses left the Yorkist lords attained and in exile.
From this point, the 15th century civil wars were transformed into a bitter procession of dynastic clashes between the rival houses of Lancaster and York - the result of which wou...
The Wars of the Roses is a complex and fascinating period of English history that dominates the second half of the 15th century and leads to the rise of the Tudor dynasty. It’s often characterised as a dynastic struggle between Lancaster and York, but it was much more than that.
In this first pa...
The treatment of mental health has been rapidly growing and improving over the past few decades, but it actually goes back thousands of years.
Whether it was the Ancient Greek physician Galen’s humoral theory - in which people’s mental health was determined by imbalances in the levels of four di...
Environmental activist and model Lily Cole is On Jimmy’s Farm to discuss how we can protect the planet we love, and the healing power of nature.
Lily started her career as an international model when she was a teenager, but she found herself on a slightly different journey into climate change ac...
Bletchley Park, Britain's key decryption centre during WWI, is known for the success of breaking the Nazi Enigma codes - experts have suggested that the Bletchley Park codebreakers may have shortened the war by as much as two years.
David Kenyon is the research historian at Bletchley Park. Recor...
Helen Rappaport joined me on the podcast for the third episode of our lockdown learning series to talk about the Russian Revolution. Join Dan Snow in conversation with historian and bestselling author of the internationally acclaimed, Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, as they tell the action-packed stor...
How — and why — did Prozac become the best-selling antidepressant of all time?
As it is Mental Health Awareness Week, we are diving into this fascinating story that speaks to a greater shift in psychiatry and attitudes towards mental health since the invention of the first antidepressants in th...
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK so we’ve got a special episode exploring the surprising way Victorians approached mental health treatment in the 19th century. Oral historian Stella Man from the Glenside Hospital Museum in Bristol tells Dan how the Victorians get a bad rap but ...
