On 7 June 1520, Henry VIII of England and François I of France met at the Field of Cloth of Gold. For three weeks on English soil in Northern France, the two Kings - and the 12,000 who accompanied them - feasted, jousted, and made merry. This party without parallel was a peace summit between the two countries, arranged by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.
A new exhibition at Hampton Court, called Gold and Glory, explores this seminal event through paintings, objects, and manuscripts. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Suzannah Lipscomb takes a tour around the exhibition with one of its curators, Dr. Alden Gregory.
On 22 June 1941 Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa the biggest military operation in human history. More than 3 million men of the Axis poured into the Soviet Union beginning a conflict, that even within the context of the Second World War, was unprecedented in both its scale and savagery. Ope...
The novel, and in particular the romance genre, is at the heart of a billion dollar industry, but when did they originate. In this episode, Professor Tim Whitmarsh from the University of Cambridge takes us back to some of the world’s earliest fictional narratives, the novels of Ancient Greece in ...
To go berserk, meaning out of control with anger or excitement: the phrase originates from stories of the Berserkers, but what do we really know about them? Dangerous to friend or foe, the Berserkers are said to have fought feuds in the nude or even to have taken magic mushrooms in battle, but ho...
