Travels Through Time

29/11/2021

Historians often refer to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as being England’s Golden Age. And of all the forty-five years in which she was the monarch, the year 1588 stands out as the most dramatic. It was a year of peril, a year of valour and a year of heartbreak.

In this episode bestselling historian and novelist Tracy Borman takes us back to the tense summer of 1588. While various events compete for attention – the fate of the Armada, the health of Leicester – Elizabeth remains at the heart of it all.

As Tracy Borman argues (and Violet Moller agrees), she was a queen to outrank all the others.

Listen here: https://buff.ly/3CLrmQH

26/11/2021

Flinging off her heels under shellfire in Civil War Spain. Taking tea with Hi**er after a Nuremberg rally. Gossipping with Churchill by his goldfish pond. The pioneering 1930s female war correspondent Virginia Cowles did all of these things.

In this special episode, we’re joined by not one, but two experts to discuss the life of the trailblazing Virginia Cowles.

The first is the author Judith Mackrell, whose most recent book, Going with the Boys, follows six women journalists, including Virginia, who reported on the Second World War. The second is multi-award winning journalist and senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, Christina Lamb, who has written the foreword to the re-issue of Virginia’s memoir.

Listen here: https://buff.ly/3FIARCb

24/11/2021

In this episode the eminent historian Robert Lyman takes us to Burma, the country that was the crucible of action for a range of competing powers.

In Burma the invading Japanese confronted the British, India, Chinese and Americans in a story that really was, as Lyman points out, ‘a war of empires.’

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/a-war-of-empires-robert-lyman-1944-podcast

Bestselling historian Robert Lyman takes us back to a country that became a fascinating crucible of history in World War Two: Burma.

12/11/2021

In this special episode we are travelling back to Elizabethan England to witness one of the most mysterious events in literary history – the death of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1593.

In the early 1590s, Marlowe was the toast of London. Thousands flocked to the playhouses that lined the banks of the River Thames to see The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus and Tamberlaine, among his other works. But writing was not Marlowe’s only source of income: he was also deeply involved in espionage, entrenched in the murky information networks that underpinned the vicious factions jostling for power at Elizabeth’s court.

The country at large was suffering from economic decline. Terrible weather and poor harvests caused widespread suffering, while there was continuing paranoia about the threat of Spanish invasion and concerns about who would succeed the ageing Queen. All this made for an atmosphere of volatility and fear.

In London, Protestant immigrants who had fled Catholic persecution on the continent were the focus of xenophobia and unrest; matters took an even darker turn in January, when a new outbreak of plague shut the city down.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/stephen-greenblatt-christopher-marlowe-podcast

11/11/2021

In 1947, Christian Dior launched his debut collection in Paris and became an immediate sensation.

His designs were characterised by enormous, fairy-tale-like skirts and hyper-feminine silhouettes. It was christened the ‘New Look’ by the then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow, because it stood in stark contrast to the sober women’s fashion of recent years.

During the war, many women had become accustomed to wearing uniforms and the rationed use of fabric had led to shorter, tighter skirts to save material.

Yet what made the romance and glamour of Dior’s collection even more extraordinary was the dark backdrop of post-war Paris.

Barely eighteen months before, Dior’s youngest and most treasured sister, Catherine, had been liberated from the German concentration camp Ravensbrück. She had been sent there having been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo for her involvement in the French Resistance.

You can listen to this fascinating story on our podcast here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/miss-dior-justine-picardie-1947

10/11/2021

Here, British soldiers parade past the Cenotaph in the Peace Day celebrations of July 1919

As they did this the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers alone remained unknown.

Families were left to respond in their own distinctive ways. To give up on missing relatives seemed, to many, to be the ultimate betrayal. Others reinterpreted the nature of their loss. While accepting the fact that a person’s physical presence had gone, they retained a conviction that that missing person could be contacted in the spiritual world.

Most of all, people took solace in the act of ‘searching’. Professional searchers - people like the writer E.M. Forster - scoured the hospitals and the barracks for clues about the missing. In the age of Sherlock Holmes these searchers were like civilian detectives, working on the most perplexing and painful of all cases: the hunt for the missing of the First World War.

Listen to the full podcast here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-searchers-of-the-first-world-war-sackville-west

09/11/2021

Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and the Missing of the First World War: Robert Sackville-West (1915)

The Armistice in 1918 might have brought an end to the violence. But for many families it did not mean the end of the story.

In 1918 the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers alone remained unknown. These were often very young people, drawn from all walks of life, right across Britain. They were people who had simply vanished into the battlefields.

In this episode Robert Sackville-West takes us back to those desperate times a century ago. He shows us three examples of how people attempted to come to terms with the loss of a loved-one. This was a loss made all the more painful as there was very often no body and no explanation.

Listen to our podcast: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-searchers-of-the-first-world-war-sackville-west

In this episode Robert Sackville-West takes us back to the desperate days of the First World War a century ago. He shows us how the bereaved attempted to come to terms with their loss.

08/11/2021

Between 1536 and 1540 over 850 monastic institutions were shut down by the Tudor regime.

This meant that thousands of monks, nuns and friars were turned out of their former homes as a monastic tradition that had flourished for a millennium came to a jolting end.

Long into the sixteenth century monasteries remained a familiar and vital part of English society. Wherever you were in the kingdom – Yorkshire, Cornwall, London, the Lakes – it was almost certain that there was a monastery just a short walk away.

And yet within a few short years in the 1530s, hundreds of these institutions vanished for good.

The dissolution of the monasteries, James Clark argues in this episode, was ‘the great drama of Henry VIII’s Reformation.’ In this episode he tells us why.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-dissolution-of-the-monasteries-james-clark-1540

Historian James Clark takes us back to one of the central dramatic events of King Henry VIII's Reformation: the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

06/11/2021

1530: Charles V and the Princes of the Renaissance with Mary Hollingsworth

In this sweeping tour of Renaissance century Italy, Mary Hollingsworth takes us to see the most powerful figure of the age: the King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, the Lord of the Netherlands and the soon-to-be-crowned Holy Roman Emperor - Charles V.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/princes-of-the-renaissance-mary-hollingsworth-1530

05/11/2021

1688: The Glorious Revolution with Margarette Lincoln

1688 is an oddly neglected year in English history. Yet it is a compelling and consequential one as the author Margarette Lincoln explains in this episode.

The year saw fiery riots, an invasion, a royal getaway and a change of monarchs. Lincoln takes us back to these events, which form part of the event we remember today as the Glorious Revolution.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/the-glorious-revolution-margarette-lincoln

04/11/2021

1572: The City of Tears with Kate Mosse

In this episode bestselling author Kate Mosse takes us to the heart of one of the most dramatic and violent episodes in French history – the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Paris in the summer of 1572. The city is hot and teeming with people who have come from all over France to witness an unexpected royal wedding between a young couple – Maguerite de Valois, a Catholic, and Henri de Navarre, a Huguenot. Their marriage has been brokered between their mothers – the formidable Catherine de’Medici and the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret. The hope is that the union between the two faiths will bring an end to the Wars of Religion, which have raged through France with exceptional violence for ten years.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/the-city-of-tears-kate-mosse-1572

03/11/2021

1963: Frostquake with Juliet Nicolson

In Britain the winter of 1962/3 has lived long in the collective memory. A time of extraordinary cold, people today still remember that the snow that began on Boxing Day and did not thaw till Easter.

In this tenderly-described, perceptive episode, the writer Juliet Nicolson takes us back more than half a century to those memorable months when the Peak District looked like the Alps. She recalls the magic of the snow, the slipperiness of the streets and her perilous adventures on frozen ponds.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/frostquake-juliet-nicholson-1963

02/11/2021

The Battle of Britain. In that perilous moment of the Second World War, with the N**i forces gathered just across the English Channel, the British people put their faith in the pilots of the RAF and that most captivating of aeroplanes: the Spitfire.

The Spitfire is widely known as a masterpiece of British engineering. It could fly at speeds of around 400mph and it had enormous dexterity, making it a formidable foe in a dogfight. But where did these qualities come from?

In today’s episode the writer and radio producer Alasdair Cross takes us back to the year 1925 to show us the genesis of this fabled aeroplane.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/spitfires-and-the-schneider-trophy-alasdair-cross-1925

01/11/2021

Russian history is full of larger-than-life characters and moments of high drama. This vast country has experienced political extremes, huge suffering, and glittering success, often all at the same time.

However, to understand modern Russia, we need look back no further than to Peter the Great and the revolutionary times he unleashed. This age is our destination in today’s episode.

We follow his wife Catherine’s extraordinary journey from illiterate peasant to ‘Ruler of all the Russias’ and their daughter’s story, beginning with her dramatic birth in the romantic wooden palace of Kolomenskoye in the forests outside Moscow.

Listen here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/the-tsarinas-in-the-revolutionary-russia-of-peter-the-great-1709

30/10/2021

1794: The Fall of Maximilien Robespierre with Colin Jones

In this brilliantly analytical episode of Travels Through Time, Professor Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, takes us back to one of the most dramatic days in all political history.

Exactly 227 years ago today, on 9 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27 July in ours, Maximilien Robespierre fell from power in Paris.

As Jones explains, Robespierre began that day feeling relatively secure. By the time the sun set into the summer horizon, his position was parlous. The next day he would be dead.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-4/the-fall-of-maximilien-robespierre-colin-jones-1794

29/10/2021

In this brilliantly analysed episode, the much-loved novelist Bernard Cornwell takes us back to that fierce, bloody, epoch-defining event: the Battle of Waterloo.

Sunday 18 June 1815 is a date of enormous consequence in western history. It was the day when the two pre-eminent military commanders of their time – Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington – came face to face in battle.

For a battle so monumental in its importance, several details of the Battle of Waterloo remain elusive.

No one knows for certain just when it started. The exact position of units continues to be a source of debate.

The action was too dispersed to be easily interpreted and those who could explain it best – Wellington being a notable example – often refused to discuss it in later years.

Wellington’s most memorable remark has long remained that Waterloo was, ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.’

Listen to the full episode here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-battle-of-waterloo-bernard-cornwell-1815

28/10/2021

Beside the ocean, on the wind scoured coast of the Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, lies the remains of Skara Brae.

This is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in all of Western Europe and, for today’s guest Neil Oliver, it is a place that continues to enchant him.

In this beautifully-described episode he takes us back to the third millennium BC to see Skara Brae as it lived and to ponder why it died.

Catch the whole episode here: https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/neil-oliver-skara-brae-podcast

27/10/2021

Tutankhamun. That one name is enough to conjure up enticing images of Ancient Egypt: dashing chariots, mighty temples, skiffs sailing on the Nile and, most of all, Tutankhamun’s own transfixing Golden Mask.

But who really was this figure who has come to represent so much?

In around the year 1343 BC an eight or nine year-old boy became the king of Egypt. His name was Tutankhamun and today we know him better than, perhaps, any other individual from the ancient Egyptian world.

We know about Tutankhamun because of the astonishing discovery of his beautifully preserved tomb almost a century ago in 1922.

The artefacts that were recovered from that site provided archaeologists with tantalising glimpses of a lost world. It suggested a place of gold and Gods, temples and ceremonies.

Today’s guest Garry J. Shaw amplifies our understanding of this ancient society.

Our perspective today, he explains, is somewhat skewed. Because temples and tombs have survived when towns and cities have not, the impression that we have is that Ancient Egypt was a civilization obsessed with death. While there was certainly a great deal of importance placed on the supernatural, there was much more to their lives than this.

You can explore these ideas and more by travelling back with Garry to the age of Tutankhamun here:

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/ancient-egypt-and-tutankhamun-garry-j-shaw-c1335-bc

26/10/2021

Miss Dior: Justine Picardie (1947)

In this episode (over on our history podcast), we meet the resistance fighter Catherine Dior, youngest sister of one of France’s most renowned designers, and we consider the question: how can individuals and nations ever move on from the trauma of war?

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/miss-dior-justine-picardie-1947

15/10/2021

Hello everyone. Something a bit different for you today. Here's a cross post from our YouTube channel. It's the raw video footage of this week's episode being recorded on Zoom and it is with a superb guest- one of the UK's best-known historians: Neil Oliver.

In this video you can listen to Neil talking to Peter about his new book, "The Story of the World in 100 Moments". Thereafter they head back to the Orkney Islands in the third millennium BC to discuss the enchanting Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae.

Enjoy! And if you are interested, there's much more about this episode at this link >>>

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/neil-oliver-skara-brae-podcast

15/10/2021

Hello everyone. Something a bit different for you today. Here's a cross post from our YouTube channel. It's the raw video footage of this week's episode being recorded on Zoom and it is with a superb guest- one of the UK's best-known historians: Neil Oliver.

In this video you can listen to Neil talking to Peter about his new book, "The Story of the World in 100 Moments". Thereafter they head back to the Orkney Islands in the third millennium BC to discuss the enchanting Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae.

Enjoy! There's much more about this episode at this link >>>

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/neil-oliver-skara-brae-podcast

09/10/2021

Not far from the coast, at the mouth of the River Scheldt, sits the city of Antwerp. It’s location, both geographically and politically, has shaped the city’s rich and enticing identity. As Michael Pye, this week’s guest, tells us, in the sixteenth-century Antwerp was known as the ‘city at the hub of the world.’

This week’s destination has been called, ‘the most consistently cool city on earth,’ by the Lonely Planet Guide and there is no doubt that, in the mid sixteenth century at least, Antwerp was top of everyone’s list.

There were many reasons for this, but freedom lay at the heart of them all. As the biggest port in Europe, Antwerp was at the centre of an increasingly global trade network, its wharves weighed down with cargoes of pepper, silver and cloth. Merchants from Venice, Germany, Portugal and anywhere else you can think of came to trade and get rich – there was nowhere better to celebrate success.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-city-at-the-hub-of-the-world-michael-pye-1549

08/10/2021

This is London in the time of the Tudors, around 1593.

Protestant immigrants who had fled Catholic persecution on the continent were the focus of xenophobia and unrest; with matters about to take an even darker turn as a new outbreak of plague shuts the city down.

The country at large was suffering from serious economic decline. Terrible weather and poor harvests caused widespread suffering, while there was continuing paranoia about the threat of Spanish invasion and concerns about who would succeed the ageing Queen. All this made for an atmosphere of volatility and fear.

We travelled back to visit London in 1593 with Harvard Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt to witness one of the most mysterious events in literary history – the death of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1593.

You can listen to the entire podcast here:
https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/stephen-greenblatt-christopher-marlowe-podcast

06/10/2021

Few inventions have reshaped human society like the printing press.

In this absorbing episode the author Susan Denham Wade takes us back to the year 1454, to a little workshop in the city of Mainz, to witness a magnificent moment in technological history.

Susan guides us through this story in three perceptive scenes. She takes us back to a European world that was anxious after the Fall of Constantinople. Yet it was a world that was also full of a strange, dynamic, creative force that today we refer to as the Renaissance.

Brought together, the moments she isolates comprise some of the most important in human history. The printing press ultimately changed society from an oral-based one, to one that focussed on visual communication through the written word.

This shift is one of the eleven moments Susan Denham Wade defines in her book: A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions, a grand, sweeping survey of how perception and human culture and interacted over time.

The book has been called ‘A remarkable achievement,’ by Stephen Fry.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/gutenbergs-printing-press-susan-denham-wade-1454

01/10/2021

In the early 1590s, Christopher Marlowe was the toast of London. Thousands flocked to the playhouses that lined the banks of the River Thames to see The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus and Tamberlaine, among his other works. But writing was not Marlowe’s only source of income: he was also deeply involved in espionage, entrenched in the murky information networks that underpinned the vicious factions jostling for power at Elizabeth’s court.

The country at large was suffering from economic decline. Terrible weather and poor harvests caused widespread suffering, while there was continuing paranoia about the threat of Spanish invasion and concerns about who would succeed the ageing Queen.
All this made for an atmosphere of volatility and fear.

In London, Protestant immigrants who had fled Catholic persecution on the continent were the focus of xenophobia and unrest; matters took an even darker turn in January, when a new outbreak of plague shut the city down.

In this special episode to launch Season Five we travel back to Elizabethan England to witness one of the most mysterious events in literary history – the death of the infamous playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1593.

https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/stephen-greenblatt-christopher-marlowe-podcast

30/09/2021

After a generation of conflict between Great Britain and France, many on the European continent greeted 1815 in more optimistic spirit.

Napoleon, the brilliant military leader whose astonishing career had convulsed and reshaped the map of Europe, had been forced to abdicate.

Following the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon was exiled to the little island of Elba off the Italian coast.

His vast forces had been diminished to a small personal guard of six hundred men and a small navy.

Few foresaw the staggering sequence of events that lay ahead. In late February Napoleon slipped away from his island prison.

Within a month he was back in Paris, King Louis XVIII had fled and he was busily recruiting a new army.

This army, as Bernard Cornwell explains, in this week's episode, was one of the finest that Napoleon ever led. It was disciplined, determined and full of veteran troops.

Within weeks the restored king, Louis XVIII, had fled Paris and one of Napoleon’s most trusted commanders, Marshall Ney, had returned to fight alongside him. Nevertheless the situation Napoleon faced was daunting.

He was encircled by enemies. He knew his only hope of survival was to quickly confront and defeat the British and Prussian armies that were close at hand.

You can listen to the full story here:
https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/the-battle-of-waterloo-bernard-cornwell-1815