Subject to Change

Professor David Abulafia's wonderful book The Great Sea covers so many topics. Today we talked about slavery. Until recently I hadn't been aware of the sheer scale of the enterprise. Slavers from the…

Scott Sumner is an economist with a well known and much quoted blog. But it is the bit of the blog that he devotes to movies that interests me. He watches a ton of films and then does a thumbnail rev…

I have always found the war Octavian fought against Antony and Cleopatra hard to understand. How did Antony find himself losing without even fighting a proper battle given all his experience as a gen…

Anna Keay's book The Restless Republic is just brilliant. It covers the period following the execution of Charles I when Britain became a republic. It is fascinating to see how the period (and the ch…

Following on from last week in this episode things reach boiling point. Marriage alliances are discarded, invasions undertaken D day style, brutal battles are fought as Perdicass marches to destroy P…

Tristan Hughes has writen a brilliant book about the years immediately following the Death of Alexander the Great. As Tristan says, history didn't just stop at Alexander's death and start again when …

Really thrilled to have Bret Devereaux and Ed Watts on the podcast together. We looked at Gladiator as a film (two thumbs up!) and also unpicking some of the history. Ranging far and wide we covered …

I chatted to Battleship Bean and John Schilling about nuclear war. We discussed the wonderful Dr Strangleove and tried to unpick some of the realities of a nuclear war. How powerful are modern weapon…

What happens when a Habsburg prince abandons European luxury to rule a bankrupt, divided Mexico? Emperor Maximilian's journey from triumph to tragedy reveals the human cost of imperial ambition and m…

Karl Marx called it 'one of the most monstrous enterprises in the annals of international history'. This seems unfair to the young Hapsburg royals who travel to Mexico in 1864 to become its emperor a…

In the Dutch Republic of the 1630's trading in tulips went mad with bulbs and even parts of a bulb changing hands for astronomical prices. Historian Mike Dash traces the extraordinary story from its …

James Howard - Johnston returns to talk about the astonishing upending of the world order that happened just a few years after the death of Muhammad. The Persian empire destroyed and the Roman Empire…

Paul Lockhart is brilliant on the history of guns (and firepower more widely). He is interested not just in the weapons themselves but how they changed the nature of the nation state itself.  Once gu…

Ed Watts is one of the most engaging writers and speakers on Roman history I have talked to. In this podcast we talk about the fall of the Republic  - why and how it happened and who was most to blam…

In October 1950 the Americans are racing to the Yalu river, trying to bring the war in Korea to a decisive close. Unknown to them a huge Chinese army has been sent to oppose them and the forces meet …

 Everyone has heard of the Silk Road but this is The Silver Way. It is the story of the Manilla galleons, massive ships that sailed annually for 250 years from 1565 to 1815. Silver from Spanish South…

The story of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 is a rich one. Roger Crowley tells the story absolutely brilliantly here. So many fascinating (and at times heartbreaking) stories within the bigger s…

In the year 617 the Roman Empire stands on the brink of extinction. In the West the empire is long gone. And now the Persians have conquered much of what is left and have arrived outside Constantinop…

Stephen Greenblatt wrote a fascinating book The Swerve about the rediscovery in 1417 of a work of philosophy from antiquity. The Nature of Things was written by Lucretius a few years before the birth…

In 1889 a woman calling herself Pearl Hart holds up a stagecoach in Arizona. In this episode John Boessenecker talks about Pearl Hart and his book Wildcat. Pearl's life from poverty to prostitution t…