Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are interrogating the past, and attempting to de-tangle the present.
They question the nature of Greatness, why the West no longer has civil wars and whether Richard Nixon was more like Caligula or Claudius.
They're distilling the entirety of human history, or, as much as they can fit into about fifty minutes.
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Date | Title & Description | Contributors |
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2024-04-17 | By 1809, Lord Byron found himself untethered and debt-ridden. Disenchanted with politics, frustrated by his literary career and haunted by his illicit homosexuality, he abandoned an oppressive England and set out upon his legendary Eastern adventure. F... |
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2024-04-14 | Few lives from history can have contained as many strange and exciting strands as that of Lord Byron's, whose story reflects the great dramas of the Napoleonic era. A vampiric hero of devilish charisma; a martyr for liberty, a licentious lothario; Byro... |
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2024-04-10 | Music for sex, dancing, and watching the straight world go by… The explosion of Disco provides an extraordinary window into the tumultuous world of the 1970s, with its themes of sex, drugs, race and sexuality. By the start of the 1970s, America was a... |
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2024-04-07 | “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” In his speech at Rice University, Texas, in September 1962, President John F. Kennedy reaffirmed Am... |
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2024-04-03 | “I think there is not a devil left in hell, they have all gone into the peasants… smite, stab and slay all”. Following on from Martin Luther’s dramatic abduction by his powerful protector, Frederick III, he had been secretly kept safe at Wartburg. The... |
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2024-04-01 | "I cannot and will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.…Here I stand, I can do no other” The Diet of Worms in April 1521 was a clash of the old world and the new, and one of history’s most dramatic confrontations.... |
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2024-03-31 | Three years on from Martin Luther’s publication of the Ninety-Five Theses - a shocking attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church and the selling of indulgences - his radical new ideas and brilliant use of the printing press had unleashed chaos in... |
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2024-03-28 | Martin Luther is one of the few people to have genuinely changed the world, igniting a religious revolution that tore Christendom in two, and undermined European tradition in ways that still reverberate today. But along with Luther’s uniquely tortured ... |
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2024-03-25 | The Reformation, launched in 1517, stands as one of the most convulsive and transformative events of all time, shattering Christendom and dividing Europe for centuries. Its outcome determined the fates of Kings and Emperors, and saw the souls of millio... |
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2024-03-21 | "Then it is I drown again, with all those dim lost faces I never understood… Include me in your lamentations.” The aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking saw different reactions erupt across the Atlantic, and the responses of both mourners and onlookers we... |
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