Legacy
Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan tell the wild stories of some of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived – and ask whether they have the rep they deserve. Should Nina Simone’s role in the civil rights movement be more celebrated than it is? When you find out what Picasso got up to in his studio, can you still admire his art? Was Napoleon a hero or a tyrant - or both? (And, while we’re at it, was he even short?) Legacy is the show that looks at big lives from the perspective of now – and doesn’t always like what it sees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
Come and join us live! On Monday 16 November, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch will be on stage at Kings Place in London with the wonderful Elif Shafak.
Her extraordinary new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, tells the story of Gustave Flaubert, the creator of Madame Bovary, through the eyes of the women whose lives shaped his, and whose stories have largely been forgotten. It's about who gets to tell history, whose voices...
What did a run of terrible Caribbean hurricanes have to do with American independence?
How did a volcano in Indonesia help give us Frankenstein?
And, why were so many of the people fighting for civil rights also fighting for the planet?
In the next part of The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow the storms, eruptions and campaigners that changed the course of history.
Why Europeans didn't just buil...
How did a woman lying on a sofa with a Pekingese on her lap write 723 books?
Why did the queen of pink chiffon put shoe polish on her eyelashes?
And, if she sold around 750 million copies, why can't you find her books in a shop today?
Matthew Sweet, author of the first biography to take Barbara Cartland seriously, tells Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch how a Doctor Who audio play about alien bookworms led him to her private...
Why were the first cowboys in the Americas from West Africa?
What does it mean in Akan culture when a man "eats from another woman's pot"?
And, could a mosquito be the reason Ghana never became a settler colony like South Africa or Kenya?
In the next part of The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch put Africa at the centre of the story, and find it at the centre of ours too.
West African villages with no w...
How do six men in three vans outside a Cotswolds air base end with America flying its bombers home?
What can 300,000 tonnes of Russian diesel actually do for American drivers?
And, are a quiet corner of England, an airport in Riyadh and the war in Ukraine all part of the same story?
In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch try to work out how the week's biggest stories fit together.
A farmer who spo...
If almost every early migration out of Africa failed, how did any of us get here?
Why does an Akan word that once meant "person from beyond the cornfields" now mean a white person?
And, when British politicians talk about net migration, who are they leaving out?
Peter Frankopan takes Afua Hirsch through 50,000 years of people on the move, using the new illustrated edition of The Earth Transformed.
A green Sahara full of...
What happens when an author gets rejected eight times, writes a ninth novel in hand-written letters, and ends up at number one on the New York Times bestseller list? Why are we so drawn to storytellers, tradwives, and 73-year-old law clerks who reject email in favor of pen and paper? And, what does a 73-year-old fictional letter-writer have in common with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the political power of nostalgia?
Afua...
Why does the ancient Greek word for bravery come from the word for man, and what did bronze spears have to do with it?
How does one of the coldest decades in 2,000 years end with around 100,000 women on trial for meddling with the weather?
And, what links a woman blamed for a hailstorm in the 1590s to ten young protesters superglued to an oil company's headquarters in London?
Afua Hirsch reads Peter Frankopan's The Earth Transform...
Why did the cod in your fish fingers go to China and back before it reached your freezer?
What does a medieval king blocking English wool from Flanders have to do with Xi Jinping's grip on rare earths?
And, if China can now build cars far more cheaply than Europe or America, could the West lose its car industry altogether?
Ed Conway, Sky News economics and data editor and Times columnist, takes Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch down...
What were the taxi drivers of 1990s Accra playing on repeat?
How does a woman who swore she was "not a bit political" write a hit about being used up and spat out by the system?
And, what does it take for the most unmistakably white icon in American country music to become the unproblematic queen of a Nigerian girl growing up in Peckham?
Afua Hirsch hands the Dolly Parton question to her friend Kelechi Okafor — author, podca...
Why are a million people about to queue at the British Museum for a strip of embroidered linen?
What if the most famous picture of 1066 isn't a tapestry, was probably stitched in England, and treats the losing king as a hero?
And, if the arrow in Harold's eye was stitched back in by 19th-century restorers, how sure are we of the one thing everyone knows about 1066?
With the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain for the first time in nearly a...
Who says no to Elvis Presley — and is proved right eighteen years later?
How does a girl from a one-room cabin with no electricity work out the economics of music publishing before most of Nashville has?
And, in an age that agrees on almost nothing, how did Dolly Parton end up claimed by drag queens, evangelicals and everyone in between?
Peter Frankopan opens on the phone call that cost Dolly Parton an Elvis record, and Afua...
Why is a war fought 44 years ago back on the front pages?
What happens when a combative president in Buenos Aires, a friend in the White House and an oil field due online in 2028 all point at the same islands?
And, when 99.8% of the people who live there have already voted, whose islands are they to argue over?
Fresh from Sir Lawrence Freedman's two-volume official history of the Falklands campaign, Peter Frankopan takes on the qu...
Content warning: this episode describes torture, civilian deaths and the 2021 Kabul airport attack.
Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is shattered, and there was never another 9/11 — so who won?
What does a war cost once you count the hospitals that closed and the food that never arrived?
And what does it mean that the United States signed an agreement with the people it went to war to destroy?
Twenty-five years on, Afu...
What happens to a trad wife influencer when she wakes up in 1855 and has to
actually do it?
Why were film producers bidding on this novel four years before it was
finished?
And when a story about white homesteaders in pre-Civil War America contains no
Black people at all, what is it quietly telling you?
Peter asks Afua what she read over the summer and gets a debut novel, a
four-year-old email she'd forgotten about, and a crit...
Content warning: this episode describes the aftermath of 11 September 2001, including torture and civilian deaths.
How does a country go from the sympathy of the entire world to invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attack?
What does a blank cheque from the UN Security Council actually buy?
And if torture only counts as torture when the pain is equivalent to organ failure, what exactly is everything below that ...
Who taught you that the Mongols only destroyed things?
What if the empire that sacked Baghdad also invented blue and white porcelain, elected its leaders, and let the Khan's first wife decide on war?
And why do the Mongols still have a worse reputation than any other empire in history — including the ones that lasted longer and killed more?
In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter is joined by Marie Favereau, one of the w...
Content warning: this episode describes the events of 11 September 2001 in detail.
What if the deadliest terror attack in history began with an American chequebook?
What if the men who carried it out had once been armed, trained and celebrated by the West as freedom fighters?
And what if the whole thing was set in motion more than twenty years earlier, on Christmas Eve?
Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan begin the story of...
How does a man go from calling Donald Trump a kook and a jackass to becoming his closest ally in the Senate?
What do you give up to keep a seat at the table, and what do you actually get for it?
And when the obituaries settle on calling you a pilot fish, has anything you did survived you?
Lindsey Graham flew home from Kyiv on a Friday and was dead by Saturday evening, aged 71 — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch on a ca...
Who decided that the thing stopping people travelling was not money, but choice?
What happens to a country when the holiday is designed so that the visitor never has to leave the compound?
And of every hundred dollars you spend at an all-inclusive, how much do you think actually stays there?
Gerard Blitz opened his first holiday village on a Majorcan beach in 1950 on the theory that what people wanted was not adventure but...
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