Travels Through Time

Live from Dr Johnson's House off Fleet Street in London, in this episode the biographer and historian Paul O'Keeffe takes us on an immersive dive into the year 1806. This was a time when both the British and the French attempted to come to terms with the fall out of the Battle of Trafalgar.

News of Trafalgar was received in Britain with great ambivalence. The sheer scale of the victory was thrilling, but it was marred by the death ...

In this episode we talk to the journalist and author Jim Windolf about a 'testy, interesting and weird' month in the mid-1960s when Bob Dylan and The Beatles came into close and sometimes volatile contact. May 1966 would be recalled by Neil Aspinall, The Beatles' road manager, as 'Dylan Month'.

This month came at a loaded moment for each of the acts. Both of them were, by this point in the Sixties, cultural sensations. But they wer...

Few parties in history can match the Georgian 'Masquerade'. And among Georgian masquerades the one given by the King of Denmark in London in 1768 was particularly enchanting. It brought those of the greatest means and highest rank together in London theatre that was filled with artful costumes and glittering jewels.

This week's guest, Meghan Kobza, tells us all about the Georgian masquerade – who started it, where did it come from,...

This week the Cambridge professor Rory Naismith takes us back to the eighth century to glimpse what we can of Offa King of the Mercians. Offa was a mighty figure in this early moment in the history of Britain and he is remembered chiefly for the extraordinary earthwork – Offa's Dyke.

But what more can be said about Offa's life? In this episode Naismith explains that he was a ruler of considerable gifts whose reputation stretched fa...

This week's episode takes us to Paris in La Belle Époque. There, among all the splendour and sophistication, we watch the great Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painting one of his great portraits.

But there is more to this history than first meets the eye. As our guest Catherine Ostler explains, the year 1881 was a critical one in Jewish history. By that point in time Jewish communities were thriving in Paris, where they soug...

As Britain's 'special relationship' with the USA falters, we look back at a very relevant epislode from our archive. In this the author and journalist Philip Stephens takes us back to a crucial month in post-war British politics. December 1962, he explains, set Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world for the next half century.

Featuring in this episode is the elderly British prime minister, Harold Macmillan; the charismat...

The Netherlands is a small nation with a big history. But in the 1940s it suffered a series of disastrous events. First came the invasion of the Nazis in 1940. Then the very next year the Japanese attacked their old empire in the east. The horrors of World War Two were then followed by the Indonesian National Revolution and, by 1950, the Dutch were a 'pocket superpower' no longer.

In this episode the journalist and hiker Nicholas W...

The late eighteenth century history was a time in Europe when a brilliant old world collapsed and raucous new one rose to replace it. In this episode the biographer Veronica Buckley explains how the Hapsburgs, one of the great European families, responded to this revolutionary change.

It was a stern challenge but inspired by one of the great matriarchs in European history, Empress Maria Theresia, her son Emperor Joseph II, his suc...

Most people know Daniel Defoe as one of the great writers in the history of English literature. But the author of Robinson Crusoe was much more than that. A rabble rousing pamphleteer and erratic entrepreneur, in the early years of the eighteenth century Defoe also became an undercover political operative.

Defoe's career as a spy intersected with a huge moment in British history when the Act of Union between England and Scotland wa...

Today’s guest, Sean Cunningham, takes us back to a particularly perilous year in the eventful reign of King Henry VII. He explains that 1497 was a year of brinkmanship, battles, plots and disasters that very nearly resulted in the fall of the House of Tudor.

Sean Cunningham is Head of Collections, Medieval, Early Modern and Legal, at the National Archives in Kew. He is one of the leading authorities on the life and times of Henry V...

Given the scandal surrounding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, we thought we'd examine an eerily familiar moment in British history. In January 1809 the Duke of York became the subject of a huge and embarrassing news story. It was a story of sex, power, money and corruption right at the heart of British politics. One of the stars of the affair was a woman of no rank, title or fortune. Her name was Mary Anne Clarke.

Scene One:...

Our guest today is the New York Times bestselling historian Charles King, the author of Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah.

The Messiah is one of the best known pieces of all classical music and, as King suggests at the beginning of this conversation, it 'may be the world's greatest monument to the possibility of hope'.

To tell us more about how such an extraordinary piece was written, ...

Our guest today is Tharik Hussain, a travel writer turned historian who has recently produced  an enchanting study of Europe's Islamic history. To investigate this at close quarters, in this episode he takes us back to Córdoba in the year 929 – the greatest city in Europe at the time, a place of wealth and splendour with a population of around 100,000.

By 929 Córdoba was emerging as a rival power base to Baghdad. At a Friday prayer...

Our guest today is Sarah Wise, an author known for her incisive social studies of nineteenth century history. In this episode Wise takes us back to a more recent year, 1947, so she can investigate the moment when the British public began to turn against the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

The Mental Deficiency Act was a terrifying piece of legislation that resulted in the imprisonment of tens of thousands of vulnerable people. As Wi...

In this episode from our archive we spoke to the archeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, a figure familiar to millions in the UK. While Oliver's television work has taken him around the world, he retains a special connection to his Scottish homeland. One historical site, in particular, continues to enchant him: Skara Brae.

Skara Brae on the wind scoured Orkney Islands is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in all of western E...

There's no more familiar piece of classical music than Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. But for all the recordings and broadcasts and interpretations of it that there has been over the past three centuries, there is still some mystery about the music. Why did Vivaldi write it? What were his inspirations? Where and when did The Four Seasons burst into life.

The broadcaster and author Dr Hannah French has written a wonderful, inci...

After some time away, we've decided that now's the moment for some new forays into the past. Keep an eye on this feed – new episodes on the way!

In the meantime we thought we'd post one of our favourite ever interviews here. It's with the author Nikolai Tolstoy on his stepfather, the novelist Patrick O'Brian.

O'Brian was a writer of great gifts. His depiction of the late Georgian world is regarded as being very nearly as vivid as J...

After a short break at TTT, enter the world’s largest flying machine.

‘R101’ was one of the most ambitious creations of the airship era. Plans for it began about a century ago in the 1920s. The vision of engineers and politicians was that the 1930s were to mark the start of a new epoch in air travel. R101 was to lead the way. Huge airships were going to glide through the imperial skies, binding together the distant outposts of the...

Join Peter Moore and Sarah Bakewell for a little walking tour of Fleet Street in London. Instead of three scenes, in this episode they stop off at three locations, as Peter tells Sarah about three of the characters who appear in his new book: the printer William Strahan, the writer Samuel Johnson and the politician John Wilkes.

Peter Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling historian. His new book is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Hap...