The Story Isn’t Over: History from the Margins

Babbulicious built a creative life across comedy, design, music and puppetry, without ever following a conventional blueprint. In this complete conversation, Babbulicious reveals how the celebrated JusReign sketches were created, why he remained independent, how his family supported an unconventional career and why one final comedy song unexpectedly opened the door to music.

The man behind the most quoted strategy book in history may never have existed.Professor Peter Lorge — one of the world's leading historians of Chinese military history — joins Amar Singh to dismantle an enduring myth in Western thought: the legend of Sun Tzu and The Art of War.What we call The Art of War isn't what it was called in ancient China. The figure of "Master Sun" is almost certainly a composite, assembled over centuries rather than the work of a singular battlefield genius. And the iconic title? An entirely Western construction.

Can Jap Ji Sahib be translated into poetic, rhyming English without losing its meaning?Satpal Singh, founder of Nanak Naam, joins Amar Singh to explain the eight-year, four-version process behind his English interpretation of Guru Nanak's Jap Ji Sahib.Every translation makes choices. In this complete conversation, Satpal explains why he felt literal translations and archaic English left something missing, and why preserving the poetry, emotion and accessibility of Gurbani made his task considerably harder.

This episode uncovers a story far richer than food culture. We go back to the 1960s, when Black and Asian migrants in Britain were refused service at pubs displaying signs that read “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.”In the West Midlands, Punjabi foundry workers created their own spaces, places that offered safety, solidarity, and, later, a new cultural identity. These early “desi pubs” weren’t restaurants; they were hubs of resistance. Activists organised inside them, and Bhangra musicians played in makeshift back rooms. In 1965, Malcolm X even walked into Smethwick to see Britain’s colour bar for himself, experiencing refusal of service in a local pub that now stands at the centre of this history.Over time, these spaces evolved. Once Punjabis felt safe inside them, food emerged as a defining feature, a fusion of working-class Britain and diasporic Punjab. What began as a refuge became a cultural invention: the mixed grill. This dish, found almost nowhere else in the world, remains tied to the industrial heart of Birmingham, the rhythms of the Bhangra scene, and a community rebuilding itself far from home.Today, as the UK faces rising tensions once again, the story of the desi pub is more relevant than ever. It reminds us how communities resist exclusion and how culture is born in the spaces where people fight simply to belong.

In this episode, I speak with historian and journalist Anne Sebba about her book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz and the unsettling role music played inside the Nazi camp system.Music is usually associated with comfort or beauty. However, at Auschwitz, it was used as a tool of control, discipline, and deception. Anne explains why the orchestra was not about uplift or art, but rather a functional part of how the camp operated day-to-day.