Send us a text In the summer of 1215, a bad-tempered king met his match in a field by the Thames. Surrounded by rebellious barons, King John of England was forced to seal a document he barely understood, one that would outlive him by centuries. The Magna Carta wasn’t meant to change the world. It was supposed to be a quick fix, a peace treaty. But instead, it planted a radical idea: that no one, not even the king, is above the law. In this episode, we go back to Runnymede, to the mud, the pol...
Send us a text Two Sundays, fifty years apart, changed Ireland forever. In Dublin, 1920, Michael Collins’s men struck at dawn, assassinating British agents. By afternoon, Croke Park ran red with blood as Crown forces opened fire on a football crowd, killing men, women, and children. Half a century later, in Derry, 1972, British paratroopers shot down unarmed civil rights marchers, reigniting the Troubles and inspiring U2’s haunting anthem Sunday Bloody Sunday. This episode unravels both trage...
Send us a text A widowed queen, a loyal servant, and a friendship that defied every convention of the Victorian age. In this episode, we uncover the unlikely bond between Queen Victoria and John Brown, a relationship whispered about in drawing rooms, condemned in newspapers, and immortalised in legend. Was Brown simply her devoted attendant, or something far more intimate? From the windswept Highlands to the corridors of Windsor, we follow the trail of letters, estate inventories, and r...
Send us a text For nearly 2,000 years, this colossal arena has stood as Rome’s most breathtaking monument to spectacle, power, and blood. In its day, the Colosseum wasn’t just a stadium—it was a machine built for awe. Here emperors staged games that made the entire empire gasp: gladiators battling to the death, wild beasts from Africa unleashed before roaring crowds, and the Roman people fed a steady diet of violence, theatre, and politics disguised as entertainment. But the Colosseum is more...
Send us a text Picture this. You’re standing on a black volcanic rock, the wind clawing at your coat, the sound of bagpipes drifting faintly from somewhere down on the Royal Mile. Ahead of you, looming over the city like a brooding giant, is Edinburgh Castle. Its stone walls, scarred by centuries of fire, rebellion, and siege, rise from the crag as if carved by some ancient hand. This isn’t just a fortress. It’s the beating heart of Scotland’s story. Here kings were crowned, traitors were exe...
Send us a text Bells ringing across the Paris skyline, echoing over the Seine, rolling like thunder through eight centuries of history. At the very heart of the city, at the heart of France itself, stands a masterpiece: Notre Dame. It has seen kings crowned, revolutions rage, and fire nearly bring it to its knees. This isn’t just a cathedral. It is a witness to history, a stage for triumph and tragedy, faith and fury, art and ambition. Today, we step through those ancient doors. We climb into...
Send us a text In the final chapter of our Congo series, King Leopold’s dark empire begins to unravel. From the Antwerp docks, a young shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel uncovers a deadly secret, a trade built not on goods, but on guns, blood, and severed hands. His relentless campaign, joined by the voice of Roger Casement and the pen of Mark Twain, turns the Congo into the first great human rights scandal of the twentieth century. But Leopold fights back, with lobbyists, bribery, and sh...
Send us a text Picking up from the blood-soaked ivory trails of Part One, Part Two plunges deeper into King Leopold’s private empire as the hunger for profit shifts from elephant tusks to an even deadlier harvest, rubber. The bicycle boom and the rise of the motor car in Europe turn the Congo’s wild vines into gold, but every drop of latex is wrung from the land through terror. Villages are burned, women taken hostage, and men worked to death. Severed hands, collected in baskets as proof of p...
Send us a text It is one of the darkest chapters in human history, and yet—astonishingly—one of the least known. At the turn of the 20th century, deep in the uncharted heart of Africa, a vast swathe of land nearly eighty times the size of Belgium was transformed into a private slaughterhouse. Not by an empire. Not by a government. But by a single man, King Leopold II of Belgium. This is not just a tale of colonial greed. It’s a story of terror disguised as civilisation. Of rubber quotas enfor...
Send us a text There’s a reason James Bond makes an entrance like no one else. The tuxedo, the swagger, the one-liners that land like bullets, and of course, the watch. Always the watch. Because in the world of 007, it’s never just about telling the time. Bond’s watches have done more than tick. They’ve detonated charges, fired lasers, unzipped wetsuits, and, every now and then, saved the world. And yet, somehow, they’ve always managed to look devastatingly stylish while doing it. From the Ro...
Send us a text Late Tudor and early Stuart England was a world of whispers and daggers, where faith could cost you your head and loyalty was a currency more precious than gold. It was a time of espionage, betrayal, and uneasy succession, a kingdom teetering between glorious legacy and looming uncertainty. And into that dangerous world stepped a man who looked more like a clerk than a kingmaker. Small, stooped, and sickly, Robert Cecil was easy to underestimate. That was his greatest weapon. H...
Send us a text Today, we’re stepping into the shimmering, storm-tossed world of Diana, Princess of Wales, queen of hearts, icon of our age. But forget what you think you know. Because Diana’s story, as told in Edward White’s Dianaworld, isn’t a fairy tale, and it’s certainly not the tabloid spectacle we’ve grown used to. It’s something far more intriguing, a story of light and shadow, public adoration and private sorrow, rebellion and vulnerability, all swirling together behind the palace gat...
Send us a text Tonight, we enter the shadows of Southeast Asia, where the scent of frangipani drifts through streets haunted by war and secrets. Vietnam is about to become the battleground not just for armies, but for ideals and egos, each choice pulling the world deeper into chaos. This isn’t just a story of generals and politicians, it’s the slow unraveling of hope. In the jungles and cities, ambition curdles into paranoia, and victory slips further from reach with every bomb dropped, every...
Send us a text Welcome back to The Golden Age of Japan. Last time, we wandered the scented corridors of the imperial court with Murasaki Shikibu and glimpsed the tangled loves and rivalries that defined The Tale of Genji. Tonight, everything shifts. We trade Genji’s moonlit drama for sharp wit and razor-edged observation, stepping into the mind of a woman who didn’t just survive court life—she laughed at it. This is The Pillow Book, and our guide is Sei Shōnagon: lady-in-waiting, poet, and th...
Send us a text Tonight, step with me into the glittering, treacherous world of Heian Japan—a palace where secrets drift on scented air, poems are currency, and beauty can make or break a destiny. Within these gilded corridors, ambition hides behind every fluttering sleeve. Here we find the Shining Prince, Genji—a man so irresistible he turns the entire court upside down. Through Murasaki Shikibu’s eyes, his life becomes a whirlwind of forbidden love, jealous rivals, and heartbreaks that echo ...
Send us a text Picture this—a storm-lashed night by Lake Geneva, thunder rumbling over the water, candles guttering in the gloom. In a circle of restless young poets and radicals sits Mary Shelley, barely out of her teens, haunted by grief but burning with imagination. That night, she will conjure up Frankenstein—a creation that will reshape not just literature, but how we think about science, responsibility, and what it means to be human. But Mary Shelley’s real story goes far beyond the mon...
Send us a text Last year, our deep-dive into the wild world of the Mitford sisters ruffled a few aristocratic feathers and sparked a torrent of listener emails. The question that echoed through every message was simple, but loaded: Were they all bad? In this follow-up episode, Keith peels back the layers of myth, gossip, and public outrage to look at the whole Mitford clan, this time, including the much-overlooked brother, Tom, and their delightfully eccentric parents. We venture beyond the h...
Send us a text Walk with me through a garden. Not just any garden, mind you, this is Kew. A place where palm trees from the Pacific share soil with Himalayan orchids, and where, if you listen closely, every leaf rustles with a story of conquest, trade, survival, and exploitation. In this episode, we uncover the tangled roots of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a quiet place that was never really quiet. For nearly three centuries, it stood at the beating heart of empire. It was here that plan...
Send us a text Let’s begin in the shadows. London, 1603. The city is thick with smoke, secrets, and the scent of betrayal. Beneath the grand stone facades of Elizabethan power, a network of spies weaves through taverns, palaces, and plague-ridden streets. In this world, trust is a luxury—and survival depends on knowing what others don’t. At the heart of it all: Robert Cecil. Hunchbacked, sharp-eyed, and more dangerous than any blade in the night. Cecil isn’t just Elizabeth I’s spymaster—he’s ...
Send us a text Imagine standing on the edge of a Canadian forest, the trees black against a bruised sky, the only sound the ripple of water, and a sudden, thunderous splash. It’s a beaver. But this isn’t just the story of a quirky rodent building dams and chewing trees. This is the story of an animal that reshaped a continent, an animal so valuable, it drove men mad, sparked alliances, and unleashed a war so brutal that entire nations were wiped from the map. Between the 1600s and 1700s, the ...