Explaining History

Latest Episodes:

The 43 Group and the Fight Against BritishPost-War Fascism Nov 10, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by novelist Susie Gordon to discuss her new book, *A Monster in the Ash* – a fictionalised account of the 43 Group, the Jewish veterans of the Second World War who returned to Britain to find fascism resurgent, and went to war with Oswald Mosley on the streets of post-war London.**

The 43 Group is a little-known chapter of British history. Everyone has heard of Cable Street in 1936, but far fewer know of the Jewish ex-servicemen – butchers, bakers, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, and even the young Vidal Sassoon – who gathered in the spring of 1946 to physically confront the fascist movement that had survived the war and was attempting to rebuild.

Drawing on Maurice Beckman's memoir and Daniel Sonnabend's history of the Group, Susie explains why she chose to write it as fiction: more people read novels than history books, and the story deserves a wider audience. We discuss the men and women who made up the Group – the majority Jewish veterans, but also non-Jewish allies – and their tactics: interrupting fascist meetings to force the police to close them down, sending spies into the enemy ranks, and engaging in bare-knuckle street fighting against former boxers and hardened anti-Semites.

We explore why this story has been forgotten. It complicates the simple narrative of the Second World War as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, and it sits uncomfortably with the post-war Jewish community's desire to keep its head down, integrate, and not "blacken the name of British Jewry." The Jewish Chronicle urged the Group to desist; even the British veterans' organisation Ajax begged them to stop. They were, as Susie puts it, "out there on a limb on their own."

We also consider the wider context: the fact that the horrors of the Holocaust were not fully known in 1945; that the British government chose not to publicise the specifically Jewish nature of Nazi crimes for fear of stirring up domestic antisemitism; and that Mosley's antisemitism was not performative but sincerely held. And we reflect on the contemporary resonance: fascism never goes away. As Susie says, "There's always that monster lurking. There's always that spore within society that waits for its moment to rise up."

**Topics covered:**

- The origins of the 43 Group in the spring of 1946

- Jewish veterans returning to post-war Britain

- The tactics of the Group: meeting disruptions, espionage, street fighting

- Oswald Mosley and the reconstruction of British fascism

- Why the story has been forgotten and silenced

- The Jewish community's ambivalence towards the Group

- The incomplete knowledge of the Holocaust in post-war Britain

- The anti-fascist tradition in Britain

- The contemporary relevance of the 43 Group's story

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*Susie Gordon's *A Monster in the Ash* is published by Claret Press and is available now in print and audiobook. Please consider buying from an independent bookshop or directly from the publisher.*

*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*

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Crossing the Gap – Health Inequality and the Divided City Nov 04, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by Dr David Ansell, Head of Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, to discuss his books *The Death Gap* and *Crossing the Gap* – and the scandal of life expectancies that differ by two decades across a single street.**

David has been a doctor in Chicago for fifty years. He spent seventeen years at Cook County Hospital, the city's public hospital, and another decade at a hospital in the neighbourhood where Martin Luther King came in 1966 to make the case that voting rights and lunch counters would not be the principal issues of the day – that the real friction would be over who gets what kind of jobs, where you get to live, and who gets access to wealth. David could see in his patients' bodies what he could see out of the windows: the correlation between neighbourhood conditions and life expectancy.

The Death Gap was written to point out the problem. Its first chapter is called "One Street, Two Worlds" – the fact that within a mile, you could have two worlds of daily life, and two worlds of health and healthcare. *Crossing the Gap* asks what happens if you try to solve it.

We explore the deep history of these ideas. Frederick Engels in 1848 described the health of the working class as "social murder." Virchow investigated a typhus outbreak in Silesia and concluded it was caused by a lack of democracy. Yet miasma theory dominated thinking into the twentieth century, and eugenics – biological determinism – took hold, partly because it was needed to justify colonialism and slavery. Sir Michael Marmot has been among the great advocates of social and structural causation, but that understanding has been systematically submerged.

The numbers are stark. US life expectancy began to diverge from Europe's in the 1980s, and by 2000 America had fallen off the curve entirely. The US ranks 38th in the world for overall life expectancy, but 60th for premature mortality – dying before 65. There are 948 cities and towns in the United States with at least a twelve-year life expectancy gap within their boundaries. The entire United States, David notes, is now equivalent in life expectancy terms to Blackpool.

We discuss the racialised history of American social policy – the fact that the Nuremberg laws were developed from studying US racial laws, that Social Security excluded Black people, farm workers and Mexicans, and that Franklin Roosevelt's proposed Second Bill of Rights, which would have established social and economic rights, was never passed. We also examine Angus Deaton and Anne Case's concept of "diseases of despair," and the way economic hollowing-out gets under the skin.

Finally, David describes the experiment he left his job as chief medical officer to pursue: what happens if you invest in a neighbourhood that has had capital extracted from it for generations? The answer, it turns out, begins with a basketball court.

Topics covered:

- Life expectancy gaps within single streets and cities

- Engels, Virchow, and the history of social causation

- Miasma theory, eugenics, and biological determinism

- The racialised foundations of American social policy

- FDR's Second Bill of Rights and the absence of economic rights

- Diseases of despair and the hollowing out of economic opportunity

- Medical debt and the morality of debt

- The neighbourhood experiment and the Wellness Village

- Preferential option for the poor, community voice, and accompaniment

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Dr David Ansell's Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City is published by University of Chicago Press and is available now in print and on Audible. Please consider buying from an independent bookshop or directly from the publisher.

*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*

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Second Hand Bookshops - a secret history Oct 30, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by Shaun Bythell, proprietor of one of Scotland's largest secondhand bookshops and author of the bestselling bookshop diaries, to discuss his new volume, The Return of the Bookshop Diarist – and the strange, stubborn resilience of the secondhand book trade.

Shaun's bookshop in Wigtown holds a catalogue of some 100,000 titles. He bought it 25 years ago, at the age of 30, on the strength of a bank loan and the previous owner's reassuring words: "Don't worry, banks have money." That 25-year loan has only just been paid off.

The conversation begins with the origins of the diaries – how everyone who worked in the shop said somebody should write a book about it, because things that happen in secondhand bookshops simply don't happen in other shops. Shaun started keeping a diary because his memory is dreadful, and the rest is history.

We explore the landscape for secondhand bookselling in the UK. Unlike new bookshops, secondhand shops have largely weathered the storms of the internet age – partly because their customer base is older and slower to migrate online, and partly because there are simply books in secondhand shops that you will never find on the internet, because nobody has bothered to list them.

Shaun provides a fascinating history of the net book agreement – the system that stabilised the book trade for nearly a century by preventing booksellers from undercutting one another. It was first torn up in the 18th century by a bookseller named James Lackington, who bought remainders at knockdown prices and sold them cheaply, proudly declaring that "even chimney sweeps buy books in my shop." It was formalised again in the 1890s, then circumvented by Waterstones and Borders – who deliberately damaged books so they could be sold at a discount – before being challenged in the courts and deemed an unlawful cartel.

We also discuss the distorting effect of charity bookshops on local high street economies, the siloing of book purchasing culture through supermarkets and celebrity bestsellers, and the role of the secondhand bookseller not as an arbiter of taste but as a guide – someone with a mass of information who can point you towards Dorothea Sayers, Agatha Christie, or Margery Allingham without ever judging what you choose to read.

Above all, this is a conversation about serendipity – the joy of walking into a secondhand bookshop and coming out with a book you never knew existed, on a subject you never knew existed. It is something the internet cannot reproduce.

Topics covered:

- The origins of the bookshop diaries

- Buying a bookshop at 30

- The internet's impact on new vs. secondhand bookselling

- The history of the net book agreement

- James Lackington and the democratisation of literature

- Waterstones, Borders, and the deliberate damaging of books

- Charity shops and unfair competitive advantage

- Supermarkets, celebrity authors, and the siloing of reading culture

- The secondhand bookseller as guide, not arbiter of taste

- Serendipity and the joy of browsing

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Shaun Bythell's *The Return of the Bookshop Diarist is available from all good bookshops. You can also order a signed copy directly from the bookshop. Please consider buying from an independent retailer or directly from the publisher.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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The unmaking of the British working class Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of The Explaining History Podcast, historian Ewan Gibbs joins us again to talk about his new book An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. We discuss the nature of class identity and allegiance in the 20th Century, the almost hegemonic denial of class as a poltiical and historic force in Blair's late 1990s Britain and the effect of mass affluence, home ownership, changing work and aspirations on class identity. We also explore the return of class to the debate, particularly where it has been weaponised by the far right.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Stateless Nations – Wales, Catalonia, and the Mezzogiorno Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by Sam Parry of Cardiff Metropolitan University to discuss the concept of stateless nations – nations that have not achieved nation-state status for complex historical reasons.

We focus on three examples: Wales, Catalonia, and the Mezzogiorno – the southern half of Italy. Due to technical difficulties, some material was lost, but the conversation remains rich in insight into how national identities form, change, and sometimes fade.

Sam argues that Britishness is a nationalism of institutions – drawing on Raymond Williams's idea that Britishness is the NHS, the coal board, the steel board, Royal Mail, Marks and Spencer. Many of those institutions are now gone or going. With the loss of empire and the erosion of social institutions, what is left of Britishness? This is a question the state has not grappled with.

We explore how Welsh nationalism grew after the 1950s – not as part of the decolonial movement, but as a response to economic change and the realisation that Britain's hegemonic position in the world had shifted. The Thatcherite revolution eroded key markers of national identity while simultaneously promoting a reactionary xenophobic nationalism. The two – libertarian capitalism and cultural nationalism – will devour each other.

The conversation then turns to Catalonia, which Sam uses as a foil to Wales and the Mezzogiorno. Catalonia is a wealthy region that has not made the step to nation-state status. We trace its history from the marriage of Aragon and Castile in 1469, through the Bourbon reforms that gave Catalonia access to American markets (at the cost of its own laws), to the disaster of 1898 and the rise of Primo de Rivera. The Catalan bourgeoisie consistently chose class over nation – supporting Spanish dictatorship to quell its own radical working class. This in turn created a more radical Catalan nationalism, which was suppressed by Francoism.

Now, Catalonia sees the growth of a far-right Catalan nationalism – neo-fascist in character – alongside the traditional left-wing and democratic expressions of Catalan identity. The idea that "to be Catalan is to be left-wing and democratic" has deep roots, going back to the French Revolution's fusion of nation and citizenship.

**Topics covered:**

- Stateless nations and the question of nation-state status

- Britishness as a nationalism of institutions

- Raymond Williams and the institutional markers of identity

- The erosion of Britishness under Thatcherism

- Welsh nationalism and economic change

- Catalonia's historical path and missed opportunities

- The Catalan bourgeoisie choosing class over nation

- The radicalisation of Catalan nationalism

- The far-right turn in contemporary Catalan nationalism

- National identity as political identity

*Sam Parry's Nations without States is published by University of Wales Press and is available in the US through the University of Chicago, it's also available to order from all good bookshops. Please consider buying from an independent retailer or directly from the publisher.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Gentlemen Amateurs – Staffing the Secret Service in the First World War Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we return to Keith Jeffery's official history of MI6 to examine a question that gets to the heart of how the secret state was built: who became a spy, and why?

When the First World War broke out, Mansfield Cumming – the first "C" of the Secret Intelligence Service – faced a peculiar problem. At a moment when all the young men wanted to do their bit at the battlefront, the notion of working in a secret service was as likely to put potential recruits off as encourage them to join. Many of those who most wanted to be involved were, from Cumming's perspective, the least attractive prospects.

This episode explores the social world of early British intelligence. Cumming's wartime recruits were typically not career soldiers or sailors. They were independently wealthy men who did not need to be paid. Frank Stagg, who joined Cumming's staff, found that three of his five main colleagues were Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve officers – one was an engineer from the Columbia Emerald mines, another had been an actor in America before the war, and a third worked for the *Tatler* magazine.

This is the myth of the English gentleman amateur – the chap who does his bit, whose private means free him from the need for a salary, and who puts his intellect to wartime service. The reality was more complex: everyone was on a steep learning curve, and people dropped in and out of the service, alternating between intelligence work and active military duty.

We also trace the organizational growth of Cumming's bureau – from a handful of staff to over thirty by the summer of 1915 – and the bureaucratic turf wars with the War Office that threatened its very existence. The army would have been quite happy to fold MI6 into its own military intelligence. Cumming had to fight continuously to retain his service's independence.

We examine the role of women in the service – as typists, clerks, and even drivers sent abroad – at a time when the Foreign Office obliged women to resign on marrying. And we meet some of the remarkable characters Cumming recruited: Freddie Browning, the celebrated cricketer and Savoy Hotel director; Thomas Merton, the physicist rejected for active service who became the service's first scientist; and Major Claude Dansey, whose career spanned colonial policing in Borneo, Somaliland, and a country club in upstate New York.

**Topics covered:**

- The recruitment problems facing Mansfield Cumming

- The "gentleman amateur" ideal in British intelligence

- Social class and the early Secret Service

- Organizational growth and geographical divisions

- Bureaucratic turf wars with the War Office

- The role of women in the service

- Key figures: Freddie Browning, Thomas Merton, Claude Dansey

- The slow professionalization of intelligence

---

*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Japanese War Crimes in China 1937-45 Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

China’s war against Japan was one of the largest, bloodiest and most consequential theatres of the Second World War — yet it is still too often treated as peripheral to the wider conflict.

In this episode of the Explaining History podcast, we examine China’s experience of war through Max Hastings’ All Hell Let Loose, exploring the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, the immense strain placed on Japanese military resources, and the devastating human consequences of occupation.

We look at the strategic importance of China to both Japan and the United States, the brutal campaigns fought across the country, and the extraordinary scale of civilian suffering. The episode also explores Japanese biological warfare and Unit 731, the racial ideology underpinning imperial expansion, the exploitation of so-called “comfort women,” and the enduring trauma left by wartime sexual violence.

Along the way, we consider a larger question: how should we understand China’s role in the defeat of Imperial Japan, and how did the experience of occupation shape the political and historical memory of East Asia after 1945?

This episode contains discussion of war crimes, sexual violence and other distressing material.

Part one of a continuing exploration of China’s Second World War.

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America's withdrawal from Iraq Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we examine the American withdrawal from Iraq – the product of Trump's war with Iran, and a strategic defeat of historic proportions.

Iraq has been enormously important to the United States since the end of the Cold War. It has served multiple strategic, foreign policy and domestic purposes. Its loss – the effective expulsion of American power from the country – is an epic disaster unfolding in slow motion. It doesn't look like the British retreat from Afghanistan in the 1840s, but it is a catastrophe nonetheless.

The war against Iran has achieved the opposite of everything it intended. It has cost America its bases in the Persian Gulf. It has empowered the Houthi rebels in Yemen and threatened control of the Red Sea. It has surrendered the Straits of Hormuz. It has alienated the Gulf states and the Saudis. And now it has forced a strategic withdrawal from Iraq.

We trace the long history of American involvement in Iraq – from the use of Saddam Hussein as a bulwark against revolutionary Iran and the Soviet Union, through the first Gulf War and the brutal sanctions regime that followed, to the catastrophic invasion of 2003. We examine the decision not to overthrow Saddam in 1991, the disbandment of the Iraqi army, the failure to understand Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, and the looting of the National Museum – met with Rumsfeld's infamous remark that "freedom is messy."

Drawing on John Gray's critique of liberal interventionism, we consider the argument that there are things worse than tyranny – and that what replaced Saddam's Leviathan was anarchy, a condition that elements of the American right seemed actively to welcome.

The withdrawal from Iraq is not the orderly dismantling of empire. It is a rout – and what replaces American influence will almost certainly be Iranian. Trump has defeated his own country.

Topics covered:

The American withdrawal from Iraq
The war against Iran and its strategic consequences
Iraq as a Cold War client state
The first Gulf War and the sanctions regime
The 2003 invasion and its catastrophic aftermath
The disbandment of the Iraqi army
The looting of the National Museum
John Gray on tyranny and anarchy
The rise of Iranian influence in Iraq

If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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A Way of Love – Gay Life in Post-War Britain with Peter Parker Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by historian Peter Parker to discuss the remarkable rediscovery of James Courage's A Way of Love – widely regarded as the first gay novel by a New Zealander – and what it tells us about gay life in post-war Britain.

First published in 1959 and banned in New Zealand in 1961, A Way of Love has returned to print after nearly seven decades. Set in 1950s London, it follows two men attempting to build a life together at a time when sex between men remained a criminal offence. Its timing is significant: it appeared two years after the Wolfenden Report recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be criminalised, but eight years before the partial decriminalisation introduced by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.

Peter Parker, author of Some Men in London volumes one and two – acclaimed anthologies of gay life in the capital – joins us to explore this fascinating transitional moment. Drawing on James Courage's extraordinary diary as well as the novel, we examine what it meant to be a gay man in a society where prosecution, censorship and social stigma were constant threats.

We discuss the geography of gay life – the private members' clubs and pubs where men could relax and be amongst their own people – and the language they used, including the secret argot of Polari. We also explore the long struggle for legal reform, the resistance of the Metropolitan Police, and the cultural shifts that helped change attitudes – from the pioneering work of the Homosexual Law Reform Society to the impact of films like Victim (1961) and John Osborne's A Patriot for Me.

Peter also reflects on the "happy ever after" problem in gay history: the assumption that rights appeared by magic overnight, rather than being won through decades of struggle, persecution and sacrifice.

Topics covered:

James Courage, A Way of Love, and its suppression and rediscovery
The criminalisation of homosexuality and the Wolfenden Report
The policing of gay life and the "pretty police"
Gay clubs, pubs, and cultures of solidarity
Polari and coded language
The Homosexual Law Reform Society and the fight for legal change
Victim, A Patriot for Me, and stage censorship
The pushback of AIDS and Clause 28
Memory, martyrdom, and the unfinished struggle for equality

Peter Parker's Some Men in London volumes one and two are available from all good bookshops. James Courage's A Way of Love is republished by Lyric Editions. Please consider buying from an independent retailer or directly from the publisher.

If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.

This response is AI-generated and for reference purposes only.

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Bombing Damascus – France, the Mandate System, and the Atrocities of 1925 Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we return to Susan Pedersen's *The Guardians* – the definitive history of the mandate system – to examine one of its darkest chapters: the French bombing of Damascus in October 1925.

The French had acquired Syria under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, though the British never really accepted their claim to it. Lawrence of Arabia had raced to Damascus in 1918 to deliver it to the Arabs – and by extension to the British – in defiance of the agreement. But the French got their mandate, and they ran it with a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and violence.

The revolt that erupted in 1925 was not, as the French insisted, the work of brigands and agitators. It was the product of accumulated grievances: the division of Syria into four statelets, the creation of Greater Lebanon, the subordination of Syrian officials to French approval, the demotion of Ottoman-trained officers, and an economic policy that pegged the Syrian pound to the unstable franc. The Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash – a Syrian nationalist who had served in the Ottoman army and joined the Arab Revolt – was not a local warlord, as the French imagined, but a man with a vision of complete independence and free elections.

The French response was brutal. Villages were burned. Circassian, Kurdish and Armenian irregulars were unleashed to loot and terrorise. Corpses were paraded through the streets of Damascus and strung up in Marjeh Square. And then, on 18 October 1925, French tanks rolled through the narrow streets and the bombardment began – two days of shelling and aerial bombing of an undefended city.

The international outcry was immediate. The *Times* of London, hardly a radical publication, ran reports that turned colonial assumptions on their heads. Readers who knew nothing of Syrian villages could place them in the category of the primitive – but every biblically literate child had heard of Damascus. And now its ancient streets were being blasted by a European power that claimed to be a civilising force.

This episode explores the bombing of Damascus as a moment of crisis for the mandate system – a moment when the gap between the rhetoric of tutelage and the reality of colonial violence became impossible to ignore.

**Topics covered:**

- The French acquisition of Syria under Sykes-Picot

- The revolt of Sultan al-Atrash and the Druze

- General Sarrail and the blindness of French colonial officials

- The use of irregular forces and aerial bombardment

- The bombing of Damascus, October 1925

- The international outcry and the *Times* coverage

- The crisis of legitimacy for the mandate system

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*If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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