Legacy

Inbox: Yesteryear | Waking Up in 1855 | Book Club Sep 10, 2026

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 criticism that has nothing to

do with the plot.

Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear drops a trad wife influencer — sourdough

starter, eight children, millions of followers — into an actual 1855 homestead

and makes her live there. Afua raced through it and gives it full marks for the

idea. Her objection sits somewhere else entirely, and it's the kind of absence

you can't unsee once someone points at it. Along the way: why publishers post

books to your house forever once you've written one, why Peter keeps being

asked to read 550 pages in ten days, and how a novel now gets optioned for film

before it has been written.

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[0:26] The one thing Afua only lets herself read in summer

[3:13] Books arrive forever once you're published, and the etiquette nobody

explains

[8:42] The novel Afua found sitting in her own inbox, four years early

[12:47] Sourdough, eight children, and a fantasy of the American past

[18:03] Peter on class and labour, and why Burke chose 1855

[20:28] Afua's real objection, and it isn't the plot

[21:13] The Legacy Book Club verdict, in three separate scores

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9/11: 25 Years On | The Forever War | 2 Sep 08, 2026

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 line?

Peter Frankopan follows the response from NATO's Article 5 to the caves of Tora Bora, while Afua Hirsch — then a trainee human rights barrister — describes what the war on terror did to British law.

Within twenty-four hours, NATO invokes Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Within three days, Congress passes a sixty-word resolution with a single vote against it; it has since been used to justify American military operations in more than twenty countries. Afghanistan is meant to be narrow and quick, and for five weeks it looks like it. Then bin Laden walks over the mountains into Pakistan, Washington's attention swings to a country with no connection to the attacks, and Colin Powell goes to the United Nations holding a small glass vial. Ten years later he is found living a mile from Pakistan's military academy — and by then the war no longer needs him. Part two of three, twenty-five years on.

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[0:00] The scorecard: two invasions, $8 trillion, 900,000 dead, and the Taliban back in Kabul

[3:56] Nous sommes tous américains — Le Monde, the Brandenburg Gate, and candles in Tehran

[5:39] Article 5, invoked once in NATO's history, to defend America from nineteen men

[12:37] Five weeks to Kabul — then a cave complex at Tora Bora, and bin Laden walks away

[18:53] "These are facts. They're not statements." Colin Powell at the United Nations

[26:32] Afua's first day as a pupil barrister, and a man accused of training the hijackers

[33:19] The torture memos: pain that only counts if it's equivalent to organ failure

[41:50] A compound in Abbottabad, a mile from Pakistan's military academy

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Inbox: Genghis Khan and the Empire We Got Wrong | Marie Favereau Sep 03, 2026

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 world's leading historians of the Mongol Empire, whose work has done more than anyone's to dismantle the story of a bloodthirsty wave that destroyed everything in front of it.

A small group of nomads from what is now Mongolia — probably fewer than a million people — reached Central Europe within sixty years. They did it partly by fighting in winter, when everyone else went home, and by bringing their families and their herds with them so they never had to depend on the villages they passed through. Then they stopped conquering and started building: cities, workshops, tax systems, religious debates at court, and a trade network running from Korea to the Mediterranean. Marie Favereau is co-curator of Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World, at the Royal Armouries in Leeds until 1 November — almost 250 objects out of Mongolia, most of which have never left the country before.

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[0:00] Peter introduces Marie Favereau, and the 248 objects that have just landed in Leeds

[5:48] Ridden, eaten, milked, worn — why everything starts with the horse

[9:47] Khans are elected, can be deposed, and the senior wife decides on trade, diplomacy and war

[13:22] "If you just build your empire on the family, you have a dead-born empire"

[16:44] Blue and white porcelain turns out to be a Mongol invention

[36:12] Why the Mongols get a worse press than any empire that came after them

Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World runs at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, until 1 November 2026. Adults £9, concessions £7, under-16s free. Co-curated by Marie Favereau and Natasha Bennett.

royalarmouries.org/leeds/whats-on/genghis-khan

Marie Favereau's book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World is published by Harvard University Press.

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9/11: 25 Years On | The World That Made 9/11 | 1 Sep 01, 2026

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 9/11 two decades before it happened, in the mountains of Afghanistan.

July 1979: Jimmy Carter signs off half a million dollars of covert aid to Afghan rebels, and a CIA programme called Operation Cyclone begins. By 1987 it is running at $630 million a year, matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. Among the thousands who answer the call to fight the Soviets is the softly spoken son of a Saudi construction billionaire. Twenty-two years later, nineteen men walk through airport security in Boston, Washington and Newark carrying box cutters that nobody had thought to ban. This is the first of three episodes marking twenty-five years since 9/11 — where al-Qaeda came from, what happened on the day, and the moment almost the entire world stood with America.

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[0:00] The story doesn't start in New York — it starts in the mountains of Afghanistan

[2:17] Christmas Eve 1979, and Soviet transport planes land at Kabul airport

[4:04] Operation Cyclone: Carter, Brzezinski, and a plan to build Moscow its own Vietnam

[7:48] Romanticised as freedom fighters — and the Saudi billionaire's son who answers the call

[12:01] Afua puts it to Peter directly: did the CIA fund bin Laden?

[16:38] The Soviets leave, the West loses interest, and bin Laden names his new organisation

[23:32] A cloudless blue Tuesday, and a primary election in New York

[29:39] Two and a half hours, nineteen men, and the deadliest terror attack in history

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Inbox: Lindsey Graham and the Price of a Seat at the Table Aug 27, 2026

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 career built almost entirely on proximity to other people's power.

He was orphaned in his early twenties and raised his younger sister. He was the first in his family to go to university, served in the Air Force, and reached the Senate in 2002 by taking Strom Thurmond's seat. For a decade he was the Republican who legislated with Democrats: the Gang of Eight immigration bill, one third of the three amigos alongside John McCain and Joe Lieberman. Then he called Trump a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot and said the party would be destroyed and would deserve it. Then McCain died. A year to the day before January 6th, the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt gave Rolling Stone the line that has followed Graham ever since: he is a pilot fish, the small fish that swims beside the shark and takes on its colouring. Peter and Afua on whether that is the whole story, and on what a seat at the table is worth.

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[0:00] A flight home from Kyiv, a cardiac arrest on Capitol Hill, and a death nobody saw coming

[6:14] A restaurant, a pool hall, two funerals, and a younger sister to raise

[9:13] The three amigos, and the decade Graham spent legislating with Democrats

[11:42] A kook, a jackass, and a party that would be destroyed and would deserve it

[12:46] "McCain died" — the two-word answer to how everything changed

[17:24] The pilot fish, the shark, and what a seat at the table actually costs

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Modern Travel | The Full Package | 5 Aug 25, 2026

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 the removal of every decision — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow that idea all the way to the gated resorts of the present.

The all-inclusive is now worth close to a hundred billion dollars a year. In the Dominican Republic it accounts for more than seventy per cent of hotel rooms and helps generate over forty per cent of GDP. And of every hundred dollars a guest spends, roughly five stays in the local economy. The rest is repatriated to foreign operators, international airlines and global supply chains, along with the food flown in so that nobody has to eat anything unfamiliar. In water-stressed places, guests can use ten times what a local resident uses in a day. In Jamaica there is now a movement against the privatisation of beaches that local people can no longer reach. Afua has just come back from an Arawak village in the Guyanese Amazon where all-inclusive means something entirely different. Peter, who has enjoyed rather more package holidays than he lets on, is not convinced the answer is to take them away from people.

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[0:00] Sun lounger wars at dawn, and the buffet as a way of life

[7:58] Gerard Blitz, a Belgian on a Majorcan beach, and the founding of Club Med

[14:59] A hundred billion dollars a year, and the country where all-inclusives are seventy per cent of the rooms

[16:39] Five dollars in every hundred — where the rest of your money actually goes

[17:54] Ten times the water a local resident uses in a day

[26:47] The beaches in Jamaica that Jamaicans can no longer reach

[31:07] Plantations sold as celebratory places, and what the industry assumes you cannot handle

[34:14] Afua in the Amazon: an all-inclusive of a completely different kind

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Inbox: Zhu Rongji and the Price of Modern China Aug 20, 2026

Why does a kettle cost less than ten pounds?

What kind of official refuses to send the army against protesters in one decade, then puts thirty million people out of work in the next?

And when the man who built modern China spent his last twenty years saying nothing at all, what was he saying?

Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch disagree, at length and on the record, about whether the architect of the modern cheap economy was brave or simply ruthless.

Zhu Rongji died in Beijing in August, aged 97. Outside China his name means very little. Inside China, and inside every container ship leaving Ningbo, it means a great deal. He trained as an electrical engineer, was expelled from the Communist Party for speaking approvingly of economic reform in Hungary and Yugoslavia, spent five years doing manual labour during the Cultural Revolution, and came back to run Shanghai. In 1989 he refused to send the army against the city's protesters and went on television to talk them down instead. Then, as premier, he dismantled the iron rice bowl and cost somewhere between thirty and forty million people their jobs. Peter thinks that took nerve. Afua thinks ruthless and callous are the better words. Neither quite talks the other round.

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[0:00] Three deaths in eight weeks, in Havana, Washington and Beijing — and why the deputy often tells you more

[4:30] Zhu Rongji, dead at 97, and why a kettle costs less than ten pounds

[6:08] Expelled from the Party, then five years of manual labour

[8:38] Shanghai, 1989: the man who would not send in the army

[11:47] Grasping the large, letting go of the small — and the end of the iron rice bowl

[17:00] Brave or callous? Peter and Afua fail to agree

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Modern Travel | The Age of the Skies | 4 Aug 18, 2026

When did flying stop being the most glamorous thing a person could possibly do?

What kind of industry fixes its own prices by law, and then competes on how much champagne it can pour?

And what happened to the man who broke it?

Sir Freddie Laker swept floors at an aircraft factory, worked out that the entire airline business was upside down, and got taken apart for it — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch on the man whose bankruptcy made your budget flight possible.

For most of the twentieth century the airlines ran a legal cartel. IATA fixed the fares, so a London to New York ticket cost the same on Pan Am, TWA or BA, and the only thing left to compete on was luxury: forty inches of legroom, professional chefs, sterling silver, a side of beef carved in the aisle. It was magnificent, and roughly eighty-five per cent of people never got on a plane. Then Laker put a transatlantic seat on sale for fifty-nine pounds and let people queue on the pavement outside Victoria for it. The industry drove him under inside five years, then adopted everything he had done. What is left is a world where five billion people fly each year, three per cent of them internationally, and the seat in front of you gets a little closer every season.

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[0:00] Peter hates airports, Afua loves them, and the words "you're a Terminal Five girl"

[5:19] The legal cartel — how IATA fixed every fare and left nothing to compete on but champagne

[6:39] Forty inches of legroom, a chef, and a side of beef carved at your seat

[8:13] Nail polish, posture, and the finishing-school standards applied to an air hostess

[11:36] Freddie Laker, the Canterbury boy who swept factory floors and broke the cartel

[13:23] Fifty-nine pounds to New York, and people sleeping on the pavement outside Victoria

[21:57] Four per cent of climate change, and the cities buckling under weekend visitors

[30:57] Why business class keeps improving while your seat keeps getting thinner

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Inbox: Hecuba, Exile and Coming Home | Arwa Omaren Aug 13, 2026

What happens to a person when the country they were born in decides they were never really from there?

What does a play about the women of a sacked city, written 2,400 years ago, have to say to an actress walking out of Syria on foot?

And how do you stand on a stage in Edinburgh and make an audience laugh about the worst thing that ever happened to you?

At the Edinburgh Fringe, Peter Frankopan meets Arwa Omaren, whose one-woman show sets her own escape from Syria inside the story of Hecuba, Queen of Troy — along with William Stirling and Charlotte Eagar, who have spent a decade staging Euripides with refugees.

Arwa Omaren found out she was a refugee at twelve, in a playground fight in Damascus. She graduated top of her class from Syria's leading drama school in 2011, signed a television contract, and then the war took all of it. She walked for five weeks through the mountains of Kurdistan. Britain granted her asylum, then she was evicted, and she slept on the street with her dog. Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? is what she made of it. Euripides wrote the first play about refugees in 415 BC, the year after Athens massacred the people of Melos. Twenty-four centuries later it is still the play that fits.

Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? runs at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh Fringe, until 31 August: edfringe.com

More on the Trojan Women Project: trojanwomenproject.org

Peter has written about the play at peterfrankopan.substack.com

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[0:00] Peter at the Fringe, and a performance he could not stop thinking about

[3:23] Oxfam, 2013, and the Greek tragedy that turned out to be about refugees

[9:50] Who Hecuba is, and why a queen reduced to nothing is the right story for now

[16:18] A playground fight in Damascus, and the day Arwa found out she was a refugee

[17:24] Five weeks walking, and the paperwork that told her she belonged nowhere

[33:13] Jacko: the dog she left behind in Syria, and the charity that brought him back

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Modern Travel | Rise Of The Seaside | 3 Aug 11, 2026

Who decided that the sea — cold, dangerous and full of smugglers — was somewhere you went for fun?

What kind of doctor prescribes plunging into the Channel naked in the dead of winter, and then drinking it?

And how did the towns Britain built to enjoy itself end up among the most deprived places in the country?

The holiday — the whole idea that ordinary people are owed one — starts with a Brighton doctor, a shed on wheels and an Act of Parliament, and Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow it from there to the boarded-up promenades of the present.

Dr Richard Russell published a book in the 1750s arguing that seawater cured everything from scrofula to melancholy, and that you ought to drink it by the pint, with milk or port to take the edge off. The elites followed him to a fishing village called Brighthelmstone, the Prince Regent built a pleasure palace there, and once the railways arrived the whole thing belonged to everybody. Then cheap flights took it away again. What the Victorians left behind is a coastline of magnificent architecture standing in some of the poorest wards in England — and, lately, the first signs of something coming back.

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[0:00] From the Grand Tour to the stick of rock — the moment travel stopped belonging to the rich

[8:52] Before the deckchairs: smugglers, pirates and a coastline you kept well away from

[9:51] Dr Richard Russell, the eighteenth-century wellness influencer who told Britain to drink the sea

[13:17] Peter jumps into the Antarctic in his swimming trunks, shamed into it by a woman in her eighties

[17:57] The steam train, the Bank Holidays Act, and the week the mills shut down

[20:53] The bathing machine: a shed, a horse, and a strong local person to dunk you

[29:54] Clacton, Jaywick, and what happened to the towns Britain built to enjoy itself

[35:09] Margate, Dreamland, and whether hipsters can fix a structural problem

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Inbox: Why Dictators Love the World Cup | Feat. Karim Zidan Aug 06, 2026

Why does every dictator, sooner or later, want to host the World Cup?

What did a military junta that never wanted the tournament discover once the goals started going in?

And when a hundred thousand people are dancing in the street, who is that actually working for?

Peter Frankopan sits down with investigative journalist Karim Zidan, who has spent a decade tracking how autocrats turn football into propaganda — and who found his own way into the story as a teenager being dragged out of a stand by Egyptian riot police.

Mussolini wrote the blueprint in 1934 and nobody has much improved on it since: host the tournament, invest in the team, let the collective joy do the rest. Videla's junta inherited a World Cup it didn't want and got away with it. Putin raised the pension age while Russia were in the quarter-finals. Qatar ended a Gulf blockade without conceding a thing. Zidan's argument isn't that you should stop watching. It's that escapism and willful ignorance are not the same thing — and that the people buying your club are not your friends.

Karim Zidan's podcast series Power Plays, presented by the Human Rights Foundation, is at powerplays.xyz. His newsletter is at sportspolitika.news.

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[0:00] Why the world's game keeps ending up in the hands of people who don't much like the world

[4:14] Cairo, 2007: a teenager in the Ultras section watches the police move in

[8:36] Mussolini's blueprint, and why he preferred boxing to football

[15:33] Argentina 1978: the junta that inherited a World Cup it never wanted

[26:19] "A monstrous, cancerous, corrupt patronage system" — Zidan on FIFA

[35:24] A message for Newcastle fans, and everyone else who welcomed the money in

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Modern Travel | The Other Grand Tour | 2 Aug 04, 2026

What happened when the people written out of the Grand Tour wrote their own account of it?

What did an eighteenth-century Bengali diplomat see in London that made him call the British a conceited race?

And how did a man from Bihar end up as shampooing surgeon to the King of England?

Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan follow the travellers the Grand Tour left out — enslaved servants, Black abolitionists, Indian intellectuals — and find them looking back at Europe with a colder eye than Europe ever turned on them.

Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond met in Rome in 1868, two free Black Americans taking in the ruins of one slave society while campaigning against a living one. Mirza Abu Talib Khan toured Britain and reported home that its true religion was money. I'tesamuddin filled a notebook with the wonders of Europe and the conceit of its inhabitants. And Sake Dean Mahomed opened a vapour bath in Brighton and gave English the word shampoo. The Grand Tour was never only white men learning Latin — it was the moment the world started looking back.

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[0:00] The Grand Tour you think you know — powdered wigs, Roman ruins, enough marble to fill a museum

[3:01] The servants who weren't servants: enslaved Africans on the road to Italy and France

[4:29] Frederick Douglass, viral superstar, meets Sarah Parker Remond in Rome

[8:36] Ira Aldridge plays Shakespeare to the aristocrats who came for the ruins

[13:40] Bihar to Brighton — and the word that came with him

[17:54] Europe judged: spiritually hollow, morally compromised, excessively fond of luxury

[25:24] The Maharajas whose Cartier and Rolls Royce orders kept European luxury solvent

[36:24] What actually killed the Grand Tour, and whether Magaluf is its heir

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Inbox: The Secret Global History of Bruges Jul 30, 2026

What's a garnet mined in Sri Lanka two and a half thousand years ago doing in a silver hairpin dug up near Bruges? Why are the Duke of Burgundy and the conqueror of Constantinople staring each other down for the first time in history? And, how did most of Belgium forget that its own counts once sat on the throne of Constantinople?

Afua turns interviewer as Peter opens the doors on Bigger Picture, the exhibition he has spent four years building to reframe Bruges as one of the great connected cities of the medieval world.

It's the opening show at BRUSK, Bruges' vast new exhibition hall — 250 objects from 90 lenders, among them a Memling released from Turin, a Vatican portrait of Alexios I Komnenos that has never been lent before, and Gentile Bellini's Mehmed II brought face to face with Philip the Good. Along the way: a very Belgian silence, a wall of Bruce Springsteen memoirs, the price of medieval pepper — and Peter greeting visitors as a hologram.

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[0:00] Afua opens the Legacy inbox on Peter's four-year secret project

[3:04] A very Belgian silence, a coffee break, and the job is Peter's

[9:13] Asked to pick one object, Peter picks three

[12:20] Philip the Good meets Mehmed the Conqueror, five centuries late

[16:14] How the counts of Flanders ended up emperors of Constantinople

[27:42] Hologram Peter, and how to see the show before 8 September

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Modern Travel | The Original Gap Year | 1 Jul 28, 2026

What actually turned a teenage aristocrat into a "finished" gentleman in the 1700s? Why did one incredibly long, incredibly expensive holiday end up inventing the whole idea of "the West"? And why can you still trace a straight line from that holiday to Frankenstein, the contents of half of Britain's country houses, and this year's tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote?

Send a nineteen-year-old aristocrat to Europe for three years with a credit line and a chaperone paid to keep him out of trouble, and what comes home is part fashion victim, part looter, part accidental philosopher — the invention of modern Western identity, Frankenstein, and a culture war about "the Continent" that's still running.

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[0:00] Peter admits his own anti-aging anxieties before Afua reveals what the new series is really about

[3:34] Meet "The Original Gap Year" — and the ex-priest travel blogger who coined the term

[13:51] The bear leader — the 18th-century minder whose entire job was damage control

[15:51] The macaronis — home from Italy in silk and powder, mocked as "un-British"

[21:19] Standing where Gibbon stood — how one ruin becomes an entire theory of civilisation

[24:56] A wrecked holiday, a volcano, and a ghost story that becomes Frankenstein

[25:37] Ten years since the Brexit vote — and the Grand Tour's fingerprints are still on it

[31:09] Where Chatsworth's marble busts actually came from

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Legacy Inbox: The Gold Britain Still Won't Return Jul 23, 2026

What does it take to get a room of ex-military festival-goers in rural Wiltshire to agree Britain should return its stolen gold? And why does an obsolete Victorian law still make it a criminal offence for the British Museum to give any of it back? Afua Hirsch just spent a week testing both — with a Buckingham Palace thought experiment, a courtroom-style cross-examination, and a verdict on two centuries of looted treasure that even British Museum members found hard to argue with.

Afua brings Peter inside two sold-out tents at the Chalke Valley History Festival — one on the Ashanti gold Britain still won't return, the other on the German peasants written out of history. Welcome to Legacy Inbox, a new lighter-touch addition to the feed.

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[0:00] Afua's back from Chalke Valley, sold-out crowds and all

[4:10] Barnaby Phillips and a sequel to Loot bring Ashanti gold into the tent

[12:05] A sacked palace, a stolen throne, and a case Afua calls open and shut

[18:55] Her answer to "it's illegal to give it back": test it in court

[21:52] The 2024 loan Britain calls generosity — and Ghana calls something else

[24:00] A blacked-out England XI, and what it says about the British Museum

[25:38] Why a tent full of skeptics left more hopeful than they arrived

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World Cup | Migration and the New Asia | 7 Jul 21, 2026

What does it mean when the sons of empire become the heroes of the nation that once ruled them? Four years later, what happens when one of those same colonies turns round and beats France on the biggest stage there is? And could two World Cups, played four years and one continent apart, actually tell you where the world's centre of gravity was heading next?

Peter and Afua trace France '98 and the first World Cup ever held in Asia, from Zidane's headed goals to Senegal's shock win over the champions, to ask what football reveals about migration, empire and a shifting world order.

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[0:00] A million people on the Champs-Élysées, and a face that didn't fit the old postcard of France

[2:56] The Republic's beautiful idea, and the empire it was built on

[6:06] Zidane, Thuram, Vieira — the team Le Pen said wasn't really French

[9:53] Ronaldo's mystery fit, hours before the final

[15:05] Iran and the USA, white flowers, and a photograph that stopped the world

[23:14] The World Cup leaves the Atlantic world for the first time in 72 years

[27:26] South Korea's run to the semi-finals, and the making of a soft-power superpower

[34:20] Senegal 1, France 0 — what it meant to beat the empire

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World Cup | Big Business | 6 Jul 15, 2026

How does a country where football is a minority sport end up hosting — and cashing in on — the biggest World Cup in history? What happens when FIFA stops behaving like a sporting federation and starts behaving like a multinational? And when the tournament generates $14 billion in a single World Cup, who's actually footing the bill?

Twelve global sponsors, three and a half million fans through the turnstiles, and a World Cup final so dull it needed penalties to save it — Peter and Afua follow the money to USA '94.

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[0:00] A World Cup arrives in a country that doesn't even like football

[3:56] João Havelange and the birth of FIFA's global sponsorship machine

[9:54] Nigeria and Saudi Arabia arrive to rewrite the football map

[19:24] The post-communist world gets its own flag on the pitch for the first time

[20:49] Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi become the stars of the tournament

[23:37] Andrés Escobar's own goal, and a tragedy nobody saw coming

[25:47] Brazil finally get the ending football's most-loved nation deserved

[27:00] Why an African team winning the World Cup would change everything

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World Cup | The End of the Cold War | 5 Jul 14, 2026

How does a country only three decades free of colonial rule end up humiliating the reigning world champions in the opening match? What happens when the last World Cup of the Cold War arrives just months after the Berlin Wall comes down? And can football ever really just be a game, when Roger Milla is dancing at a corner flag while an old world order quietly falls apart around him?

Cameroon stun the reigning champions, Gazza cries in the semi-final, and Nessun Dorma becomes the unlikely soundtrack to the end of an era — Peter and Afua go back to Italia '90.

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[0:00] Maradona, a fading empire, and a World Cup arriving as Europe's map redraws itself

[8:11] Cameroon walk out against the champions — and nobody gives them a hope in hell

[9:15] Roger Milla, at 38, becomes the tournament's most unlikely superstar

[17:04] Gary Lineker breaks Cameroonian hearts in the game of the tournament

[24:18] Gazza cries, and England fall for their most fragile genius

[26:40] Maradona, past his best, and the tragedy of peaking too soon

[31:29] Why football still fails the geniuses it creates

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Gary Lineker | Nation, Identity and the Beautiful Game | 2 Jul 09, 2026

What does it mean to cheer for the country that once colonised yours? Forty years on from the Hand of God, does one match still define how a nation sees itself? And when Ghana play England, who exactly is Afua Hirsch supposed to be supporting? Gary Lineker returns to relive 1986 — the Golden Boot, Maradona, and a quarter-final played four years after the Falklands War — before the conversation turns to something far more personal: identity, belonging, and what it means to wear a nation's shirt.

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[0:54] Part two: Gary Lineker on nation, identity and the beautiful game

[4:05] Forty years since the Golden Boot - and the Hand of God

[6:56] The most famous goal in World Cup history, minutes after the worst

[9:02] Afua wears her Ghana strip - and picks a side

[9:32] What it means when the coloniser plays the colonised

[16:05] Why England's diversity is now part of its story

[20:00] Racism, FIFA and the women's game - coming on Legacy Plus

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Gary Lineker | The Polictics Of The World Cup | 1 Jul 07, 2026

hould football and politics ever really be kept apart? What happens when the host nation is at war with one of the teams competing in its own tournament? And when FIFA hands its brand-new peace prize to Donald Trump, has the beautiful game lost the plot completely? Gary Lineker sits down with Legacy for the first of three conversations on the World Cup, drawing on forty years inside the game to explain why politics has never once stayed off the pitch.

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[0:00] Gary Lineker and forty years at the heart of the World Cup

[5:35] A history of politics gatecrashing every World Cup since Mussolini

[8:23] Inside the Kremlin: Gary on meeting - and refusing to meet - Putin

[14:23] Afua's own US visa troubles, and whether Gary's could be next

[15:46] The White House note nobody expected

[20:45] Would Gary refuse Trump the way he refused Putin?

[23:33] Trump in a football kit: Gary picks his position

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World Cup | The World of Dictators | 4 Jul 02, 2026

What happens when a World Cup final is played a few hundred metres from a torture centre? How does a newly independent nation humiliate the champions of Europe — and still get knocked out by a fix in plain sight? And when a boy from the slums of Buenos Aires beat England with his fist, was it the cruellest cheat in football — or perfect revenge? Afua and Peter follow the World Cup through its darkest decade — Argentina's generals roaring at finals while prisoners vanish next door, Algeria's reckoning with Europe, and a kid called Maradona turning a single match into a settling of old scores.

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[0:00] A torture centre, a stadium, and the cheers that drowned out the screams

[4:20] The general who seized power two years before kick-off

[6:12] The final played within earshot of the 'death flights'

[13:50] An African side wins a World Cup match for the very first time

[15:40] Argentina need six goals against Peru — and somehow get them

[17:38] The Dutch players who refused to shake a dictator's hand

[20:35] Algeria stun West Germany, then watch Europe close ranks

[29:29] The Hand of God, and a goal that settled an old score

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World Cup | The World Cup and the New World Order | 3 Jun 30, 2026

What turns a football team into a country's most powerful weapon? How does a game invented to entertain end up laundering the reputations of dictators? And when seventy years of European control collapsed in a single afternoon's vote — who took the game, and what did they want with it? From the sunlit genius of Brazil in 1970 to a backroom ballot in Frankfurt, Peter and Afua track the moment football slips out of European hands — and everyone, from newly free nations to military juntas, lunges to grab it.

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[0:00] The greatest team ever to play — and the regime that basked in them

[3:56] Apartheid South Africa digs in while the rest of the world breaks free

[8:34] The Brazilian swimmer who saw what Europe refused to

[13:30] Mexico 1970: sunshine, colour TV, and football reborn as carnival

[15:30] England's captain, accused of nicking a bracelet in Bogotá

[18:38] Pelé becomes the most famous man alive — for a government that tortures

[22:17] Zaire arrive, the leopard-print rebellion begins

[30:52] One vote in Frankfurt ends seventy years of European rule

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World Cup | Post Colonial World | 2 Jun 25, 2026

What happens when the nations that invented football start losing their grip on it? How does a team representing a country that doesn't officially exist end up touring the world and unnerving an empire? And why did thirty-one African nations refuse to play at all?

Afua and Peter follow football into the age of decolonisation — Algeria's phantom side, Nkrumah's Black Stars, a seventeen-year-old in tears in Stockholm — as the colonised stop asking permission and take the game for themselves.

[0:00] 1950: the empires are gone, but nobody's told the World Cup

[6:55] Bandung — half the planet decides to stop being spectators

[9:27] Algeria's ghost team: the national side that didn't officially exist

[12:46] Nkrumah, the Black Star, and building a nation out of nothing

[17:48] South Korea lose 9–0 — and it still counts as a triumph

[19:51] A teenager weeps on his teammates' shoulders and reorders the game

[26:37] Thirty-one nations walk out of the World Cup at once

[29:33] Eusébio: the man winning for the empire that denied his own

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World Cup | Origins In Empire | 1 Jun 23, 2026

How did a game scribbled into rules by Victorian schoolboys end up watched by four billion people? Why do the countries that were colonised take such fierce joy in beating the ones that colonised them? And by the time Mussolini was watching from the stands, was the World Cup ever really just about football?

Peter and Afua follow football out along the empire's trade routes — from a London rulebook in 1863 to the first World Cups, where conquest, nationhood and fascism were already stitched into the world's game.

[0:00] Twenty-two players, a ball, ninety minutes — and something far older underneath

[7:52] Afua on cheering full Ghana against the country that once ruled it

[17:19] The game nobody owns: how 1863 and a single rulebook started everything

[20:19] Two footballs, a rulebook, and the Scotsman's son who infected Brazil

[22:06] The British invent the game — so why do the French end up running it?

[25:22] One final, two nations, and a fight over whose ball to even use

[27:42] Mussolini works out exactly what football is for

[37:28] 1938: empires line up on the pitch, and almost none bring their colonies

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1776 | America 250: What the Culture Says | 2 Jun 18, 2026

What does a country sing about when it can't agree on its own founding? Why has Hollywood, which will film literally anything, never made a great movie about 1776? And when both the Black Lives Matter marchers and the January 6th rioters claim to be the true heirs of the Declaration of Independence, who actually owns the revolution?

From Hamilton's founding hustlers to Beyoncé's cowboys to a White House captioning a royal portrait "two kings," Peter and Afua track the Declaration through the culture that keeps remixing it — and a country that still can't agree on what it says.

[0:00] Two riots, one document, and everyone insisting they're the real sons of liberty

[3:10] How a hip-hop musical about a slaveholding revolution became the biggest thing on Broadway

[7:49] The friend Afua had to physically stop from walking out of Hamilton

[12:27] An empty thousand-seat cinema, and the one Melania line worth hearing

[16:00] The first American cowboys came from West Africa — and Beyoncé knows it

[19:14] Why Hollywood will green-light anything except 1776

[23:36] The protest movement that refuses to say Trump's name

[32:13] The day the White House posted a photo and called it "two kings"

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1776 | The Legacy For Our Culture | 1 Jun 16, 2026

Why did African Americans spend a century celebrating the Fifth of July instead of the Fourth? Why did a sitting US president personally try to end a journalist's career over one newspaper series? And two hundred and fifty years on, why can't America agree on what its founding document actually means?

A 250-year-old promise of equality collides with slavery, revolution and a modern-day tenure battle as Afua and Peter close out their Declaration of Independence series.

[1:28] Fifty-six men sign in Philadelphia — many of them slave owners writing "all men are created equal"

[8:07] Lafayette's regret: "I would never have drawn my sword..."

[11:42] Why a Virginia senator can't stomach Bolívar's revolution

[15:20] Why Black Americans spent a century celebrating the Fifth of July instead

[17:27] Frederick Douglass asks the question that still stings: "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?"

[18:53] The project that says America was really founded in 1619

[28:55] A sitting president personally tries to take the story down

[30:54] She wins a Pulitzer. Her university refuses her tenure anyway.

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1776 | The Women Washington Could Never Catch | 2 Jun 11, 2026

Who really built American freedom — and why does the answer make so many people so uncomfortable? What happens when an enslaved woman takes the Declaration of Independence more seriously than the man who wrote it? And, when the President of the United States turns the full machinery of government against one young Black woman — why can't he catch her?

Belinda Sutton petitioned a court for fifty years of unpaid wages and won. Ona Judge walked out of the President's house while George Washington ate his dinner, and spent the rest of her life free. The founding story you were taught left both of them out entirely.

[0:00] The founding myth and its glaring blind spot

[3:00] Belinda Sutton — kidnapped at 12, enslaved for 50 years, and why she still fought back

[7:50] The petition that became one of the earliest demands for reparations in American history

[12:00] John Hancock signs off — and why the estate still refuses to pay

[17:00] How Belinda's story spread and why Ta-Nehisi Coates and Harvard both came calling

[19:30] Ona Judge — Washington's secret system for keeping his household enslaved in Pennsylvania

[24:00] The night she walked out while the President ate dinner

[27:30] Washington weaponises the federal government to hunt her down

[31:00] She negotiates with the President — and he blinks first

[34:00] "I am free" — Ona Judge's answer, fifty years later, says everything

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1776 | The Founding Mothers | 1 Jun 09, 2026

The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal. But what did that mean to the women who heard those words and knew they were being lied to? Who were the women the founding fathers never mentioned — and what did they do about it? And, if America was founded on the idea of freedom, why did it take another century — and a civil war — to even begin to make good on that promise? Afua and Peter turn the founding of America upside down, telling the story of 1776 through the women the Declaration forgot: a teenage poet who became the first Black woman in history to publish a book of poetry in English, and an enslaved woman who walked into a lawyer's office and used the Constitution to abolish slavery in Massachusetts.

(0:00) The Declaration of Independence is about to turn 250 — but whose freedom was it really for?

(1:43) Legacy Plus — bonus episodes, early access, and fewer ads 2:00 Why enslaved Americans didn't wait to be freed — they were already fighting

(5:36) Lord Dunmore's proclamation and the moment thousands of Black men chose their side

(7:48) Phillis Wheatley: kidnapped at seven, named after the slave ship that took her

(9:59) From chalk letters on a wall to mastering Greek — the making of a prodigy

(12:09) The court case where she had to prove she wrote her own poems

(14:23) Sent to London as pro-slavery propaganda — and why it spectacularly backfired

(16:12) Published in London, ignored in Boston: the first Black woman to publish poetry in English

(17:23) The poem she sent to George Washington — and why he actually wrote back

(18:47) They met in Cambridge in 1776: the Virginia enslaver and the young woman he couldn't ignore

(20:04) How post-revolutionary America still wouldn't publish her — and how she built a subscription model 250 years before Substack

(21:50) She reached Washington, Jefferson, Thomas Paine — and died at 30 in a boarding house

(23:34) Elizabeth Freeman: the woman who heard the Declaration read aloud and walked straight to a lawyer

(25:11) "Where's my freedom?" — the most direct question anyone asked of the founding fathers

(27:05) The iron-shaped scar she refused to hide — and how she weaponised it

(27:41) Bett v Ashley: the case that abolished slavery in Massachusetts

(31:36 She wins not just her freedom but freedom for every enslaved person in the state — then changes her name to Elizabeth Freeman

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Declaration of Independence | The Brand | 2 Jun 04, 2026

Who wrote "all men are created equal" — and then went home to more than 180 enslaved people? What does a document actually mean when it excludes women, Indigenous peoples, and one in five of the very population it claims to liberate? And, was the Declaration of Independence a genuine statement of universal human rights — or the most successful rebranding exercise in political history?

Peter and Afua tear apart the Declaration of Independence: who wrote it, what it actually meant, what was left out on purpose, and why its contradictions still define America 250 years on.

(0:00) "All men are created equal" — by men who didn't believe it

(9:00) Britain vs the colonies: mistrust, miscalculation, and the slide into war

(14:00) Lexington, Concord, and the shot heard around the world

(19:00) Lord Dunmore's offer: freedom to the enslaved — and the colonists' outrage

(24:00) Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the power of simple ideas

(30:00) John Hancock signs big and invents a new word for "signature"

(35:00) After independence: debt, fragility, and the problems victory didn't solve

(42:00) How the revolution accidentally redirected the British Empire

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Declaration of Independence | Follow The Money | 1 Jun 02, 2026

What if the Boston Tea Party had less to do with liberty and more to do with a smuggler protecting his profit margins? What if hurricanes tearing through the Caribbean helped light the fuse of revolution? And, what if the men who gave birth to America were not visionary idealists but wealthy merchants who had simply run out of patience with British trade restrictions?

Peter and Afua pull back the curtain on the financial machinery behind American independence — the Caribbean slave economy, the smuggling networks, the Bengal famine, and the merchants who dressed their self-interest in the language of liberty.

(0:00) It wasn't about democracy. It was about who controlled the money

(2:00) Britain's debt doubles after the Seven Years' War — and someone has to pay for it

(7:50) The colonists were richer, taller, and paid less tax than anyone in Britain

(11:50) Tea, empire, and why the whole system was built on piracy

(13:30) The Boston Tea Party: orderly political theatre and a £10,000 act of destruction

(17:35) The Boston Massacre and the propaganda machine that turned it into a rallying cry

(20:30) The Caribbean cash machine — and how hurricanes made colonial merchants very rich

(27:20) John Hancock: celebrated patriot, and according to British customs officials, the head of a massive smuggling operation

(30:00) The first Continental Congress: protecting constitutional rights — and profit margins

(34:00) The Bengal famine, 10 million dead, and why it became a weapon against British imperialism

(38:00) Neither side wanted war — and that's exactly how they stumbled into one

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Founding Fathers | Saints and Sinners | 4 May 28, 2026

Was Alexander Hamilton the real architect of American capitalism — or just the most self-destructive genius in the room? What does it mean that the man who shaped the nation's finances spent his career surrounded by an economy built on enslaved labour he understood firsthand? And, if the founding fathers were so brilliant, why is America still fighting about what they actually built?

Peter and Afua peel back the marble on two of the most mythologised men in history: Hamilton, the penniless Caribbean immigrant who survived a hurricane, built the American financial machine, and then blew up his own career with a 95-page confession; and Washington, the slave-owning Virginia planter who became the face of liberty — and knew exactly when to put the power down.

0:00 Hamilton, Washington, and the show that won't let the founders off the hook

1:48 The Caribbean origins of Alexander Hamilton — and what Nevis reveals about colonial violence

5:30 How working at the epicentre of the Atlantic slave economy shaped Hamilton's political thinking

9:10 The outsider who doubled down: Hamilton's ambition, his tongue, and why people feared him

11:36 The Reynolds affair — confessing adultery to defeat a corruption charge

15:50 What Hamilton brought to the revolution that none of the others could

20:10 George Washington: the Virginia planter who had to learn how to be a gentleman

24:00 How marrying Martha Custis transformed Washington's wealth and status overnight

26:40 The land grab Britain tried to block — and why it radicalized Washington

30:30 The fragile coalition: Franklin's joke, the hanging rope, and what really held them together

35:00 Washington's genius was knowing what not to do — and when to walk away

38:40 The American dream was built on free labour — and the dishonesty that disguised it

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Founding Fathers | The Original Brexit | 3 May 26, 2026

Who was the boring lawyer who quietly built the machine that made America work? Was John Adams so relentlessly right that even his allies couldn't stand him? And, how did the man who wrote the most beautiful words on human equality spend decades owning the woman who bore his children?

Peter and Afua tear into the contradictions of 1776 — the forgotten architect, the honest man nobody liked, and the wordsmith whose legacy history has never quite known what to do with.

0:00 The original Brexit: what 1776 really was

6:00 John Jay — the unsung hero who built the legal framework of a nation

11:00 The Federalist Papers and the Roman Republic obsession

14:00 Jay's reluctant revolution: the man who wanted reconciliation

16:00 Enter Thomas Jefferson: plantation privilege and the Declaration of Independence

18:30 Jefferson at his desk — and the enslaved people outside the window

21:00 Martha, Sally Hemings, and the relationship history tried to bury

25:00 John Adams: the honest man too competent for his own good

31:00 Rome's collapse, checks and balances, and why they feared what they were building

36:00 Jefferson gave the revolution its language, Jay its structure, Adams its urgency

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The Founding Fathers | The O.G.'s | 2 May 21, 2026

What turned America's most famous British loyalist into its most dangerous revolutionary? What does a public humiliation in a Whitehall chamber have to do with the Declaration of Independence? And, if the man who designed the American constitution believed men were angels, would he have bothered?

Peter and Afua trace how a candle-maker's son who pulled lightning from the sky and a sickly scholar obsessed with the fall of Rome built the architecture of the most powerful republic in history.

0:00 Franklin: the 18th century's global multimedia superstar

6:10 Poor Richard's Almanac and the art of building a platform from scratch

9:45 From kite and key to the Royal Society — Franklin's lightning moment

13:20 A proud Briton in London: the comfortable life that couldn't last

16:00 The Hutchinson letters, a Whitehall ambush, and an hour of public savaging

18:30 The moment Franklin stopped thinking of himself as British

21:00 Enter James Madison: the smallest man in public life and the biggest thinker

24:30 Two thousand years of history as a laboratory of political failure

28:00 Taxation without representation, the Intolerable Acts, and the radicalisation of Madison

31:30 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary'

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Founding Fathers | The invention of the United States | 1 May 19, 2026

How did a collection of desperate survivors, religious outcasts, and petty criminals become the architects of the world's most powerful nation? What does it mean to build a society on the language of liberty when that society is entirely dependent on enslaved labour? And are Americans still reckoning with a founding story that was never quite what it seemed?

Peter and Afua go back to the very beginning — from the disaster of Roanoke and the brutal early years at Jamestown, to the transatlantic slave economy that quietly powered the rise of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

00:00 Introduction — what America actually means

03:00 Roanoke and Jamestown — England's catastrophic first attempts

08:00 The colonial economy — slavery, sugar, and the triangle trade

14:00 New York's hidden history — one in five New Yorkers were enslaved

19:00 The contradiction at America's heart — liberty built on unfreedom

25:00 Who were the Founding Fathers — and who was left out?

32:00 Preview — Franklin and Madison up next

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Rasputin | How Rumour Broke an Empire | Feat. Sir Antony Beevor May 14, 2026

How does a Siberian peasant mystic end up controlling the most powerful empire in Europe? Could the rumours that destroyed a dynasty have been entirely false — and did they matter anyway? And, without Rasputin, would there have been no Lenin — and would the 20th century have looked completely different? Peter sits down with Sir Antony Beevor — bestselling author of Stalingrad, Berlin, and D-Day — to dig into his new book on one of history's most mythologised figures: Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian wanderer who charmed the Tsarina, antagonised everyone else, and whose murder was so catastrophically bungled it reads like black farce.

0:00 From Siberia to the Imperial court — how a peasant mystic reached the centre of power

5:30 Holy fools, wandering pilgrims, and why Russia was always fertile ground for figures like Rasputin

10:00 The voice, the eyes, and the seduction: how Rasputin actually worked on people

13:00 The Tsarina's obsession — and why Antony Beevor is certain the rumours were fake news

17:30 How Rasputin's ministerial choices set the railways on fire and sparked a revolution

24:00 Rasputin was right about the war — and then made everything worse anyway

27:30 The assassination: poisoned cakes, Yankee Doodle, and a murder plot of spectacular incompetence

32:00 Putin, Nicholas II, and why historians should be wary of historical parallels

36:00 Without Rasputin, no Lenin? The counterfactuals Antony loves but won't fully follow

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Diets | One Stomach Flu Away From My Goal Weight | 2 May 12, 2026

What did it take for human beings to start controlling what they ate — and why did "health" so quickly become a cover

story for something else? How did a Venetian nobleman's wine-heavy calorie restriction become a blueprint for the

modern diet industry? And, when tobacco companies, Hollywood, and the beauty industry all decided women's body

anxiety was a market opportunity — who, exactly, was the diet really for?

Peter and Afua trace the history of the human body as a commercial battleground: from the first diet books in 1558,

through the birth of the calorie and the explosion of Weight Watchers, to the heroin chic 90s and the disordered eating

it left behind.

0:00 The Venetian nobleman who invented calorie restriction — and still drank 14oz of wine a day

7:30 George Cheyne: 32 stone, no meat, no alcohol, and a bestselling book in 1740

14:00 Empire, refrigeration, and why cheap food created the first diet industry

21:30 The discovery of the calorie — the invention Afua still resents

25:30 Freud's nephew, cigarettes, and the moment thinness became a product to sell

31:00 Weight Watchers, zero-fat yoghurt, and the 80s: cottage cheese as cultural trauma

36:30 The 90s: heroin chic, cellulite alerts, and the era that hospitalised a generation

40:00 Keto, Atkins, and the diet that keeps reinventing itself

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Diets | Three Eggs and a Bottle of Wine | 1 May 07, 2026

What did Vogue actually recommend women eat in 1977 — and why did it make one food writer cry in the

bathroom? How did the Greeks turn a six-pack into a moral argument? And, has the human obsession with

controlling what we eat ever really been about health at all?

Peter and Afua trace the long, strange history of dieting — from ancient Greek athletics and Roman

feast-and-purge excess, to medieval starvation saints who turned self-denial into a radical act of female agency.

0:00 Vogue’s 1977 Wine and Egg Diet — and what happened when someone actually tried it

6:30 The diet industry’s dirty secret: it was never about nutrition

9:00 Peter on fasting, cranky emails, and what not eating teaches you about your relationship with food

14:30 Ancient Greece: when abs were a moral statement, not just an aesthetic one

19:30 The manosphere’s Spartan fantasy — and what the Greeks would actually make of it

23:00 Rome: the inventors of binge and purge culture

24:30 When Christianity enters the chat — and fasting becomes holy

26:00 Catherine of Siena: the medieval starvation saint who used hunger as protest

30:00 Anorexia mirabilis — holy anorexia, and why Peter is wary of projecting modern diagnoses onto the past

32:00 Why medieval peasants weren’t dieting — they were just trying to stay alive

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Mystics | Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man In The World | 3 May 05, 2026

What happens when you raise a child telling him he's the Beast — and he decides to prove you right? Could a man

who genuinely repelled everyone around him have quietly shaped the culture we live in today? And, is the world of

sex, drugs, and rock and roll actually the legacy of a repressed Victorian occultist with a god complex?

Peter and Afua descend into the dark, theatrical, and genuinely troubling life of Aleister Crowley: English occultist,

self-declared Great Beast 666, and the man who may have done more than anyone to wire transgression, desire, and

spiritual hunger into the DNA of modern culture.

0:00 The wickedest man in the world — and why he owned it

6:00 The Exclusive Brethren: the suffocating sect that made Crowley inevitable

10:00 Cambridge, cigars, and erotic poetry: the beast is unleashed

15:00 Golden Dawn and the occult underground of Victorian London

20:00 Mountaineering, meditation, and the spiritual pick-and-mix

24:00 Cairo, 666, and the Book of the Law

26:00 Rose Kelly: the woman without whom none of it happens

33:00 The Abbey of Thelema and a scandal that shocks even the tabloids

38:00 How Crowley became the Beatles' and Led Zeppelin's spirit animal

42:00 Jack Parsons: the rocket scientist who performed Crowley rituals by night

44:00 Was Crowley a feminist? (Afua has thoughts)

48:00 The stain that runs through modern culture straight back to him

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Mystics | Helena Blavatsky's Karma | 2 Apr 30, 2026

Who invented the spiritual vocabulary of the modern world — karma, reincarnation, yoga studios, the idea that you can be "spiritual but not religious"? What if the hidden masters living in remote Tibetan mountains who inspired her weren't real — but the New Age movement they sparked absolutely was? And can you change the course of Western spirituality forever while being accused of fraud, plagiarism, and dropping fake letters through the ceiling?

Peter and Afua explore the extraordinary life of Helena Blavatsky: Russian aristocrat, globe-trotting mystic, chain-smoking occultist and the most polarising spiritual figure of the 19th century — whose Theosophical Society gave us yoga mats, abstraction in art, and the modern wellness industry, all while she battled accusations of being one of history's greatest frauds.

0:00 Introduction: The Woman Who Invented New Age Spirituality

4:15 Russian Aristocrat: Growing Up Between Two Worlds

9:40 The Lost Years: Tibet, Egypt, and the Mysterious Mahatmas

16:20 Arriving in New York: Spiritualism, Grief, and the Telegraph

23:10 Meeting Henry Steel Olcott: The Partnership That Changed Everything

28:35 Isis Unveiled: 1,200 Pages That Sold Out in 10 Days

35:50 Moving to India: Strategic Genius or Cultural Appropriation?

41:20 The Mahatma Letters: Messages from the Ceiling

47:05 The Coulomb Scandal and the Hodgson Report

53:30 Vindication? The 1986 Harrison Report

58:10 The Secret Doctrine and Her Uncomfortable Nazi Legacy

1:03:45 Blavatsky's New Age Legacy: From Mondrian to Matcha Lattes

1:09:20 Final Verdict: Genius, Fraud, or Both?

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Mystics | Nostradamus: The Arophecary | 1 Apr 28, 2026

Nostradamus has predicted every major disaster in history — or so the internet would have you believe. Peter and Afua get behind the myth to meet the real man: a plague-era apothecary, rejected by the medical establishment, whose greatest invention wasn't prophecy — it was selling certainty to an anxious world.

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The Age Of Cargo | The TEU | 3 Apr 23, 2026

Malcolm McLean was a frustrated truck driver who thought there had to be a better way. The metal box he invented now carries 90% of the world's traded goods — and quietly runs the global economy.

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The Age Of Cargo | Globalisation and the Oceans | 2 Apr 21, 2026

From colliers carrying coal out of Newcastle to Marshall Plan grain crossing the Atlantic, Peter and Afua trace how the movement of goods by sea built the modern world. This is the story of bulk cargo — and why the ships that carried it changed everything.

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The Age Of Cargo | The Cargo Ship | 1 Apr 16, 2026

The cargo ship didn't just move goods — it moved civilisations. Peter and Afua trace 2,000 years of maritime trade, from Roman grain ships and spice routes to the Hanseatic League, the sugar plantations of Madeira, and the brutal economics of the triangular trade.

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Facelifts | The Gory Truth Behind the Celebrity Glow | 2 Apr 14, 2026

Afua and Peter explore the "undetectable" world of deep plane facelifts, examining why celebrities are finally trading surgical secrecy for viral transparency. They dissect the astronomical costs of modern "tweakments" and the rising pressure to match AI-generated perfection as surgery recipients get younger than ever before.

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Facelifts | From Jericho to Kardashian | 1 Apr 09, 2026

Peter and Afua delve into the surprising 9,000-year history of facial modification, spanning from ancient trephining rituals in Jericho to the "eerily impressive" modern results seen on Kris Jenner. They analyze how surgical techniques have evolved through a symbiotic relationship between wartime reconstruction and a global, often problematic, pursuit of Eurocentric beauty norms.

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Global Impact Of Economic Shocks | The Reconfiguration of the World of 1973 | 4 Apr 07, 2026

From the formation of OPEC to the Yom Kippur War, Peter and Afua trace how oil-producing nations finally seized control of their most powerful weapon — and how the shock of 1973 sent the entire global economy into freefall, from petrol queues in Europe to coups in Africa.

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Global Impact Of Economic Shocks | 1973 - Oil and the 20th Century | 3 Apr 02, 2026

From the geology of the Gulf to the CIA-backed coup that toppled Iran's elected prime minister, Peter and Afua trace how oil became the defining force of the 20th century — and why the West's century-long obsession with Iranian oil still shapes the crisis unfolding in 2026.

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Global Impact of Economic Shocks | The Cataclysm of Suez | 2 Mar 31, 2026

In this second installment of their series on economic shocks, Peter and Afua dissect the 1956 Suez Crisis, where Gamal Abdel Nasser's bold nationalization of the canal stripped the British Empire of its remaining credibility. They reveal the clandestine "Protocol of Sèvres" conspiracy and explain how a furious President Eisenhower leveraged the International Monetary Fund to bring a bankrupt Britain to its knees.

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Global Impact of Economic Shocks | 1915 and the Dardanelles | 1 Mar 26, 2026

Afua and Peter examine the brutal 1915 closure of the Dardanelles, revealing how a single geographic choke point strangled the Russian economy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution. Drawing haunting parallels to modern conflicts in the Strait of Hormuz, they explore how Winston Churchill’s over-ambitious naval gambles led to a devastating legacy of human and financial loss.

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Great Environmental Shocks in History | How An Earthquake Splintered The World | 4 Mar 24, 2026

Afua and Peter examine the terrifying 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, revealing how a massive geological rupture in Japan unexpectedly triggered a radical energy revolution in Germany and shifted the scales of European geopolitics. From the heroic struggle of the "Fukushima 50" to the strategic vulnerabilities exposed by a reliance on Russian gas, they explore the sobering reality that even our most advanced engineering remains at the mercy of the Earth's shifting plates

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Great Environmental Shocks in History | Before the Plague | 3 Mar 19, 2026

Afua and Peter explore the "Great Famine" of the early 1300s. Triggered by sudden global cooling and torrential rains, Europe's food supply was decimated and up to 70% of its cattle were wiped out through a terrifying bovine plague. This often-overlooked catastrophe didn't just cause mass starvation; it physically "scarred" a generation of children, leaving them uniquely vulnerable to the Black Death when it arrived decades later.

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Great Environmental Shocks in History | Darkness at Noon - The Justinianic Plague | 2 Mar 17, 2026

A sudden, catastrophic dimming of the sun in 536 AD triggered the coldest decade in two millennia, launching a "volcanic winter" that saw harvests fail from Ireland to China. Peter and Afua explore this environmental shock that directly facilitated the first global pandemic of Yersinia pestis, shattering the imperial ambitions of Rome and Persia while paving the way for the explosive rise of Buddhism and Norse mythology.

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Great Environmental Shocks in History | The Remaking of the Ancient World | 1 Mar 12, 2026

Afua and Peter launch their new series on environmental catastrophes by revealing how a massive volcanic eruption in Alaska—10,000 kilometers away—secretly orchestrated the downfall of Cleopatra and the birth of the Roman Empire. They trace the "butterfly effect" from Julius Caesar’s bloody assassination and "bling" obsession to the failure of the Nile floods, proving that the ancient world was reshaped by climate chaos as much as by political intrigue.

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Iran | Feat. Christopher de Bellaigue | On The Eve Of Confrontation | 3 Mar 10, 2026

Iranian history is defined by a fierce sense of exceptionalism rooted in geography, language, and a unique intellectual enlightenment that Western narratives often ignore. This deep-seated identity now fuels an explosive youth rebellion that increasingly prioritizes personal freedom over national sovereignty, setting the stage for a violent final showdown with a millenarian regime that is prepared to kill to survive. Guest Christopher de Bellaigue is a distinguished historian and journalist whose work, including The Islamic Enlightenment, provides an intimate look at the reformers and thinkers who shaped the Middle East's long-standing struggle for modern constitutionalism.

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Iran | Feat. Kim Ghattas | The Legacies Of 1979 | 2 Mar 05, 2026

Afua and Peter explore the seismic shift of 1979, tracing how a single revolutionary year transformed Iran from a U.S.-allied monarchy into a militarised theocracy determined to export its "Black Wave" across the Middle East. They analyse the regime's enduring "besieged mentality"—forged by a decade of war and perceived Western betrayals—and the defiant courage of a younger generation now dancing in the face of brutal suppression. They are joined by Emmy Award-winning journalist and author Kim Ghattas, whose deep reporting on the Saudi-Iran rivalry reveals how the echoes of 1979 continue to drive the proxies and power plays of 2026.

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Iran | Feat. Ali Ansari | Seen From The Inside And Out | 1 Mar 03, 2026

Afua and Peter dive into the historical psyche of Iran, exploring how a civilization with deep imperial memories navigates a modern reality of global interference and internal revolution. They unpick the "dual structure" of Iranian politics, where a sense of cultural superiority clashes with a narrative of Western betrayal that spans from the 19th century to the 1979 revolution. They are joined by Professor Ali Ansari, a renowned historian from the University of St Andrews, who provides rare insight into the Supreme Leader's absolute authority and the Ponzi scheme currently threatening to implode the Iranian economy.

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Ernest Hemingway | One True Sentence | 2 Feb 26, 2026

Afua and Peter track Ernest Hemingway’s spiral from the peak of his Nobel success into a dark cycle of alcoholism and untreated head trauma. They explore how the 20th century’s "Alpha" icon eventually collapsed under the weight of his own performance, leading to a tragic end that mirrored his father’s suicide.

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Ernest Hemingway | The Lost Generation | 1 Feb 24, 2026

Afua and Peter track Ernest Hemingway’s path from a suburban Chicago childhood spent hunting and boxing to the bloody front lines of Italy. They show how a brutal war injury and his newsroom grind birthed the "iceberg theory," revealing a man who hunted Nazis and survived plane crashes but often treated his own life like his best piece of fiction.

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Gertrude Stein | Oozing Cubism | 2 Feb 19, 2026

In this second installment, Peter and Afua examine Stein's boldest move: ghostwriting her partner’s "autobiography" to claim the global stardom she felt she deserved. They confront the darkest corners of her history, including her bitter public feuds and her controversial survival as a Jewish woman during the Nazi occupation of France.

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Gertrude Stein | It Takes A Lot Of Time To Be A Genius | 1 Feb 17, 2026

Peter and Afua discuss the life of Gertrude Stein, an influential figure in the Parisian art and literature scene. They explore her relationships with artists like Picasso and her complex personality.

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This is Samurai | The Samurai Take Control | 2 Feb 12, 2026

How did a warrior class born to serve end up ruling Japan for seven centuries? When the Mongols twice tried to invade — and were twice destroyed by typhoons — what did that do to the samurai myth? And, when the Meiji government banned the wearing of swords in public in 1876, was that the end of the samurai — or just the beginning of something stranger?

Peter and Afua trace the samurai from their seizure of power under the first shogun, through the Zen culture, the arrival of European firearms, and the Warring States chaos, to their abolition, their afterlife in the Second World War, and why the world can't stop romanticising them.

0:00 Minamoto Yoritomo becomes the first shogun in 1192 — and strips all real power from the

imperial court

6:00 Zen Buddhism arrives and fits the samurai like a glove: discipline, impermanence, acceptance

of death

9:00 The Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 — and the typhoons that became divine winds

14:00 The Ashikaga shogunate: weak political control, extraordinary cultural flourishing

18:00 The Warring States period — Japan descends into anarchy, and the samurai finally have their

moment

20:00 Europeans arrive with matchlock guns — and personal martial prowess stops being enough

23:00 Christianity enters Japan and starts pulling apart the existing order

28:00 Commodore Perry's steam warships in 1853 — and the crisis that ends the samurai age

31:00 The Meiji Restoration abolishes the samurai: stipends cut, swords banned, a class erased

35:00 Bushido, kamikaze, and Seven Samurai — how a real warrior class became a global myth

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This Is Samurai | The Rise Of Medieval Warlords | 1 Feb 10, 2026

Who were the samurai before the armour and the mythology? How did a class of provincial enforcers — hired muscle

for a crumbling imperial court — become the most powerful force in Japanese history? And, when the Taira and

Minamoto clans finally went to war in the 1180s, was this a clash of warrior honour — or just two gangs fighting for

control of the state?

Peter and Afua trace the samurai from their origins in Japan's fragmented early kingdoms, through the arrival of

Buddhism, the collapse of imperial authority, and the emergence of the warrior class that would define a civilisation.

0:00 Japan before the samurai: competing clans, Shinto ritual, and a court that ruled through

ceremony

8:00 Buddhism arrives as a diplomatic gift from Korea — and immediately splits the court

15:00 Prince Shotoku's vision: government as ethical practice, not coercion

18:30 The Taika reforms of 645 — Japan models itself on Tang China and builds its first

bureaucracy

25:00 Why elegance wasn't enough: how the imperial court's fragility created a vacuum

27:00 The word "samurai" — what it means, where it comes from, and how armed men became a class

31:00 The Taira and Minamoto: two great warrior clans and the rivalry that would define Japan

35:00 The Genpei War, 1180–1185 — when the samurai stopped serving power and started wielding it

37:00 The drowning of child emperor Antoku and the moment Japan's future moved from palace to

battlefield

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Women and Healing | It's All On WitchTok | 3 Feb 05, 2026

From shamans and oracles to modern psychics and wellness gurus, humanity has always searched for answers beyond medicine. This episode traces how spiritual healing, prophecy and belief survived — and why they’re booming again today.

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Women and Healing | The Original Witch Hunt | 2 Feb 03, 2026

Women were humanity’s first doctors — midwives, herbalists and healers — until fear, religion and power turned care into a crime. This episode explores how women’s medical knowledge became witchcraft, and why healing women were systematically erased.

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Women and Healing | The Strange Story of the Penis Nest Trapped in a Tree | 1 Jan 29, 2026

Women were the world’s first doctors — mastering plants, childbirth, and healing — until their knowledge became a threat to rising male-dominated medicine and the Church. From ancient shamans to Egyptian surgeons to medieval witch trials and the infamous “penis nest” myth, this is the hidden history of women, power, and healing.

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The History of Wellness and Wellbeing | Shamans, Oracles and Gurus | 4 Jan 27, 2026

Why did ancient people believe illness came from spirits — and who had the power to cure it? Peter and Afua explore shamans, oracles, and sacred healing rituals that once shaped health, fate, and meaning. From Mesopotamian demon-healers to modern ayahuasca retreats and Instagram gurus, they ask what happens when ancient spiritual medicine returns in the modern world.

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The History of Wellness and Wellbeing | The Importance of Sleep and Exercise | 3 Jan 22, 2026

Afua makes the case that sleep is sacred — and modern “grind culture” is quietly wrecking us — as Peter and Afua explore how the ancients actually slept, dreamed, and interpreted the night. Then it’s the birth of exercise: from survival-strength and ritual dance to wrestling, hunting, and the gymnasium — and how movement became medicine (and status).

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The History of Wellness and Wellbeing | The First Treatments and Cures | 2 Jan 20, 2026

Afua loses her voice, fixes it with an old-school red onion + honey remedy, and the pair dive into the ancient origins of cures: food, herbs, water, ritual and early “science.” From honey as the first superfood to purification, bathing, and who gets access to wellness, this episode asks what we’ve forgotten — and what we’ve commodified.

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The History of Wellness and Wellbeing | The Early Years | 1 Jan 15, 2026

New Year, new you — but where did the idea of “wellness” actually come from? Peter and Afua travel back 10,000 years to hunter-gatherers, early medicine, ancient diets, and the surprising origins of how humans learned to be “healthy”.

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Encore: Gorbachev | The Man Who Lost an Empire | 4 Jan 13, 2026

Under Gorbachev's leadership the once sprawling empire that was the Soviet Union collapses. Is this his true legacy? Or was it all inevitable? And with present day Russia looking to the past for glory, what lessons can we learn from history's last Soviet leader?

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Encore: Gorbachev | Meltdown | 3 Jan 08, 2026

On a spring morning in 1986 one of the most catastrophic events in global history occurs - Chernobyl. It brings chaos to the environment, chaos to Europe and chaos to Mikhail Gorbachev's premiership. Will he survive this?

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Encore: Gorbachev | Shutting Down the Cold War | 2 Jan 06, 2026

With the levers of power now in his control, Gorbachev steps out on the international stage with one aim: to avoid a nuclear war. He forges a new relationship with US President Reagan, but will it be enough to remove the shadow of armageddon?

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Encore: Gorbachev | The Boy from Stavropol | 1 Jan 01, 2026

Shaped by the brutality of the Stalin regime, Gorbachev’s childhood was one of poverty and hardship. But the communist system also works to his strengths, and allows him to reach the very top. All along, he remains a true believer but knows change must happen.

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Encore: Charles Dickens | The Final Curtain | 4 Dec 30, 2025

At the height of his fame, Dickens falls in love with a young woman (Nelly Ternan) and a city (Paris). He survives a train crash and public disapproval over his separation from his wife. People turn out in droves to see him perform his works on stage. But his lifestyle is catching up with him and his health is failing. What is his final scene to be? We look back at his life and try to work out what “Dickensian” really means.

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Encore: Charles Dickens | A Very Dickens Christmas | 3 Dec 25, 2025

“A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!” A Christmas Carol is a huge success and Dickens is an international celebrity. There’s lots of money coming in – Bleak House, Hard Times, David Copperfield all do well - but he has a big family and a lavish lifestyle to fund, as well as his Home for Homeless Women. Plus, there’s trouble in his marriage when Dickens’ eye is caught by the turn of a pretty ankle.

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Encore: Charles Dickens | Dickensmania | 2 Dec 23, 2025

Dickens’ star is on the rise. Sketches by Boz is a success and he publishes The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and more. Plus, he is a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Dickensmania’ sweeping the United States. But there is tragedy at home. And when his new novel doesn’t do as well as he’d hoped, he needs a new idea. Something to do with Christmas maybe?

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Encore: Charles Dickens | Hard Times | 1 Dec 18, 2025

A young Charles is filled with imagination and ambition, but his childhood with humiliation and uncertainty. His father is in and out of debtors’ prison and he is forced to sacrifice his education for a string of menial jobs to make ends meet. But he discovers he has a skill. He can paint pictures with words like no one else can. Could this be his destiny?

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Jane Austen | Feat. Marlon James | It's Jane Austen's World And We're Living In It | 3 Dec 16, 2025

Booker Prize winning author - Marlon James joins Afua and Peter to tear open Jane Austen’s world — from slavery shadows to savage social critique — and reveal why her novels still cut like a knife.

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Jane Austen | Proud Or Prejudiced |2 Dec 11, 2025

Jane Austen wrote about drawing rooms, dances, and marriage plots — but beneath the lace and manners she was dissecting power, class, gender, and the world-changing revolutions unfolding outside her window. In this episode, Peter and Afua explore the sharp politics, hidden tensions, and unexpected radicalism behind Austen’s most “polite” novels.

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Jane Austen | Making The Small Things The Right Size | 1 Dec 09, 2025

Jane Austen’s world wasn’t quiet, genteel, or boring — it was full of scandal, class tension, family drama, and the pressures that shaped one of literature’s sharpest minds. In this episode, we trace the messy, revealing early life that forged the writer who made the small things enormous.

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Kellogg | Snap, Crackle, Pop | 2 Dec 04, 2025

John Harvey Kellogg built a wellness empire obsessed with purity, bowel cleansing, and bland food — then accidentally launched the most successful sugar-delivery system in history. From celebrity-studded sanitariums to anti-masturbation crusades and the birth of Cornflakes, this is the wild story of how a health cult became a global cereal powerhouse.

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Kellogg | From The End Of The World To Wellness | 1 Dec 02, 2025

A breakfast empire built on purity, fear, and some of the strangest medical ideas of the 19th century. From apocalypse cults to anti-masturbation crusades, this is the real story behind Kellogg’s rise from Battle Creek to global wellness.

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The Rise of the Nazis | How Disease and Religion Paved the Way for Evil | 2 Nov 27, 2025

Germany’s crises didn’t end with Versailles — they mutated. Hyperinflation, political extremism, spiritual panic, and a pandemic all collided to push an obscure drifter named Adolf Hitler toward power. This episode shows how a broken society helped unleash a catastrophe.

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The Rise of the Nazis | How Disaster Lead to Catastrophe | 1 Nov 25, 2025

A collapsing empire, a starving population, and a country drowning in humiliation — this is how Germany fell apart after WWI. In this episode, we trace how chaos, revolution, and a brutal peace deal created the perfect conditions for the Nazis to emerge.

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Greenland | The 51st State? | 2 Nov 20, 2025

Greenland’s coat of arms has changed, Trump is circling, and Denmark is suddenly sweating. We dive into why the world’s largest island has become the hottest geopolitical prize of 2025 — and what it means for all of us.

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Greenland | This Is Greenland | 1 Nov 18, 2025

Greenland: colossal, misunderstood, and suddenly the centre of global power politics. From Viking PR stunts to Danish colonialism to today’s strategic tug-of-war, this is the story of the world’s most important island.

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Kwame Nkrumah | Rise and Fall | 4 Nov 13, 2025

The rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah — Africa’s first postcolonial leader who dreamed of freedom but faced betrayal, paranoia, and a CIA-backed coup. From hope to heartbreak, this is the story of how Ghana’s independence inspired a continent… and why it all came crashing down.

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Kwame Nkrumah | Pan Africanist | 3 Nov 11, 2025

In post-war London, Kwame Nkrumah turns from student to revolutionary — building the movement that would end colonial rule. From fish heads in Camden to the Pan-African Congress in Manchester, this is where independence began.

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Kwame Nkrumah | A Man Who Changed The World | 2 Nov 06, 2025

As fascism rises in Europe, a young Kwame Nkrumah in America finds his purpose — to unite Africa and destroy colonialism. From racism in Jim Crow America to rebellion in the lecture hall, this is the making of a revolutionary.

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Kwame Nkrumah | The Good Subject | 1 Nov 03, 2025

Peter and Afua trace the early life of Kwame Nkrumah — from a small Ghanaian village to the first sparks of revolution that would change Africa forever. A story of faith, rebellion, and the birth of an idea: freedom on African terms.

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St George | This is England and Beyond - St George's Flag Today | 2 Oct 30, 2025

As England’s flag fills the streets again, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch ask what the Cross of St George really stands for today — pride, pain, or power. From crusades to colonisation to football fandom, this is the story of how a saint became a symbol that divides.

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St George | This is England - The Flag Of St George | 1 Oct 28, 2025

Peter and Afua explore the surprising story behind England’s most famous symbol — the flag of St George.

How did a man born in what’s now Turkey, with Palestinian and Greek roots, become the patron saint of England? And what does his red cross really stand for today? From ancient martyrdom and dragon-slaying myths to the Crusades, royal propaganda, and modern debates about identity, this episode traces how St George’s image has been reinvented through history.

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Martin Luther | A Man Who Changed The World | 2 Oct 23, 2025

Peter and Afua return to uncover the far-reaching — and often unsettling — legacy of Martin Luther. From shaping Henry VIII’s England and Europe’s bloody religious wars to influencing education, nationhood, and even Nazi ideology, Luther’s impact is as complex as it is profound. A flawed revolutionary who changed the world — for better and for worse.

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Martin Luther | Revolutionary, Hero and Villain | 1 Oct 21, 2025

He defied the Church and changed the world.

Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch explore the life and legacy of Martin Luther — the rebel monk who sparked the Reformation, transformed faith, and left a legacy both heroic and deeply troubling.

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The Humble Potato | The Famine and the Frontier | 2 Oct 16, 2025

Legacy is back with Part 2 of The Humble Potato. How a miracle crop turned to misery — fuelling famine, exile, and the fight for Irish independence.

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The Humble Potato | The Root Of Empires | 1 Oct 14, 2025

Legacy is back! This time, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch dig into the story of the humble potato — before becoming the centrepiece of the Sunday roast, this unassuming root built empires, toppled economies, and quietly changed the world.

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Joan of Arc | The Birth of a Saint | 4 Jun 18, 2025

Joan's last-minute change of heart seals her fate. She faces the end with her usual indomitable spirit, while the King and country she’s given her life for, turn their backs. What is the true legacy of this girl who didn’t even make it out of her teens, but whose courage has inspired us for centuries?

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Joan of Arc | Trial by Fire | 3 Jun 11, 2025

The march on Paris ends in failure and Joan’s star is beginning to wane. Maybe she is not sent from God after all? The English are on the war path, but Joan is still determined to drive them out of France for good. Then, catastrophe strikes. Joan has one last battle to fight - as she’s put on trial for her life.

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Joan of Arc | The Girl Who Made a King | 2 Jun 04, 2025

Joan's prophecy seems to be coming true. She's liberated Orleans and, dressed in her armour and brandishing her flag, is by Charles’ side as he’s crowned King of France. But Paris must still be won. Can Joan lead her troops to victory once more?

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Joan of Arc | The Maid of Orleans | 1 May 28, 2025

Joan of Arc is an ordinary French girl, unbothered by the war waging between France and England. Then, in 1425, she starts hearing the voices of saints – and of God. They say that she will be the one to restore Charles the Dauphin to his rightful place on the French throne. Can this teenager be the saviour her country is so desperate for?

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Stalin | The Stain of Stalin | 4 May 21, 2025

Stalin's paranoia and violence knows no bounds - even when it comes to those who might have helped him. But despite being denounced by successors from Kruschev to Gorbachev, today his reputation is strong as more and more Russians consider him a great leader.

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Stalin | Fighting Hitler | 3 May 14, 2025

When Hitler breaks their deal and attacks the Soviet Union, Stalin falls apart. How can he rally the struggling Soviet Union to defeat the Nazi war machine? And when the end of the war comes, can he persuade Roosevelt and Churchill to redraw the world map in his favour?

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Stalin | The Terror | 2 May 07, 2025

With the Bolsheviks in power, Stalin becomes Lenin's right hand man. Then at last his canny plotting wins him the top job, and he can unleash his ruthless vision for the Soviet Union. But the cost is untold thousands of human lives...

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Stalin | The Georgian Bandit | 1 Apr 30, 2025

A violent childhood in Georgia, then part of the vast Russian Empire, sets young Joseph dreaming of a different world. He becomes a Bolshevik and, hardened further by a sudden tragedy, is ready to seize his chance when the revolution finally comes.

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Freud | Goodnight Vienna | 4 Apr 23, 2025

After his beloved daughter, Anna, is taken by the Gestapo, Freud is finally persuaded to leave Vienna. He arrives in England to a rapturous welcome and starts seeing patients. Tragically though, his illness catches up with him and he dies just before WWII breaks out.

How do we evaluate the legacy of the man who took us inside our own heads? Are his ideas still relevant? Psychoanalysts and Freud experts, Dr Susie Orbach and Professor Brett Kahr, join the discussion.

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Freud | Battle of The Egos | 3 Apr 16, 2025

Professor Freud is now famous, his ideas part of the zeitgeist – but serious rifts are appearing in his relationship with his friend and protegé, Carl Jung. Plus, the rise of the Nazis is becoming a very real threat to an Austrian-based Jew.

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Freud | A Meeting Of Minds | 2 Apr 09, 2025

Freud may have devised a new revolutionary method, ‘psychoanalysis’ but the problem is: almost no one cares, or reads his books. His controversial insistence that sexual issues are the cause of most psychological problems doesn't help. But then, among the his small following, he notices a young Swiss psychologist who is enthralled by his work – Carl Jung.

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Freud | Mommy's Boy | 1 Apr 02, 2025

The Oedipus complex, Freudian slip, repression, the ego and the id – Sigmund Freud’s ideas have become part of everyday language. He opened up the world’s mind to the idea of the subconscious. He also pioneered the idea that our childhood shapes who we are. But what are the secrets of his own early years? And what started him on the path towards, literally, changing our minds about everything?

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John Lennon | Imagine | 4 Mar 26, 2025

Has Lennon's muse abandoned him? After years of no recording, a dramatic near-disaster at sea reignites his spark. But then his plans are tragically cut short. Today his impact on music is undeniable, but did his imagination really change the world?

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John Lennon | All You Need is Love | 3 Mar 19, 2025

Lennon meets the woman who will change his life: Yoko Ono. Together they ask the world to Give Peace A Chance... but Lennon's band is feeling anything but peaceful...

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John Lennon | Love Me Do | 2 Mar 12, 2025

John Lennon and The Beatles rise from obscurity to success with dizzying speed. Hysterical headlines diagnose "Beatlemania" as screaming fans mob the Fab Four. And the Beatles become synonymous with the drug-fuelled experimentation of the swinging sixties. But amid all the screaming, is Lennon losing his creative touch?

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John Lennon | The Boy Everyone Wanted | 1 Mar 05, 2025

A tug of love sees the young John Lennon pulled between his mother, father and aunt Mimi in a disrupted childhood. But that experience of conflict finds a creative outlet when he meets a cool kid with a guitar called Paul McCartney.

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Genghis Khan | The Final Campaign | 4 Feb 26, 2025

The great Genghis Khan is dead, his burial place one of the world’s best kept secrets. But the Mongol hoards rampage on, advancing on Europe and striking terror into hearts as far west as Hungary and Poland. No individual has ever ruled so vast a territory. His name is forever linked with terrible violence but his impact on the way we organise society is still felt today. What is the true legacy of Genghis Khan?

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Genghis Khan | Sackings and Slaughter | 3 Feb 19, 2025

After victory in China, Genghis Khan goes west and takes on the Khwarezmians, surprising his enemy with a daring assault. He conquers all in his path and now controls the biggest empire the world has ever seen. But whose shoulders are broad enough to become his successor?

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Genghis Khan | The Unstoppable Khan | 2 Feb 12, 2025

The many Mongolian tribes are now under the control of one man. They have crowned him Genghis Khan – the supreme ruler. His army is organised, disciplined, deadly and unstoppable. But the Mongolian Steppes aren’t enough for the great Khan. He has his sights set on his next glittering prize.

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Genghis Khan | Survival of the Fittest | 1 Feb 05, 2025

As a young boy on the Mongolian steppes, Temujin (not yet Genghis Khan) shows promise. He’s a wily hunter, a skilled rider and a keen falconer. He needs all those skills when his father’s death casts his family into the wilderness. In his fight for survival, he begins to attract followers, men who can see in him the great leader he’ll become. But an arch enemy is standing between him and the ultimate victory.

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Marie Antoinette | The Grim Finale | 4 Jan 29, 2025

Louis XVI has been executed and now Marie Antoinette herself is on trial. The outcome seems a foregone conclusion - especially when her son is manipulated into making terrible accusations against her. Finally, the most hated woman in France steps into the arms of Madame Guillotine. What was really the cause of her cataclysmic fall? And what does France – and the world – think of her today?

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Marie Antoinette | At The Mercy of The Mob | 3 Jan 22, 2025

Fresh from storming the Bastille, the revolutionaries are coming for the royals at Versailles. Marie Antoinette avoids a massacre by clever use of a secret passage - but perhaps it’s time to flee the country altogether? A plan is hatched… but fate is against them.

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Marie Antoinette | Queen of Scandal | 2 Jan 15, 2025

Now 18 and Queen of France, Marie's raison d'être is to produce a future King. But after 4 years of marriage, she still hasn’t had sex with her husband. Her big brother is sent in for ‘the talk’. Meanwhile, she distracts herself with extravagance. But the people are France are starving, and her lifestyle is causing a lot of upset.

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Marie Antoinette | A Princess and a Pawn | 1 Jan 08, 2025

Married off at the age of 14 in her mother’s very own Game of Thrones, Austrian-born Marie Antoinette finds herself in a foreign country, shackled to the teenage future King of France - who's more interested in lock-making than love. How are they to produce an heir? Then in 1774, the King is dead. Little does Marie know that she is about to be the last Queen of France...

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Charles Dickens | The Final Curtain | 4 Jan 01, 2025

At the height of his fame, Dickens falls in love with a young woman (Nelly Ternan) and a city (Paris). He survives a train crash and public disapproval over his separation from his wife. People turn out in droves to see him perform his works on stage. But his lifestyle is catching up with him and his health is failing. What is his final scene to be? We look back at his life and try to work out what “Dickensian” really means.

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Legacy and British Scandal Special: The Scandalous Life of Charles Dickens | 5 Dec 27, 2024

Peter and Afua go on the British Scandal podcast hosted by Matt Forde and Alice Levine to discuss the life and times of Charles Dickens. Behind the snowy scenes, jolly carols and festive cheer, the so-called “Father of Christmas” had a turbulent home life full of drinking, alleged extramarital relations and workplace fights. But can we truly call his life scandalous? Matt and Alice weigh in.

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Charles Dickens | A Very Dickens Christmas | 3 Dec 25, 2024

“A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!” A Christmas Carol is a huge success and Dickens is an international celebrity. There’s lots of money coming in – Bleak House, Hard Times, David Copperfield all do well - but he has a big family and a lavish lifestyle to fund, as well as his Home for Homeless Women. Plus, there’s trouble in his marriage when Dickens’ eye is caught by the turn of a pretty ankle.

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Charles Dickens | Dickensmania | 2 Dec 18, 2024

Dickens’ star is on the rise. Sketches by Boz is a success and he publishes The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and more. Plus, he is a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Dickensmania’ sweeping the United States. But there is tragedy at home. And when his new novel doesn’t do as well as he’d hoped, he needs a new idea. Something to do with Christmas maybe?

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Charles Dickens | Hard Times | 1 Dec 11, 2024

A young Charles is filled with imagination and ambition, but his childhood

with humiliation and uncertainty. His father is in and out of debtors’ prison and he is forced to sacrifice his education for a string of menial jobs to make ends meet. But he discovers he has a skill. He can paint pictures with words like no one else can. Could this be his destiny?

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Winston Churchill | Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat | 4 Dec 04, 2024

The war is won but the nation seems far from grateful as the election of 1945 sweeps Labour into power. But the Churchill phenomenon doesn’t stop and he’s back in Number 10 in 1951 as the new Queen Elizabeth’s first prime minister. Upon his death he receives a state funeral, but there were – and still are – many who question whether he truly was a national hero.

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Winston Churchill | His Finest Hour | 3 Nov 27, 2024

It’s 1939 and Churchill has been proved right in his fervent opposition to appeasement of Hitler. German tanks have crossed the Polish border and Churchill is brought straight back into government. Now he is tasked with guiding the country through one of the biggest crises it has ever faced. How can the seemingly overwhelming Nazi threat be beaten into submission? If there was ever a time for self-belief, this is it.

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Winston Churchill | The Unsinkable Politician | 2 Nov 20, 2024

The First World War sees Churchill as confident as ever in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty. But rash judgements – especially around the disastrous campaign in Gallipoli - cost thousands of lives. The UK press describes him as ‘a danger to the country’, he’s left out of Lloyd George’s cabinet and, at home, tragedy strikes. All the while he can see trouble brewing in Europe, but no one is listening to him...

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Winston Churchill | Born To Rule | 1 Nov 13, 2024

One of the most famous leaders of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill is far more than just WWII. The ‘pretty baby’, who as a boisterous boy fought for the attention of his aristocratic parents eventually emerged into adulthood as a soldier and war journalist. Soon he finds himself travelling through the Middle East and Africa - and risking his life. But will anyone back home notice?

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John F. Kennedy | Camelot Comes Crashing Down | 4 Nov 06, 2024

Arguably the most famous political assassination of the 20th century, the shooting of John F. Kennedy has ignited scores of conspiracy theories. Was Oswald really acting alone? Could the Soviets have been involved? The CIA?

And how does his infamous death affect how we view his legacy? Should he be remembered as charismatic proponent of civil rights who prevented nuclear world war? Or a womaniser who mishandled foreign affairs and was too slow to support the plight of African-Americans?

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John F. Kennedy | Clash of The Cold Warriors | 3 Oct 30, 2024

For the White House and the Kremlin, the question of nuclear war is not if, but when. Newly-elected President John F. Kennedy is launched into proving his skills in international diplomacy. He faces a crisis in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and must win over Krushchev in a crucial summit. Will his charm prevail now that he’s in the top job?

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John F. Kennedy | Violence at Home and Abroad | 2 Oct 23, 2024

As the Kennedys face tragedy after tragedy, JFK becomes aware that time may not be on his side. But soon things move fast for him: after winning a seat in Congress - and marrying Jackie in a wedding fit for a royal couple, he is propelled to the presidential candidacy. But there are two obstacles in his way: his Catholicism, and Richard Nixon.

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John F. Kennedy | The Poor Little Rich Boy | 1 Oct 16, 2024

The son of a rich and prestigious family, John F. Kennedy’s childhood is seemingly idyllic. Yet his mother is strict and distant, and his father is openly a womaniser who resents John's frailty as a sickly child. But John is a fighter. He thrives at Harvard, and during World War Two, joins the navy. And it's there in the wake of a dramatic rescue mission, that he proves his heroism, setting him on the path to political success.

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Marilyn Monroe | Who Killed the Movie Star? | 4 Oct 09, 2024

Marilyn's death sparks grief, soul-searching and mystery - mystery that persists still to this day. Looking back at her legacy, how did Marilyn Monroe come to shape and define Hollywood, and America's views on sexuality, autonomy and feminism?

This episode contains reference to suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available 24/7. Contact Samaritans on 116 123 or visit https://www.samaritans.org/.

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Marilyn Monroe | Drama, Drink and Drugs | 3 Oct 02, 2024

At the peak of her fame, Marilyn takes on the studios in a bid to control her own career. But her superstardom is threatened by her own insecurities, and her increasing reliance on drink and drugs.

This episode features descriptions of alcohol and drug abuse. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, contact the support service Frank day or night by calling 0300 123 6600 from within the UK, or go to https://www.talktofrank.com/

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Marilyn Monroe | Becoming Marilyn | 2 Sep 25, 2024

The struggling starlet is exploited by the powerful executives who run Hollywood. But Marilyn begins creating what will become the iconic Marilyn look which she'll use to her advantage to climb the industry ladder. But her ascent is jeopardised when a decision from her past threatens to create a scandal… and destroy everything she’s built so far.

This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse and domestic violence. If you're in England or Wales and have been affected by any form of sexual abuse, support is available 24/7. Call 0808 500 2222 or visit https://247sexualabusesupport.org.uk. If you've been affected by domestic violence, support is available 24/7. Call 0808 2000 247 or visit https://refuge.org.uk/.

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Marilyn Monroe | The Foster Kid Who Loved The Movies | 1 Sep 18, 2024

The young Marilyn Monroe has a traumatic childhood in and out of foster homes. Watching movies is a precious escape from reality, but it’s not enough to shield her from a mentally unwell mother and absent father. But this is LA, the land of Hollywood, and life-changing opportunities. And soon she discovers she might have a place in front of the camera.

This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse. If you're in England or Wales and have been affected by any form of sexual abuse, support is available 24/7. Call 0808 500 2222 or visit https://247sexualabusesupport.org.uk.

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Encore: Cecil Rhodes | Must Rhodes Fall? | 4 Sep 11, 2024

More than a century after Rhodes' death students in South Africa and Britain thrust his name back into the spotlight. Should statues of colonialists like him be torn down? And, in Africa, how is Rhodes' legacy felt today?

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Encore: Cecil Rhodes | A Brooding Spirit | 3 Sep 04, 2024

Rhodes deals with the fallout from the Jameson Raid as questions about his conduct reach the British parliament. He finds a new cause to further his ambition but years of ill-health are starting to catch up with him.

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Encore: Cecil Rhodes | The Rise of Rhodesia | 2 Aug 28, 2024

Rhodes dashes back to Kimberley to be with his dying friend. He then redoubles his colonial efforts, using ruthless tactics to trick the indigenous population out of their land. But an ill-fated scheme to take on the Boers is about to hurt him.

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Encore: Cecil Rhodes | Eureka! | 1 Aug 21, 2024

We've delved into the Legacy archives to bring back one of our most divisive characters: Cecil Rhodes. A sickly vicar’s son travels from England to Africa to join the diamond rush. Cecil Rhodes wants to make his fortune. But he also wants to extend the British Empire. Drama in his private life threatens to undermine both ambitions.

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Bob Marley | One Love | 4 Aug 14, 2024

Despite an assassination attempt, Bob Marley continues to spread political messages of peace, freedom and anti-colonialism throughout the world. But health issues from his childhood are catching up with him, and he'll have to confront a devastating diagnosis. Today, his face appears on t-shirts, lighters and posters around the world, but has his legacy become detached from the meaning behind his music?

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Bob Marley | Catching Fire | 3 Aug 07, 2024

Songs like 'Get Up Stand Up' and 'No Woman, No Cry' garner international success for Bob Marley and the Wailers. Not only do people love the music, but they're also inspired by the freedom fighting messages within it. Yet as political tensions heat up in Jamaica, Marley's global stardom and revolutionary lyrics become a threat to his safety...

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Bob Marley | The Rise of the Rasta | 2 Jul 31, 2024

Bob Marley, now in his early 20s and part of the newly-named band the Wailers rises to popularity in Jamaica. The band use their music to ask for peace on the island and beyond. But Bob's life is about to change when he's introduced to a new religion: Rastafari. And a special woman named Rita.

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Bob Marley | The Captain's Son | 1 Jul 24, 2024

Born in colonial-era Jamaica to a black teenage mum and an absent white dad, Bob Marley has a fractious childhood and is constantly moved around. But Bob dreams of making it big as a musician, whilst Jamaica dreams of independence. Can this small island boy make it big amongst the violence and chaos engulfing his home nation?

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Hoover | The Deep State Lives On | 4 Jul 17, 2024

Hoover wrote the playbook used by many of today's politicians, not least Donald Trump. What would Hoover make of today's political landscape? And how much did he shape it?

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Hoover | Civil Rights and Dirty Tricks | 3 Jul 10, 2024

FBI spying reaches new depths, as Hoover persecutes civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King. But then a daring break-in exposes the FBI's tactics.

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Hoover | Guns, Gangsters and G-Men | 2 Jul 02, 2024

Rumours about Hoover's sexuality threaten to overshadow his work building the FBI into a credible crime fighting force. And although he's obsessed with information, he misses a key piece of intelligence, which could have changed the path of the Second World War.

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Hoover | The Library Clerk Who Became All Powerful | 1 Jun 25, 2024

As a young boy, J Edgar Hoover strives for perfection and control. After a stint working at the Library of Congress he embarks on a career in law enforcement. But it's not long before his perfect image is threatened, and he needs to find someone to blame when things goes wrong. What happens next will set him on the path to becoming the founding director of the FBI - and one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century.

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Margaret Thatcher | We’re All Thatcherites Now | 4 Jun 18, 2024

Stabbed in the back by her Tory allies, Thatcher is forced to wave goodbye to Number 10. She remains active in public life until declining health forces her to withdraw. Today, more than a decade after her death, her legacy continues to divide: for some, she is an icon of conservatism who revived the British economy; for others, the harbinger of increased inequality. Either way, Thatcher's legacy still defines British politics.

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Margaret Thatcher | Strikes, Bombs, & Selling the Silver | 3 Jun 11, 2024

Conflict is never far from Thatcher's politics - and life. She becomes locked in a year long bitter stand off with miners on strike over her planned closures. She doesn't give in either to the IRA. If anything - after surviving a near-miss assassination attempt, she is more resolute than ever in seeing through the changes she believes the country needs.

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Margaret Thatcher | Cuts, Riots, & War | 2 Jun 04, 2024

As Britain's first female Prime Minister, Thatcher has made history. But she's off to a shaky start: her economic policies are unpopular and lead to riots across the country. It looks like her tenure might be cut short - until ... Argentina decides to invade the Falklands islands.

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Margaret Thatcher | The Making of the Iron Lady | 1 May 28, 2024

The daughter of a methodist shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher has never believed in luck. She knows that together with her strength of character, hard work is what will bring her success. And soon enough, she proves herself one of the most formidable politicians the country has ever seen.

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Cleopatra | The Last Pharaoh of Egypt | 4 May 21, 2024

From Shakespeare to Netflix, Cleopatra's life and death has been told and retold. Siren seducer, serious scholar, powerful African queen - or all of the above? Untangling the real Cleopatra reveals as much about our own identities as hers.

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Cleopatra | Bling...and Bloodshed | 3 May 14, 2024

Cleopatra emerges victorious after a series of battles and sets sails across Egypt. She dazzles another great Roman, Mark Antony. But will her political ambitions be helped or hindered by him?

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Cleopatra | The Courageous Queen | 2 May 07, 2024

Cleopatra's future hangs in the balance, but there is one person who could change her fate. He is Julius Caesar, the most powerful man in the world - and he's come to Egypt. If only she can convince him of her worth.

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Cleopatra | A Taste for Betrayal | 1 Apr 30, 2024

Cleopatra is born into a life of luxury - and violence. Beautiful and brilliant, the young queen of Egypt is still a teenager when she ascends the throne - but it's not long before she's betrayed by those closest to her.

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Alan Turing | A Forgotten Hero | 4 Apr 23, 2024

Alan Turing’s life is tragically cut short. And his crucial impact during the war remains unknown for years. But in the 21st century, his legacy in Artificial Intelligence is more relevant than ever and so is his identity as a queer man. How should we reassess the legacy of Alan Turing?

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Alan Turing | Illegal Love | 3 Apr 16, 2024

Turing returns to a normal social life after the war, where he is open about his sexual orientation with his friends. Until a burglary turns everything upside down and Turing faces the reality of being criminalised for who you love. Will Turing survive this?

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Alan Turing | Cracking the Code | 2 Apr 09, 2024

The stakes are high for Turing and his team of codebreakers as they try to decrypt Nazi messages. Known as “Prof”, Turing and his eccentricities are central to life at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Will he and his team be able to turn the tide in Britain’s favour?

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Alan Turing | An Awkward Genius | 1 Apr 02, 2024

A curious bookish boy, Alan Turing is already an outsider at a young age. But at Cambridge, he comes up with an idea that shapes the foundation of computer science. His genius will later alter the course of the Second World War. But Turing's personal life will destroy his reputation for generations to come.

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Nina Simone | Rebirth | 4 Mar 27, 2024

The tide is turning for Nina Simone. A new generation falls in love with her music, she's reconciled with her daughter and her mental health has recovered. But alongside the civil rights movement, Nina's significance as an activist is forgotten until recent events in the US give them new relevance.

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Nina Simone | Breakdown | 3 Mar 20, 2024

Amidst marital and financial problems, Nina escapes the US for an eclectic life abroad - finding love in Barbados, happiness in Liberia, and a better education for her daughter in Switzerland. But mental health struggles soon come to the fore and before soon Nina Simone will reach a new low.

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Nina Simone | To Be Young, Gifted and Black | 2 Mar 13, 2024

Nina Simone's star is rising - however cracks in her personal life are starting to show. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement is catching up with her. Where does she stand in the midst of this? And will she be on the right side of history?

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Nina Simone | The Road to Carnegie Hall | 1 Mar 06, 2024

Born in the Jim Crow South, Nina Simone's talent is obvious from an early age. She dreams of becoming the first black classical pianist but after a life-changing rejection, she has no choice but to reinvent herself...

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Gorbachev | The Man Who Lost an Empire | 4 Feb 28, 2024

Under Gorbachev's leadership the once sprawling empire that was the Soviet Union collapses. Is this his true legacy? Or was it all inevitable? And with present day Russia looking to the past for glory, what lessons can we learn from history's last Soviet leader?

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Gorbachev | Meltdown | 3 Feb 21, 2024

On a spring morning in 1986 one of the most catastrophic events in global history occurs - Chernobyl. It brings chaos to the environment, chaos to Europe and chaos to Mikhail Gorbachev's premiership. Will he survive this?

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Gorbachev | Shutting Down the Cold War | 2 Feb 14, 2024

With the levers of power now in his control, Gorbachev steps out on the international stage with one aim: to avoid a nuclear war. He forges a new relationship with US President Reagan, but will it be enough to remove the shadow of armageddon?

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Gorbachev | The Boy from Stavropol | 1 Feb 07, 2024

Shaped by the brutality of the Stalin regime, Gorbachev’s childhood was one of poverty and hardship. But the communist system also works to his strengths, and allows him to reach the very top. All along, he remains a true believer but knows change must happen.

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Picasso | Drawing Lessons | 4 Jan 31, 2024

A bombshell memoir by a former lover annoys and embarrasses Picasso in his final years. But it is only half a century after his death that his misogyny is seen as truly problematic. And leaves many now grappling with how to separate the art from the artist.

Artwork:

The Woman in a Chair, Pablo Picasso (1948)

Seated Woman in Green, Pablo Picasso (1953)

Self Portrait Facing Death, Pablo Picasso (1972)

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Picasso | The Weeping Woman | 3 Jan 24, 2024

Death is ever more present in Picasso’s work, as horrific events in his home country inspire him to create one of the defining paintings of the 20th century. Meanwhile his own mortality weighs on him as he approaches old age.

Artwork:

Guernica, Pablo Picasso (1937)

The Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso (1937)

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Picasso | The Muse | 2 Jan 17, 2024

Picasso finds inspiration in an unlikely setting and changes art forever. He also finds his first muse, then his second... and then his third - leaving a trail of suffering behind him.

Artwork:

Family of Acrobats with Monkey, Pablo Picasso (1905)

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso (1905-6)

The Young Ladies of Avignon, Pablo Picasso (1906)

Olga in an Armchair, Pablo Picasso (1917)

The Dream, Pablo Picasso (1932)

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Picasso | Bullfights, Brothels & Bohemia | 1 Jan 10, 2024

His father wants him to become a great classical painter, but teenage Pablo Picasso has other ideas. He joins the heady bohemia of Barcelona and Paris, where tragedy transforms his art and puts him on the road to fame.

Artwork:

The Little Yellow Picador, Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1889)

The First Communion, Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1896)

La Vie, Pablo Picasso(1903)

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Cecil Rhodes | Must Rhodes Fall? | 4 Jan 03, 2024

More than a century after Rhodes' death students in South Africa and Britain thrust his name back into the spotlight. Should statues of colonialists like him be torn down? And, in Africa, how is Rhodes' legacy felt today?

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Cecil Rhodes | A Brooding Spirit | 3 Dec 27, 2023

Rhodes deals with the fallout from the Jameson Raid as questions about his conduct reach the British parliament. He finds a new cause to further his ambition but years of ill-health are starting to catch up with him.

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Cecil Rhodes | The Rise of Rhodesia | 2 Dec 20, 2023

Rhodes dashes back to Kimberley to be with his dying friend. He then redoubles his colonial efforts, using ruthless tactics to trick the indigenous population out of their land. But an ill-fated scheme to take on the Boers is about to hurt him.

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Cecil Rhodes | Eureka! | 1 Dec 13, 2023

A sickly vicar’s son travels from England to Africa to join the diamond rush. Cecil Rhodes wants to make his fortune. But he also wants to extend the British Empire. Drama in his private life threatens to undermine both ambitions.

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Napoleon | The Emperor & The Duke | 4 Dec 06, 2023

After escaping exile on Elba, Napoleon marches back to power. But the British Duke of Wellington is on his way to Waterloo to end the Napoleonic era. When the battle subsides, what’s left of Napoleon’s legacy? And what is his legacy today?

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Napoleon | Clash of Empires | 3 Nov 29, 2023

Napoleon’s military success has cowed a continent but, in Russia, he meets almost unimaginable horror. He was defeated, he says, not by the Tsar, but by winter. His subjects aren’t so sure. And his enemies see an opportunity.

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Napoleon | Charlemagne's Crown | 2 Nov 22, 2023

It’s not enough for Napoleon to dominate France. He fights right across Europe before sweeping into Notre Dame, Josephine at his side, to claim an imperial crown, watched by Europe’s elite.

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Napoleon | Vive La Revolution | 1 Nov 15, 2023

A Corsican boy, an outsider, seizes his chance to make a name for himself when France is turned upside down by a long and bloody revolution. He’s relentless in his pursuit of power, and in the pursuit of one woman.

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Introducing…Legacy Nov 08, 2023

Legacy lands Wednesday 15th November. 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.

Amazon Prime members can binge entire seasons early on Amazon Music. Wondery+ subscribers can binge full seasons early in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts.

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