FRDH podcast host Michael Goldfarb was in L'viv Ukraine recently and this is his diary. L'viv is a city he knows well and he explores how war has changed it and how different the courage of Ukrainians who are living through real war is to the enervated resignation of Britons and Americans to their own deteriorating democracies. Give him 13:30 precisely to explain it to you.

The autumn of 2022 has brought Britons local and global economic crises and in this podcast the Financial Times' Martin Wolf tries to make sense of both. Did new British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng not know their budget that they said wasn't a budget would cause a crisis in the markets? Didn't they think for a minute about the difficult state of the world economy reeling from three years of pandemic and now war? Give Wolf and FRDH host Michael Goldfarb 35 minutes to untangle the factors creating these economic crises and perhaps find a bit of hope for getting out of them.

Was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev a geopolitical visionary or a leader who failed at domestic politics in Russia? In this FRDH podcast, Martin Walker, who covered Gorbachev’s years in power as the Moscow correspondent of Britain’s Guardian newspaper looks back with host Michael Goldfarb on the achievements, the failures and the long eclipse of Gorbachev the man who ended the Cold War and unintentionally ended the Soviet Union. Give them 40 minutes precisely to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear that shaped the world of today.

Bill Russell was one of the great figures of his time, and what a time it was. Russell was a man who transcended sport, a leader at the moment when athletes became leaders by example in the Civil Rights movement. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb talks with Michael Carlson, American ex-pat and long-time interpreter of American sport to British audiences, about Bill Russell's historic significance and what it was like to be young in a time when sporting Gods were heroes off the court as well.

America’s Children of WW2 Victory grew up in a time of progressive politics and have lived our adult lives in a reactionary age and the reason is the events of October 1973. That's FRDH host Michael Goldfarb's theory and in this podcast he looks at America just before October 1973 and what happened to it after as the Great Inflation which started that month took hold. Give him 22:18 to explain his thesis.

Inflation is back and in this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb speaks with Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu about the difference between inflation now and then, then being the 1970s. Nothing inspires fear in policy makers like inflation. It is the economic problem that more than any other can change a nation's trajectory in history. Take 29:30 to learn about inflation now, and what it was like back then.

As Queen Elizabeth the Second celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, 70 years on the throne, this First Rough Draft of History podcast looks at how the Queen intersects with many lives, including that of host Michael Goldfarb. The Jubilee marks the end of an era and is a time for a bit of reminiscence about the Queen, her family and what reporting on them over the decades has taught him about the place of the monarchy in British and American lives.

To mark three months since Russia's invasion of Ukraine a conversation with the Economist's Wendell Steavenson who has been an eyewitness writing the first rough draft of the history of the war. Steavenson, a veteran reporter and author of books about the 21st century's major conflicts has fresh impressions to share with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb about Ukraine and the extraordinary mobilization of its citizens, to fight a war, like "none we have seen in this century."

This FRDH podcast originally broadcast on the BBC World Service looks at the story of Jewish Emancipation and how it changed Jewish identity through attempts at assimilation. This is done through conversations with three prominent Jews each representing a very different strand of post-war Jewish experience ... plus lots of music. A podcast that has resonance for all minority groups trying to assimilate into societies where they are not completely welcome.

War defies simple words, it's the time when we turn to poets to make sense of the incomprehensible. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb speaks with award-winning British poet George Szirtes who has written more than two dozen poems so far trying to make sense of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In this wide ranging half-hour conversation they talk about poetry, form, and the difference between how Central and Eastern Europeans experience history from those of us in the West. And also read poems, lots of poems.