In the last decades of the fifteenth century, life in England was finally starting to settle down after years of upheaval and conflict during the Wars of the Roses which had riven society since the mid 1450s.

Waves of Plague had decimated the population, causing widespread distress but providing unexpected opportunities for those who survived. The cultural and political landscape were ripe for change.

This week’s guest, the distinguished historian Nicholas Orme, takes us back to this time. He guides us back to 1480, a year he describes as being ‘on the cusp’. ‘It is not exactly a year of great achievement’, he argues, but in England it was ‘a year of great promise.’

Nicholas Orme is Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, he has written more than thirty books. Tudor Children, his latest, takes the reader from birth to adulthood through the themes of work, play, religion and education.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Westminster. William Caxton's shop, where he is selling books, 80% of them in English, including his printed edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which helps to develop the 'King's English', based on the Midlands dialect.

Scene Two: Oxford. William Waynflete is opening his new grammar school, Magdalen College School, which for the first time is going to teach classical, rather than medieval, Latin and bring England into the Renaissance.

Scene Three. Bristol. William Worcester is measuring and describing the streets of the city: the first ever historical survey of an English town. 

Memento: Second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published by William Caxton.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Nicholas Orme

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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This month marks 80 years since the government of Nazi Germany announced the shocking discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest in the occupied USSR. Thus began one of the most tangled and disturbing of WW2 stories. Just what had happened?

In this episode from our archive, the writer Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyń, takes us back to the year 1940 to find out.

***

In April 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War.

The identity of the victims was clear enough. They were the Polish military elite and significant figures – academics, writers, industrials, doctors - from wider Polish society.

But who was responsible? The Germans instantly blamed the Soviets. The Soviets retaliated that the accusation was a ‘vile slander’, intended to mask yet another instance of Nazi wickedness.

In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.

Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth  

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Show notes

Scene One: March 1940, Starobelsk camp, Soviet Ukraine. Bronisław Młynarski and his friends find a mysterious message tied to the collar of a stray dog.

Scene Two: April 1940, Starobelsk camp. NKVD Commissar Kirshin stands on the steps of the ruined church watching the transports of men depart: ‘You are leaving,’ he says, ‘for a place where I would like to go myself.’

Scene Three: July 1940, Griazovets camp near Vologda in the far north of Russia. The artist Józef Czapski gives an informal lecture about Marcel Proust, delivered entirely from memory, to a group of friends lying on the grass in the sun.

Memento: One of the Christmas decorations created by graphic artist Edward Manteuffel while he was a prisoner in Starobelsk camp.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Jane Rogoyska

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Colorgraph

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Today the archaeologist and executive director of World Monuments Fund, John Darlington, takes us on a dramatic trip back to the 1690s to witness a devastating earthquake in the Caribbean. Scroll down, too, for news of a special discount code.

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After its capture by the English in 1655, Port Royal, Jamaica, became a place of great significance. Home to around 6,500 people by the 1690s, it was known variously as 'the fairest town of all the English plantations' and the ‘richest and wickedest city in the New World’.

Everything, though, changed on the morning of 7 June 1692 when an earthquake struck the town. Two thirds of Port Royal sunk immediately into the sea. Sand liquefied. Ships capsized and one was lifted over rooftops by the subsequent tsunami.

It was a blow from which the town would never recover. Today Port Royal is a small fishing village. The ruined remains of its heyday survive under the sea.  

Our guide on this dangerous journey back in time is the celebrated archaeologist John Darlington whose ‘obsession with ruinous and abandoned places’ began as a baby being pushed around the ruins of Leptis Magna in his pram.

Darlington currently works for the World Monuments Fund, and his new book Amongst The Ruins, Why Civilisations Collapse and Communities Disappear is published today by Yale University Press. In it, he tells the stories of lost places as diverse as ancient Assyria and twentieth century St Kilda, grouping them around five themes, before offering some ideas for how this kind of destruction can be avoided in the future.

*** SPECIAL OFFER for listeners: to get 20% off John Darlington's Amongst The Ruins, Why Civilisations Collapse and Communities Disappear (just £20 with free postage and packing) head to the Yale website and enter the code RUINS . Valid from 11 April to 30 June and for UK orders only.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 6 June 1692. Merchants, slaves, pirates and priests throng the heady streets of Port Royal, where there is one alehouse for every ten people. Huge ships arrive leaden with luxuries, docking in the deep-water harbour of the town, which is built on a fragile series of coral islands.

Scene Two: 7 June 1692. The Reverend Emmanuel Heath sits down with his friend John White, acting Governor of Jamaica, to enjoy a glass of wormwood wine. An earthquake strikes the city followed by a tsunami, sucking entire streets into the liquified sand, throwing ships over the collapsing buildings and ejecting corpses from graves.

Scene Three: 8 June 1692. The survivors survey the hellish remains of their city, most of which has disappeared under the sea or lies in ruins. A series of aftershocks cause more destruction and death, meanwhile diseases like Cholera begin to take hold, killing thousands more in the days to come.

Memento: A French pocket watch excavated from the under-sea ruins of the city, stopped at 11.40am on 7 June, the moment the earthquake struck.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: John Darlington

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Yale University Press

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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‘I have so often wondered’, the historian Katja Hoyer says, ‘what I would have made of the state that I was born into had I been born a few years earlier and lived through it in the way that other people did.’

That state was East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This was a nation that emerged out of the ashes of World War II and existed until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990. The GDR is remembered today in the West as a neurotic, oppressive nation, synonymous with its Ministry for State Security or Stasi.

But in her new book Beyond The Wall, Hoyer attempts to present a fresh image. What was life really like for the citizens of the GDR, especially its youth? How did the ideals of the time impact them? Why were young leftists - among them Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn - so drawn to visit?

In this revealing episode, Hoyer takes Artemis Irvine back on a trip to 1973 to find out. 

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and. A visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the podcast The New Germany. Her new book, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, is out this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 29 March 1973, the Kosmos cinema, for the premiere of the film The Legend of Paul and Paula.

Scene Two: 2 July 1973, East Berlin in the Alexanderplatz, for the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Scene Three: 7 August 1973, the death of Walter Ulbricht, the man at the top of the GDR’s political framework.

Memento: A silk scarf bearing the inscripted hopes and dreams of anyone the guest may have met at the Youth Festival.

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Katja Hoyer

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner:

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In this episode we talk to the game designer David Milne about his historical work on the hugely popular real time strategy game Company of Heroes 3. Milne takes us back to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, from Tobruk in North Africa to Anzio in Italy, as we learn how games developers faithfully evoke the past.

Company of Heroes 3 is the latest instalment in the multi-million selling Company of Heroes franchise. Developed by Relic Entertainment in Vancouver, the game has been enthusiastically critically received. Gaming Trend called it ‘a masterpiece’. The reviewer for the NME described it as ‘fiercely intelligent.’

To accompany the title’s launch SEGA have developed a supporting content hub  called The Briefing Room. Filled with interactive maps, biographies of significant military figures and featuring analysis by leading academic authorities, it shows how faithfully SEGA have confronted the history that informs the game. Click here to explore The Briefing Room.

David Milne is a senior game designer at Relic Entertainment.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: June 1942, Second Battle of Tobruk

Scene Two: December 1943, Battle of Ortona

Scene Three: March 1944, Anzio Beachhead

Memento: As many soldiers’ memoirs as he can carry

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: David Milne

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: SEGA

Theme music: Anvil Main Theme, Company of Heroes

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Today the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe. But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary work. In doing so they became, as Bakewell explains, ‘the first of the great literary humanists’.

This is the starting point of Sarah Bakewell’s new book, Humanly Possible, a broad and sweeping history of humanism. In this episode she takes us back to these uncertain first moments, when first Petrarch and then Boccaccio started to hunt for ancient manuscripts and to distil their learning into ambitious literary works of their own.

Sarah Bakewell’s new book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking*, Enquiry and Hope. It will be published next week.

*In homage to this freethinking, we’ve given Sarah a little more leeway (three years instead of the usual one) than usual this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 1348. Parma.  The Black Death spreads around the Italian peninsula as well as much of the rest of Europe. The writer Francesco Petrarch, living in Parma, does not catch it, but many of his friends die, including "Laura", the woman who inspired many of his most beautiful love sonnets.

Scene Two: 1349. Parma, Padua and Florence.  This first outbreak of the disease recedes (though not for long).  Driven by a pervasive sense of loss, Petrarch - now mostly living in Padua - starts gathering copies of the letters he had written to friends over the years. 

Scene Three: 1350. Florence. Petrarch and Boccaccio meet. Petrarch is passing through Florence, visiting the city of his exiled family's origins for the first time in his life.

Memento: A cutting from one of Petrarch experiments with one his laurel bushes.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Sarah Bakewell

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

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The relationship between England and India is a deep and complex one. In this episode the academic and author of Courting India, Nandini Das, takes us back to a significant moment at the very beginning of this relationship. She tells us all about Sir Thomas Roe, the courtier who led the first English embassy to India.

Roe's mission was an exciting and a daunting one. Stories about the riches of India had long been exchanged in England and, when he stepped ashore in Surat in 1615, he was able to see the might of the great Mughal Empire for himself. In contrast, England was regarded by many as an island of little consequence.

But, as Das explains, there was one figure that Roe was desperate to impress. This was the richest man in the world, the fourth Mughal emperor, Jahangir. In early 1616, after arriving in Ajmer, he would get his chance.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Brought up in India, she was educated at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, before moving to England for further study. Her book, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire is out this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: 10 January 1616, Mughal imperial court (durbar), Ajmer. The first meeting between Roe and the emperor, Jahangir.

Scene Two: 24 May 1616, imperial private audience chambers, Ajmer. Roe desperately clings on to his English identity and has a problem with a runaway Englishman who wants to enter Mughal service.

Scene Three: 18 December 1616. In the Mughal imperial procession (lashkar) across Rajasthan, following the emperor Jahangir. Roe

Memento: A miniature portrait, belonging to Thomas Roe.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Nandini Das

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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In this deeply moving episode from 2020 the New York Times bestselling author Ariana Neuman told her father's extraordinary story for the very first time. Hans Neumann was a young Jewish man from Prague who managed to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust.

Ariana Neumann grew up in the Venezuela of the 1970s and 1980s. This was a land of possibility and progress. Her father Hans Neumann - a hugely successful industrialist and patron of the arts – epitomised both these characteristics.

But while Hans was outwardly a paragon of success and strength, there were parts of his private self that were unsettling to his close family. He would wake at night screaming in a language his daughter did not understand. He hardly ever mentioned his childhood in central Europe. He never said that he was Jewish. ‘Life,’ he would tell his daughter, ‘was to be lived in the present.’

On his death in September 2001, Ariana discovered a box of papers and photographs that her father had left her. They became the starting point for a personal investigation into her father’s European family and an unspoken history of horrific persecution and enthralling survival during the Holocaust.

This episode of Travels Through Time was recorded on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. During the course of this conversation Ariana guides us back to the drama and tragedy of the year 1944: a defining year for the Neumann family of Prague.

To see Hans’s doll, Zdenka ring and the Jan’s identity card – some of the objects discussed during the course of this conversation – please visit our website.

When Time Stopped was published internationally in February 2020. It was an instant New York Times Bestseller.

Scene One: June 23 1944, Red Cross Visit to the Camp of Terezín, CZ. The place is beautified. Thousands are sent to Auschwitz to ease overcrowding and a charade is enacted to fool the International Red Cross inspectors.

Scene Two: September 29/30 1944, The arrival of transport EI in Auschwitz, Poland.

Scene Three: October 9 1944, Berlin Germany. Hans Neumann has been hiding in plain sight and using a fictitious identity. He receives a summons (issued October 5th) to appear in the Nazi District Court in Prague. Going back to Prague and appearing in court would, almost certainly, mean death.

Memento: The sound of Otto Neumann humming the folk song Golem.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Ariana Neumann

Producer: Maria Nolan

This week we tackle the fascinating and complex relationship between science and religion, in the company of the academic and writer Nicholas Spencer.

Spencer takes us back to a dramatic moment of conflict that began at the end of the 1850s with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. This book ignited a fierce debate about his new theory of natural selection and of humanity’s place in the world.

The feud would become increasingly bitter over the year that followed. It would ultimately lead to the famous Oxford debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) and Bishop “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce in June 1860.

Spencer guides us through all this history, taking us back to meet Darwin himself. He gives us an insight into Darwin's personal life, his relationships with his wife and family and the effect losing his beloved daughter Annie had on his faith in God.

Nicholas Spencer is a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London and director of the think tank Theos, which investigates the place of faith in society. His new book is, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Charles Darwin receiving a letter from clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, in November 1859, congratulating him on The Origin of Species, an advance copy of which he has just read.

Scene Two: The publication of the most controversial book of the age – not On The Origin of Species but Essays and Reviews, in March 1860, igniting a passionate debate about Biblical texts.

Scene Three: The famous Oxford debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) and Bishop “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce in late June 1860.

Memento: One of Charles Darwin’s notebooks, written when he returned from his voyage on the Beagle, as his theory of evolution began to take shape in his mind.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Nicholas Spencer

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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Nothing symbolises the might of imperial Rome like their roads. Expertly engineered and perfectly cambered, they were the arteries of the great empire through which merchants, armies and information flowed.

In this episode we will follow one of those lost roads back in time to the very beginning of the Roman occupation of Britain, in the company of the writer Christopher Hadley. He takes us back to 51 AD, a turning point in the invasion, when Caratacus, King of the Catuvellauni Tribe and leader of the British resistance, was defeated and capitulated to his Roman adversaries.

Christopher Hadley is a journalist and author. His acclaimed first book, Hollow Places, was a Times Book of the Year. The Road, A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past was published recently.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Scene One: Somewhere on the English/Welsh border - Caratacus’ last stand.

Scene Two: Somewhere in northern England - Cartumandua hands Caratacus over to the Romans.

Scene Three: Somewhere in Rome - Caratacus appears before the Emperor Claudius who grants him clemency.

Memento: A rare Caratacus coin.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Christopher Hadley

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

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