In this episode the cultural historian Mike Jay takes Peter back to the high Victorian Age to see how a pioneering group of scholars and artists experimented with mind altering drugs.

Jay labels these characters 'psychonauts'. These were daring, romantic figures like Sigmund Freud who championed cocaine as a stimulant, and William James whose experiments with nitrous oxide brought new insights into human consciousness.

Others at this time used drugs more informally. One such person was Robert Louis Stevenson. Suffering from poor health in the mid-1880s he took advantage of the powerful drugs that were easily accessible. A result of this, Jay explains, is Dr Jeykill and Mr Hyde, one of the great short stories in English literature.

Mike Jay is the author of Psychnauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind.

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

Scene One: January 1885, Vienna - Sigmund Freud publishes his self-experiments with cocaine.

Scene Two: March 31st 1885, Cambridge, Mass - William James in his study, corresponding with Benjamin Blood and Edmund Gurney about nitrous oxide.

Scene Three: September 1885, Bournemouth - RL Stevenson writes Jekyll & Hyde in three days.

Memento: A branded Merck vial of cocaine 

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Mike Jay

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_

See where 1885 fits on our Timeline

In this lively episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr David Veevers takes us to the heart of the seventeenth century to visit three key locations in which the British Empire was being formed, challenged and resisted. 

First, we head to the Deccan Plateau of the Indian Subcontinent to witness a dramatic stand off between the Mughal and Maratha Empires. It would set off a series of events which would eventually lead to the English East India Company acquiring a colony of its own in the region. Next, we cross continents and oceans to meet the Indigenous Kalinago of the Eastern Caribbean as they sign a treaty with the English and French. And finally, David takes us to the west coast of Africa where the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa is launched – an operation that would soon gain a monopoly over the trade in enslaved people in West Africa.

These stories represent just a select few from David’s brilliant new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire. It’s a work of history that challenges our idea of the empire as one in which the British came, saw and conquered.

Dr David Veevers is an award-winning historian and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bangor, and was formerly a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. 

Show Notes

Scene One: January, 1660, Deccan. The Mughal Empire invade the emerging Maratha Empire, setting off a series of events that lead to the sack of Surat and the quest of the English East India Company to acquire a colony of its own in India.

Scene Two: March, 1660, Guadeloupe. An Anglo-French delegation conclude a treaty with the Indigenous Kalinago of the Eastern Caribbean to partition the region between them.

Scene Three: December, 1660, London and West Africa. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa is launched, eventually gaining a monopoly over the trade in enslaved people in West Africa.

Momemto: A silver cup that the British allege is stolen by Powhatan people.

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_

See where 1660 fits on our Timeline

This week we head to the turbulent world of sixteenth century France to meet three fascinating queens whose lives were inextricably linked – Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots. They are the subject of our guest today, Leah Redmond Chang's, new book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power.

'The royal body exists to be looked at,' Hilary Mantel wrote in her essay "Royal Bodies". For a royal woman especially, this has meant that the most intimate parts of her biology have been closely observed and occasionally used to alter the course of her country's history. Whether she had started menstruating, was fertile, was able to sexually satisfy her husband or provide him with a son and heir could all be details on which massive political decisions were based. As Leah Redmond Chang shows in her wonderful new book, these details of women's lives aren't a sideshow to the main event but, in fact, central to the action.

In this episode we visit 1559 to witness the unexpected and violent death of Henry II of France in a jousting competition. It was a tragic accident that would forever change the lives of his wife, Catherine de' Medici, his daughter, Elisabeth de Valois and his daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots.

Show notes

Scene One: June 30-July 10, 1559, Paris. The tragic and violent death of Henry II of France in a jousting accident after the wedding of his daughter, Elisabeth de Valois.

Scene Two: Mid-July 1559, the Louvre. The Spanish Duke of Alba visits the mourning chambers of Catherine de’ Medici.

Scene Three: Late November, 1559, Châtelleraut. The Departure of Catherine’s daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, for Spain.

Momento: Henry II's faulty jousting helmet, and/or the first letter Catherine de' Medici sent to her daughter as she was on her journey to Spain to meet her husband. 

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_

See where 1559 fits on our Timeline

The Renaissance was stirred into life by many figures of genius. In this episode Peter meets up with the art historian, Andrew Spira, to talk about three of the great masters in one of the most captivating of years.

In different ways Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer were finding new stories to tell in their paintings. Spira evaluates all of this for us and he detects the emergence of something else that would be of central importance in the emerging Western society. This was a revolutionary new conception: 'the self'.

Andrew Spira is the author of The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art, among other works. He is also one of the esteemed tour directors at Ace Culutral Tours.

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

Scene One: Sandro Botticelli's Mystic Nativity

Scene Two: Pietro Perugino's Resurrection

Scene Three: Albrecht Dürer's Self-portrait

Memento: A Dürer print

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Andrew Spira

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_

See where 1500 fits on our Timeline

For this week's episode Peter headed in to Penguin's offices in London to meet Serhii Plokhy and talk to him about his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War. They discussed how a culture of secrecy continues to define Russian society as it did before with the Soviets. They looked at the progress of the war and Putin's failed attempt to found a 'Eurasian Union'.

Following this Serhii revisits the dramatic events of 1991, when he watched on as the Soviet Union collapsed in the most unexpected of ways.

Serhii Plokhy has been described as 'The world's foremost historian of Ukraine' by the Financial Times. His new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, is available in hardback now.

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

Scene One: August 1991. Moscow during the attempted coup

Scene Two: Late August. Edmonton, Canada. The Canadian prime minister pledges to recognize Ukrainian independence

Scene Three: 25 December. Mikhail Gorbachev's Resignation Address

Memento: Serhii Plokhy's aeroplane ticket from 1991

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Serhii Plokhy

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_

See where 1991 fits on our Timeline

It's time to delve into our archive. In this brilliantly descriptive and entertaining episode, the award-winning writer and satirist Craig Brown takes us on a cultural tour of 1963. We discuss the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles meteoric rise to fame and the assassination of JFK.

For much, much more about all this and to be the first to see the amazing new colourised photograph of the Beatles in Washington DC at their first US concert – head to our website.

Scene One: August 1963, lingering with the robbers in their hide-out at Leatherslade Farm.

Scene Two: Second half of 1963, Jane Asher's family home, Wimpole Street, to see/be Paul McCartney, living with the Ashers, at the time of the first flush of the Beatles’ success.

Scene Three: November 23 1963. In the Texas School Book depository with Lee Harvey Oswald as he shoots President Kennedy.

Memento: Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Yesterday’

Presenter: Peter Moore

Interview: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Craig Brown

Producer: Maria Nolan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

Podcast Partner: ColorGraph

Craig Brown’s book One, Two, Three Four: The Beatles in Time is available now from 4th Estate books.

In this episode of Travels Through Time the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin takes Artemis on a tour of the debauched and dangerous world of Roman politics. We meet Messalina, one of the Rome's most notorious women, and follow her through the events of 48 AD that would lead to her eventual downfall and execution.

For over two thousand years Messalina has been characterised as the scheming and sexually rapacious wife of Emperor Claudius. In one famous story she attends a brothel to take part in a twenty four hour sex competition. But now, in her wonderful new biography, Messalina: A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery, Honor Cargill-Martin challenges this version of the empress's life. In particular, Honor seeks to rescue Messalina's reputation from some of the more egregiously sexist stereotypes that powerful women throughout history have often borne the brunt of.

As Honor shows us in this episode, Messalina certainly wasn't a saint, but she was a serious political operator who had survived and thrived in the volatile world of the first century Roman Empire. 

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

Scene One: Autumn 48 AD, Imperial Palace, Palatine Hill. The emperor Claudius is out of Rome. Messalina, the handsome Gaius Silius, and their friends are partying in celebration of the wine harvest. This, her enemies will argue, is actually a bigamous wedding party.

Scene Two: A few days later in autumn 48 AD, From the Via Ostiensis to the Praetorian Camp. Messalina stands accused of adultery, bigamy, and treason. She tries to beg Claudius to spare her life but is blocked. The freedman Narcissus shows Claudius evidence of her adulteries before taking him to the Praetorian Camp where he executes a string of her alleged lovers.

Scene Three: New Years Day 49 AD, Claudius marries Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero. Lucius Silanus – Messalina’s daughter’s fiancé, now accused of incest to clear the way for her to marry Nero – commits suicide as the morning of the wedding dawns.

Memento: Nero's golden snakeskin bracelet. 

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_

See where 48 AD fits on our Timeline

Today Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two.

Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands.

The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believe that it was true. But, as Churchill learned at a dramatic meeting in Whitehall in June 1940, the beams were scientifically plausible. The man who told him this was an extraordinary 28-year-old physicist. His name was RV Jones.

RV Jones is the central character in Tom Whipple’s enthralling new book. The Battle of the Beams: The Secret Science of Radar That Turned the Tide of WW2 is out this week.

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

Scene One: 21 June 1940. RV Jones attends a meeting at the cabinet room in Whitehall

Scene Two: June 1940. With Flight Lieutenant Bufton/Corporal Mackie on a mission to find Jones’s ‘beams’ over Britain

Scene Three: 6 November 1940. At the crash site of a Heinkel III bomber at Chesil Beach in Dorset

Memento: Vera Cain’s (RV Jones’s wife) diary

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Tom Whipple

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_

See where 1940 fits on our Timeline

It has been said that the past is another country, but the events we discuss in this episode feel all too familiar. Media interference in elections, Russian influence on Western politics, controversial immigration policy and the technology industry are all as close to the top of the agenda today as there were in 1924.

Today Violet is joined on a tour back to 1924 by the celebrated writer Simon Winchester. Simon is one of the great literary figures of his generation. His career as a journalist and an author spans the past half century, from reports on the Troubles in Northern Ireland to pioneering works of creative non-fiction like Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Born in Britain, in this episode he joins Violet from his home in rural Massachusetts.

Simon’s latest book, which has just been published, Knowing What We Know, The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic takes us from ancient Babylon to Chat GPT, analysing many of the subjects that are discussed here.

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

Also, if you want to have a look - here's the Sandisfield Times!

Scene One: 25 October 1924, the Zinoviev Letter is published in the British press, setting Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour Party up for election disaster.

Scene Two: 1924. In New York City, the creation of IBM – International Business Machines.

Scene Three: 1924. In Washington, the Asian Exclusion Act passes through Congress, enshrining anti-immigration policy and racism into law.

Memento: IBM ‘golf ball’ font attachment for typewriter.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Simon Winchester

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_

See where 1924 fits on our Timeline

England in the mid sixteenth century was filled with drama and novelty. As conspiracies played out and a new queen sought to established herself on the throne, a glamorous new technology was emerging in the fashionable world.

In this fascinating episode, Rebecca Struthers, the author of Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time, takes us back to the high Elizabethan Age to tell us all about the early days of watchmaking.

The stories that feature in this episode are covered in much more depth in Rebecca’s acclaimed new book. Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time is published this week.

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

Scene One: 1572. With Mary Queen of Scots in Sheffield Castle.

Scene Two: 1572. With Queen Elizabeth I in Whitehall.

Scene Three: 24/5 August 1572. Paris. St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Memento: Queen Elizabeth’s watch.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Rebecca Struthers

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Hodder & Stoughton

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

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

See where 1572 fits on our Timeline