We have our fair share of bizarre rulers in the twenty-first century, but the subject of today’s episode makes Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Il seem rather tame. According to the Oxford academic and bestselling novelist Harry Sidebottom, our guide this week, the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus was the maddest and baddest of them all.

Heliogabalus turned Rome upside down as he rampaged over political and religious tradition during his lust-fuelled, four-year reign, contributing to the instability and chaos of the later third century AD.

In this special end of year episode, we get into the spirit of Heliogabalus by allowing Harry Sidebottom to trample on our own tradition of choosing just one year in history to travel back to.

Today we visit three separate years, 218, 220 and 222 so we can hear the full extraordinary story he tells in his new book on the maddest emperor of them all.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Sidebottom’s latest book. The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome is out now.

Scene One: 1 May 218. Heliogabalus’ grandmother sneaks him out of Emesa (modern day Homs) in Syria to start the revolt that will elevate him to the position of Emperor of Rome.

Scene Two: Midsummer’s Day 220. Heliogabalus holds a huge parade in Rome to demonstrate his new religion.

Scene Three: March 222. Heliogabalus is murdered on the orders of his grandmother.

Memento: Heliogabalus’ horn.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Harry Sidebottom

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 rivalry between Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger is one of the most intense in political history. Both were high-ranking figures of great gifts, but their personal feud was a powerful factor in the downfall of the Roman Republic.

Joining us in this episode to tell us more about Cato and Caesar’s contrasting characters and the dramatic historical events they lived through is the award-winning author and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, Josiah Osgood.

Osgood takes us back to the year 46BC. Here we see Caesar at his peerless best on the battlefield and then, shortly afterwards, we analyse Cato’s shocking and defiant response.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Osgood’s latest book. Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic is out now.

Show notes

Scene One: April 6, 46 BC, the Battle of Thapsus, North Africa.

Scene Two: April 10, 46 BC, Utica, North Africa: Cato’s suicide.

Scene Three: September, 46 BC, Rome, Caesar’s Egyptian triumph.

Memento: The sign that was paraded through the streets of Rome during Caesar’s Asia Minor Triumph with the words ‘Veni, vidi, vici’.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Josiah Osgood

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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In this episode Philip Mansel takes us inside the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, probably the most lavish, extraordinary royal palace ever built.

Versailles was a place where the fun never stopped. There were parties, plays, banquets, firework displays and concerts. Life at court was a giddy carousel of extravagance, culture, beauty, wit, sophistication and intrigue.

As the decorated historian Philip Mansel tells us in this sparkling episode, Versailles was the centre of power, politics and pleasure. It was the home of the royal family and the nobility, a hotbed of conspiracy and scandal.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Mansel’s award-winning book, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV.

Scene One: 17 November 1700. Louis XIV presents his seventeen-year-old grandson to assembled diplomats and courtiers as Philip V King of Spain, by the will of God and the will of the nation.

Scene Two: 1700. Military review of Louis XIV’s guards, the special regiment of cavalry nobles whom he loved and who formed the foundation of his power.

Scene Three: 1700. A procession in front of Louis at the Palace of Versailles of freed white French slaves, who had been captured by Algerian pirates in the Mediterranean.

Memento: One of the magnificent books from the Royal Printing Press.

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Philip Mansel

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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As the English football team prepare for one of the most important games in their recent history at the Qatar World Cup, one of the nation’s finest sports writers takes us back to the year Gareth Southgate’s players are trying to emulate: 1966.

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England’s performance in the first World Cups was underwhelming. For a nation that prided themselves on having invented the game, on successive occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s the English players were left to watch as West Germany and Brazil lifted the trophy.

1966 brought a chance to change all this. With the tournament being played at home, with a disciplined managed in Alf Ramsey and a fine crop of players including the Charlton brothers, as the summer progressed the supporters’ hopes rose. Here was the opportunity to realise Ramsey's bold prediction from 1963 that England were going to win.

Paul Hayward, who for many years was the Chief Sports Writer at the Daily Telegraph, takes us back to that fabled summer in English sporting history. In doing so he describes what football meant to the English, and how the English had forged a national identity around their beloved sport.

Paul Hayward is the author of England Football: The Biography

Scene One: Early summer 1966. England training camp at Hendon.

Scene Two: 30 June 1966. The cusp of the World Cup final.

Scene Three: July. Ashington, Northumberland. Jack and Bobby Charlton return to their home town after the historic victory.

Memento: A vinyl pressing of Revolver signed by The Beatles

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Paul Hayward

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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In this special episode the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan take us back into Australian history in three enchanting pieces of music. Each track features on their acclaimed album, This Is Us, which arose out of a collaborative project with the National Museum of Australia.

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Over the past two decades the Grigoryan Brothers have established themselves as among the finest Australian musicians of their generation. Several years ago, following a chance meeting at a concert in Adelaide, they were invited to begin an unusual collaboration with the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

To mark its twentieth birthday the museum invited the brothers to select a series of objects from its collections and to use them as the inspiration for a series of original compositions. The project went forward during the Covid 19 Pandemic and in 2021 the resulting album, This Is Us, was published.

The music engages with a broad range of fascinating Australian histories, from ones connected with the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Strait peoples, to the cricketing feats of Donald Bradman, and those of the nineteenth-century astronomers who first scoured the southern skies.

In a departure from our usual format, we did not ask Slava and Leonard to pick one calendar year. Instead we invited them to play three songs and to tell us about the objects that inspired them. 

This Is Us by the Grigoryan Brothers is streaming now. Read more about the project at the National Museum of Australia’s website.

Song One: ‘Love Token’ – inspired by the convicts’ love tokens.

Song Two: ‘Stolen’ – inspired by a gate salvaged from a children’s home.

Song Three: ‘Fortunate Wind’ – inspired by an anchor belonging to HMS Investigator

Years: c.1932 / 1950s.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Production: Matt Hiley in Sydney / Maria Nolan in London

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

This week, the performer and author Elizabeth Wilson speaks to Artemis from the offices of Yale University Press in Bedford Square. Elizabeth tells us about the early life of a remarkable pianist, Maria Yudina, who rose to fame in Stalin’s Russia.

Maria Yudina was born in 1899 to a Jewish family in Nevel, a small town which now sits close to Russia’s border with Belarus. Legend has it that Maria was Stalin’s favourite pianist. Those who have seen Armando Iannucci’s satirical film The Death of Stalin may remember the opening scene in which a pianist is forced to repeat her live performance so that a recording can be made of it and sent to Stalin. As Elizabeth explains in her new biography of the musician, Playing with Fire, the provenance of this story and whether it is about Maria is unclear. However, there is no shortage of fascinating and true stories about Maria, as Elizabeth shows us in this conversation.

Maria came of age as the February revolution broke out in St Petersburg, where she was studying music. She took part briefly – even accidentally firing a rifle through a ceiling – before being questioned by a teacher from the conservatoire where she was studying. For most of her life though, Maria wasn’t a revolutionary but an intellectual. Her social circle was made up of the leading figures of Russia’s intelligentsia, including Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. 

In this episode we visit Maria in 1921, the year she graduated from the conservatoire and was appointed as a member of staff aged just 21. It was also a year in which the relationship between Russia’s new revolutionary state and the country’s artists and intellectuals felt uneasy and, at times, destructive. 

Show notes:

Scene One: Maria’s graduation ceremony.

Scene Two: Maria’s debut performance in Petrograd, which coincides with the poet Alexander Blok’s death and funeral. 

Scene Three: The end of the civil war and the introduction of NEP.

Memento: A chess set which shows pieces representing 2 sides of the Russian Civil War.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Elizabeth Wilson

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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On 2 November 1967 Winnie Ewing shocked the political establishment when she won the Scottish seat of Hamilton for the Scottish National Party. As today’s guest, Professor Murray Pittock explains, so began a month that would radically re-shape modern British politics.

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For British politics the 1960s was a testing time. While the country experienced its fabled cultural flowering, it simultaneously had to come to terms with its reduced place in the world. Decolonisation was going ahead at pace. Sterling was losing its power as a currency. In geo-politics Britain did not know where to turn: to the United States, or towards Europe and the EEC.

In this episode Murray Pittock shows how Britain was forced to confront all of these issues within the space of one single month. November 1967 opened with a political shock, when the young politician Winnie Ewing won a bi-election for the Scottish National Party. During her campaign she made use of a gripping slogan: ‘Stop the World: Scotland Wants to Get On.’

Here was an early sign of something to come. And as the SNP rose north of the border, more trouble was simmering to the south in Westminster. Soon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, would be obliged to resign. And in Europe, too, Charles de Gaulle was poised to make matters still worse.

Professor Murray Pittock is one of Scotland’s foremost living historians. He is the Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Pro-Vice Principal. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which is Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present.

Scene One: 2 November 1967: Winnie Ewing wins the Hamilton by-election a total surprise, with the victory slogan ‘Stop the World: Scotland wants to get on’.

Scene Two: 18 November 1967: sterling devalued against the US $ by 14%; Chancellor of the Exchequer resigns.

Scene Three: 27 November 1967: UK application to join EEC vetoed for a second time by de Gaulle.

Memento: $1 Silver Certificate banknote

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Professor Murray Pittock

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 week the Roman historian and archaeologist Jane Draycott takes us to meet one of history’s most glamorous and infamous couples, Antony and Cleopatra. 

Show notes

People/Social

This Remembrance Week the best-selling historian James Holland takes us back to a crucial year in the Second World War. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers.

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On the damp and blustery morning of 6 June 1944 the Sherwood Rangers fought their way onto Gold Beach. An armoured regiment, filled with Sherman tanks, the Sherwood Rangers had already had an exhausting war. From Palestine to North Africa, the young men in its ranks had been involved in much bitter fighting. Now, as D-Day began, the regiment began its bloodiest campaign yet.

This week’s guest, James Holland, takes us back to that time. He tells us about some of the Sherwood Rangers’ memorable individuals – men like the charismatic Stanley Christopherson and the awe-inspiring John Semken.

He explains the dilemma that confronted the Rangers as they tried to establish a beachhead on D-Day and he takes us back to a moment of huge personal bravery several weeks later as the Battle for Normandy played out.

Last of all, we see the Rangers on Christmas Day – exhausted, depleted but still with their humour and humanity.

The stories that feature in this week’s episode come from James Holland’s latest book. Brothers in Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment's Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day .

Scene One: Tuesday, 6 June - Gold Beach, Normandy

Scene Two: Monday, 26 June - Rauray Ridge, Normandy

Scene Three: Monday, 25 December - Schinnen, Netherlands

Memento: Sgt. George Dring’s tank Akilla

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: James Holland

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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As 1945 began the greatest conflict in human history was drawing to a close. But with the war in the west almost over, a new question was increasingly being asked. It was one to which Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt all had different answers. What was going to happen next?

In this episode the million-copy bestselling author Giles Milton takes us back to some key moments in 1945. At Yalta on the Crimean peninsula and later in the ruins of Berlin, the shape of the post war world – the world we know today – was beginning to take shape.

What is clear now was not so then. Were the Allies really friends or were, as Churchil worried to Anthony Eden, they hurtling towards a third world war? Arriving in Berlin at the start of July 1945, the US army colonel Frank Howley feared much the same. As Milton explains, it was Howley who saw before almost anyone else that the Germans had ceased to be enemies and the Russians had ceased to be friends.

The characters and stories that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time form part of Milton’s latest book. Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World.

Show notes

Scene One: 4 February 1945. Yalta. Opening of the Crimea Conference

Scene Two: 2 May 1945. Berlin. Yevgeny Khaldei takes a photograph of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag

Scene Three: 1 July 1945. Berlin. Colonel Howley arrives

Memento: A little of the Schliemann Gold

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Giles Milton

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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