Short History Of...

From the day he burst onto the scene, Muhammad Ali changed boxing history. But he also influenced the American civil rights movement, the perception of Islam, the view of the war in Vietnam, and the s...

From Noiser, comes the brand-new podcast Detectives Don’t Sleep. The show takes you beyond the police tape to shadow the real detectives who worked history’s most intriguing cases. In this taster epis...

When Edward Cope and OC Marsh began their race to identify and name new species of dinosaur in the 1870s, palaeontology was still a new discipline. Before these two wealthy men entered the field, just...

Frida Kahlo is as much a modern icon for her personal flair as she is for her paintings. But how did her style develop, and what did she intend it to communicate? What was so subversive about her work...

Though St Patrick is honoured by millions of revellers worldwide every year, few know more about him than the popular myths concerning shamrocks and snakes. The real story of St Patrick reads like an ...

The Trans-Siberian railway is the longest train line in the world, spanning 5700 miles, seven time zones, and straddling two continents. Though today’s passengers on the week-long journey can enjoy re...

Since it was created 900 years ago, the Bayeux Tapestry has survived war, revolution and the ravages of time. This fragile piece of linen, almost seventy metres long, depicts the events leading up to ...

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is one of the most widely published books in history. This story of a man stranded alone on an island is said to be second only to the Bible in its number of ...

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. 500 years old and just 77x53cm in size, it is kept behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre museum in Paris, where it draws 10 mil...

In 1947, the British divided up its former colony of India into two provinces. What followed was confusion, chaos, and an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence that left up to a million dead. 15 mi...