HistoryExtra podcast

For centuries, sailors crossing the Atlantic believed they were not alone – haunted by ghost ships, watched by mermaids, and stalked by sea monsters. Historian Karl Bell talks to Jon Bauckham about th...

Historian Leigh Straw describes one pivotal summer in the life of the Kennedy family. With most of the family in their Cape Cod summer home, the summer of 1944 was marked by personal grief and politic...

Born in the tumultuous 15th century, Margaret Beaufort – mother of Henry VII – endured personal tragedy, dynastic danger, and the ever-shifting fortunes of power. Yet she emerged as one of the most in...

Idi Amin is 20th-century Africa’s most notorious ruler – a cartoonish tyrant who has been bracketed with the likes of Hitler and Stalin. And it’s true that, as Uganda’s dictator for most of the 1970s,...

In the 80 years since Nazi leaders stood in the dock, how has the international community sought to deal with war criminals around the globe? For this concluding episode of our four-part series on the...

The Assassins and the Knights Templar are two of history’s most intriguing, enigmatic and legendary groups. While they may seem vastly different on the surface, their intertwined stories reveal a surp...

For the Allies it was an enormous triumph and for Nazi Germany it was another Stalingrad. But 80 years on, the battle for Tunisia is barely mentioned in popular accounts of the Second World War, havin...

In the tumultuous aftermath of Henry I’s death, England was thrown into one of the most chaotic civil wars in its history – the Anarchy. At the heart of the struggle stood Empress Matilda: daughter of...

William the Conqueror used them to devastating effect in 1066. Robert the Bruce worked out how to neutralise them. And when Richard III was knocked from his, England would never be the same again. Her...

In October 1946, after a trial lasting almost a year, the Nazi leaders on the dock in Nuremberg received their verdicts. But what did the judges decide? And how did the defendants, and the world outsi...