All Episodes

From plague 'searchers' to strawberry birthmarks: a history of women's bodies

The country house at war

The pioneering surgeon who stood up to Rasputin

The stolen Native Americans who shaped US history

Being disabled in the medieval era

Vanilla: a far from ordinary history

Ancient explosives and the philosopher's stone: a history of alchemy

North Korea's religious dictators

Inside Venice’s Jewish ghetto

WW2's bloody battle for Arakan

The Bayeux Tapestry: secrets of the stitchers

How Henry VII seized – and kept – the crown

The Soviet spy who couldn't love

The slave ship that changed history

Have we overlooked England’s local histories?

The making of the modern Middle East

Joan of Arc: inspirational leader or flawed failure?

The forgotten slave traders who shaped Britain

What is ‘Europe’, anyway?

Christianity, conflict and catastrophe: the life of CS Lewis

Was Napoleon III the world's first populist leader?

The Bayeux Tapestry blockbuster at the British Museum

The secrets of our DNA

What's it like to live in a royal palace?

Roman kings: myth, memory and the making of power

Philip Augustus: the Plantagenets’ greatest rival

Laura Ingalls Wilder: life of the week

How bullies shaped 19th-century America

Is there a royal sex scandal hidden in plain sight in the Bayeux tapestry?

Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2?

Did the Catholic Church support Hitler?

Frida Kahlo: life of the week

How the Americas transformed Tudor England

Preview: Master the medieval art of knowing yourself

Have we got ancient women's sexuality all wrong?

Adultery, assassination and Agatha Christie: the dark side of the hotel

Hedy Lamarr: life of the week

How WW2 transformed Asia

Preview: Was Jack the Ripper Queen Victoria's grandson?

How opium became a powerful global commodity

A wild history of partying

Yuri Gagarin: life of the week

How Christianity conquered the Roman empire

The Odyssey’s forgotten epilogue

Why did witches confess?

Inside the Maya storyworld

Zheng Yi Sao: life of the week

The Fifth Crusade: triumph, disaster and the battle for Egypt

Is the Odyssey myth or memory?

Renaissance Italy's firearm revolution

How blood banks saved Britain in WW2

Pericles: life of the week

Did Churchill save the monarchy?

Gods and monsters: the hidden stories of the Odyssey

Preview: Was Elizabeth I one of history’s greatest leaders?

The Bayeux Tapestry's secret code of tyranny and injustice

How to survive a day in the 14th century

Bess of Hardwick: life of the week

Alliance and acrimony: a history of Jewish-Muslim relations

Who wrote the Odyssey?

1966: The World Cup that changed a nation

How Rome really conquered Britain

Edward Colston: life of the week

Was Elizabeth Báthory really a serial killer?

What did the American Revolution really achieve?

The captain's wife who took command

What could you eat in Georgian London?

Pablo Picasso: life of the week

When football became a weapon of the Cold War

How Britain lost America

A history of the US in 100 unexpected objects

An A-Z history of the English alphabet

Abigail Adams: life of the week

The astonishing laws of medieval Wales

Inside the Declaration of Independence

Cannibalism, heartbreak and Madame Guillotine: George Forster's extraordinary life

Charlotte Brontë's life through clothes

Emma Goldman: life of the week

Stealing the V2 rocket: Britain’s secret WW2 intelligence coup

The road to the American Revolutionary War

The protestant missionaries that didn't change the world

Strangers and aliens in Tudor England

Alexander the Great: life of the week

What myths do we tell about royal women?

Cleopatra’s death – and cultural afterlife

Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War

Churchill's toughest decision

Henry Paget: life of the week

The hidden history of female sexual pleasure

Why Cleopatra was more than a bewitching beauty

Better than Bridgerton: the real Georgian masquerade

Weimar's descent from democracy to barbarism

Alan Turing: life of the week

The self-made Marilyn Monroe

Cleopatra’s bloody rise to power

Gullible Georgians: hoaxes in the Enlightenment period

Spies, radicals and deportees: one hotel in wartime Paris

Timur: life of the week

How Orkney became the centre of Viking Age violence

Young Cleopatra: the making of a queen