Simon Russell Beale is one of Britain's most recognisable and well-loved actors. He has played many roles on stage, film, television and radio - ranging from Winston Churchill to Stalin, George Smiley to King Arthur. But ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes that rendered him half-blind, he has...

Have you ever wondered about Edgar Ætheling, the fourteen-year-old who took on William the Conqueror? Or about the woeful collapse of the Angevin Empire under King John? Or what about Eleanor Cobham, a noblewoman found guilty of witchcraft for predicting the death of the King? Join Matthew Lewis and the creators of History Hit on a guided tou...

A vast area of Pompeii is being excavated for the first time, revealing astonishing insights into how people really lived. In this revelatory new history, Director of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the untold stories that are at last emerging. Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workm...

'Sir, we are homosexuals . . .' So began the letter penned by Roger Butler and sent to several British newspaper editors - some of whom were so shocked they thought it was a hoax - in June 1960. Writing such a letter seven years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality was a radical and dangerous move. This is the story of the first man to com...

The remarkable true story of America's first women astronauts. When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed too fragile for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA relented and opened the application process to eve...

The best queer history book you'll listen to this year. Shoulder to Shoulder is a love letter to the LGBTQ+ pioneers of solidarity and coalition. Offering a new global look at forgotten moments when those from marginalised backgrounds stood shoulder to shoulder to build a better future for all. Through astounding research and fascinating storytelli...

One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains, flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated citi...

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture...

Towards the end of the 19th century and for the first few years of the 20th, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, 50 years earlier, would have been looked on...

In the winter of 1941 an alien-seeming object was captured in a death-defying dash by an RAF reconnaissance pilot flying a lone unarmed Spitfire across the French coast. Balanced upon the cliffs near Le Havre was what appeared to be a giant convex dish, directed across the Channel at the war-torn British coastline. Might the dish constitute a highl...

An impossible mission in wartime Italy: the next explosive best seller from Damien Lewis. In the hard-fought winter of 1944, the Allies advanced northwards through Italy but stalled on the fearsome mountainous defences of the Gothic Line. Two men were parachuted in, in an effort to break the deadlock. Their mission: to penetrate deep into enemy ter...

With a foreword by Patrick Barkham. And an essay by Welsh hill farmer, Dafydd Morris-Jones. Written on the eve of the Second World War, this memoir tells the remarkable story of how 21-year-old Thomas Firbank decided on impulse to purchase a 2,400-acre hill farm in the rugged, inhospitable mountains of Snowdonia, and how he and his wife struggled t...

The end of the Second World War is in sight. Following the overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin all seek to shape the global future to their own ends and win the race to Berlin. The British launch Operation Market Garden, the greatest airborne operation the world has ever seen. It is a bold roll of the dice, which, if succ...

On June 7th 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamt, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather. It marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when 10,000 Jews fled to Texas in...

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best...

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Be captivated by stories of forbidden love like Patroclus & Achilles (ex...

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Be captivated by stories of forbidden love like Patroclus & Achilles (ex...

From battlefields, cathedrals and museums to castles and stately homes, from the Lancastrians and Yorkists to the Roundheads, Royalists and an abundance of kings called Edward (and Henry!), the history of our island nation unravels its rich tapestry beneath our very feet - if only you know where to look. Take, for instance, the Tower of London, whi...

For decades, the question has haunted the Arab and Muslim world. Was it always so? When did the extremism, intolerance and bloodletting of today displace the region's cultural promise and diversity? In Black Wave, award-winning journalist and author Kim Ghattas argues that the turning point in the modern history of the Middle East can be located in...

In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f--k things up. From Chairm...

Al Murray's passion for military history and the Second World War in particular has always run parallel with his comedy and was brought to the fore with several acclaimed and award-winning television shows and the recent huge success of his podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk which he hosts with fellow bestselling military author James Holland....