History’s Greatest Fails

Elizabeth Day grew up in Belfast and would as a child walk past the most bombed hotel in Europe. Dan Jones recalls a Croatian widow whose husband went out for bread and never returned. In this final episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan and Elizabeth name war as history's ulti ...  Show more

Elizabeth Day grew up in Belfast and would as a child walk past the most bombed hotel in Europe. Dan Jones recalls a Croatian widow whose husband went out for bread and never returned. In this final episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan and Elizabeth name war as history's ulti ...  Show more

If you’re an artist, when would you like recognition to strike? Do you want it to be in your lifetime, only to be forgotten decades after your death? Or do you want to remain undiscovered, with your story potentially echoing for centuries after you’ve been discovered posthumously ...  Show more

If you judge him by his own elaborate metrics, Leonardo da Vinci was a failure. Long before the Mona Lisa became shorthand for genius, Leonardo imagined himself as something else entirely: a military engineer, a designer of bridges and armoured vehicles, a master of siegecraft an ...  Show more

What would you do if your life was omitted, reduced to an overlooked footnote, or filed away as an anomaly? In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth turn a lens on the practice of history itself, interrogating the choices and power structures that have traditionally left women out of t ...  Show more

To love is to risk heartbreak. And while for some, breakups result in renewal, maybe some therapy (or a few months’ spent wallowing), for the historical figures of this episode… a relationship’s end has broken many more things than hearts. In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth disco ...  Show more