Episode #155- What Became of the Benin Bronze...

The only literary sources we have about the Viking settlements west of Greenland come from the Icelandic Sagas. The only problem is that the Sagas can be totally off-the-wall. Corpses reanimate and speak prophecies, giant-eyed doppelgängers vanish into thin air, and one-legged cr ...  Show more

Between the 9th and 11th centuries Norse explorers undertook a series of remarkable journeys through the North Atlantic. Iceland and Greenland were settled by medieval farmers eager to find new uninhabited lands. But just how far west did these seafarer's manage to travel? The un ...  Show more

In 1897 Queen Victoria marked her diamond jubilee and Britain was in a celebratory mood. The British Empire had never been stronger. Few could imagine that this world-spanning empire might very well be peaking. But in 1897 Britain was in no mood for painful self-reflection. Inste ...  Show more

Looting has been a part of warfare since the earliest times. Despite the fact that looting was common for much of history, it was always recognized as an especially harmful and humiliating by-product of armed conflict. By the late 19th century, the looting of sacred objects and c ...  Show more

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in Worl ...  Show more

The Royal Collection is one of the most wide-ranging collections of art and artefacts in the world and provides an intriguing insight into the minds of the Monarchs who assembled it. In this series, BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz encounters dozens of these unique objects - some pr ...  Show more