From Ancient Ireland to Westeros: A History o...

Family history is often where the heroic version of the past falls apart.We like to imagine our ancestors standing on the right side of history. Someone in the GPO in 1916 or in the IRA in 1920. We like to think they made brave choice when it mattered. But most people were not he ...  Show more

In the summer of 1907, the Irish Crown Jewels were stolen from the heart of British power in Ireland, under the noses of the police, the military and the political establishment. Worth £50,000 at the time, their disappearance made headlines around the world. It was also deeply hu ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore dragons, literally and symbolically potent creatures that have appeared in many different guises in countries and cultures around the world. Sometimes compared to snakes, alligators, lions and even dinosaurs, dragons have appeared on clay tablets i ...  Show more

Take dinosaur bones, snake poison, volcanic lava, fear of the unknown. Mix it all together and you have a dragon!

Today we're finding out about the ancient origins of dragons and why there used to be a much wider variety of dragon types than we see today. Our guide i ...

From Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast, the roots of fairy tales stretch back thousands of years — to the dawn of Indo-European languages and beyond.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by author and journalist Laura Spinney to explore the origins of mytholo ...  Show more

We live in the golden age of dragons – they appear in Game of Thrones, most film adaptations of the works of J.R.R. Tolkein, and nearly everything tangentially related to fantasy. They date back millennia, appearing in every cultures mythology, from ancient Greece and India to me ...  Show more