The West's enduring fascination with Asia

We might picture Charlotte Brontë's life as an isolated one, separated from much of the world and its fashions as she whiled away the hours in her father's Haworth parsonage. But the truth, as Eleanor Houghton tells Lauren Good, is very different. By exploring the clothes Charlot ...  Show more

Anarchist, feminist, revolutionary: 19th-century activist and writer Emma Goldman emigrated from the Russian empire to the United States as a teenager, and spent decades challenging power and convention. In this episode, Ruth Kinna tells Danny Bird about Goldman's extraordinary s ...  Show more

There's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even ...  Show more

The Ottoman Empire was gigantic; at one point it reached the walls of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and beyond. It was established at the end of the 13th century with its centre in what is now modern Turkey. It held swathes of Europe for centuries right up to the First World War. ...

Born on the Western edge of an empire that stretched all the way to India, Herodotus was a Greek historian of the 5th century BC. His major work The Histories, a long and detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars and the cultures of the ancient world, is considered the founding ...  Show more

How can you condense the history of the world into a book? Well-celebrated historian Simon Sebag Montefiore does just that in his new epic. He takes Dan on an exhilarating journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mug ...