Final Days of Rasputin

What’s better than a witch story on Halloween? Today, we’ve got a special episode from Cautionary Tales’ Tim Harford to share. Back in 1612 Lancashire, a chance roadside argument between a peddler and a teenage girl spirals into England's most notorious witch trial, after the ped ...  Show more

We're celebrating Maddy's new documentary all about London's most famous ghost - the ghost of Cock Lane! It's out today on History Hit - https://www.historyhit.com/This is a rerun of our episode from earlier this year promoting Maddy's new book 'Hoax: Truth & Lies In The Age Of E ...  Show more

The legend of Rasputin's death goes that he survived poisoning, being shot in the head before being thrown through a hole in the ice in the Neva River, where he finally died by drowning. But Rasputin biographer Douglas Smith, Dan's guest today, says that isn't what happened. H ...

There are few twentieth century figures as mysterious as Grigori Rasputin. The Siberian mystic has been portrayed as a scheming dark magician who seduced the Russian Queen and made a cuckold of Tsar Nicholas II. He's been blamed for everything from the First World War to the Bols ...  Show more

Was Rasputin really Russia’s greatest love machine? Did he have any healing powers? And why might his penis be pickling in a jar?In this episode, we are drawing this mystical man out of his cloud of green smoke to find out which of the things we know about him might actually be t ...  Show more