Regency Era Sex Ed: Round Two

It's our Regency Era, which means we had to get Vanessa Riley (current Queen of Regency era fiction) on the podcast. This week we're revisiting out conversation from 2023 about her novel Queen of Exiles, about the life of Haiti's Queen Marie-Louise Christophe. It's interesting to ...  Show more

The real Pirates of the Caribbean were Black, and women! And Jacquotte Delahaye was the most famous of them all. Author Vanessa Riley's new novel, Fire Sword and Sea, is a sweeping, immersive saga based on the life of the legendary seventeenth-century pirate Jacquotte Delehaye. V ...  Show more

Our mini-series exploring the worst f*ckboys in history is back!In today's episode, Kate is joined by Dr. David Taylor of Oxford University to get to know the so-called Merry Monarch and the many women in his life.Was it better to be married or be a mistress to Charles II? How ma ...  Show more

The year is 1816, and 18-year-old Mary Shelley has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her sister, Claire. They're on their way to visit Lord Byron's villa in Lake Geneva, Switzerland - and to change the course of literary history. In this episode, Jacke talks to Carol ...  Show more

And we are back again with another week of Herodotus and his Histories. This time, we go backwards to explore how the Persian Empire got power within Asia. Isn't that fun? There certainly will not be any tangents here! No, not at all. Why would you think that?Submit your question ...  Show more

In this episode, Jacke talks to author David Denby about his new book, Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, a group biography (loosely inspired by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians) that describes how four larger-than-life figures upended the restrained culture of ...  Show more