Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (part one)

In the Regency Era, reputation was all many working-class women had. When Edinburgh schoolteachers Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie were accused of sapphic behaviour by their student Jane Cumming, they lost everything. So they decided to sue their accuser's wealthy grandmother for l ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد

Put on your black turtleneck! Jacke starts the episode with a look at #22 on the list of The Greatest Books of All Time, The Stranger by Albert Camus. Then he talks to Jake Poller about British and American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin wa ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد