The Phoenicians

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of an alliance which transformed the geopolitics of the classical world: the Delian League. Since the start of the 5th Century BCE, city states across Greece had been fighting a series of armed conflicts in the Greco-Persi ...  Show more

At the Hay Festival, Misha Glenny and guests discuss the impact of the Norman invasion on the people and land of Wales and across the modern border with England in what became known as The Welsh Marches, march being a term for a militarized borderland. Hay was one of the first Ma ...  Show more

Imagine you are a traveller sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Based in Tyre, Sido ...

“Carthago delenda est.” Carthage must be destroyed: this was the rallying cry of Cato the Elder, the senator endlessly pushing for war against Rome’s sworn enemy, Carthage. But what are the origins of this supposedly decadent and sinister city, and did the Carthaginians really sa ...  Show more

Perhaps best known from the Biblical tale of David and Goliath, the Philistines were an ancient civilisation who lived on the south coast of Canaan. Despite living over a millennia ago, their name has been rebranded as a description of someone who disregards intellectual pursu ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of histories, dubbed by his detractors as the father of lies. Herodotus (c484 to 425 BC or later) was raised in Halicarnassus in modern Turkey when it was part of the Persian empire and, in the years after the P ...  Show more