Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, half his age, and gave birth to their son Henry ...Show more
The Columbian Exchange
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. That was when Columbus reached the Bahamas, a time when Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students for ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war and the social unrest that followed, as the French capital was cut off from the rest of the country and food was scarce. When the French government surrendered Paris to the Prussians, power gravitat ...Show more
The Russian civil war: How the Soviets rose to power
The Russian Civil war was a struggle for power at every level – from the villages to the imperial centre, with more than 11 foreign powers involved as well as nationalists, from Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, fighting for independence. This conflict, which took place a hu ...Show more
*Content Warning - This episode contains references to rape and suicide* The Russian Civil War was a brutal episode in the rise of Bolshevik Russia. Taking place between 1917 and 1922 (after the perhaps better known, Russian Revolution) it pitted the Communist Red Army, led by Vl ...Show more