The History of Football (Radio Edit)

Greg Jenner is joined in 20th-century America by Dr Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins and comedian Desiree Burch to learn all about singer and Hollywood actress Lena Horne.Born into a middle class Black family in New York, a young Lena Horne soon followed in the footsteps of her actres ...  Show more

Greg Jenner is joined in 17th-century France by Dr Jonathan Spangler and comedian Tom Allen to learn all about Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s younger brother.King Louis XIV is one of the most famous monarchs in French history: the man who built and presided over the glitter ...  Show more

Football, or soccer depending on where you are in the world, is quite unsuitable for women, wouldn’t you agree? No? Well the Football Association thought so when they issued a ban on women’s football in 1921, which stayed in place for fifty years.

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 ...

Football is the most popular sport in the world, and is played anywhere from pitches marked out in desert dust, to warzones with helmets for goalposts. But it’s still predominantly a male sport. So what about the roots of women’s football in the UK? How did social change in the F ...  Show more

With the 2022 FIFA World Cup well underway, the phenomenon of sportswashing is once again in everybody's minds. Autocracies and democracies alike have long relied on major sporting events to shore up their legitimacy and project their presence on the world stage. But why is sp ...