The History of Football (Radio Edit)

In this special live episode, recorded at the 2023 Hay Festival, Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Gillian Kenny and comedian Seán Burke to learn about medieval Irish folklore.Greg and his guests discuss the lore and stories from Gaelic Irish culture. Gaelic culture remained the domina ...  Show more

Greg Jenner is joined in medieval Spain by historian Professor Nora Berend and comedian Toussaint Douglass to learn about the colourful life and afterlife of the warrior known as El Cid. El Cid – real name Rodrigo Díaz – was a mercenary in eleventh-century Spain who fought for bo ...  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 ...