Travels Through Time

Bernard Cornwell: The Battle of Waterloo (1815)

One of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo.
Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Over the course of twelve or so hours on a Sunday at the start of summer, these two commanders met on a battle in modern-day Belgium, to settle the future of Europe.
For a battle so vast is size and significance, it still has some elusive elements. Historians cannot agree on when it started. The movement of the troops is still subject to debate. Wellington, who might have been best qualified to answer these riddles, preferred not to speak of Waterloo. His famously laconic verdict was simply that it was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.’
Few people are as qualified to analyse this tangled history as Bernard Cornwall. For forty years he has been writing about this period of history through his ‘Sharpe’ series of books.
As Cornwall publishes his first new Sharpe novel for fifteen years, we take the opportunity to ask him about the battle that was central to all. Over a brilliantly analytical hour, he walks us through the battlefield, in three telling scenes.
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Click here to order Bernard Cornwell’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
Show Notes
Scene One: Sunday June 18th, 11.10 am.  Napoleon orders his grand battery to start firing
Scene Two: Sunday June 18th, 8.00 pm. Napoleon sends the Imperial Guard to save the battle.
Scene Three: Sunday June 18th, 10.00 pm.  Wellington weeps over the casualties.
Memento: A heavy cavalry sword, carried in an attack at Waterloo
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Bernard Cornwell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Stephen Greenblatt: The Death of Christopher Marlowe (1593)

Welcome to Season Five! In this first episode we sit down with one of the world’s finest historians. Stephen Greenblatt takes us back to the late sixteenth century to witness the death of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
In 1593 Marlowe was the toast of London. Thousands flocked to the theatres that lined the River Thames to see his hit plays, The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus and Tamberlaine. Then, one spring afternoon, Marlowe was killed in an altercation at the home of Dame Eleanor Bull house in Deptford.
The facts of what happened that day have been contested ever since. Today Marlowe’s death is considered one of the great mysteries in literary history. In this episode of Travels Through Time, Greenblatt takes us back to a time of religious fervour, spies and suspicion, to weigh the evidence.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: 30 May 1593. Marlowe meets three others at a house belonging to Eleanor Bull in Deptford, a busy port to the east of the city of London.
Scene Two: 5 May 1593. A placard is found pinned to a church used by Dutch immigrants threatening them with death if they did not leave the country and signed ‘Tamburlaine’.
Scene Three: New Year 1593/4. The Earl of Essex accuses the Queen’s personal physician, Rodrigo Lopez, of plotting to poison her, resulting in his trial and death.
Memento: The political climate of 1593 as a warning today.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Professor Stephen Greenblatt
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Season Five Trailer!

Hello to one and all! Almost two months has whizzed by since we rounded off our fourth season with Maximilien Robespierre’s execution in Revolutionary Paris. In that time we’ve had a good rest, spent lots of time reading and now we’re back to start all over again.
Our new season of recordings will begin this coming Tuesday with a fascinating conversation between Violet Moller and one of the world’s greatest living scholars: the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Professor Stephen Greenblatt.
Thereafter we’ll be off to the Battle of Waterloo, to Sicily and Australia, Ancient Egypt and Modern London, and many other places besides.
New episodes will be released on Tuesdays and to get the first news of them make sure you subscribe to our feeds on Apple Podcasts (UK, US, AU), Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you get your podcasts.
We hope you enjoy this little trailer. See you soon!

Colin Jones: The Fall of Robespierre (1794)

227 years to the day since Maximilien Robespierre went to the guillotine we investigate the circumstances of his downfall.
In this brilliantly analytical episode, Professor Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, takes us back to one of the most dramatic episodes in all political history: 9-10 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27-28 July in ours.
As Jones explains, Robespierre began 9 Thermidor feeling relatively secure as he went to sleep in his austere lodgings near the Place de la Révolution. By the time the sun set into the summer horizon, his position was parlous. The next day he would be dead.
The story and characters that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time are drawn from Jones’s forthcoming book, The Fall of Robespierre: twenty four hours in Revolutionary Paris, which will soon be published by Oxford University Press.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: 12 midnight 8-9 Thermidor: Robespierre in his lodgings.
Scene Two: Some time in the evening – maybe around 9 pm – in the Place de la Maison Commune (Place de l’Hotel de Ville), a National Guard company discussing what is going on and what decision they should make over who to support.
Scene Three: Robespierre at midnight 9-10 Thermidor: reflecting on the day and his and the Revolution’s future.
Memento: Robespierre’s last letter.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Professor Colin Jones
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Alex Renton: Blood Legacy (1839)

How does a person reckon with a disturbing episode in their family’s past? For the journalist and historian Alex Renton, this question became acute five years ago when he realised the extent of his family’s involvement with slavery. In his book, Blood Legacy, Renton decided to confront this history head-on.
As Renton describes in this episode, his approach is unusual in a British society that either avoids the subject of slavery, or prefers to recast the story in the celebratory terms of William Wilberforce and the Abolition Movement.
The reality, however, is not so comfortable. Renton takes us back to the 1830s, to the very moment slavery was abolished across the British Empire. He explains that during this time pragmatism was at play as well as principle, and that while very many families lost their slaves, they also became spectacularly rich.
Alex Renton is a campaigning journalist working on poverty, development, the environment, food culture and food policy. He has won awards for investigative journalism, war reporting and food writing.
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery is an account of his own family’s involvement in slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries. 
More about this episode and the subject matter it engages with will be shortly be available on website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: August 1st 1838, Falmouth, Jamaica. William Knibb and his congregation meet to bury a coffin containing a whip, chains and an iron punishment collar. An inscription by the burial reads: 'Colonial Slavery died 31st July 1838, aged 276.'
Scene Two: August 28th 1839, Ayrshire, Scotland. The Eglinton Tournament begins.
Scene Three: 1839, Rochdale. The founders of the Anti-Corn Law League, Richard Cobden and John Bright deliver their first speeches in what would become one of the most successful campaigns of the 19th century. The trade reforms they campaigned for would destroy the sugar island economies and put most of the newly liberated people out of work and into desperate poverty for the next 50 years.
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Alex Renton
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Ellen Alpsten: The Tsarinas and Peter the Great (1709)

According to one critic, the world the novelist Ellen Alpsten conjures in her book The Tsarina's Daughter makes Game of Thrones 'look like a nursery rhyme.'
This world - the Russia of Peter the Great - is our destination in this week's episode. Peter the Great is known as the man who struggled in the early eighteenth-century to transform his country into a modern, West-facing nation by defeating the Swedes, founding St Petersburg, and creating a navy.
Yet his much-celebrated achievements should be considered alongside the conditions of the Russian people at this time. Russia was a land whose greatest natural resource were its beleaguered inhabitants. Here were millions of serfs whose disposable lives made anything possible for its omnipotent ruler, the Tsar.
Everything that belonged to a Russian belonged first and foremost to him. And with a nation of slaves at his beck and call, pretty much anything could be achieved through ruthlessness and ambition.   
For the women around him, however, the world was quite different. Kept as private possessions, hidden away in the great palaces and stately homes of the aristocracy, they were seen only by their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Uneducated, isolated, and entirely dependent on the will of the men around them.
Even so, many did manage to lead astonishing lives. It is these women whose stories Ellen Alpsten tells us all about, as we venture back to the year 1709.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: The battlefield outside the Ukrainian city of Poltava
Scene Two: The Red Square outside the Kremlin fortress
Scene Three: A bedchamber in the magical timber palace of Kolomenskoye
Memento: Elisabeth’s St Nicholas amulet, studded with diamonds, which she wore around her neck for protection.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Ellen Alpsten
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Alasdair Cross: The Spitfire and the Schneider Trophy (1925)

This week marks the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain. In that perilous moment of the Second World War, with the Nazi forces gathered just across the English Channel, the British people put their faith in the pilots of the RAF and that most captivating of aeroplanes: the Spitfire.
The Spitfire is widely known as a masterpiece of British engineering. It could fly at speeds of around 400mph and it had enormous dexterity, making it a formidable foe in a dogfight. But where did these qualities come from? In today’s episode the writer and radio producer Alasdair Cross takes us back to 1925’s Schneider Trophy to show us the genesis of this fabled aeroplane.
Alasdair Cross is a successful radio and TV producer and the co-author of The Spitfire Kids: The generation who built, supported and flew Britain's most beloved fighter.
Brought up in the Orkney Islands, an annual summer treat was Britain’s smallest air show, once memorably visited by a powder pink Spitfire. He has worked on many BBC programmes as well as the popular BBC World Service podcast Spitfire: The People’s Plane.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: 3 January 1925 - Chamber of Deputies in Rome, Italy- Mussolini makes a speech which effectively makes him dictator of Italy. So begins the new age of the dictators, but also a time of glamour and speed.
Scene Two: 10 March 1925, Supermarine factory, Southampton, UK. Henri Biard flies the Southampton flying boat for the first time. This is the aircraft that establishes the reputation of RJ Mitchell and ensures the longevity and prosperity of the Supermarine company.
Scene Three: 23 October 1925. Baltimore, USA. This is the location for the Schneider Trophy race of 1925.  Mitchell’s revolutionary S4, the precursor of the Spitfire, crashes. Mitchell has stretched too far but will learn an enormous amount from the experience.
Memento: Henri Biard’s flying suit.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Alasdair Cross
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Philip Hoare: Albert and the Whale (1520)

In 1520 the artist Albrecht Dürer was on the run from the Plague and on the look-out for distraction when he heard that a huge whale had been beached on the coast of Zeeland. So he set off to see the astonishing creature for himself.
In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520. We catch sight of Dürer, the great master of the Northern Renaissance, as he searches for the whale. This, he realises, is his chance to make his greatest ever print.
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, and the studies, Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden.  Spike Island was chosen by W.G. Sebald as his book of the year for 2001.  In 2009, Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside, and in 2017 by RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. 
His new book, Albert & the Whale led the New York Times to call the author a 'forceful weather system' of his own. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, and co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the digital projects http://www.mobydickbigread.com/ and https://www.ancientmarinerbigread.com/
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: Nuremberg, home of Albrecht Dürer, at the height of its power as an imperial city, of art and technology.
Scene Two: The Low Countries. Driven out of Nuremberg by the plague and a city in lockdown, Dürer escapes to the seaside.
Scene Three: Halfway through his year away, Dürer hears a whale has been stranded in Zeeland.  This is his chance to make his greatest print, a follow up to his hit woodcut of a rhinoceros.  What follows next is near disaster, a mortal act.  It changes his life.
Memento: Memento: A lock of Dürer’s hair (which Hoare would use to regenerate him and then get him to paint his portrait)
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Philip Hoare
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Richard Ovenden: The fall of Glastonbury Abbey (1539)

The 1530s were a decade of huge administrative and religious reform in England. While the policies were driven by Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s chief minister, from Whitehall in London, the effects were felt in many parts of the country.
The most visible and ruthless of Cromwell’s changes came in his dissolution of many centuries-old monasteries. These were more than religious houses. They were places of community and repositories of culture. Their loss was traumatic and much of what was destroyed could never be recovered.
In this episode we journey back to 1539 and the site of one such story. Our guest, the historian, academic and librarian, Richard Ovenden, takes us back to witness the fall of Glastonbury Abbey.
Richard Ovenden is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian (since the post was set up in 1600) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. His book, Burning the Books, A History of Knowledge Under Attack, is out now and was recently shortlisted for prestigious the Wolfson History Prize.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: Summer, 1539. The last of the halcyon days at Glastonbury Abbey.
Scene Two: Early Autumn, 1539. The visit of the Commissioners and the trial of Abbot Whiting.
Scene Three: Late Autumn, 1539. The formal dissolution of the Abbey and the beginning of the dispersal of the library.
Memento: St Dunstan’s Classbook
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Richard Ovenden
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Nicholas Crane: Latitude (1739)

From the tides to lightning, the movement of the planets to the workings of the human body, the Enlightenment was an age of problem solving. In this episode we head back to 1739 to talk about efforts to combat one of these great puzzles: calculating the precise measurement of a degree of latitude.
Trying to solve this problem were the members of the very first international scientific expedition – an enterprise planned by the Académie des Sciences) in Paris. The expedition’s destination was the little-known equatorial region of South America, around the location of modern-day Ecuador.
Today’s guest Nicholas Crane takes us back to join this expedition at a crucial moment. Nicholas Crane is a writer, broadcaster and adventurer. He has presented the BAFA winning BBC show, Coast, as well as many others.
Crane’s new book, Latitude, tells the broader story of the history we engage with in this episode. To be in with a chance of winning a copy of Latitude, make sure you sign up to our newsletter list at our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notes
Scene One: April 17, 1739. peak of Sinasaguan: Four years after leaving Europe, survey is almost complete, when mountaintop camp is struck by terrible storm that smashes tents. Local helpers abandon the scientists. All seems lost. Yet the scientists persevere and descend the mountain with their observations.
Scene Two: May 20 1739. Ingapirca. During a bout of bad weather on the peak of  Bueran, La Condamine seizes opportunity to ride across valley and complete first detailed survey of an Inca site. It is one of a long list of episodes that show how the scientists spread their interest beyond geodesy.
Scene Three: August 29, 1739. Cuenca. The murder in a fiesta bullring of the expedition’s surgeon. Just as the science was nearing completion, a tragedy intervenes.
Memento: La Condamine's quadrant.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Nicholas Crane
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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