Episodes

  • #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 8 2026

    Nothing is what it seems? We, poor Londoners, paying our penny to stand at the Globe in 1606 would agree with that. With Robert Cecil’s government relentlessly pumping out fake news around the Gunpowder Plot, it’s not at all clear who the real criminals are. As Macbeth, murderer of a Scottish king, is overtaken by the evil of ambition we begin to see that our Scottish king James is also in danger. Doesn’t the ambitious scheming of his Principal Secretary threaten to reduce him to an irrelevance? Didn’t Cecil’s father, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, kill our own king’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots?


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    36 mins
  • #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?

    #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?
    Apr 1 2026
    Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had fatally damaged the status of the nobility and caused the rise of the small independent farmer. Feudalism in England and Wales was over… or at least we thought it was, until now. (R)

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    29 mins
  • #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

    #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 25 2026
    One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales. (R)

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    30 mins
  • #94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

    #94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 18 2026
    By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the historian Michael Postan long ago (in 1939) famously called ‘political gangsterdom.’ (R)

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    35 mins
  • #93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?

    #93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 11 2026
    Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague… (R)

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    31 mins
  • #92 'Welcome traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?

    #92 'Welcome traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 4 2026
    Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister as a traitor in 1450, by sailors dissatisfied with an ineffective king, was shocking. It revealed that the common people believed the true crown was the community. You can’t get more modern than that. (R)

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    28 mins
  • #107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut

    #107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut
    Feb 25 2026
    We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon. (R)

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    31 mins
  • #106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut

    #106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut
    Feb 18 2026
    Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. (R)

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    29 mins