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Zeb Baker-Smith
AoH Book Club: Phil Craig on 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World
A year on from publication, the historian explains to the Editor how the final months of the Second World War exposed tensions between Britain and the Allies’ wartime ideals and imperial ambitions.
Great to have you in the interviewee’s chair for once, Phil. So 1945: The Reckoning has, a few months ago, celebrated its 1st birthday. It was the culmination of a kind of trilogy on Britain and the Second World War. What drew you to the final year of the war, and why...
Episode 274
Chalke Daily: Operation Torch to Dancing Queen
Cooler, breezier, busier – the biggest day so far
The passing of time has a strange way in these parts. As the carnyces sound around site, WW2 jeeps swing by, Celts mingle with civil war militia, Neolithic outfits juxtaposed with band members of the much-loved ABBA tribute, you’d be forgiven for a certain amount of...
Episode 273
Chalke Daily: Hobnobbing and the Hottest of Takes
Infernal temperatures as the programme kicks off properly
A night in a bed, if not a cure to stem the swells of insomnia, helped. Tuesday had been sapping and the idea of escaping the site, shade at a premium under the midsummer sun, attractive when a schoolmate invited me to stay in the neighbouring village. My father and...
Chalke Daily: Storm Clouds and Scaramucci
We’re back in Wiltshire on the first day of the UK’s largest festival devoted to history!
And it feels oh-so-familiar, cosy even. Editor-at-large, Justin Doherty, and I began proceedings with the hour-long drive down from Somerset, a nervous sort of excitement as we discussed the line-up and prognosticated about just how searing it could get this week....
AoH Book Club: Steven Veerapen on The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I
In conversation with the Editor, the historian reflects on his mission to rescue England’s first Stuart king from centuries of caricature and revealing a politically astute monarch whose skills lay in image-making and peaceful governance.
Hello Steven – thanks for talking to us a few years on from the publication of The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I, our Book Club pick for June. In the book, you set out to strip away the myths around the first Stuart King of England – what was the...
Episode 270
The World’s Reformation: How Protestantism Became a Global Religion, by Alec Ryrie
A nuanced and globe-spanning examination of how Protestantism’s often chaotic missionary efforts helped shape the early modern world.
In a secular age, religious history can feel slightly tangential and recondite, particularly when set against the commercial and colonial designs of fledgling empires in the early modern age. Very well, except that is missing the point. Reformation Europe remains a...