Category Archives: Podcasts 2025

Global Roaming (ABC) I usually listen to Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald, but don’t always blog it because it is too topical. But in the episode What does a West-less future look like? they interview Dr Samir Puri whose book Westlessness: The great global rebalancing isn’t one of those ” Shock! Horror! Decline of the West!” arguments, but instead, a look at the rebalancing of power and cultural influence to blocs that do not have Western members e.g. BRICS (which now includes Indonesia, so I suppose it’s now BRIICS.) He draws a distinction between perceptions of maritime colonialism (e.g. the British Empire on the High Seas) and neighbourhood colonialism (e.g. India with the Mughals, and perhaps Russia/Ukraine??) Interesting distinction.

The Rest is History Episode 550 The Road to 1066 Rise of the Normans (Part 3) I think that I knew, but didn’t quite understand, that the rise of the dukes in France (Normandy, Anjou etc) constituted a revolutionary new political, social and military worldview. This is all pretty chaotic in both England and in France as various branches of the royal family vie with each other- real Game of Thrones stuff, with Queen Emma acting stupidly and treacherously. To quote the show notes:

Born into a world of treachery, violence and death, William of Normandy defied all expectations, forging a legacy that lasts to this day. Born out of wedlock and dismissed as an upstart, he was originally known as William the Bastard. Inheriting the Duchy of Normandy at just eight years old, William was faced with betrayal, bloodshed, and anarchy. From the restless Normans, who expanded across Europe as mercenaries and horsemen, to the growing threat of Anjou, the early years of his reign were blighted by power struggles. Following the brutal murder of his guardians, and with Normandy on the brink of collapse, William was forced to survive in a world without loyalty, where ambition was the ultimate currency. Meanwhile, across the Channel, the English throne was in turmoil, as the sons of Æthelred the Unready fought for survival and power… [and somehow Ethelred’s progeny, Harold, ended up on the throne after all]

The Human Subject (BBC) The Children Whose Teeth Were Destroyed This is the story of the more than 600 patients at Vipeholm Hospital in Sweden who, in 1946, were enrolled in a set of unexpectedly dark studies now known as the ‘sugar experiments’. Vipeholm was an institution for ‘feeble minded’ individuals who had come from other institutions where they had been labelled ‘hard to handle’. At this time, it was not really known what caused tooth decay, and people worldwide had very bad teeth. For example, in both WWI and WWII you only needed to have 6 opposing teeth for enlistment. The experiments at first were preventative ie. giving half the amount of sugar of a ‘normal’ Swedish diet at the time, with vitamin supplements. The second phase of the experiments moved to inducing tooth decay by providing large amounts of sugar in their food, as sugary drinks with meals, and most damagingly, between meals when children were allowed to eat 25 toffees a day (toffees, because as we all know, they stick to teeth). When the toffees caused huge numbers of cavities, the teeth were pulled, leaving 660 inmates without teeth. To this day, Swedish children only really have sweets on Saturday.

In the Shadows of Utopia: S2 Episode 5: The Path to the Second Indo-China War – Part Two– The CIA, the NLF and Diem. Time Period Covered 1954 – 1961. So why did the US get involved and get sucked into a situation that the French had been unable to resolve before them. There are three approaches to the war in the historiography: (i) anti-war (ii) domino theory (iii) the Vietnamese perspective. The CIA viewed the Geneva Accords as disastrous because they did not stop the growth of communism. Edward Lansdale of the CIA led small groups of US ‘advisors’ as the Saigon Military Mission, which blew up the railway in Hanoi. By 1956 the United States was pouring aid, especially military aid, into South Vietnam. Despite some private doubts about the suitability of Diem, Eisenhower welcomed him to Washington and pledged his support. The Diem government was full of nepotism and corruption, and he led harsh crackdowns on communism. However, there was still strong resistance in rural areas, and the South Vietnamese communists began appealing to North Vietnam to start up an organization of resistance- the National Liberation Front. Village chiefs were put under pressure by both the NLF and the government troops. Eisenhower changed the rules of engagement, making it possible for US advisors to accompany South Vietnamese troops. In 1959 the first US soldiers died and two years later Kennedy was elected: now it was his problem.

I have been travelling overseas with family, and so I didn’t have many opportunities to listen to podcasts, and those that I did listen to were mainly on current affairs (e.g. The Rest is Politics UK and US) and so not really worth recording.

The Rest is History The Road to 1066. One of the few books that I had bought for me as a child was a poetry book about 1066 which I think must have been 1066 and All That. I can’t for the life of me work out why I wanted that book, or how I even knew about it. Nonetheless, I have always been aware of that 1066 was an important date. This 4 part series is right down Tom Holland’s alley, as he wrote the book Millenium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom which looks at the turn of the first millenium, and he takes the running in these podcasts. Taking from ‘The Rest is History’ page (largely because I have lost my own notes), Episode 548: The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)The Norman Conquest of 1066, culminating in the legendary Battle of Hastings, is perhaps the greatest turning point in the history of the English nation. It was a year that changed the fate of England forever, forging empires, and settling continents. And yet, despite its infamy and significance, the true nature of those totemic events are often forgotten. So what happened in the build up to the Battle of Hastings? The dramas of 1066 were set in motion by a succession crisis in 975 AD, following the death of King Edgar. England by that time was the wealthiest and best run government in Northern Europe, a kingdom of united English speaking peoples, established by Alfred the Great and his successors. Following the mysterious death of Edgar’s first son, Edward, his second son, Æthelred – later known as ‘The Unready’ – took the throne. For many years his kingdom flourished, until disaster struck: the Vikings returned to reign terror upon the Anglo-Saxon people, under the leadership of the terrifying Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. With his coffers straining, his people enslaved, and his lands shrinking, Æthelred, now wed to the foreign Emma of Normandy, finally decided to take drastic action, and weed the Vikings out once and for all. So it was that with the dawning of the millennium, a terrible, bloody massacre began….

And then in Episode 549: The Road to 1066 The Revenge of the Vikings Pt 2 Following the bloody St Brice’s Day Massacre, of the 13th of November 1002, which saw King Æthelred brutally exterminating the Danes from England, the Vikings were hungry for revenge. None more so than the terrifying Scandinavian King, Sweyn Forkbeard. Having capitalised on his famous father, Harold Bluetooth’s unification of Norway and Denmark, through his aggressive christianisation of the formerly pagan peoples there, Sweyn had built up a formidable force. It was this power that Æthelred had unwisely taunted, underestimating the might of the Danes. He would pay the price only a few short months later when Sweyn’s terrible fleet landed at Wilton Abbey in Wessex – one of the greatest symbols of the House of Alfred the Great – to bleed England dry, and destroy her King. Time and time again, from this date onwards, Sweyn’s Danish raids would devastate England, even going so far as to lock the Archbishop of Canterbury in a cage…by 1013 Æthelred’s reign was essentially over, his family having fled to Normandy, and England under Danish rule. But then, the death of Sweyn Forkbeard would change everything, setting in motion another titanic war of succession, this time pitting the Scandinavian Cnut against Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside.

We’ve been on holidays for the last two weeks of March, and so most of my listening has been in the car, with another passenger. I mainly indulged my love of current affairs with the UK and US variations of The Rest is Politics, but I did manage to get a couple of other podcasts in.

One was the ABC’s six-part series Conspiracy?: War on the Waterfront which deals with the waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998. I’ve mainly been left with the image of men in balaclavas and attack dogs, and I’d forgotten about the role of the National Farmers Federation and Dubai. It’s quite chilling hearing the familiar voices of John Howard and Peter Reith matter-of-factly telling lies. Interestingly, all sides claim to be winners, except the contract workers brought in to break the strike, even the unions and the waterside workers who, to me, seem to have lost more than they gained.

While we’re on the ABC, it’s worth listening to David Marr’s thoughtful interview with Associate Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University who was part of the working committee that developed the Universities Australia definition of anti-semitism. Yes, there I was shouting to myself as I listened to the podcast, frustrated by Slucki’s inability to define certain activities and attitudes as antisemitic or not, when students’ lives and careers are being held hostage to such judgements.

I was in Tasmania during this period, so it seemed fitting to listen to an episode Convict Mutineers Part 1 from Australian Histories Podcast hosted by the rather giggly non-historian Jenny which is rather a little too Convicts, Gold and Bushrangers for my liking. Nonetheless, she has an interesting episode on William Swallow, a man with a string of aliases who managed to escape imprisonment in Hobart Town to return to England, only to be arrested again and returned to Port Arthur where he plotted yet another escape. It’s part of a two-part series Convict Mutineers, and the second part continues with Swallow’s story.

Thoughtcast I was preparing for my talk at the Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship about the Peabody Sisters, three 19th century Unitarian women living in Boston and Salem who mixed in Transcendentalist circles, but are mainly known as the wives of important men, rather than significant figures in their own right who were at the founding (and even prefigured) Transcendentalism. This interview conducted by Jenny Attiyeh is with Megan Marshall, the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, and it gives a good flavour of the book.

The Human Subject. This rather gory podcast looks at The Prisoners Used for their Skin at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison (AKA ‘the Terrordome’) during the 1960s. Dermatologists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr Albert Kligman, instituted a program where they would pay prisoners, the vast majority of whom were black and on remand, $1.00- $1.50 per day to subject themselves to experimentation. The prisoners were told that they were testing bubble-bath, but many of the experiments were funded by Dow Chemicals, but without their oversight. Kligman tested the effects of dioxin at concentrations 480 times the level recommended by Dow, and also experimented with depigmentation of black skin.

The Rest is History Episode 229 Portugal: Gold, Earthquakes and Brazil (Part 3) starts with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed 85% of the city and killed perhaps 50,000 people. Because Portugal was now under the Spanish crown, they were at war with the Dutch, and the Portuguese felt that the Spanish weren’t pulling their weight. Because of slavery in Brazil, huge wealth was pouring into Portugal. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British (with whom Portugal had always had a good relationship) gave escort to the Royal Family to Brazil, in exchange for opening Portuguese ports to British trade. (Huh. They were doing ‘deals’ back then too.) Wellington invaded Spain successfully, but withdrew in order to secure Lisbon. With the Royal Family ensconced in Brazil, it was becoming the metropole for Portugal- a strange turn of events. In 1821 the King returned to Portugal and was forced to sign the Constitution, and Brazil achieved independence.

I was so horrified by the Trump-Zelensky press conference that I spent the rest of the week listening to commentary about it, including The Rest is Politics (both UK and US editions), Fareed Zakaria on the NYT Ezra Klein Show with The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy, Heather Cox Richardson, Ian Bremmer on GZERO, Matt Bevan on If You’re Listening, David Smith on the Guardian’s Full Story Podcast Trump v Zelenskyy and the 10 minute tirade that changed the world, and Simon Schama This is a day of massive historical importance (video)

I am very apprehensive.

The Coming Storm This second series petered out with Episode 8 The Last Election, which was just basically an interview between Gabriel Gatehouse, producer Lucy Proctor and Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University, in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Radio Theatre. It wasn’t really worth listening to. However, the program redeemed itself with Inauguration: A Bonus Episode where Trump’s picks for cabinet positions threw up many people that they had interviewed or come across earlier while exploring different conspiracy theories. They briefly discuss Kash Patel, but the majority of the episode is devoted to Robert Kennedy Jnr and the vast conspiracy theory he espouses that links the assassination of his uncle and father, vaccines, China, COVID and Anthony Fauci.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 17 The Khmer Rouge’s New Vanguard isn’t quite as long as the very lengthy previous episode- far more manageable. Lachlan Peters returns to Cambodia, where the Workers Party of Kampuchea was working mainly through teachers at private schools. He starts with a meeting in 1960, attended by perhaps 30 people at the Phnom Penh Railway Station (I’ve been there!) where Saloth Sar, who was by now third in line for the leadership of the party, addressed the faithful with a peaceful, relevant speech. They were by now shedding the Vietnamese influence, and the students from France took a more prominent role, sidelining the veterans of the older communist struggle, who were more tolerant of Sihanouk for his anti-imperialism, and more aligned to the Vietnamese communists. The ‘old guard’ were despatched to the countryside to gain the affections of the rural peasantry. But communism was a hard sell. By 1960s Sihanouk’s father, who had taken over the throne to free Sihanouk up to stand for election, died so he put his mother in, and had himself made Head of State for life. This required a referendum, which passed with a yes vote of 99.8%. Sihanouk was popular, and getting money from China, Russia and the United States. In 1961 he relaxed the pressure internally because he was more involved with the conflict with Thailand for the first half of the year. In the second half of the year he turned his eye back to the communists, with an eye to the upcoming 1962 election. The party went into hiding, while the official Communist Party the Pracheachon were arrested. Tou Samouth, the party secretary of the clandestine party was murdered. Historians disagree whether Sihanouk’s supporter Lon Nol, or Saloth Sâr (Pol Pot) were behind the murder. Nonetheless, Sâr became acting secretary of the party in hiding. It’s hard to know when he changed from Saloth Sâr to Pol Pot. In 1963 there was a student riot at Siem Reap where anti-Sihanouk slogans were chanted. The Workers Party of Kampuchea held another congress near Central Market (I’ve been there too!) where Sâr was elected Party Secretary. In February 1962 Sihanouk published a list of 34 ‘known subversives, which included Saloth Sâr .

The Daily NYT ‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done. Powerful Conservatives are Listening Well, as far as I am concerned, anyone who is a friend of J.D. Vance is an enemy of mine, and Vance talks very approvingly about Curtis Yarvin. He is a computer engineer who has “done his own research” to come up with an argument that, to quote The New York Times “the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he’s called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.” His way of arguing is repellent: he machine-guns out a scattershot of historical facts, any one of which could be unpicked if he gave you time. A repellent, slipshod, bombastic man.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 2 Maoism and the Great Leap Forward 1949-1962 In this very long episode (2 hours 43 minutes) Lachlan takes us over to China where, after the Korean and Indo-China wars finished, the Chinese Communist Party could concentrate on local matters and the need to delineate ‘the people’ from ‘the enemy’. In 1953 a five year plan was initiated on the Stalinist model, where small farmers took over the land that had previously belonged to their landlords. In May 1958 Mao looked at the countryside, and after declaring the four pests (rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows) embarked upon the Great Leap Forward, later described as a ‘bubble of unreality’ which pushed the country towards starvation. The small farms, only recently given, were taken back into huge communal farms, with an emphasis on agricultural targets and communal eating. There was a push towards industrialization, with backyard furnaces slowly pillaging families’ household goods in the production of poor-quality steel. By 1959, famine had taken hold, prompting cannibalism and necrophagy and culminating in the death of perhaps 30-45 million people (no-one really knows). After Mao’s Minister of Defence criticized the Great Leap Forward, Mao rachetted it up even more to prove him wrong. It was not until 1962 that conditions improved. Meanwhile, the Sino/Soviet relationship had always been testy but initially Russia showed a readiness to co-operate militarily with the new Communist regime in China. However, Krushev’s denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ after Stalin’s death was not taken well by Mao, who was curating a cult of personality of his own. Mao can be seen as either the 3rd or 4th Great Prophet of Communism after Marx (who identified the stages of communism and the importance of class), Lenin ( who introduced the concept of the ‘vanguard’ of the revolution), and maybe or maybe not Stalin (who created the centralized command economy). Mao wanted to use the nationalist cause combined with Confucian concepts of ‘right thinking’ and built on struggle and volunteerism. He had a fraught relationship with Krushev, who he believed had betrayed communism, and as the rift between the two countries increased, Soviet advisors returned to Russia and the promise of an atom bomb was withdrawn.

The Rest is History Episode 228 Portugal: The Golden Age of Discovery Part 2 The first episode finished with the reconquest of the Muslim ‘invaders’ of the Iberian Peninsula. This led a militant edge to Christian exploration outside the known world. The Portguese had ports all around the Cape of Good Hope, so they didn’t need Columbus. During the negotiations for the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese tricked the Spaniards by getting them to shift the line 1000 km that meant that Portugal got Brazil. Vasco da Gama was chosen to lead his expedition in search of India because he was a hard man. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned right at Kenya and sailed for 23 days to get to Kerula. He reached Indian, Malaysia and Japan, and was very violent towards the Muslims. The Portuguese ’empire’ was more a series of nodes, and they were not very good at administration. By now the Portuguese throne had been inherited by a Spanish king, but Portugal retained its own identity.