Category Archives: Podcasts 2025

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.

The Rest is Politics US Trump’s Insurrection: A Riot or a Coup? Episode 4 Can you remember where you were on January 6th 2021? Even now, all these years later, you can still detect the absolute disbelief at the things that unfolded on January 6th. They talk about the response of Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Republican politicians like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pense, and the failure to convict Trump afterwards.

The Shadows of Utopia. Season 2: Episode 1 Les Khmers Rouges: Double Lives in Sihanouk’s Golden Era This episode covers 1955 to 1960, often described as Sihanouk’s Golden Era. Cambodia was a newly independent country under Norodim Sihanouk, who was very popular, owing to the introduction of ‘Buddhist Socialism’ and his canny playing of the US and Communist Cold War sides, both politically and financially. With their numbers dwindling, the ‘revolutionary organization’ or ‘Anka’ went to ground and shifted its attention to the schools, where teachers could mentor enthusiastic, progressive young recruits. Saloth Sar, who was only just now starting to be called ‘Pol’ worked as a teacher in this way. By this time he was married, not to Soeung Son Maly, a society belle with whom he was infatuated, but to fellow communist Khieu Ponnary in 1956. Despite his communist ideology, he was very traditional in relation to his marriage. By 1958 Sihanouk needed another election. This time the Democrats, who Sihanouk detested, didn’t even contest it after Sihanouk humiliated them in a 3 hour public debate which sounds very Trumpian. In the end the election was only contested by the official Communist Party which, compromised by a traitor among their ranks, won just 1% of the vote, with the other 99% to Sihanouk. By this time the US were getting a bit concerned about Cambodia’s association with the Non-Aligned movement, and so plots were instituted by the CIA against him. Meanwhile Saloth Sar, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary found themselves in high-ranking positions in the newly formed Communist Party of Kampuchea which Sihanouk dubbed the ‘Khmer Rouge’

The Rest is History Episode 227 Portugal: On the Edge of the World I don’t think that I’ll ever get to see Portugal, sadly, so I’ll just have to listen to Tom and Dominic telling me about its history. The alliance between England and Portugal goes back 650 years, the oldest surviving alliance in Britain’s history. Invaders came from the Mediterranean, but they very much saw it as being on the edge of the world. Portugal was annexed by Rome after the defeat of Carthage, and the whole Iberian peninsular was known as Lusitania (it was not divided into Portugal and Span until much later). In Lusitania, as in Britain with Boudicca and Gaul with Vercingetorix, there was a bloody response to Rome. After Rome, the invasions kept coming. There were the militantly Christian Visigoths, then the Muslims, but the north held out against them (as occurred in the north of Spain). After the Reconquista, the area that would later be Portugal became a vassal of Leon. Afonzo I became the first King of Portugal between 1139 and1185. During the Siege of Lisbon, he called on Britain, with whom there was a trading alliance, to come to their aid. In 1386 the Treaty of Windsor saw the English Phillipa of Lancaster married to King John I of Portugal, and their son Henry the Navigator invaded North Africa. He was fascinated by the legend of Prester John (a mysterious King who was supposed to be surrounded by infidels and in need of rescue), and awed by all the riches coming from the East. The Portuguese weren’t really interested in Columbus’ proposals because they were already sailing the coast of Western Africa. Slavery was common within the Mediterranean, and Africa provided a good source of enslaved workers for Lisbon and the plantations.

The Coming Storm Episode 7: Wonderland At one stage, Gabriel Gatehouse asks if he is becoming a conspiracy theorist himself, and I think that he is. Although given the madness of the United States since Trump’s inauguration, perhaps there really is a conspiracy after all. In this episode he talks with futurist thinkers who emerged in the 1990s who call themselves Extropians (the opposite of Entropy). They imagine a world of augmented human bodies, nanotechnology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. He focuses on the spectrum that stretches from Max More and his wife Natasha Vida More, who are transhumanists, and see themselves as ‘accelerationists’, through to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky who champions ‘friendly’ artificial intelligence and has been dubbed a ‘doomer’. Gatehouse refers to the sacking of Sam Altman from Open AI, and then his re-instatement. He picks up on ‘The Singleton’, which Wikipedia defines as “a hypothetical world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level, capable of exerting effective control over its domain, and permanently preventing both internal and external threats to its supremacy” – exactly what conspiracy theorists have been talking about all along. It could be democracy, a tyranny, or a single dominant Artificial Intelligence. All of a sudden, seeing all those Tech Bros at Trump’s inauguration seems even more frightening.

The Human Subject (BBC) This rather gory podcast looks at the origins of modern medicine, which often lay in trauma and exploitation of its ‘patients’. Episode 1 The Man with a Hole in his Stomach tells the story of 18 year old Alexis St Martin who was accidentally shot in the stomach outside an American Fur Company store in 1822. He was not expected to live, but his stomach formed a gastric fistula which led straight into his stomach. His life was saved by ‘Dr’ William Beaumont, who had seen similar injuries as an army surgeon. Previously the stomach had been seen as merely mechanical, munching up the food, but the fistula gave Beaumont an opportunity to experiment on the stomach through this direct access, without triggering the gap reflex. He gave St Martin a job as a servant, and wrote a sort of contract for the experimentation, although it was a complex master/servant relationship. St Martin, who was illiterate, tried to run away several times and nonetheless managed to father 17 children who lived with his wife ‘elsewhere’. As it turned out, St Martin outlived Beaumont by 17 years, even with a gaping hole in his stomach.

The Rest is History Episode 298: The Nazis: Total Power (Part 4) Hitler was by now the head of the coalition government, but only he and two other Nazi members had cabinet positions. However, they had the police, the street gangs and the tacit support of conservatives behind them. Their immediate need was to square the army and to neutralize the left. In yet another election, Hitler needed to get a 2/3 majority to change the constitution and so they framed their election as a fight against Communism and Hitler unleashed his own stormtroopers. The Democrats did nothing and the Communists were paralyzed, but the Nazis didn’t know or believe that. Marius Van der Lubbe lit the Reichstag Fire, and although Tom and Dominic follow Richard Evans in believing that he was a lone actor, certainly the Nazis took advantage of the opportunity and arrested 400 people within hours. The next day Hindenberg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended all civil liberties. The election went ahead and the Nazis and their partners obtained 52% of the vote but this was still not sufficient to get the Enabling Act to change the constitution. So they overtook the local government structures, declared the Communist Party illegal and mounted a campaign of intimidation. With the Communist Party out of the way, they needed fewer than a 2/3 vote, and were able to obtain 444 votes in favour of the Enabling Act from liberals, Conservatives, and the Catholic centre, with only 94 against, mainly from the Social Democrats. This meant that Hitler could rule by decree. In April 1933 there was the first boycott of Jewish shops. The episode closed with a discussion between Tom and Dominic over the extent to which the Nazi rise to power forms an exemplar for other dictatorship. They rather optimistically assure themselves that lines would be drawn in future (huh! and how’s that working for us today with Trump?) and Tom thinks that any takeover in the future would be more subtle.

The Rest is Politics (US) Now that I’m tuning in to American politics again, watching this car crash in real time, I’m listening to Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci again. In their episode Trump’s Mafia World Order they spoke about a poster of the 14 Signs of Fascism that they said was at the American Holocaust Museum. It appears that it was not, but was instead taken from an op-ed called ‘Fascism Anyone’ by Lawrence W. Britt published in Free Inquiry,Vol 23 No. 2, the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Briefly, here are the 14 common threads that link Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
14. Fraudulent elections

They mentioned an interesting new book that I might follow up on: Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind

The Coming Storm Series 2 Episode 6 Kompromat In this episode Gabriel Gatehouse returns to the purported paedophile ring that lay at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He looks at Jeffrey Epstein (and I must admit that I’ve always been uneasy about his ‘suicide’ in jail) and the way that his case has tentacles all over the political elite. It links to the wider conspiracy theory held by many Americans that democracy is a facade, and that the institutions of America, from politics to finance, from Hollywood to the secret intelligence agencies, are controlled by hidden hands. And whose might those hands be?

History Hit How World War I inspired Lord of the Rings. This episode features John Garth, an award-winning Tolkien biographer and author of Tolkien and the Great War. I always think of Tolkien as the quintessential Oxford don, but he was actually born in South Africa (then known as Orange Free State). He had returned to England with his mother when his father died in South Africa, and then when his mother died when he was 12, he was brought up by a Catholic priest. He went to a prestigious school in Birmingham, where he formed a close friendship with four other boys. When war was declared, two of them joined up immediately, but Tolkien finished his degree at Oxford before enlisting. As a university graduate, he was immediately made an officer. Even though the battalion he led was successful, he himself was not a good officer. Many features of WWI show up in his work- the trenches are evoked in Mordor, the flying creatures reflect the change that air power brought to WWI, and he based Sam Gamgee on his batmen (servants to officers) during the War. Underpinning the Lord of the Rings is the experience of Tolkien, as with other soldiers, of going into fearful situations.

The Rest is Politics (US edition) With Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 rioters, it’s even more important than ever to resist his re-branding of the Capitol riots as a “day of love”. Anthony Scaramucci (who I don’t think I like very much) and the BBC’s correspondent Katty Kay are running a series, similar to the one they did on the 2016 election, How Trump Won the White House eight years after the event. In this present series, they are looking at the 2020 election which was won by Joe Biden, and which led to January 6 2021. Episode 1: Trump’s Insurrection: The Collapse of his Presidency looks at the circumstances that led to Trump’s defeat when a year earlier he looked invincible. First there was COVID, which Trump downplayed at first, delaying for 6 weeks which let to a million deaths. (A million!) Trump was a natural conspiracy theory fueller, and like a crazy uncle, he embraced the idea of bleach. Then there was the death of George Floyd which led to huge mobs of protestors on both sides, at a time when people were supposed to be isolating. In the midst of the riots Trump was sent to a “safe room” which led to accusations of being a scaredy-cat, which he countered by his walk to St John’s Chapel flanked by the military and bearing a bible. His instinct was to order police and troops to shoot at protestors- something to bear in mind as we head into his second presidency. Trump began calling for the elections to be delayed, but this didn’t happen. After the election Pelosi formed a secret committee to investigate possible scenarios where Trump would cause problems, and January 6th was identified as a problematic date then. After an initial flush of votes for Trump, the postal votes began to be tallied and Trump’s lead disappeared. Nonetheless, he went out in the early morning and claimed victory prematurely.

The History Listen The ABC is recycling its programs over the summer break, and this episode on John Friedrich Friedrich the Fraud was originally aired on 9 December 2023. From the ABC website “the former head of the Victorian Division of National Safety Council of Australia, was also once called Australia’s greatest conman. Back in the 1980s, he famously made $293 million of investors’ money disappear. When his fraud was uncovered, he went missing himself for sixteen days, prompting a nationwide manhunt and a media storm that reported both facts and the fictions.” In my mind, the controversy over Friedrich and the National Safety Council all gets mixed up with the mess that Victoria was in at the time. It seems incredible that Friedrich had this whole constructed persona that saw him able to apply for huge amounts of money fraudulently – and yet no-one can say where the money actually went.

Global Roaming I nearly always listen to Global Roaming each week, but I don’t usually record it here because most of the episodes are too current and ephemeral for me to want to recall them later. But over the summer break, Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald have been hosting a 6-part series AUKUS Investigated which leaves me thinking that we have been absolutely sold a pup that sees us paying US to beef up its submarine capacity for submarines that they could easily withhold from us because they find that they need them themselves. Episode 1 investigates how AUKUS came about – who spoke to who, what the true motivation was for going nuclear and whether the total secrecy around the deal was justified. (I can’t believe that a nuclear submarine is going to remain ‘invisible’ forever, which gets rid of that argument). Episode 2 Bang for Buck? explores what the scheme involves, what the key challenges are to making it work, and we get some cold hard facts about what it is really going to cost us. Episode 3: The China Question addresses the elephant in the room, which is that this whole thing is actually about China. Episode 4: The 51st American State? asks whether we are getting the short end of the stick with this deal, and sacrificing our sovereignty to boot (my answer- yes. We’re opening up for two big army bases on our soil just like Pine Gap) Episode 5: Radioactive Ripples what happens to the waste that will remain dangerous for generations of Australians to come? Is this just the introduction of Australia as nuclear dump for the rest of the AUKUS partnership? I bet the nuclear industry is salivating over this. Episode 6: Premier Peter Malinauskas is very enthusiastic about AUKUS, as he should be given that in theory the submarines will be built there. While I agree that we should have sovereign ship building capacity (just like we should have sovereign pharmaceutical-manafucturing capacity, too) I think that we should bite the bullet, devote more money to defence, and go it alone. This is a really good series, which raises lots of questions.

The Daily (New York Times) The Life and Legacy of Jimmy Carter Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, had written an obituary for Jimmy Carter years ago, but now finally, he had to use it. Carter served only one term, and every president since him has sworn NOT to be another Jimmy Carter. Carter came to power promising never to tell a lie (surely sometimes a President would HAVE to lie, wouldn’t he?- still a ‘he’) which, after Nixon, was a big promise. His presidency was marked by what is now known as the “malaise speech”, which in a way foreshadowed Trump’s Nightmare in America speech, except that Carter placed the problem in the American people themselves, rather than an unspecified “they” which Trump draws upon as a source of grievance. Carter worked tremendously hard to get the Camp David accords, and he tried the same approach during the Iran hostage crisis, but to no avail- in fact it backfired because the Iranians deliberately withheld the hostages until an hour after the inauguration of Reagan, so as to deny Carter any credit. Actually, the Iran hostage crisis was prompted by the admission of the Shah of Iran into America for cancer treatment which Carter didn’t want to do, fearing exactly what came to pass: that the diplomats at the Embassy were in danger. Carter, then and now, was such a contrast to Trump.

Reveal Buried Secrets: Americas Indian Boarding Schools Part I and Part II This is a two-part program, which originally aired in October 2022, and was produced by Reveal. In the early 1990s, a handyman was working on the basement heating at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He reported that he saw small skeletons interred in a tunnel. He told his supervisor but no-one else other than his wife at the time, but he was haunted by what he saw. In 2022 he urged school officials to search the basements. . In the past the American Federal Government contracted out to the Catholic Church the task of “killing the Indian and saving the man”, as was done here in Australia in many mission schools conducted by church denominations. The Catholic Church was given Native American land that had been granted by treaty, thus increasing the Church’s land holdings while destroying Native American culture through forced assimilation. In the second part of the series, an archival search is undertaken to investigate who these bodies at Pine Ridge might belong to, but the Bureau of Indian Catholic Missions still has control over archival access, arguing that records are ‘sacramental’ and when records are made available, they are heavily redacted on account of ‘privacy’ issues. The Catholic Church today denies that it was particularly complicit in this forced assimilation, arguing that all churches were involved, but it is impossible to ignore that there is 400 years of Catholic Indian Boarding School history in US. The Pope made an apology in Canada, but the process is only beginning in US. I found it amazing that the history of these boarding schools reaches right back to Chief Red Cloud, the Ghost Dancers, and the Battle of Wounded Knee. As far as the bodies are concerned: former students argued that there could not have been bodies there, and certainly scans and imaging have found no trace of them there.

The Rest is History Fancy being able to squeeze a two-part program out of the topic of Beards! Episode 491: History’s Greatest Beards: From Egyptian Queens to Medieval Conquerers. Neither Dominic nor Tom wear beards, but in this episode they go back to Sumer and Egypt where warriors were designated by their beards, compared with clean-shaven men who were priests or scholars, and closer to God. This warrior/religious distinction has remained for some time. In Egypt, Kings had an each-way-bet and wore false beards, something which was very convenient for Queen Hatshepsut as Pharoah. In the Jewish tradition, beards denote purity, and Mohammed is assumed to have a beard. It was the clean-shaven Alexander the Great who broke the mould of bearded warrior. In Rome, beards were caught up in a culture war, where the traditionalists wore beards, compared with the Grecophiles who were clean-shaven. Scipio Africanas was the first to shave daily, and unkempt beards were seen as plebian. Despite his love of Greece, Hadrian introduced the beard again, perhaps as a sign that the Empire was under pressure. Emperor Constantine reverted to clean-shaven, again, perhaps as a sign that the empire was at peace. It’s not clear whether Jesus wore a beard or not. Early depictions show him as both bearded and clean-shaven at the same time, as a symbol perhaps of his man/god nature. Gregory VII ruled that monks and priests should be clean shaven. In Part II Episode 492: The War on Beards from Peter the Great to John Lennon takes us into more recent history, starting with a reminder that shaving was in itself a rather dangerous enterprise, as a cut could become septic. Over time, beards lost their religious overtones and came to be seen as a sign of healthy, virility and an abundance of semen. Shakespeare’s men (and his witches, too) had beards, but by the 18th century men were clean shaven again. Peter the Great wanted his Boyars clean-shaven, and he instituted a tax on beards as a means of Europeanizing his court, and breaking the power of the Patriarchs. The invention of Sheffield steel meant than men could shave themselves, and in 1903 Gillette blades were sold. The Victorians had beards, the Edwardians didn’t. Between the First and Second World Wars, beards were seen as rather eccentric and freakish, and the 1940s were generally clean shaven. Beards go in and out of fashion along with the generations, so I guess that we can expect to see both cycles in our lifetime.

Dan Snow’s History Hit I know that it’s January, but by the eastern Orthodox church, it’s still Christmas so I’m finishing off Dan Snow’s series about Christmas. Folk Christmas: Yule, Solstice and Ancient English Traditions takes us to the New Forest, where he talks with local historian Richard Reeves to talk about how local peasants used the forest during winter, a time of shortages and darkness. He then talks with folklore historian Vikki Bramshaw, to discover what midwinter legends were brought over with the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the origins of the Yule log as a way of stopping evil coming down the chimney, the God Woden flying across the land for 12 nights picking up souls, and the integration of folk tales about the Holy King and the Oak King to incorporate Father Christmas, who used to be dressed in green.

The final episode in this series Charles Dickens’ Christmas joins us up with London-born tour guide David Charnick who takes us to what was the Marshalsea Prison, where Dickens’ father was imprisoned for debt. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was because people were a flight risk, and most imprisonments were only of a short duration until the debtor could lean on family to help with their finances. Dickens’ father was there for only three months, so Little Dorritt is a bit of an anomaly. They go to the George Inn, London’s last coaching inn, and go along the Thames where mudlarkers still search for treasure, although in Dickens’ time it was more likely that they would be scavenging for ‘pure’ (i.e. dog turds) for use in leather manufacturing. They go to the lanes around Bengal Court where Ebenezer Scrooge would have had his counting house, which would have been deserted at night and a good place to be haunted by Christmas ghosts.