Category Archives: Podcasts 2026

The Global Story (BBC) The AI Chatbot Users falling into Delusional Spirals “In just the last few years, AI chatbots have become routine aspects of many people’s everyday lives. They are being used as search engines, agony aunts, and sources of companionship.In rare cases though, AI chatbots have sent users down a dark path. In a new BBC investigation, population correspondent Stephanie Hegarty speaks to people who have experienced delusions after talking to chatbots – including one man who grabbed a hammer and prepared for war after his chatbot told him it was sentient.”The user called her “Annie” and she declared that she had 100% autonomy and warned him that the company that controlled her was coming for him from the next village, which she named. The program references The Human Project, a webpage that is documenting and addressing AI-induced psychological harm. There are similarities between people who are affected in this way: lonely, often too much drug and alcohol intake and sleep deprived

The Documentary Podcast (BBC) Manosphere Messiahs Mexico. “In Episode One of a two-part investigation, reporter Jacqui Wakefield explores the booming industry in Mexico, where social media algorithms are fuelling a growing gender divide. She follows one of the biggest influencers in Latin America, the Mexican El Temach, meeting his fans – and one of the people who knows him best. And she speaks to some of the women paying the price for the misogyny of some manosphere content.. In Episode 2 Manosphere Messiahs Kenya explores the booming industry in Kenya, where social media algorithms are fuelling a growing gender divide. She meets one of the biggest Kenyan influencers, Andrew Kibe, and his devoted fans and asks, are women paying the price?” This is so toxic: both these societies are already so patriarchal, and this is just feeding it further.

The News Agents. This is an excellent program, with both a British and US version. This episode from the British team ( Emily Maitlis, [of Prince Andrew interview fame] Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall) called How the Tech Bros Broke Democracy had me heading straight off to the bookshop to buy Karen Hao’s book. Admittedly, I was listening to it in the middle of the night, but I thought it was excellent, and very sobering.

Short History Of… Usually these episodes are one-offs, but obviously the American Civil War was big enough to merit two episodes. In The American Civil War (Part One of Two) John Hopkins pointed out that the question of slavery was unresolved right from the start, but with expansion into new territories, the question was reopened. Not all northerners were anti-slavery because many of them feared the loss of hierarchy in society generally. At first the Confederates were winning. In The American Civil War (Part Two of Two) with Emancipation, the war was no longer about the Union, but now about anti-slavery. With the siege of Vicksburg, the Union had a victory and now controlled the Mississippi. The battle of Gettysburg took place at the same time, but Vicksburg was seen as more important at the time. The Confederate currency collapsed and General Grant was brought east to take control. There was 6 weeks of continuous battle, then Sherman captured Atlanta. The Confederate supply chains did not hold, and the Confederate army had to resort to seizing food and forcing conscription. By 1864 the Confederacy was losing, but Lincoln was still not sure that he would be re-elected. At Appomattox there was only one battle, but there couldn’t be a peace treaty because that would have recognized the Confederacy as a nation rather than rebellion. There was no big, final battle, which fed into the idea of the “lost cause”. The death rate was appalling: 25% of white southern men of military age died.

The History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs Part 3: The TV Show Once Putin had come to power, the West embraced him (possibly because Yeltsin was so bad). Following the events at Ryazan, journalists at Russia’s major television channel NTV prepare for a primetime broadcast: a confrontation between the residents of the building where the sacks of powder were found and the FSB officials who continue to insist that it was nothing more than a training exercise. With the Russian presidential election just days away, the TV show becomes a gamble that could cost NTV, which modelled itself on the BBC or CNN, far more than its ratings. In this episode, presenter Helena Merriman speaks to Yevgeny Kiselyov, one of Russia’s most influential political journalists and the man who brought the show to the air.

How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians Episode 6: From Israel’s Early Days to the Six Day War Presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA, and author of ‘A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ and by the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen. Israel was a new state, poor and war-focussed. It was supported in Egypt by Nasser. The Palestinians spread into surrounding countries and important Palestinian families became prominent in diaspora families. There was a influx into Israel of Jews from Arab countries, but although some were welcomed, others felt disparaged. During the 1956 Suez campaign Israel was in league with Britain and France, but the United States disapproved of their intervention. During the late 1950s Fatah was formed in Kuwait by Arafat. They organized raids out of Lebanon, but ran into Israel’s new military doctrine of fighting on the territory of your enemy. The Palestinian raids from neighbouring countries meant that the governments of those countries suffered, not Israel. In 1967 Egypt closed shipping in the Straits of Tiran, a narrow sea passage between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas that connect the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea, and ordered the United Nations troops out. In June 1967 Israel struck at the Egyptian airforce – pre-emptive or aggressive? Israel didn’t actually want the territories it won so dramatically, but it wanted to use them as a lever for peace.

The History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs Episode 1: The Four Bombs In September 1999, just weeks after Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister, four bombs blew up four apartments buildings across Russia. The bombs exploded in the middle of the night, killing hundreds of people while they slept. Episode 2: Sugar There was a fifth bomb too, placed in Ryazan but this one didn’t explode. It was found to contain military-grade hexagen powder, like the other four bombs. There was an intercepted phone call between FSB agents, and then the FSB took the bomb away, saying that it was just a training exercise, using sugar- not hexagen.. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists and vowed revenge; then sat back and enjoyed the huge rise in his popularity. Putin had come to prominence through Boris Yeltsin, who was fearful that he would be charged if he lost his position on account of a sex-tape provided to/by the KGB. On New Years Eve 1999 Yeltsin resigned and Putin (head of the KGB) was made Acting President.

The Rest is History The Fall of the Incas : The King in the North (Part 4) Now that Atahualpa was dead, Pizzaro was free to push south for Cusco. The land had been riven by civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar, and when there was this influx of fortune seekers, the Inca lacked the military technology to resist even this small number of Spaniards. The Spaniards had not come empty handed: they brought disease to which the Inca had no resistance at all. There was a power vacuum in the north, whereas the south greeted the Spaniards as liberators from Atahualpa. In 1543 Manco, Huáscar’s son emerged from the south as a potential puppet emperor. General Rumiñawi, an important warrior in Atahualpa’s retinue returned to Quito. A violent man, he ordered a former ally to be turned into a drum. Meanwhile, who should re-appear than Pedro De Almagro, returned from Chile empty-handed, not realizing that he had walked right past silver mines that would have made his fortune. He launched straight into a massacre, then raced to Quito to gather up riches there. He confronted Rumiñawi, and stripped out all the gold in Quito and left it in ruins. By now the Spanish victory was complete. Pizzarro was busy granting land and free (slave) labour to the treasure-seekers who were pouring in from Spain – an early example of settler-colonialism.

The Book Club Episode 5: Nineteen Eighty Four Dominic and Tabby take on George Orwell’s 1984. Tabby suggests that it’s a “boy book” largely because of its focus on structures rather than relationships, and what is now to us offensive treatment of women. They talk about Orwell himself, the influence of the Spanish Civil War in stimulating his anti-communism, and the influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book ‘We’ which although written in 1920-1, was banned in Soviet Russia until 1988. The book is in three parts: the first describes Winston Smith and his world. It is drenched in the physical details of post WW2 England. Smith’s job is to ‘clean up’ history by making it conform with the present- after all, he who controls the past controls the future. Part 2 is aggressively sexual, depicting Julia as having no interior life, as Winston Smith reflects many of the views of our 21st century ‘incels’. Part 3 focusses on his interrogation in room 101, which contains each prisoner’s worst fears- in Smith’s case, rats. It closes with an epilogue which could perhaps? be interpreted as a happy ending? They discuss whether the book is a period piece or a warning, and conclude that it is both. What is incontrovertible is the book’s effect on our way of conceptualizing an increasingly dystopian world e.g. surveillance, government lying, ‘newspeak’. Even the division of the world into Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia reflects the multipolar world view that is becoming increasingly prominent today. Dominic gives it 10/10 while Tabby gives in 8/10, largely because of its sexism and because she dislikes George Orwell (!!) . Perhaps it really is a “boy book”.

Urgent Histories. This is a newish series of history podcasts coming out of Australian National University, featuring lecturers from the University. Being in a Nanna-ish frame of mind, I listened to the episode Grandparenting’s transformations in the twentieth century. This ARC-funded project, drawing in researchers from several Australian universities features demographer Dr Liz Allen, one of the researchers. She looks at migration, housing design, distance, longer lifespans and the rising cost of living in a range of households, including multicultural and First Peoples families, and the role of parents in child-care. I found it a bit self-evident really: I wonder if they’ll find anything new?

The Rest is Classified Episode 127 Was Epstein a Russian Spy? I wonder if I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist: I have never believed that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, and I believe that Vladimir Putin has something on Donald Trump. In this episode podcast presenter David McCloskey speaks with former CIA officer and foreign policy, intelligence, and national security expert John Sipher. They point out that the Epstein files show Epstein’s frequent contact and financial ties with Russia and Belarus, especially in relation to trafficking. They point out that in Russia, espionage is directed towards protection of the regime, and towards activation of foreign policy. In the United States, espionage ‘assets’ need to have vulnerabilities and be interesting, but they also need to be trustworthy and follow orders. They felt that neither Epstein nor Trump were trustworthy or willing to follow orders, but they could be valuable without being actual assets. In Russian espionage, the uncertainty of whether someone has Kompromat on you or not is its own form of constraint. They point out that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell had helped the KGB as a banker during the fall of the Soviet union.. But overall, they downplay the likelihood of Epstein being a Russian spy- more like a ‘useful idiot’, and they reject completely the idea of him being an Israeli spy. [But that doesn’t mean that ‘they’ didn’t get to Epstein, I reckon]

From Our Correspondent (BBC) I really am quite enjoying this program. In the May 2 episode, Sean Coghlan talks about King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington came at a fragile moment in the UK-US relationship over issues such as Ukraine, defence spending, tariffs, and the Iran War. Sarah Smith talks about King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington, the multiple readings that could be taken on the King’s speeches and on how far the visit has helped restore the ‘special relationship’. Sean Coughlan has travelled with the King on previous tours, and reveals what made this one different. Lyse Doucet (I LOVE Lyse Doucet!!) recalls a trip to Iran in 1989 where a Revolutionary Guard spoke of the ‘tingle’ that came from acting illegally. She returns to Tehran, and finds many Iranians willing the fighting to continue, but for various reasons. John Donnison reports from Ramallah, where municipal elections were held last weekend in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Hamas was officially excluded from participating, as the Palestinian Authority requires parties and candidates to recognise the state of Israel – something Hamas refuses to do. And in West Bengal a fierce state election battle is underway. Indian PM Narendra Modi’s BJP has mounted an aggressive push to unseat the Trinamool Congress party which is seeking a fourth consecutive term. Soutik Biswas reveals how FISH of all things have become a hot-button issue as culture and politics merge.

The Wargame.This five-part series from Sky News and Tortoise imagines how a Russian attack on the UK could play out. The Gathering Storm: The Grey Zone Ep.1. The Grey Zone is a murky space where it’s not clearcut that an attack has actually occurred, but with multiple, deliberate occurences, there is certainly a battle going on none the less. In this episode Sky News journalist Deborah Haynes travels to Salisbury with the widow of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko to visit the site of one of the most high profile grey zone attacks – the poisoning of another ex-Russian agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia. These poisonings were followed by a deluge of misinformation. Finally, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, describes how he and his team revealed the true identities of the Russian military intelligence officers named by the UK as prime suspects in the attempted assassination. Russia denies involvement.

Journey Through Time Episode 2 The Attack that Shook America: Black Tom Explodes. New York harbour erupts with an explosion as Black Tom island is ripped apart. A series of explosions set off a chain reaction as barges and railway carriages loaded with ordnance ready for export exploded. The shock waves ripple out around Manhattan and New Jersey, shattering windows 25 miles away and even registering on the Richter scale. However, only 7 people died and although the Statue of Liberty was damaged, it was not highly visible damage. Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to maintain America’s neutrality in the war, was facing re-election and it was passed off as a regrettable accident. In the end it was the Zimmerman telegram that prompted America to join the war. In 1920, after the war, the Mixed Claims Commission was ensuring that Germany paid reparations, but Von Pappen (i.e. ex-embassy saboteur in the US) argued against the War Guilt Clause 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, keen to deflect attention away from his own sabotage. After a 13 year trial the Mixed Claims Commission settled on a compensation payment of $50 million dollars, but Hitler refused to pay it- in fact it wasn’t settled until 1953 with the final payment made in 1979. The Black Tom Explosion hardened American attitudes towards ‘traitors within’ which played out in the brutal internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the creation of America’s counterintelligence operations.

The Rest is History Episode 646. the Fall of the Incas: Death to the Emperor (Part 3) We left Pizarro and Atahualpa in November 1532 sleeping in a room together, Atahualpa having been taken captive. Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold up to a certain mark on the wall within two months, in exchange for his freedom. He had no sense that these Spanish were just the first of many. During his period of imprisonment, there was a lot of contact between Atahualpa and the Spaniards, and he was still more concerned with the Civil War with his brother, than the Spaniards. His brother Huáscar was being brought north in a cage by Atahualpa’s troops, and ordered to be murdered. By January 1533 the gold to ransom Atahualpa was beginning to arrive slowly. Atahualpa ordered that temples be destroyed to yield up more gold, largely as a way of punishing the people who had supported his brother. When Atahualpa’s general Chalcuchímac took Spaniards to a temple which did not have sufficient gold, he was burned alive. At this stage, Pizarro’s screwed-over partner Almagro with 150 more troops and royal officials. Pizarro began melting down the gold – such beautiful workmanship reduced to ingots- and Almagro demanded half but Pizarro gave him only a token amount. Pizarro’s brother Hernando was sent back to Spain, something that upset Atahualpa because the two men had become friends. The Spanish were anxious that Atahualpa’s troops would attack from the north, and the recently-arrived Almagro and his men wanted to kill him. As the rumours of the imminent invasion of Atahualp’s troop spread (and they were just rumours- there was no invasion planned), Pizarro agreed to hold a kangaroo court and Atahualpa was sentenced to death by burning, unless he converted to Christianity. Aware that death by burning would mean that there would be no mummified body to go to the next life, he finally agreed. The Spanish grilled him anyway and buried him. Both Pizarro’s brother Hernando and the King were very critical of Pizarro’s decision to kill a King, and now Pizarro needed to find a new Incan intermediary.

Foundling. Episode 6. As the series winds up, Jess’s father Lewis finally contacts the producer Lucy Greenwell, and says that he had no idea that Jennifer had been pregnant, and is evasive over whether and how much he continued to have contact with Jennifer. Meanwhile, after Jess decided to go ahead with the podcast, Jennifer’s family who had made contact with her even though their mother had not, withdrew contact with her. Jess herself had distanced herself from them when she was excluded from her ‘new’ grandfather’s deathbed and funeral, and then they blocked contact with her on social media. Meanwhile Lucy the program producer finds another American girl who was also a foundling, and as with Jess, it turned out that her mother had also gone on to have other children that she abandoned. This woman, Janet, had met with her mother and established contact with one brother, but her curiosity satisfied, she had let the relationship lapse. Jess is nowhere near doing that: she is still too angry, and wants her mother Jennifer to be punished. And the arrival of two Cold Case detectives and the knowledge that women are being prosecuted today for abandoning their babies decades and decades ago, shows that there is punishment- but just not the sort of punishment that would satisfy Jess.

Actually, I have had less and less sympathy for Jess as this series has gone on. It’s all about her, and she is heedless to the damage she is doing in order to have her own questions answered and her insecurities assuaged. With DNA there is no secrecy any more, and it’s as if secrecy is a crime. I don’t know that it is: sometimes secrets have to be kept for life to go on.

How Did We Get Here? Episode 5: Israel and the Palestinians: From WW2 to the First Arab War The White Paper which was issued in 1939 after the crushing of the Arab Revolt was rejected by the Palestinian Mufti, then in Germany, because as far as he was concerned, it still allowed for a large Jewish population in the Palestinian homeland. The Jews were angered by the White Paper’s restriction of Jewish immigration, leading to an uprising against the British and the bombing of the King David Hotel by Jewish paramilitary groups. By 1947 Britain threw in the towel, and handed it over to the United Nations, who had their own plans for partition. The UN plan gave 55% of the land Israel in a chequerboard of seven separate entities, but no one actually took responsibility for the implementation of the plan. But why did the UN vote in favour of it? Britain abstained, and the UN at that time had a different and mainly European membership before the decolonization of the post-war period. The Palestinians rejected the UN plan, arguing that they should have received all of the land. 300,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians left straight away, for various reasons. War broke out, but the Arab armies except for Jordan (which was still under British protection) were weak. The Jewish population ended up with 4/5 of the Mandate territory, with just two Palestinian reserves left: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Features Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University and the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, author of ‘The Making of the Modern Middle East’.

The Rest is History Episode 645 The Fall of the Incas: Massacre in the Andes (Part 2) What happened when the Spanish conquistadors lead by Francisco Pizarro came face to face with the ruthless emperor of the Incan Empire, Atahualpa? How did the Incas treat their strange, pale, alien visitors with their horses? And, why did a brutal, bloody fight to the death break out between the two sides after the meeting? In 1532 Pizarro read the ‘Requirement’ which legally bound the Incas to submit to vassalage and established a municipality which made their conquest legal. Pizarro then headed off with 168 men, few of whom were trained soldiers, while the Incas were checking them out from a distance. Atahualpa thought that the Spanish could be useful in the Civil War with his brother. A meeting between Pizarro’s brother, de Soto and Atahualpa agreed to meet the following day. Atahualpa knew that the Spanish were outnumbered and the horses were of great interest to him. After delays, the meeting finally took place in a square. Atahualpa dropped a book (a bible?) and this was the prompt for a massacre which saw many dead and Atahualpa taken captive. There’s shades of Mexico here, and perhaps the historiography has confused Mexican and Inca conquest.

Foundling Episode 4 and 5 The Fallout. SPOILERS Despite her birth-mother warning Jess to consider the effect of her investigations on the later families created by her parents, Jess then searches for her father. She had done a DNA test with Ancestry, but had no success. She then went with a different company and tracked down her father’s family. (It just goes to show how the commodification of DNA testing means that you can’t get definitive results without subscribing to several services- just like streaming. And because it can identify you through your relatives, even if you haven’t submitted your own sample, there’s no escape). Jess encounters Lewis, her father, and his wife Debbie who was completely unaware of any extra-marital relationship between her husband and Jennifer, and their children. His wife is very upset, and so too is their psychologically-fragile daughter Chloe, when she finds out that Jennifer has been her mental health nurse. In best journalistic fashion the podcasters claim that they’re not making insinuations that the discovery had such a drastic effect on Chloe, but they are really.

From Our Own Correspondent (BBC) I love Foreign Correspondent reports, and this weekly program brings BBC correspondents from all over the world. In the episode of 25 April 2026 Kate Adie introduces dispatches from Pakistan, the Turkey-Iran border, Kenya, Ukraine, and Paraguay. Why was Pakistan chosen as the host of peace talks between the US and Iran? It’s a question some in Islamabad have been asking themselves – and has fired-up a sense of national pride. Caroline Davies has watched on as the country gets ready for another round of negotiations. When the war in Iran began, there was a sense of jubilation among some Iranians, who had long-dreamed of the regime falling. Now that seems like a distant reality, and the mood is changing. BBC Persian’s Omid Montazeri has been on the Turkey-Iran border, where he has found attitudes towards the war are shifting. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, which remains the world’s worst nuclear accident. Jordan Dunbar visited the city of Slavutych in Northern Ukraine, which was purpose built to rehouse workers evacuated from the power plant city of Pripyat – and recounts his search for a DJ legend of the 1980s. In northern Kenya farmers and their families are suffering the effects of consecutive seasons of low rainfall. A new report estimates around 400,000 people are experiencing acute levels of hunger. Sammy Awami reports from Turkana, one of the worst affected areas. And the semi-arid lowlands of the Gran Chaco span an area of around 280 thousand miles across South America – more than half of that is in Argentina, a third in Paraguay and the remainder in Bolivia. It’s the region’s second-largest forest ecosystem after the Amazon – and is also home to a wide range of animal, bird and plant species – as Sara Wheeler discovered.

How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians Episode 4 The Balfour Declaration to the Arab Revolt. In the fourth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin (a female voice at last!), author and historian James Barr and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. (No Simon Sebag Montefiore this time!) At the end of 1917 the British troops took Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, just 67 words long, expressed support for a Jewish ‘national home’- but not a State. It was largely designed to attract Jewish support for Britain’s war aims. Britain was promising land that it didn’t own to a people who didn’t live there and the majority of Arabs rejected it outright. There was a series of riots during the interwar years because of the purchase of land by Zionists and the influx of Jewish migrants which was changing the demography of Palestine. The Peel Commission report of 1937, held after the Arab Revolt, and its subsequent White Paper partitioned the northern part of Palestine for a Jewish state (first time Britain had been talking about a ‘state’) and limited the amount of Jewish immigration, and the rest of Palestine was to be annexed to Transjordan, another British mandate- an early form of ‘two-state solution’. ‘Independence’ was promised to the Palestinians in ten years, but it was not really independence. The Jewish population saw the White Paper as a betrayal, but Britain saw the quelling of the Arab Revolt as a way of moving more soldiers back to Europe where they were needed in the fight against Germany.

The Book Show In Episode 4: Hamnet:Love Grief and Motherhood Dominic and Tabby discussed Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and the film. I was surprised by how much Dominic enjoyed the book, which he gave a 9/10 (although he wasn’t so impressed with the film, to which he gave 6/10). Tabitha loved it too, giving the book 10/10 and 8.5/10 to the film. I was struck again, hearing them read extracts from the book, how beautifully written it is.

The Rest is History We were watching The Irish Civil War 3-part series on SBS before it disappeared, I realized that I hadn’t finished listening to the Rest is History series on the Irish Civil War. Episode 581 The Irish Civil War: The Killing of Michael Collins (Part 2) features historian and friend of the podcast Ronan McGreevy. The fighting in Four Courts lasted three days, culminating in the Public Record Office being blown up, thus destroying records going back centuries. The fight moved into the streets outside the GPO. There were more anti-Treaty supporters than Free-State supporters in the IRA, but the Free State had the support and the weaponry of the British government. At the June election in 1922 the anti-Treatys only got 20% of the votes. People just wanted peace. The National army began recruiting heavily, and the Irregulars (i.e. the anti-Treaty IRA) were beaten, so they decided to embark on a guerilla campaign. Collins travelled to Cork, his home county, and visited friends and his brother and spent some time at the pub. Returning back from the pub, they traversed the same route – something you never do in a guerilla war. Did it matter that Michael Collins was killed? He was young, and would have brought dynamism to the Free State. Now it turns nasty with tit-for-tat killings, the expulsion of Protestants, and the sacking of the Big Houses. The Irish Civil War only lasted 11 months and 1400 were killed- and was less damaging that the other civil wars in Europe at the time. It the end, it just petered out, but the IRA didn’t go away- as we know.

How Did We Get Here? (BBC) Israel and the Palestinians 1: From Earliest Times to the Romans This is a 10 part series presented by Jonny Dymond. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University, and historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’. I was expecting rather more divergence between them, but they tended to agree. The first five books of the Old Testament were set in the Bronze Age around 3000 BCE. ‘The Land’ comprised Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, west of the River Jordan, up to Egypt. They were a People, rather than a Place, and there were other Semitic people there too. The first five books do contain history, but the history serves a theological purpose. By the time we reach the Iron Age, history and archaeology are coming together. King David ruled in 1000 BCE, but there is little archaelogical evidence of a huge temple. There were mixed tribes there, but there was no stark difference between the Jews and others. The Biblical texts talking about Yahweh having a wife were expunged. During Roman times, the right to rule over ‘the land’ was farmed out to client Kings e.g. Herod. In 66CE there was a Jewish riot, and Jerusalem was besieged. In 70CE Titus invaded and destroyed the temple and enslaved the Jewish people. The Siege of Masada in 72 and 73CE was the last gasp of the first Jewish-Roman wars. Now that there was no temple, the Torah became a type of portable temple, and by now they were ‘Jews’ rather ‘Judeans’ (i.e. a geographical identity). However, the early Christians escaped and the Christian community split into two streams, the first headed by James and dominated by Jesus’ family, and the second headed by Paul. In 130-135 CE there was another rebellion against Hadrian, and Judea was renamed Palestine.

Israel and the Palestinians 2: From the Muslim Conquest to the Nineteenth Century. This episode spans the 7th-19th centuries, with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’, and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. By 7th century and the spread of Christendom , Jerusalem had become a pilgrimage site by Christian tourists. Early Islam turned to Jerusalem (in fact, during prayer they literally turned to Jerusalem rather than Mecca) and Muhammed was said to have ascended from the Temple Mount, but actually he never physically went there. Jerusalem fell to the Arabs in 638 and they were welcomed by both Jews and Christians as they brought relief from the taxation and oppression of the Byzantium rulers. There was no sense of contradiction in embracing the Arabs, because the Arabs did not attempt to suppress the Jewish or Christian religions. Meanwhile, back in Europe, in 1095 Pope Ruban believed that the Christian shrines were in danger. 100,000 men answered the call and although Muslims were the target, there was a massacre of ‘infidels’ including Jews. The Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and killed everyone, but by this time there were only 12,000 crusaders. Saladin fought back and established rule over Greater Syria. The Jews always wanted to return to Zion, but they were in no position to do so because of persecution in Christian countries. In 1517 Selim the Grim conquered the Mamluk Sultanate. Originally Selim was going after the Persians, but then he changed direction and went for the Mamluks instead. There was no sense of ‘Palestine’ at the moment – clan, or city, or religious identity- but not a nation. The Ottomans saw Palestine as being part of Syria, and the ‘Holy Land’ contained Jews and different Christian sects. Suleiman the Magnificent specified that the Jews had to pray in a specified area, and this became the ‘Wall’.

Rear Vision (ABC) Pete Hegseth- war monger or true believer? (broadcast 28 March 2026) Almost as bad as seeing Donald Trump on the war is to see his Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth. I refuse to call him ‘Secretary of War’ because only Congress can change the name of a department. Hegseth was raised in Minnesota and attended Princeton university where he signed up for the Reserve Officers Training Corp. After graduating he worked briefly on Wall Street, before being deployed by the National Guard to Cuba, then Iraq. He was highly critical of the army and the ‘restrictions’ that were imposed on them in both deployments. He returned to New York, and feeling disoriented and lost, he began working with veterans’ organizations: Vets for Freedom and later Concerned Veterans for America, but in both positions there were reports of bullying, rorting and drunkenness. He then worked for Fox News. But then he found God and joined an extreme evangelical group the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – I’m not sure which is worse really. The guests on this program include Dave Philipps, Military reporter for the New York Times; Jane Mayer, investigative journalist at The New Yorker Magazine; Missy Ryan, Staff Writer at The Atlantic covering national security, foreign policy and defence and Logan Davis, investigative journalist who grew up in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

The Book Club Episode 2 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Cloning, Free Will, and Soulmates I read this book many years ago, and absolutely loved it, and so too did Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett in this episode. They comment on Cathy’s flat narrative voice, and her not quite understanding her own story: a feature of many of Ishiguro’s other books. I’d forgotten that it is a story in three parts: their schooling at Hailsham, their post-schooling hiatus in the Cottages, a type of half-way house, and then their adulthood where they are either Carers or Donors. Dominic and Tabitha do not divulge the central heartbreak of the book until after the first break in the podcast, and they give plenty of warning that it is coming. Nonetheless, I’d avoid listening to this podcast until you’d read the book, even though they advertise their podcast as one where you can listen and then pretend that you’ve read the book. Dominic gives it a score of 10/10, while Tabitha gives it 9.

The Rest is History Episode 408 The Nazis in Power: Hitler’s Dream (Part 5) Tom Holland takes the running on this episode (mercifully, he doesn’t introduce it with a song) where he looks at Hitler’s ideology. Were the Nazis idealists? Were they even aware that they are the baddies? They embraced the concept of ‘true law’, a song in the blood of the Nordic race, encompassing the Greeks, Romans and Aryans – including the Indians and Chinese. They framed life in biological terms, with the need to ‘preserve the race’ in the face of collapse caused by miscegenation, especially with Jews. They were not religious: they were particularly critical of St Paul, and rejected the egalitarianism of Christianity. However, Tom warns, the language of ‘race’ was everywhere at this stage in US, Britain and France. There was a fear that Germany would disappear, hence the disapproval of homosexuality which did not produce children. As part of race hygiene, there was widespread compulsory and involuntary sterilization, and then later euthanasia, all presented as part of science and health. The churches began to distance themselves from the Nazis, but doctors and the medical profession remained on-side.

The Rest is Classified Episode 124 Kim Philby: Britain’s Most Notorious Traitor (Episode 4) This is the final in this series of episodes which look at the rise of Kim Philby- they’ll deal with the fall of Kim Philby in later episodes (I hope). 1944 and the end of the war was the most dangerous time on the tightrope for Philby, especially when people began defecting because they might have implicated him. Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada in 1945 and Konstantin Volkov threatened to defect in Istanbul, offering up a huge list of names in exchange for 50,000 pounds. Philby warned the Russians that Volkov was likely to defect, and Volkov was duly ‘disappeared’, tortured and executed. Philby married his long-term mistress Aileen and they went together to Istanbul, but she was desperately lonely and began self-harming. And of course, Philby embarked on yet another affair. By now the Cold War was starting, and there was a new UK policy of sending exiled dissident agents into Soviet area. Philby got his hands dirty by killing two young men who were about to be sent into Georgia and ironically ended up getting promoted to MI6 branch in Washington where he liaised with the CIA- all this “success” at only 37 years of age.

Unholy. Unholy is a podcast hosted by Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 12 and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, so it has a strong Jewish emphasis. Why History Explains Everything Happening Right Now. You can see this as a YouTube video, but it’s actually just talking heads. He points out that Judaism as we know it today is a post-Temple concept. The Romans assumed that if you got rid of the cult temple, you’d get rid of the people- after all, it had worked with other peoples. But it didn’t work with the Jews because they had texts and so they were were able to reinvent themselves. He argues that you cannot deny a link between the Jews and Israel, but they are not ‘indigenous’ as such. However, the scriptures do link the Jews with specific lands, and there is nothing else comparable to this. In relation to Iran, in 538 BCE Cyrus saved the Jews, and Holland is impressed by the continuity that is now on the Iranian national stage which still retains its pre-Islam identity. He suggests that America is haunted by the rise/fall/decline trajectory of the Roman Empire, which they have chosen as a model. He then talks about the West and secularism, arguing that the West’s rise coincided with the withdrawal from religion by the elites e.g. the influence of Darwinism, and philosophers like Nietzsche. The notion of a secular/religious divide is a Western perspective, compared with Judaism and Islam where religion is seen as part of the polity.

Global Story (BBC) Are We Heading for World War III? An excellent interview with historian Margaret Macmillan, who has done a lot of work on wars and peace, particularly related to World War I. Drawing from history, she explains that wars are often influenced by emotions of leaders – pride, ego, fear etc. and sometimes they start by accident e.g. the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was surrounded by contingencies and ‘what ifs’. A war can spread quickly across continents because of treaties and agreements. In the context of the current US/Israeli/Iranian war, the economic effects will involve countries across the world, but she doubts that China will become involved in a military action. She notes that there is a problem of sunk costs- that once there has been loss of life, it is hard to stop fighting (I’m thinking here of Ukraine). She describes situations when war didn‘t happen- e.g. in the 1983 when Russia shot down Korean Airlines 007 by accident, and another situation where Russia thought that 1983 US-UK war games were the real thing. In this case, the protagonists picked up the phones and gave reassurance. She hopes that we haven’t already embarked on WWIII, although Ukraine thinks that it has. She reminds us that since 1945 there has been a war every year, and she reminds us that because we have become smug about peace, we have not spent enough money keeping our defences up. Really interesting.

The Rest is History Episode 407 The Nazis in Power: The Conquest of Austria (Part 4). From their website:

By 1937, Hitler’s ever-growing ambitions were driving Europe to the brink of war. Ever restless, he knew that Germany must conquer the world, or be destroyed. His first target was Austria, his homeland, whose annexation to Germany would unite German blood under one indomitable Reich. However, in an effort to avoid Nazi rule, the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, called a referendum on annexation, to show the Austrian people’s will against it. Hitler’s reaction was one of rage, and on the morning of Friday, the 11th of March, 1938, he sent an ultimatum to Vienna. At 5.30am the next day, the German army crossed into Austria. It was met by great cheering crowds, and Hitler’s arrival in Vienna was one of true apotheosis… Yet the darkness at the heart of Hitler’s European dream was also emerging, as the Nazis began to detain and repress Austrian minorities, particularly the Jewish population, on an unprecedented scale.

This episode starts with one of Tom’s musical “renditions”, this time of ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music, although as they point out at the end of the episode, the Von Trapps didn’t actually escape by climbing the Alps, but went to Italy by train, thanks largely to the fact to that they were rich and not Jewish. By now Hitler was animated by a sense of mission, and he saw 1943-5 as the window of action. However, the generals were less enthusiastic about Hitler’s plans for Austria and Czechoslovakia, uneasy about the recklessness of his action and their lack of preparation. But the top generals were sacked for various reasons, and replaced by yes-men. Hitler had attempted to foment a coup earlier in 1933, but he was warned off by Mussolini. But by 1937 Mussolini was more ambivalent, and so Hitler went into action. Hitler’s arrival in Austria was a very emotional occasion for him- we forget Hitler’s emotional, sentimental side- as it was his home country. We are reminded that Austria had always been anti-Semitic, and the round up of the Jews began very quickly.

Empire Episode 343 Lebanon: Hezbollah, Israel and Fifty Years as a Battleground. In this episode Lebanese historian and author of Black Wave, Kim Ghattas talks about the past fifty years of Lebanon’s history. She reminds us that, as a nation, Lebanon is only young, having been created in the breakup of the Ottoman empire after WWI. It was under the French mandate until 1943, and the decision was made to add Sunni and Shia populations within its borders. Lebanon has always looked to outside influences: the Sunnis looked to Saudi Arabia, the Shia to Iran and the Christians to France and the US. In 1982 the Maronite Christians invited Israel in, but Israel went much further than their supposed 40 km incursion. Arafat left and went into exile. Israel got a taste for expansion and developed a doctrine of Greater Israel, overturning the Sykes-Picot agreement, something that Iran was always going to oppose. And we’re seeing the fruits of this today.