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Latest episodes
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52 min
Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible with Harry Spillaine (Bodleian, 202…
Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order…
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60 min
Terror, Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, with Deana Heath, hosted by Salman Sayyid and Claudia Ra…
In this episode, Salman Sayyid and Claudia Radiven were joined by Deana Heath to discuss her work Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2026). H…
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60 min
Radio ReOrient S15:2: Terror, Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, with Deana Heath, hosted by Salman…
In this episode, Salman Sayyid and Claudia Radiven were joined by Deana Heath to discuss her work Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2026). H…
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54 min
Disability: A History of Resistance with David Turner (Random House, 2026)
Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to a lack of evide…
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37 min
Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment with John Potter (Yale UP, 2026)
The English Christmas carol has been sung in court and cloister, tavern and field since medieval times. But with the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880—and with a vi…
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48 min
Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain with Lise Shapi…
Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press. Read…
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49 min
Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712 with Nat Cutter (Oxford UP, 2026)
From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tu…
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46 min
The Brass Band Story with Trevor Herbert (Yale UP, 2026)
Brass bands have played a unique role in the cultural history of Britain. Amidst the industrial revolution, an increasingly urban population turned to music for mass entertainment.…
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38 min
Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings with Ken Dark (Bloomsbury, 2026)
How Roman Britain ended is one of the most controversial questions in British history. Unique among former Roman citizens in Western Europe, the Britons established long-lived king…
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1 h 07
Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination with Paul Kléber Monod (Cambridge UP, 20…
What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of…
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42 min
Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species with Lee Raye (Reaktion, 2026)
Lee Raye joins Jana Byars to talk about their new book, Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species (Reaktion, 2026). Discover why a beaver was said to bite off its…
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31 min
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden with Timothy Mowl (Reaktion, 2026)
Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes…
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29 min
Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend with Jeremy Harte (Reaktion, 2026)
Jeremy Harte, President of the Folklore Society, joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend (Reaktion, 2026). The book un…
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1 h 00
The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa with Adam Rovn…
This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and…
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36 min
Assassins and Secret Listeners: Britain's Invisible Armies, 1939-45 with Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, 2026)
Throughout Britain, all day, every day and in the dead of night, the secret listeners went about their solitary work. Hands on headphones, these men and women, drawn from all walks…
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51 min
Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing with Marion Quirici (Syracuse UP, 2025…
Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexualit…
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35 min
Matthew Mason, "Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World" (U Virg…
How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny…
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57 min
Arthur der Weduwen, "The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife o…
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29 min
John Gilbert McCurdy, "Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert N…
The fascinating story of a British army chaplain's buggery trial in 1774 reveals surprising truths about early America.On the eve of the American Revolution, the British army consi…
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50 min
Ciara Breathnach, "Absence in the Archives" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last mo…