Secrets of the Neanderthals • 2024

26:00

How did one man succeed in relaunching the Olympic spirit and turn the Games into a global event?

S2E5 • Butterfly Effect • 2018 • History

52:06

As the country's economy falters, the Nazis plan invasions and a racial purge while the leaders of the inner circle fight to win Hitler's favour.

5/10 • Hitler's Circle of Evil • 2017 • History

43:42

Presenter Bettany Hughes explores the day in 49BC when, defying the Senate, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the river Rubicon, plunging the Republic into civil war. With the aid of the most recent archaeological finds and theories, she examines Caesar's character, his dealings with Crassus, Pompey the Great and Cicero, and how his quest for absolute power effectively sounded the death knell for the Roman Republic and paved the way for dictatorial rule.

S1E3 • Eight Days That Made Rome • 2017 • History

59:28

Simon discovers surprises in Istanbul as it rose to become the imperial capital and Islam's most powerful city. Visiting the great mosques and palaces built by the Ottoman emperors, he tells the stories behind them - of royal concubines, murderous bodyguards and sultans both the powerful and the depraved. He shows how the Christians, Muslims and Jews of the city once co-existed before the waves of nationalist rebellions brought the Ottoman empire to its knees. In the 20th century the ancient capital was once more transformed by the new secular vision of Ataturk.

Part 3 • Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities • 2013 • History

43:29

A great short history of the Japanese Empire, from the early mediaeval strife of the time of the code of the Samurai which carried through to to the opening of Japan to Western trade. There's good detail on how Japan began to rely on its military caste and its deification of its Emperor. The search for Empire is its very undoing as the military seize political power and begins to rival the colossus of the USA for domination of Asia, a disastrous policies that ends beneath the foreboding mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

S1E2 • The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire • 2011 • History

14:58

Trade, and in particular trade in luxury goods, drove the commerce economies of the Bronze Age. This is the time when the first super powers in history, Egypt and Mesopotamia, emerge and dominate the "world" stage of the Mediterranean and Aegean seas and surrounding areas.

S1E2 • Bronze Age • 2016 • History