The English words nobody can explain
Some of the most ordinary words in English have origins that no one can explain. Among them: "dog", "big", "bird", "donkey", "boy", "girl" and "puzzle".
What the Tudors REALLY ate
In this episode of her series on Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman explains how no two weeks of the Tudor diet were ever the same. Each food source had its own…
The entire history of English in 22 minutes
In this video you'll learn about where English came from, what impact the Vikings had on our language, what the Normans did to English, why Middle English is so weird,…
Does the Bible Command Women to Wear Veils?
Religion for Breakfast
Reasons Why People Become Atheists
Religion for Breakfast
Beyond The Pottery: The Creative Giant, Josiah Wedgwood
Historian and author AN Wilson explores the life of his great hero, Josiah Wedgwood. As one of the founding fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Wegdwood was a self-made, self-educated creative…
Not Just the Tudors: When Europe met Islam
In the Early Modern period the boundaries between Christian and Islamic civilisations were far more porous than we imagine: Isaac Newton’s library included Arabic biographies of the Prophet Muhammad; the…
Chinese Porcelain
A BBC Documentry
History Extra podcast: Giuseppe Garibaldi
He led one of history's most celebrated guerrilla campaigns, showed remarkable political acumen, and drove aristocratic English women wild. Is it any wonder that Giuseppe Garibaldi is one of the…
A brief history of singular ‘they’
The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.