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When was the best time in English history to be alive?

12/22/2025 • 29 min

Did you know that Elizabethan Londoners were good kissers? That medieval drinkers used beer to fight off the flames of a raging inferno? And that Jane Austen doesn't paint an entirely accurate picture of the early 19th century? These are just some of the facts served up in Ian Mortimer's new book, Mortimer's A to Zs of English History. Here, in conversation with… Play episode

“I am to flirt my last”: Jane Austen’s twenties
The secret propaganda war against the Nazis
The many faces of James VI & I
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: life of the week
A short history of ghost hunting
Becoming Jane Austen
Ghosts, gods & sea monsters: a supernatural history of the Atlantic
The summer that changed everything for the Kennedys
Margaret Beaufort: life of the week
Idi Amin's willing helpers
“You can’t kill and maim with impunity”: the powerful legacy of Nuremberg
Assassins vs Templars
WW2's Tunisian campaign: the Stalingrad of Africa
Empress Matilda: life of the week
How warhorses transformed medieval England
Did the Nazis get a fair trial?
Forgotten female secret agents of WW2
What causes cultures to decline and fall?
Christopher Marlowe: life of the week
Uprising: the Civil Wars untangled
The Nazis’ crimes laid bare
What does Hitler’s DNA really tell us?
Mutilated corpses and undead mothers-in-law: vampire epidemics through his…
The problem with poo: a millennium of manure
James Garfield: life of the week
A new history of multicultural Britain
What should we do with the Nazis? The road to the Nuremberg Trials
Who stole the Tudor crown?
The librarian who stole KGB secrets
Nellie Bly: life of the week
The improbable alliance that defeated Hitler
Remember, remember: The legacy of the Gunpowder Plot
Five partitions that shaped South Asia
Crystal balls & contacting angels: predicting the future in early modern E…
Giuseppe Garibaldi: life of the week
A day in the life of a gladiator
What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded?
Bodies, bones & overflowing churchyards: a history of graveyards
Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century?
Malcolm X: life of the week
Ghosts, grief and the paranormal
How the Gunpowder Plot unravelled
Sex and sensationalism: a history of the tabloids
11th-century Europe: not just the Norman Conquest
William Shakespeare: life of the week
Tudor life with Ruth Goodman
Who laid the fuse for the Gunpowder Plot?
Reagan's plan to 'make America great again'
How enslaved people fought for freedom across the Atlantic

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