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In this episode, Tony Fox discusses “Remember Me to My Comrades,” a collection of letters and diaries from International Brigade volunteers from Northern England. The narrative explores the political dimensions of these volunteers, their sacrifices during the Spanish Civil War, and their lasting legacy in the fight against fascism, highlighting their humanity and commitment.
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In August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Indian Constituent Assembly on the eve of independence: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.’ The phrase captured something genuinely extraordinary. But it concealed as much as it revealed. Independence came simultaneously with partition — and the violence that accompanied it remains one of the largest catastrophes of the twentieth century. The tryst with destiny was written in blood before it was written in ink.
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In 1839, Louis Daguerre announced to the French Académie des Sciences a process by which light acting on a chemically prepared surface could produce a permanent image of whatever lay before the lens. It was not simply a technical innovation. It was an epistemological event. For the first time in human history, the external world could be made to represent itself, bypassing the intermediary of the human hand. The question of what this meant — for knowledge, for art, for memory, for truth — has been argued over for nearly two centuries, and has not yet been resolved.
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On 17 December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi stood outside the regional headquarters of the Tunisian government in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, doused himself in paint thinner, and set himself alight. His act of self-immolation became the symbolic catalyst for the most significant wave of popular uprisings in the Arab world since decolonisation. Within weeks, the president of Tunisia had fled. Within months, the presidents of Egypt and Libya had fallen. Within five years, most of those hopes were extinguished.
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How Witte’s state-driven industrialisation of the 1890s made Russia a modern power — and manufactured the working class that would rise against the autocracy in 1905 and 1917.
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The counter-reforms, Russification and the paradox of a regime that industrialised the economy while forbidding the political change industrialisation everywhere produced.
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Emancipation, the zemstva, the law courts and the military reforms — and why every Great Reform stopped short of limiting the autocracy that made it.
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How Khrushchev tried to reform Stalinism without surrendering the Party’s monopoly — de-Stalinisation, the Virgin Lands, living standards and the limits of the Thaw.
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In the latest solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore John Gray’s False Dawn and the remarkable parallels between two failed attempts to remake Russia on a Western model – Bolshevism and the “shock therapy” of the post‑Soviet 1990s. The Treaty of Versailles and the Missed Opportunity After the First World War, John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, warning that the Carthaginian nature of the Treaty of Versailles – the punishment of Germany – would set in motion terrible consequences. Keynes argued that new systems of economic international cooperation were needed, and that the…
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In the latest solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, I explore the striking parallels between the British Labour Party’s war on Jeremy Corbyn and the Democrat establishment’s growing fear of Zohran Mamdani – and what it tells us about the bankruptcy of the centre-left. The Liberalism That Wasn’t Let’s start with a confession. I used to be irritated by the American right’s habit of calling everything left of centre “liberal”. Fox News pundits would scream about “liberals” as if they were the vanguard of a socialist revolution. And I would think: no, you’re confusing liberalism with the left. They…