Short History Of...

Professor Marisa Linton is a historian and author of Choosing Terror, virtue, friendship and authenticity in the French Revolution.

Maximilian Robespierre was a lawyer in a house in northern France. If the revolution hadn't happened no one would have heard of him he was mild mannered, he was inoffensive but then the revolution happened and he got drawn into it like so many other people and he becomes very much a political activist.

If Robespierre had died in 1792 we would probably just think he was a good man and idealistic man. He was all those things but he was also a very dedicated revolutionary and he comes to believe like many others that in the cause of the revolution you may have to do things that are terrible so he starts to accept as many others do that terrible things must be done.

Robespierre asks the convention if they can leave in peace someone who is in his words no less guilty and no less accused by the nation than Louis.

When France and Austria were at war with one another whether the revolution should continue Mary Antoinette passed battle plans of the French armies to the Austrians. So in fact she was a traitor, she actually was. But the people who put her on trial didn't know that they guessed it but they didn't know it. And what they really convict her of is being a bad woman generally on the basis of some quite fabricated evidence.

With thanks to Robert Twigger, author of Red Nile: A Biography of the World's Greatest River.

Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to John Man, historian and author of the book 'Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior'.

John Mann is a historian and author of the book Ninja, a thousand years of the Shadow Warriors.

Tracy Borman is a historian, author and joint curator for Historic Royal Palaces.

Sir John Conroy was an interesting character and a huge influence over Victoria's early life.

So he'd been hanging around her family for some time. He was her late father's aquary and then he sort of transferred to the service of Victoria's mother. And the two became very close.

Obviously, as there always were in these situations, there were rumors about just how close Victoria's mother and Sir John Conroy actually were.

But he was a very dominant figure. He clearly liked to rule the roost. He really heavily influenced Victoria's mother and therefore Victoria herself. And she speaks of him as a devil incarnate and monster.

Miranda Oldhouse Green is a professor of archaeology at Cardiff University and the author of the book Boudica, Britannia.

It was deemed legendary that Britain was very rich in minerals, very rich in wheat growing. And so in terms of economics, it made sense.

So there are a lot of things that came together fairly near the beginning of the first century AD for Rome to cast covetous and slightly frightened eyes at Britain.

Dr. Adam Marshak is the author of The Many Faces of Herod the Great. Antipater's family are Idumean elites and they've been in a position of power in Idumea for a very long time.

Antipater is one of the leading men and his family is one of the leading families in Idumea.

Bruce Chilton is professor of religion at Bard College and author of The Herods, Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession.

The people of Idumea had been at the mercy of larger empires for centuries.

Their territory had literally been shifted over from the east towards the west.

They were not in the most fertile part of the region.

They didn't have established, well-developed institutions.

Nonetheless, there were problems. Primarily, the fact that his father didn't really appreciate that there was anything special about Winston. He was constantly putting his son down. He was not visiting him, and neither did his mother.

And so in that sense, although he was ignored quite a lot as a child, he did worship his parents. He thought his father was the greatest man on earth and attempted to emulate him, and he loved his mother unreservedly, even though rather sadly, he said, she shone for me like the evening star, brilliant but at a distance.

He had lots of American friends. He was somebody who felt at home in America. He went to America 14 times.

And so he really did sort of understand the American continent in a way that surprisingly enough, very few other British politicians did at the time.

Barely soon after starting his journalistic career, he was the best paid war correspondent in the world which is a tremendous thing.

Fiona MacDonald is the author of Gentlemen Rogues and Wicked Ladies, a guide to British highwaymen and highway women.

Probably one of the earliest examples would be Robin Hood.

Our skewed ideas of highwaymen owe much to a writer named William Ainsworth who pulled Turpin's story from relative obscurity.

Published in 1834 nearly a century after Turpin's execution Ainsworth's novel Rookwood is an instant bestseller but it's a secondary character that grabs the public's imagination.

Newton, a slave trade captain, turned Anglican cleric and abolitionist advises Wilberforce to remain in post and do God's work from there.

Kenneth Womack is professor of English and popular music at Monmouth University and author of The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles.

So John essentially recruits his friends. If you were a friend of John Lennon, you were in his band. It was just about that simple. He wasn't necessarily interested in talent. He was just excited by the sound. Being a great guitar player didn't seem to be important to him. He just liked the idea of doing it, right? Which is what a lot of the skiffle bands were like in England in the mid-1950s.

In 1816 around the age of 40 Jane completes two more novels. Emma which follows the matchmaking misadventures of young heroine Emma Woodhouse is packed with satirical bite and as requested the novel includes a dedication to the Prince Regent.

If you look at the Mercator maps and some of the other maps of that era, the maps of the pole usually show like a pizza that's neatly divided into four pieces with open water of some kind between those.

And I think that the fact that actual geography is so much less symmetrical and predictable than the imaginary ones was, took a while to grasp.