History as a guided visit.
Travels Through Time treats history as a guided visit rather than a race through facts. Each conversation settles into a year, a place, or an object, then lets a guest widen the view.
PRESS PLAY
Travels Through Time is a history interview show built around the pleasures of historical presence. Its governing idea is simple enough to grasp quickly: a conversation is anchored in a particular year, scene, book, or historical problem. From there, the show moves carefully. It does not hurry the past into a neat lesson. Recent episodes suggest a broad and textured range, moving from Catherine Ostler and *The Renoir Girls (1881)* to Philip Stephens and *Britain Alone (1962)*, Nicholas Walton and *The End of the Dutch Empire (1950)*, Veronica Buckley and *The Hapsburgs and the French Revolution (1790)*, and Marc Mierowsky and *Daniel Defoe the English Spy (1706)*. Other conversations reach further, into Neanderthals, Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence, and Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The show is strongest when it lets a material detail open onto a larger structure. A painting, a wedding, a diplomatic meeting, a book, a ruined imperial settlement, or a political betrayal can become the route into a much wider historical world. The tone is warm but not loose. Questions are given room to breathe, and guests are allowed to build explanations across context, anecdote, and consequence. Peter Moore appears repeatedly in the excerpts as the person steering many of these conversations, while Artemis Irvine and Violet also appear in named introductions. The show’s editorial center is history as lived texture, not merely as dates and outcomes. It is comfortable with art, politics, empire, monarchy, diplomacy, memory, and violence, but it tends to approach even grave subjects through patient framing rather than shock. That gives the episodes a hospitable quality. The listener is not dropped into a lecture hall so much as led into a room, a city, a crisis, or a set of documents. British and European history recur often, especially the long consequences of political settlements and imperial choices. Yet the recent selection also makes space for China, prehistoric life, and the personal work of remembering historical trauma. The appeal lies in the show’s combination of scene-making and scholarship. It suits a listener who wants to understand why a moment mattered, while still seeing the clothes, rooms, books, paintings, and human decisions that made it feel real.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys measured historical conversation, especially when a single year, artwork, political crisis, or book becomes the doorway into a wider world.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the scene-based interview: guests do not merely name a period, they help make a year feel visible through places, objects, personalities, and consequences.
In each episode we ask a leading historian, novelist or public figure the tantalising question, "If you could travel back through time, which year would you visit?" Once they have made their choice, then they guide us through that year in three telling scenes. We have visited Pompeii in 79AD, Jerusalem in 1187, the Tower of London in 1483, Colonial America in 1776, 10 Downing Street in 1940 and the Moon in 1969. Chosen as one of the Evening Standard's Best History Podcasts of 2020. Presented weekly by Sunday Times bestselling writer Peter Moore, award-winning historian Violet Moller and Artemis Irvine.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A single-year frame turns political turning points and private lives into focused, evidence-minded conversations.
Travels Through Time gives each conversation a date, then lets Peter Moore and his guest rebuild the pressures around it. The method keeps large political changes attached to decisions and lived consequences, moving from Daniel Defoe's activity around the Anglo-Scottish union to…
A year in history looks tidy until you meet Defoe the spy and Renoir's young sitters.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Renoir sitting opens into Parisian society, family intrigue, and the shadow of war.
Peter Moore's conversation with Catherine Osler opens on a striking scene: two young girls in colourful lace dresses before Pierre-Auguste Renoir's easel in Paris in 1881.
Macmillan's 1962 Common Market push sharpens a timely discussion of Britain's place between America and Europe.
Travel Through Time links present-day geopolitical unease with Philip Stevens' account of Britain's postwar identity, drawing the United States and Great Britain, the Common Market, and 1962 into one steady line of inquiry.
A reflective look at how the Dutch empire was reckoned with, slowly and belatedly.
Nicholas Walton takes Travels Through Time to the Netherlands in the mid-20th century, where a small country with a big history was reckoning with the end of empire and the aftershocks of war.
A clear look at late 18th-century Europe, from revolution and reform to Joseph and Mozart.
The episode follows Peter Moore and Veronica Buckley through late 18th-century Europe, tracing upheaval from unrest in Britain's American colonies to the French Revolution and into Joseph's Austria.
Defoe's literary fame becomes a story about the Union, Scottish commissioners, and political maneuvering.
Peter Moore uses Daniel Defoe to open a wider view of the active union between England and Scotland, and the discussion is at its best when it moves from Robinson Crusoe to Defoe the pamphleteer, novelist, entrepreneur, and political operative.
Careful history with narrative momentum.
Shakespeare’s world, made tangible.
Small objects, large histories.
Royal history with scores, jokes, and grudges.
England's story, one nominated place at a time.
Peter Moore opens on Paris in 1881.
The host opens by tying the episode to the geopolitics of the 2020s.
Nicholas Walton joins Travels Through Time for the Netherlands in the 1950s.
Peter Moore opens with Veronica Buckley.
Peter Moore opens with Daniel Defoe.
An archived interview from 2020 where archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes discusses Neanderthal life, including their hunting, tool-making, burial practices, and art, set 126,000 years ago.
Art historian James Hall discusses Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence in 1504, his career, and his book The Artist's Studio.
Tania Branigan discusses her book 'Red Memory' about China's Cultural Revolution and her time as a correspondent in China.
Simon Akam discusses his book on the British Army's failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the changing culture within the institution.
A live recording of Peter Moore interviewing Oxford professor Diarmaid MacCulloch about Thomas Cromwell in 1536 at the Buxton Literary Festival.