Episodes

George Orwell wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four before the full reality of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe had unfolded. So how did he see it coming? In this episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior and Rog...

Roger Moorhouse joins Antonia Senior for another episode of History Book Buffs: On This Day — and today we’re in Warsaw on 14 May 1955 for the signing of the Warsaw Pact. This was the treaty that formalised the Soviet bloc an...

wo new books on Weimar Germany arrive at once: Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy and Katja Hoyer’s Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe . Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse discuss the fragile republi...

On 30 April 1945 , as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler died in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. In this On This Day episode, Roger Moorhouse and Antonia Senior reconstruct Hitler’s final hours—his physi...

Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Tudor history—and a revenge story with a twist. Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse compare two very different novels about Anne Boleyn: one grounded in meticulous research, the other wildly inventive—...

BUY THE BOOK: https://amzn.eu/d/0eHvoNPP Were the Cambridge Five glamorous rebels… or something far darker? In this episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior joins Roger Moorhouse from Cambridge itself to unpack the real...

How did one woman become one of the most extraordinary figures in the Polish Resistance? In this powerful episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior speaks to award-winning historian and biographer Claire Mulley about her...

What happens when two of the 20th century’s most notorious men tell their own stories? In this episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse dive into two of the most seductive, slippery and deeply unreli...

In this episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior talks to historian Josh Ireland about his gripping book The Death of Trotsky , which tells the extraordinary story of how Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hunted down his gr...

In March 1948, Jan Masaryk , the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and son of the country's founding president, was found dead beneath the window of the Foreign Ministry in Prague. Was it suicide ? Or was it murder ordered b...

In this episode of History Book Buffs , Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse dive into the extraordinary story of Grigori Rasputin —the mystic, healer, and alleged holy man who gained an astonishing hold over Tsar Nicholas II a...

108 years ago, Lenin signed one of the most punishing peace treaties in modern history. In this 10-minute Buffs in Brief , Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse examine the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the deal that took Russia out...

A burning parliament. A communist caught at the scene. Within weeks, German democracy was effectively dismantled. Was the Reichstag Fire a Nazi conspiracy — or a brilliantly exploited accident? In this ten-minute deep dive, w...

Was this the most reckless speech in modern political history? In February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a four-hour address that stunned the room — and reshaped the com...

The Teutonic Knights. Pagan forests. Crusade-by-fire. And the medieval origin story behind modern Europe’s most volatile borderlands. Antonia Senior and historian Roger Moorhouse explore the Baltic Crusades through Alexander ...

What if the origins of America’s Cold War science boom — and even the Space Race — were built on the knowledge of Nazi scientists ? In this episode, Antonia Senior and historian Roger Moorhouse dive into the dark, fascinating...

On 29 October 1929 , the world changed forever. As share prices collapsed, panic ripped through Wall Street, fortunes vanished in hours, and confidence in capitalism itself cracked. What began as a stock market crash in New Y...

Happy New Year from History Book Buffs! After our 21 Days of Christmas Book Gifts , we’re back with a special episode looking ahead to the most exciting history and historical fiction books coming out in 2026 . From Soviet as...

Welcome back to History Book Buffs for Part 2 of our 21 Days of Christmas Books series — a bumper festive episode packed with brilliant history (and a couple of cracking novels). I’m Antonia Senior — writer and journalist — j...

🎄 21 Days of Christmas Book Gifts – Round-Up of the First 10 Books 🎄 In this special episode, we run through the first ten titles in our 21 Days of Christmas Book Gifts series — a curated collection of the very best in histor...

Eighty years ago, the world watched as the Nuremberg Trial opened in a ruined German city — the first time leaders of a defeated regime were prosecuted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. In thi...

On 23 August 1939, two dictators who despised each other made a decision that reshaped the world. In this episode, we explore the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact — often known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact — and its profound impact on Euro...

🔍 Inside Operation Biting: Antonia and Roger review Operation Biting, Max Hastings's account of one of WWII’s Most Daring Raids | Churchill, Radar & Revolution Step into the shadows of World War II as we uncover the high-stak...

KeywordsU-Boat War, Wolfpack, Das Boot, WWII, German perspective, naval history, PTSD, memoirs, historical narrative, empathySummaryIn this conversation, Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse dive into the complexities of the U-...