In this episode, the acclaimed art historian James Hall takes us back to 1504, to see two masters - Michelangelo and Leonardo - at work.

The journalist Tania Branigan takes us back to the opening phases of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Mao Zedong’s attempt to purge Chinese society of its impurities. Over the course of a few fraught months in the summer of 1966, the transformational movement that would last for a decade, began.

Marion Turner takes us back to the fourteenth century to meet a fascinating figure from the Canterbury Tales. This is Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous creation: The Wife of Bath.

This week we’re heading back to the fourth century BC to take a look at one of the world’s greatest ever philosophers. Indeed, according to today’s guest, John Sellars, Aristotle is even more than that. He might well be the single most important human ever to have lived.

In this episode Simon Akam takes us on a tour of duty, to see what has happened inside the British Army in the years since 9/11.

As today’s guest Tim Clayton explains, 'the late eighteenth-century mixed the extremely crude with the extremely fine in a fascinating sort of way.’ The grand master of this potent concoction was the greatest political caricaturist of modern times: James Gillray.

According to the academic and novelist Harry Sidebottom, our time travel guide this week, the Emperor Heliogabalus was the maddest and baddest Roman leader of them all.

The rivalry between Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger is one of the most intense in political history. Both were high-ranking figures of great gifts, but their personal feud, as Josiah Osgood tells us, was a powerful factor in the downfall of the Roman Republic.

In this episode Philip Mansel takes us to the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, probably the most lavish, extraordinary royal palace ever built.

Just before England confronted France in their dramatic quarter final match at the Qatar World Cup, we spoke to one of the nation’s finest sports writers about the year that Gareth Southgate’s players (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) were trying to emulate: 1966.

In this special episode the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan take us back into Australian history in three enchanting pieces of music.

In a significant week in Scottish politics, when the United Kingdom Supreme Court ruled against a second independence referendum, we head more than half a century back to another pivotal moment for the nation. Professor Murray Pittock takes us back to November 1967.

This Remembrance Week the bestselling historian James Holland takes us back to a crucial year in the Second World War. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers.

As 1945 began the greatest conflict in human history was drawing to a close. But with the war in the west almost over, a new question was increasingly being asked. It was one to which Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt all had different answers. What was going to happen next?

Walking around a cathedral today can be a solemn and an awe-inspiring experience, but what if we could stand inside the same building and travel back 800 years or so? In this episode we do exactly that. Our guide is Dr Emma J. Wells, a historian, broadcaster and author of Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals.

‘It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly’, Orlando Figes writes of the Russian Revolution. In the episode we scruitinise that formative event in three, telling scenes.

In this episode we head back to a crucial year in the time of the Tudors. In 1558 Elizabeth succeeded Mary and the long history of Catholic England came to an end.

In this episode the novelist Damian Dibben takes us back to Venice, the Queen of the Adriatic, to meet one of the most enigmatic of the Renaissance masters. Giorgione, or ‘Big George’.