Daisy Dunn

Nunc est bibendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Peter Stothard’s portrait of an ambitious young Lothario running wild and refusing to knuckle down is certainly not the Horace we know from Latin lessons

The best radio at the moment is on the BBC World Service

31 May 2025 9:00 am

Online viewings of Conclave increased threefold following the death of Pope Francis last month. At least some of the traffic…

A fabulously entertaining new podcast about ancient Greece

3 May 2025 9:00 am

How did a myth about the consequences of poor judgment become a parable for aspiration? The question is posed by…

Perfection: The Rest is Classified reviewed

5 April 2025 9:00 am

Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter…

Booze now has its own Rest is History-style podcast

8 February 2025 9:00 am

Intoxicating History is the perfect title for drinks expert Henry Jeffreys and food critic Tom Parker Bowles’s new podcast. Its…

Why I’m obsessed with Farming Today

11 January 2025 9:00 am

Farming Today airs at an undignified hour each morning on Radio 4. On the few occasions I’ve caught it live…

Why space is the perfect subject for podcasts

7 December 2024 9:00 am

The podcasts I’m recommending to everyone at the moment are Nasa’s Curious Universe and the Royal Astronomical Society’s The Supermassive…

Radio 4’s Lord Lucan series is rescued by a brilliant narrator

9 November 2024 9:00 am

It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become…

They weren’t all scheming poisoners: the maligned women of imperial Rome

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Joan Smith criticises the distortions of Robert Graves in particular, whose villainisation of the empress Livia had no historical basis whatever

This UFO testimony had me hooked

12 October 2024 9:00 am

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick…

How Berlin nearly broke Bowie

14 September 2024 9:00 am

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the…

A fiery examination of the damage wrought by internet culture

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Historically, when a woman was giving birth, she was attended by the women she trusted most, including her child’s prospective…

Do men and women need different podcasts?

20 July 2024 9:00 am

Do men and women need different podcasts? The notion goes against the unisex, every-sex, what-is-sex-anyway culture we have come to…

Rushdie on how the best magical realism transcends fantasy

22 June 2024 9:00 am

Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle.…

The jaw-dropping story of the British Museum thefts

25 May 2024 9:00 am

It’s August 2023 when news breaks that artefacts have gone missing, presumed stolen, from the British Museum. I’m about an…

How to live off the land for a year

27 April 2024 9:00 am

Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge…

A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I’ve ever heard

28 October 2023 9:00 am

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the…

Enjoyable and informative but where’s the drama? Political Currency reviewed

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The first episode of George Osborne and Ed Balls’s new podcast, Political Currency, opened with an old clip of the…

The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley

2 September 2023 9:00 am

The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about…

The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic

12 August 2023 9:00 am

With its carefully calibrated sense of time, the Iliad is clearly the work of a single man and not a ‘rolling snowball’ of different contributions, argues Robin Lane Fox

Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed

5 August 2023 9:00 am

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men…