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Rome is burning, and the Emperor is on stage, singing. We all know the image. But what if Nero isn't history, what if Nero is now?

In this episode, historian Keith Hockton draws a line from Nero's Rome to Trump's America, through a single wrestling word that explains why facts don't work, why supporters cheer the wreckage, and why "bread and circuses" is a warning we never actually learned. Some parallels in history are vague. This one is standing right in front of us, waving.

And if you take the comparison seriously, you have to follow it all the way to the end, to what actually happened to Nero.

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An outcast boy with no right to anything took a cattle-clan of a few thousand souls and, inside a single lifetime, forged it into a nation, one strong enough, sixty years after his death, to hand the British Empire the worst defeat it had ever suffered on a battlefield.

In Part Two we go back to the beginning: to a fatherless child mocked with a name that meant beetle, cast out with his mother Nandi to live at the edge of someone else's fire, and to the cold rage that boy carried into the making of the most formidable fighting machine Africa had ever seen. But we tell it with our eyes open — because almost everything the world "knows" about Shaka reaches us through two English adventurers, one of whom advised the other to make him "as bloodthirsty as you can… it helps sell the work." So we hold the whole contradictory man in view at once: genius and butcher, founder and tyrant, and follow his spear all the way to the hill called Isandlwana.

A story of empire and invention, terror and grief, and, above all, of a boy and his mother, cast out together, a very long way from home.

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On a single afternoon in January 1879, in a corner of southern Africa most of the men fighting there could not have found on a map, the British Empire suffered the worst defeat in its history, and, a few miles away, under the same sky, fought the most celebrated last stand it ever told stories about. One catastrophe and one miracle, side by side, beneath the same darkening sun.

This is the story of the Anglo-Zulu War: a war nobody in London had quite authorised, against a king who had done everything to avoid it, fought by an army the Empire had dismissed as savages and would never underestimate again. But it's also the story of a Welsh mother lying awake six thousand miles from the fighting, of a wall built from grain sacks and biscuit boxes, and of one young soldier who lived long enough to carry the whole vanished world into the age of the atom.

We'll separate the legend from what actually happened, the provoked invasion, the medals handed out partly to change the subject, the "Welshness" that came afterward — and we'll try, at the end, to tell it true. Come for the battles. Stay for the woman in Brecon.

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They banned it from the trains. They barred it from the hotels. And still they called it the King of Fruits.

For four hundred years the durian split every traveller who ate it clean in two, one gagging at rotten onions, the next melting over custard, almonds and brown sherry, and somehow the argument never ended. Heaven or horror? Was it the finest fruit on earth, or foulest?

This is a short history of the world's most divisive fruit, and an invitation to decide for yourself.

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How hard was it, really, just to stay alive in the fourteenth century? You wake up in an English village around 1350 and find out, one hazard at a time.

The smoke-filled house. The sewer you drink from. The splinter that becomes a grave. The law that tells you what to wear, and the plague is waiting at the far edge of the century to erase half of everyone you know. But this isn't just a catalogue of horrors: it's the story of resilient, funny, gloriously alive people who danced at weddings and earned their old age the hard way.

Could you survive a single day? The bar, I promise you, isn't high.

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In 1911, the British Crown knighted Roger Casement for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon. Five years later, the same government hanged him for treason. Ever since, people have said he was "hanged on a comma", that a single mark of punctuation in a 565-year-old medieval statute sent a knight of the British Empire to the gallows.

It's one of the most famous stories in legal history. And it's not quite true. In this short, Keith Hockton untangles the myth from what really happened: the humanitarian who became an Irish rebel, the unpunctuated 1351 law argued over word by word, the "Black Diaries" that drained away all sympathy, and the question that still splits opinion, traitor, or martyr?

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George Town, 1867.

Beneath the British flag, another power ruled the streets.

Secret societies commanded thousands of men. Money flowed through opium, gambling and the revenue farms. Loyalties ran deeper than the law, and behind the respectable façade of colonial Penang was a world of violence, fear and sworn brotherhoods.

Then, one afternoon, a man looked over a fence. Someone accused him of being a thief. Someone threw a rambutan. And suddenly, the powder keg that had been building for years caught fire.

What followed was ten days of bloodshed in the streets of George Town, and a terrifying glimpse of just how little control the British actually had over their own colony.

A story of secret societies, guns, money, murder and power. And the strangest beginning to a riot you are ever likely to hear.

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Genghis Khan didn't want the war that would become the most devastating campaign of his life.

It began with a trade caravan, the murder of hundreds of merchants, and one spectacularly arrogant decision by a ruler who had no idea who he was dealing with.

In Part Two of The Wrath of Khan, we follow the Mongol war machine as it tears through the wealthy Khwarazmian Empire, destroys some of the greatest cities of the medieval world, rides across the frozen rivers of Russia and reaches almost to the gates of Vienna. Even Genghis Khan’s death could not stop it. His sons and grandsons would more than double the size of his empire, conquer Russia, sack Baghdad and rule China.

But this is also where the Mongol story becomes far more complicated.

The same empire that built pyramids of skulls also made the Silk Road safer than it had been for centuries. Trade flourished. Religions were tolerated. Knowledge, inventions and ideas moved between East and West on an unprecedented scale. And along those same roads eventually travelled something else: the plague that became the Black Death.

Were the Mongols uniquely savage, or simply more efficient at the brutal business of medieval conquest? Were they destroyers, empire builders, or both?

And if the abandoned boy Temüjin had died on the frozen steppe as a child, how different would our world be today?

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