HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-04T14:50:36.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a brief history of dating
items: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is much more historically accurate than you think – here's why
items: Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
items: “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”
items: 9 things you might not know about Sherlock Holmes
items: Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror?
items: Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
items: 31 July: On this day in history
items: 30 July: On this day in history
items: 29 July: On this day in history

Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a brief history of dating
type: item
date: 2026-02-13T15:39:00.000Z
creator: Nichi Hodgson
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Valentine's Day
description: From calling cards and corsets to 'the pill' and the sexual revolution, we have always found inventive ways to find and further love. Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, takes us on a whistle-stop tour of courtship through history
encoded: When I first began writing about the history of dating, what struck me most was how similar the problems of today are to the 1930s, the 1840s, and even the 1780s. From worrying about a partner’s financial standing, or whether someone was going to stick around long enough for you to have children with them, to persuading your parents they are indeed a good fit, the means by which we go about finding love may have changed, but not the hopes, dreams and anxieties we’ve had about discovering it. In the Georgian era, for example, the advice was clear: looks matter but value them at the peril of your long-term happiness: “She, who, intoxicated with flattery, protracts the triumphs of her beauty in youth, may live to lament the barren spoils of it in age.” Indeed, throughout history, grooming and dressing as well as you possibly can has always been a better strategy than ruminating on what you don’t have. Victorian women wore dresses cut just above the nipples, with pearl necklaces draped lasciviously in their décolletage, while some Edwardian men favoured wearing corsets and delighted in the sensation of tight lacing. When the mini skirt was invented in the early 1960s, some men even tried it out, including 16-year-old trainee brick layer Tony Liggard whom the Daily Mail reported was convinced it would catch on among men. It didn’t – but long hair, floral patterns, make-up and jewellery all eventually did. So much for the myth that male grooming is a recent phenomenon! <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/2GettyImages-559574483-24ee5fb-e1770990862524.jpg" width="1499" height="1000" alt="A Victorian advertisement showing black and white sketches of men wearing corsets. Across the top is an address and an advert for Madame Dowding" title="Some Victorian and Edwardian men experimented with wearing corsets, as this 1899 advertisement reveals (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once you were suitably styled, you needed to get a date’s attention.…

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is much more historically accurate than you think – here's why
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T17:41:15.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: Dr Hugh Doherty worked as the historical consultant on HBO’s new Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Speaking to HistoryExtra, he sets out how the series got closer to reality than many historical dramas
encoded: Some works of fiction feel startlingly close to reality. Perhaps surprisingly, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – HBO’s latest Game of Thrones spin-off series – might be one such example. “I was astonished. I had never seen anything like it,” says Dr Hugh Doherty, the show’s historical consultant, in an interview with HistoryExtra. Doherty is a medievalist and lecturer in medieval history at the University of East Anglia. He has worked as a historical consultant on – among other projects – Netflix’s robust historical drama The King, a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henriad starring Timothée Chalamet as Hal (seen more recently in Marty Supreme). Based on author George RR Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms follows the adventures of the titular knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his strange squire, Egg. Unlike Thrones and its other spin-off, House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms largely eschews its fantasy trappings to instead zero in on the trials of a lowly, aspiring knight wandering the fictional land of Westeros in search of prestige. It’s a less ‘epic’ story in its scope and scale – without a dragon or White Walker to be seen. It focusses on a smaller stage, rooted in hard landscapes and their even harder inhabitants. However, much like its progenitor series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is defiantly enmeshed in medieval history. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series took significant inspiration from the late medieval Wars of the Roses of the 15th century, a series of real conflicts saw England ripped apart by the distended ambitions of dynasties that grappled for the crown. The real history that inspired A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Being a prequel to Game of Thrones, it makes sense that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms draws from slightly earlier inspirations. That’s where Doherty came in. He was tasked with ensuring that the series’ depiction of the daily cut-and-thrust of chivalric knighthood, and ma…

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Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T13:00:01.000Z
creator: Dr Rob Blackmore
subject: General History
subject: Magazine
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: From 1066 to 1918, our obsession with battles, elections and even voyages of discovery risks distorting a true understanding of the past
encoded: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.” Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1066-and-all-that-later-edition-CMYKWeb-Ready-dfb5326.jpg" width="2295" height="1530" alt="The cover of a book, with the title 1066 And All That across the top, and two men standing side by side in green and pink clothing" title="The 1930 book 1066 and All That wittily parodied the conventional approach to teaching history in schools at that time (Image by Amazon)" /> But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford Eng…

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“We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”
type: item
date: 2025-11-15T22:00:52.000Z
subject: 21st Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Trends-News
description: Turi King and Alex J Kay have married genetics with history to study a sample of DNA from Adolf Hitler – and, as they reveal, their research has thrown up some extraordinary insights into the Nazi dictator’s private life
encoded: Few historical figures have been discussed and debated as much as Adolf Hitler. We have a wealth of primary source material available to us about his life, including his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, personal correspondence, political directives and military orders, recordings and transcripts of his countless speeches, eyewitness accounts, photographs and film footage. Now, 80 years after his death, Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, a groundbreaking documentary produced by Blink Films and currently airing on Channel 4, has unlocked a new source by presenting the results of a world-first analysis of a sample of Hitler’s DNA. The DNA was taken from the blood on a small piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler died after shooting himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 We have the privilege of being part of this documentary – both as lead investigators and in our separate roles as senior historical consultant (Alex) and the person leading the genetic analysis (Turi). The background to the documentary was a multi-stage process, each step a powerful marrying of genetics with history. It probably goes without saying that the first step was to confirm that the blood sample was actually that of Hitler. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that, as in any forensic case, DNA evidence cannot be taken in isolation. It has to be combined with other types of evidence, in this case reaching back into the past for information first about Hitler’s suicide and then about how the piece of fabric came to be available for DNA testing. The Führer’s family tree So, what does the history tell us? With the Red Army closing in, Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on the afternoon of 30 April 1945. In the days following his death, the Soviets controlled access, and few people were allowed in. Among those who were permitted to enter was Lieutenant Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, public information officer for General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme Al…

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9 things you might not know about Sherlock Holmes
type: item
date: 2025-09-04T08:35:03.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: TV interest
description: The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, has for more than 130 years been a star of stage and screen, played by actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Ian McKellen and serialised in countless books. But how much do you know about this famous crime-buster, who made his first appearance in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual? Here, author Martin Davies shares 11 lesser-known facts about Sherlock Holmes...
encoded: 1. The first actor to play Sherlock Holmes was American… The first actor to take on the role of Sherlock Holmes in any official capacity was the American William Gillette. His 1899 stage play was adapted from a script by Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Opening six years after the author had attempted to kill off his creation at the Reichenbach Falls, the play was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic: between 1899 and 1932, Gillette performed the role more than 1,000 times. Gillette is also credited with introducing the curved briar pipe that was to become synonymous with the great detective – possibly because a straight pipe obscured the actor’s face when he delivered his lines. On the podcast | Sherlock Holmes: the real history that inspired the detective stories On first meeting Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Gillette is said to have appeared in character, complete with deerstalker, and after examining Conan Doyle most minutely, to have opined: “Unquestionably an author!” 2. … who introduced a love interest Gillette was also one of the first to annoy the purists by introducing a love interest for Holmes. When he telegraphed Conan Doyle with the question “May I marry him?” the author is said to have replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him!” It’s impossible to count the number of writers who, since then, have taken Doyle at his word. Read more | Real-life Sherlocks: the detectives of Scotland Yard and their curious cases 3. He defied death Holmes, having survived the Reichenbach Falls, refused to die with his creator. By the time of Conan Doyle’s death on 7 July 1930, Holmes was already a star of stage and screen. His film debut, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, came as early as 1900. Just a few seconds long, the film used stop-motion camerawork to show Holmes attempting to grapple with a burglar who repeatedly disappears, then reappears in a different part of the room. 4. A 1940s duo cemented Holmes and Watson's on screen personas One of the olde…

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Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror?
type: item
date: 2025-08-24T07:00:28.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did. So where does that leave King and Conqueror?
encoded: If you’re going to make a TV series about the Norman Conquest, you’ll need to be ready for the British public, and historians particularly, to come at you and ask what liberties you’ve taken with the story. The makers of King and Conqueror, the new BBC eight-part drama with big name actors and a decent publicity budget, seem to know that. James Norton, who plays a very handsome Harold Godwinson, and is also executive producer for the series, had this to say on the matter in a BBC interview article: “There were obviously artistic licenses that we had to take, particularly in terms of the timeline, because you often have to condense chapters with historical dramas like this. It was also about finding specificity and nuance. We know about the broad brush strokes of Stamford Bridge and the battle of Hastings, but you don't really get much about an individual from the Bayeux Tapestry and the wider historical facts.” The Tapestry is of course the contemporary embroidery that recounts the events of 1066 with stitched vivacity, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Bayeux-Tapestry-Unravelling-Conquest/dp/0500297657/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3LFH40EPMX7AP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nyDBbFuUpjX2742iKbfODQLnC-PkIOH9V85vXtdFV1Ud1S2yF0lkkYNsgaapOdcWfA8qkNDfmDU5nhQmP5c22Bq8qbXW2C0Til4sZNmVy-rozQdzpc9vW2eXLiydJDQsrfB_Oklrkisvyk32qQSXx8ft-Ws7gUgrujT7nHVNJzdAYsNFjR7Vtzmb6j59h7oVE4gFbbMKLjAkipNcTxu0cyuIMP93305taonO6k3lJME.JUaFrBXlyyAVzt4qxeeNwbdUwcX-Yqtecm_fxCruL_w&dib_tag=se&keywords=bayeux+tapestry&qid=1755706505&sprefix=bayeux+tapestry%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-3&tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-288593" rel="sponsored" target="_blank">and which I’ve co-written a book about. It tells the story of the clash between King Harold of England and Duke William of Normandy, and most historians would have it that William’s half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux was the man who had the embroidery made. Very excitingly, it’s going to be loaned from Bayeux in Normandy to the UK this time next year, for a blockbust…

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Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
type: item
date: 2025-08-01T12:00:07.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were daring and dazzling constructions that have burned bright in the human imagination right up to the modern day. Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of the ancients to tell their remarkable stories
encoded: Crawling underneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some 2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – were charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic soldiers. Built more than 45 centuries ago, this pyramid, the oldest of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a catalyst for awe. And it is not alone. Across time, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have really mattered. They mattered so much that, in the epoch after Alexander the Great’s death, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them together. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it is our oldest extant evidence for a catalogue. We are not sure who created the list, but we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has inspired poetry, prose and works of art for millennia. Don't miss... Bettany's new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is airing on Channel 5 from Saturday 2 August 2025 The precise entries vary a little: in some versions, the walls or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is mentioned; the Lighthouse has sometimes bee…

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31 July: On this day in history
type: item
date: 2025-07-31T05:00:08.000Z
subject: On This Day
description: What events happened on 31 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
encoded: 31 July 1703 Daniel Defoe spent the last of his three days in the pillory after being convicted of seditious libel. He was surrounded at the pillory by his supporters, thus sparing him the indignities normally suffered by those sentenced to such a punishment. 31 July 1932 In Germany’s federal elections, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party wins 38 per cent of the vote and 230 seats to become the largest party in parliament for the first time. 31 July 1972 British forces launched Operation Motorman, an attempt to regain control of the ‘no-go’ areas established by Republican paramilitaries, notably in Belfast and Derry/ Londonderry. 31 July 1991 After nine years of negotiation between their two countries, US president George Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in the Moscow Kremlin. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 30 July Next: 1 August

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30 July: On this day in history
type: item
date: 2025-07-30T05:00:13.000Z
subject: On This Day
description: What events happened on 30 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
encoded: 30 July 762 Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour commissioned the construction of Baghdad as his new capital city on the Tigris. 30 July 1511 Birth in Arezzo, Tuscany of painter, architect and historian Giorgio Vasari. In 1550 he published his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, one of art history’s most important early texts. 30 July 1540 Three reformers (Barnes, Garrett and Jerome) were burned for heresy and three Catholics (Abel, Powell and Fetherston) were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Smithfield. 30 July 1756 In St Petersburg, the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli unveils the magnificent Catherine Palace to a delighted Catherine the Great. 30 July 1863 Henry Ford, the American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, was born in Wayne County, Michigan. 30 July 1975 Having arranged to meet his Mafia contacts in a car park in a Detroit suburb, the controversial American union leader Jimmy Hoffa disappears and is never seen again. Browse more On this day in history Previous: 29 July Next: 31 July

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29 July: On this day in history
type: item
date: 2025-07-29T05:00:11.000Z
subject: On This Day
description: What events happened on 29 July in history? We round up the events, births and deaths…
encoded: 29 July 238 After a joint reign lasting just three months, the elderly Roman emperors Pupienus and Balbinus are cornered in the imperial palace by mutinous Praetorian Guards, who drag them to their barracks before hacking them to death. 29 July 1612 Jennet Preston was hanged for witchcraft. She had met with the ‘Lancashire witches’ at Malkin Tower but as she lived in Craven in Yorkshire, Preston was taken to York for her trial and subsequent execution. 29 July 1763 Birth at Largo in Fife of future Scottish admiral Philip Charles Durham. One of the few survivors of the sinking of the Royal George off Portsmouth in 1782, Durham commanded HMS Defiance at the battle of Trafalgar. 29 July 1890 The Dutch post- impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh died at Auvers-sur- Oise near Paris after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver two days earlier. He was 37 years old. 29 July 1921 Adolf Hitler was named leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The occasion was to be the first time Hitler's title, Der Führer, was used in public. 29 July 1981: Royal nuptials lift Britain’s flagging spirits Millions celebrate as Prince Charles weds Lady Diana in a fairy-tale wedding that was to end in tears The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer could hardly have been better timed. The summer of 1981 had been one of the grimmest in modern British history, with unemployment figures soaring, the inner cities ablaze and Margaret Thatcher’s popularity sinking to unprecedented levels. The nation was in the mood for a party. On 29 July, more than half a million people gathered on the streets of London to cheer the couple, while an estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the service on television. Not everyone, of course, enjoyed the spectacle. At City Hall, the Greater London Council leader, Ken Livingstone, ostentatiously spent some of the day working, while a small group of leftwing activists, among them the future Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, wen…

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