Revisionist History; 1619; Wind of Change; The British History Project
Various platforms

What separates the podcast from a radio programme? From one angle there is the hint of a medium making fewer concessions to its audience: listeners sign in because they like the sound of it – if they don’t, they can go. From another there is the greater intimacy that exists between presenter and patron. Podcasts are seldom highly populated: often there is only a single voice talking to a solitary pair of ears. Complicity crackles in the ether.

Certainly the American historian Malcolm Gladwell, impresario of Revisionist History, comes across as the emcee of a sophisticated private members’ club, desperately hoping that you are having as much fun as he is in these spirited examinations of “things overlooked and misunderstood”. Recent offerings have included “Hamlet Was Wrong” (billed as “the delicate science of hiring nihilism”) and a roller-coaster exposé of the relationship between subject and amanuensis that produced The Autobiography of Howard Hughes.