The EI Podcast

Gill Bennett, former Chief Historian of the British Foreign Office, analyses the geopolitical shocks of 1956 and explains why historians ought to focus on more than just the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising.
Image: Signpost outside a British army base near the Suez Canal, 1952. Credit: Alamy

John Bew joins Jack Dickens to discuss how the British tradition of statecraft grappled with the postwar world. What lessons does it offer today?
Image: Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary in 1947. Credit: Alamy

In a new age of great-power rivalry, Europe appears caught between three main challengers: the US, China and Russia. Dimitar Bechev sits down with Jack Dickens to discuss the continent’s volatile future and how it might recover some of its former strength.
Image credit: Alamy

France is in some ways one of Europe’s most conservative societies, and yet revolutionary violence is never far from the surface. Muriel Zagha joins Alastair Benn to discuss this month’s riots and what they mean for next year’s presidential election.
Image: ‘Liberty Leading the People’ by Eugene Delacroix (1830). Credit: Alamy

Britain and Germany have shared royal dynasties, forged pragmatic alliances, exchanged huge flows of capital and fought terrible wars against each other. In his new book, ‘Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany’, Jan Rüger documents that symbiotic relationship’s twists and turns over the past 300 years.
Image: An anti-German British propaganda poster from the First World War. Credit: Wikimedia Commons