Episode notes
Content warning: this episode describes the aftermath of 11 September 2001, including torture and civilian deaths. How does a country go from the sympathy of the entire world to invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attack? What does a blank cheque from the UN Security Council actually buy? And if torture only counts as torture when the pain is equivalent to organ failure, what exactly is everything below that line? Peter Frankopan follows the response from NATO's Article 5 to the caves of Tora Bora, while Afua Hirsch — then a trainee human rights barrister — describes what the…
Podcast
Legacy
Original Legacy Productions · History · English
Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan tell the wild stories of some of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived – and ask whether they have the rep they deserve. Should Nina Simone’s role in the civil rights movement be more celebrated than it is? When you find out what Picasso got up to in
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24 Sep 2026 · 40 min
Inbox: The Bayeux Tapestry and the Arrow Nobody Can Prove | Sue Brunning
Why are a million people about to queue at the British Museum for a strip of embroidered linen? What if the most famous picture of 1066 isn't a tapestry, was probably stitched in England, and treats the losing king as a hero? And, if the arrow in Harold's eye was stitched back in by 19th-century restorers, how sure are we of the one thing everyone knows about 1066? With the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain for the first time in nearly a thousand years, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch sit down with Sue Brunning, the British Museum curator who helped bring it here and waved Sutton Hoo off to France…
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E174 · 22 Sep 2026 · 32 min
Dolly Parton | It's Dolly Parton's World and We're Living In It | 1
Who says no to Elvis Presley — and is proved right eighteen years later? How does a girl from a one-room cabin with no electricity work out the economics of music publishing before most of Nashville has? And, in an age that agrees on almost nothing, how did Dolly Parton end up claimed by drag queens, evangelicals and everyone in between? Peter Frankopan opens on the phone call that cost Dolly Parton an Elvis record, and Afua Hirsch traces what that refusal was really protecting. Part one of two. Locust Ridge to Nashville, the Porter Wagoner years, and the moment a songwriter worked out that…
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17 Sep 2026 · 26 min
Inbox: The Falklands Campaign | Milei, Trump and Oil | Book Club
Why is a war fought 44 years ago back on the front pages? What happens when a combative president in Buenos Aires, a friend in the White House and an oil field due online in 2028 all point at the same islands? And, when 99.8% of the people who live there have already voted, whose islands are they to argue over? Fresh from Sir Lawrence Freedman's two-volume official history of the Falklands campaign, Peter Frankopan takes on the question Afua Hirsch can't let go: whose rights come first? The official record reads like a detective story: the orders, the officers' doubts, and a Prime Minister…
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E173 · 15 Sep 2026 · 40 min
9/11: 25 Years On | The Reckoning | 3
Content warning: this episode describes torture, civilian deaths and the 2021 Kabul airport attack. Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is shattered, and there was never another 9/11 — so who won? What does a war cost once you count the hospitals that closed and the food that never arrived? And what does it mean that the United States signed an agreement with the people it went to war to destroy? Twenty-five years on, Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan add up the bill — and find that bin Laden had written the strategy down in advance. February 2020: the United States signs a deal with the Taliban in…
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10 Sep 2026 · 23 min
Inbox: Yesteryear | Waking Up in 1855 | Book Club
What happens to a trad wife influencer when she wakes up in 1855 and has to actually do it? Why were film producers bidding on this novel four years before it was finished? And when a story about white homesteaders in pre-Civil War America contains no Black people at all, what is it quietly telling you? Peter asks Afua what she read over the summer and gets a debut novel, a four-year-old email she'd forgotten about, and a criticism that has nothing to do with the plot. Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear drops a trad wife influencer — sourdough starter, eight children, millions of followers —…
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3 Sep 2026 · 42 min
Inbox: Genghis Khan and the Empire We Got Wrong | Marie Favereau
Who taught you that the Mongols only destroyed things? What if the empire that sacked Baghdad also invented blue and white porcelain, elected its leaders, and let the Khan's first wife decide on war? And why do the Mongols still have a worse reputation than any other empire in history — including the ones that lasted longer and killed more? In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter is joined by Marie Favereau, one of the world's leading historians of the Mongol Empire, whose work has done more than anyone's to dismantle the story of a bloodthirsty wave that destroyed everything in front of it. A…
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E171 · 1 Sep 2026 · 38 min
9/11: 25 Years On | The World That Made 9/11 | 1
Content warning: this episode describes the events of 11 September 2001 in detail. What if the deadliest terror attack in history began with an American chequebook? What if the men who carried it out had once been armed, trained and celebrated by the West as freedom fighters? And what if the whole thing was set in motion more than twenty years earlier, on Christmas Eve? Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan begin the story of 9/11 two decades before it happened, in the mountains of Afghanistan. July 1979: Jimmy Carter signs off half a million dollars of covert aid to Afghan rebels, and a CIA…
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27 Aug 2026 · 25 min
Inbox: Lindsey Graham and the Price of a Seat at the Table
How does a man go from calling Donald Trump a kook and a jackass to becoming his closest ally in the Senate? What do you give up to keep a seat at the table, and what do you actually get for it? And when the obituaries settle on calling you a pilot fish, has anything you did survived you? Lindsey Graham flew home from Kyiv on a Friday and was dead by Saturday evening, aged 71 — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch on a career built almost entirely on proximity to other people's power. He was orphaned in his early twenties and raised his younger sister. He was the first in his family to go to…
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E170 · 25 Aug 2026 · 43 min
Modern Travel | The Full Package | 5
Who decided that the thing stopping people travelling was not money, but choice? What happens to a country when the holiday is designed so that the visitor never has to leave the compound? And of every hundred dollars you spend at an all-inclusive, how much do you think actually stays there? Gerard Blitz opened his first holiday village on a Majorcan beach in 1950 on the theory that what people wanted was not adventure but the removal of every decision — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow that idea all the way to the gated resorts of the present. The all-inclusive is now worth close to a…
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20 Aug 2026 · 25 min
Inbox: Zhu Rongji and the Price of Modern China
Why does a kettle cost less than ten pounds? What kind of official refuses to send the army against protesters in one decade, then puts thirty million people out of work in the next? And when the man who built modern China spent his last twenty years saying nothing at all, what was he saying? Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch disagree, at length and on the record, about whether the architect of the modern cheap economy was brave or simply ruthless. Zhu Rongji died in Beijing in August, aged 97. Outside China his name means very little. Inside China, and inside every container ship leaving…
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