The Rise and Fall of Britain's Islands
Not Just the Tudors
History Hit
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How did Britain's islands become woven into our collective cultural psyche? Traversing Irish poetry, Renaissance drama and Restoration utopias, author Alice Albinia’s research has boldly upturned established truths about Britain, paying homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories - including of women rulers.
In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Alice Albinia talks more about her book The Britannias: An Island Quest with Professor Suzannah Lipscomb.
This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy and produced by Rob Weinberg.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to not just the tutors from History Hit. |
| 0:03.0 | To listen to all of our episodes, add free, |
| 0:06.0 | and watch hundreds of history documentaries, |
| 0:08.0 | download the History Hit app, |
| 0:11.0 | or go to History Hit.com forward slash subscribe. |
| 0:15.0 | And if you're an app or listener, you can subscribe for new ad-free episodes within the app. Britain likes to think of itself as an island nation, but autumn forgets that it is a nation made up of not one, but thousands of islands. |
| 0:39.0 | The mainland now has a centrifugal pole, but the outlying islands have played a vitally important role in history. |
| 0:47.0 | They were not remote. In the days before trains, they were more easily accessible than the most inland of cities. |
| 0:55.4 | And if seen from an insular perspective the history of Britain looks decidedly different. |
| 1:02.1 | Islands have been the sights of rebellion and heterodoxy, |
| 1:05.0 | radicalism and lawlessness, |
| 1:08.0 | brutal massacre and colonization, |
| 1:10.0 | experimentation and spectacle. |
| 1:13.0 | They are places that reveal the underbelly of history to us. |
| 1:17.0 | They are microcosms of the main. |
| 1:19.0 | My guest today, Alice Albania, has re-centered Britain's islands in her beautiful and latest book, |
| 1:27.0 | The Britannias, an island quest. |
| 1:30.0 | In it she roams from the Neolithic, |
| 1:32.0 | from Anglesey Druids, all the way through to the present day Thames estuary. |
| 1:37.6 | But I took the opportunity to ask her about some of her central chapters, on islands that should be more central to our understanding |
| 1:46.6 | of the 16th and 17th centuries. Alice Albina, |
| 1:55.0 | Albina, welcome to not just the Tudors. |
... |
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