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Legacy

Original Legacy Productions

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 his studio, can you still admire his art? Was Napoleon a hero or a tyrant - or both? (And, while we’re at it, was he even short?) Legacy is the show that looks at big lives from the perspective of now – and doesn’t always like what it sees.

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#174
Today · 31 min
It's Dolly Parton's World and We're Living In It
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 the leverage was never in the performance. Along the way: a theme park propping up one of Tennessee's poorest counties, a book scheme built for a father who never learned to read, and a working women's anthem that half the people singing it have never thought about. Underneath it all, a harder question — whether being loved by everybody is a strategy, and what it costs to hold on to. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Elvis wants the song. Then the phone rings. [2:08] One room, twelve children, and a childhood with its own acronym [5:33] Nashville the day after school finishes, and no plan B [8:05] The double act that made her, and the goodbye song that ended it [12:55] Half the publishing, one sleepless night, and a fortune left on the table [15:11] 9 to 5: the most political song she never called political [18:35] A theme park, 4,000 jobs and billions into East Tennessee [26:07] Dixie, Black Lives Matter, and the edges of staying out of it Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thursday · 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 who went against some of her own senior ministers. But the argument behind it never went away. Afua sets out why the politics look upside down to someone who opposes colonialism. Peter traces Argentina's claim back to a 15th-century treaty. Then come Chagos, Guam and the British Virgin Islands, and the question of whether Britain applies its own principle consistently. There's also the odd matter of why Yair Netanyahu weighed in at all. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [1:15] A summer with Sir Lawrence Freedman's official history of the Falklands [2:34] Milei, Trump and oil: why a 1982 war is live again [7:18] Inside the official records, and Thatcher's gamble [10:54] Afua's question: whose rights? [14:08] 99.8%, and the islanders who've been there for 200 years [16:48] Chagos, Guam, the British Virgin Islands: is Britain consistent? [19:47] Two wrongs, red post boxes and the Victory Pub [24:44] Why Yair Netanyahu picked a side Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#173
September 15 · 39 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 Doha. The government of Afghanistan is not in the room. Eighteen months later the Afghan state collapses in a matter of days, Kabul airport fills with people willing to cling to the undercarriage of a departing aircraft, and America's longest war ends almost exactly twenty years after it began. Then comes the audit. Brown University puts the direct death toll at more than 940,000, and the total — once you count the collapsed health systems, economies and food supplies — at somewhere near 4.7 million. The attack that started it cost around half a million dollars. The response cost eight trillion. Bin Laden had a phrase for that: he called it bleeding America. The final part of three. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] The uncomfortable question: how much of what he wanted did bin Laden actually get? [4:25] Doha, February 2020: the deal, and the government that wasn't invited to sign it [6:39] Not a gradual collapse — provincial capitals fall in a matter of days [11:53] The audit: $8 trillion, 940,000 killed directly, and 3.6 million more [14:56] "Bleeding America" — bin Laden wrote the plan down and said it out loud [19:29] Afghan women, and the argument nobody makes any more [30:23] What the rest of the world was doing while America looked the other way [36:09] The question neither of them wants to answer: whose fault is Afghanistan now? Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
September 10 · 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 — into an actual 1855 homestead and makes her live there. Afua raced through it and gives it full marks for the idea. Her objection sits somewhere else entirely, and it's the kind of absence you can't unsee once someone points at it. Along the way: why publishers post books to your house forever once you've written one, why Peter keeps being asked to read 550 pages in ten days, and how a novel now gets optioned for film before it has been written. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:26] The one thing Afua only lets herself read in summer [3:13] Books arrive forever once you're published, and the etiquette nobody explains [8:42] The novel Afua found sitting in her own inbox, four years early [12:47] Sourdough, eight children, and a fantasy of the American past [18:03] Peter on class and labour, and why Burke chose 1855 [20:28] Afua's real objection, and it isn't the plot [21:13] The Legacy Book Club verdict, in three separate scores Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#172
September 8 · 43 min
9/11: 25 Years On | The Forever War | 2
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 war on terror did to British law. Within twenty-four hours, NATO invokes Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Within three days, Congress passes a sixty-word resolution with a single vote against it; it has since been used to justify American military operations in more than twenty countries. Afghanistan is meant to be narrow and quick, and for five weeks it looks like it. Then bin Laden walks over the mountains into Pakistan, Washington's attention swings to a country with no connection to the attacks, and Colin Powell goes to the United Nations holding a small glass vial. Ten years later he is found living a mile from Pakistan's military academy — and by then the war no longer needs him. Part two of three, twenty-five years on. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] The scorecard: two invasions, $8 trillion, 900,000 dead, and the Taliban back in Kabul [3:56] Nous sommes tous américains — Le Monde, the Brandenburg Gate, and candles in Tehran [5:39] Article 5, invoked once in NATO's history, to defend America from nineteen men [12:37] Five weeks to Kabul — then a cave complex at Tora Bora, and bin Laden walks away [18:53] "These are facts. They're not statements." Colin Powell at the United Nations [26:32] Afua's first day as a pupil barrister, and a man accused of training the hijackers [33:19] The torture memos: pain that only counts if it's equivalent to organ failure [41:50] A compound in Abbottabad, a mile from Pakistan's military academy Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
September 3 · 41 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 small group of nomads from what is now Mongolia — probably fewer than a million people — reached Central Europe within sixty years. They did it partly by fighting in winter, when everyone else went home, and by bringing their families and their herds with them so they never had to depend on the villages they passed through. Then they stopped conquering and started building: cities, workshops, tax systems, religious debates at court, and a trade network running from Korea to the Mediterranean. Marie Favereau is co-curator of Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World, at the Royal Armouries in Leeds until 1 November — almost 250 objects out of Mongolia, most of which have never left the country before. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Peter introduces Marie Favereau, and the 248 objects that have just landed in Leeds [5:48] Ridden, eaten, milked, worn — why everything starts with the horse [9:47] Khans are elected, can be deposed, and the senior wife decides on trade, diplomacy and war [13:22] "If you just build your empire on the family, you have a dead-born empire" [16:44] Blue and white porcelain turns out to be a Mongol invention [36:12] Why the Mongols get a worse press than any empire that came after them Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World runs at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, until 1 November 2026. Adults £9, concessions £7, under-16s free. Co-curated by Marie Favereau and Natasha Bennett. royalarmouries.org/leeds/whats-on/genghis-khan Marie Favereau's book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World is published by Harvard University Press. Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#171
September 1 · 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 programme called Operation Cyclone begins. By 1987 it is running at $630 million a year, matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. Among the thousands who answer the call to fight the Soviets is the softly spoken son of a Saudi construction billionaire. Twenty-two years later, nineteen men walk through airport security in Boston, Washington and Newark carrying box cutters that nobody had thought to ban. This is the first of three episodes marking twenty-five years since 9/11 — where al-Qaeda came from, what happened on the day, and the moment almost the entire world stood with America. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] The story doesn't start in New York — it starts in the mountains of Afghanistan [2:17] Christmas Eve 1979, and Soviet transport planes land at Kabul airport [4:04] Operation Cyclone: Carter, Brzezinski, and a plan to build Moscow its own Vietnam [7:48] Romanticised as freedom fighters — and the Saudi billionaire's son who answers the call [12:01] Afua puts it to Peter directly: did the CIA fund bin Laden? [16:38] The Soviets leave, the West loses interest, and bin Laden names his new organisation [23:32] A cloudless blue Tuesday, and a primary election in New York [29:39] Two and a half hours, nineteen men, and the deadliest terror attack in history Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
August 27 · 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 university, served in the Air Force, and reached the Senate in 2002 by taking Strom Thurmond's seat. For a decade he was the Republican who legislated with Democrats: the Gang of Eight immigration bill, one third of the three amigos alongside John McCain and Joe Lieberman. Then he called Trump a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot and said the party would be destroyed and would deserve it. Then McCain died. A year to the day before January 6th, the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt gave Rolling Stone the line that has followed Graham ever since: he is a pilot fish, the small fish that swims beside the shark and takes on its colouring. Peter and Afua on whether that is the whole story, and on what a seat at the table is worth. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] A flight home from Kyiv, a cardiac arrest on Capitol Hill, and a death nobody saw coming [6:14] A restaurant, a pool hall, two funerals, and a younger sister to raise [9:13] The three amigos, and the decade Graham spent legislating with Democrats [11:42] A kook, a jackass, and a party that would be destroyed and would deserve it [12:46] "McCain died" — the two-word answer to how everything changed [17:24] The pilot fish, the shark, and what a seat at the table actually costs Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#170
August 25 · 42 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 hundred billion dollars a year. In the Dominican Republic it accounts for more than seventy per cent of hotel rooms and helps generate over forty per cent of GDP. And of every hundred dollars a guest spends, roughly five stays in the local economy. The rest is repatriated to foreign operators, international airlines and global supply chains, along with the food flown in so that nobody has to eat anything unfamiliar. In water-stressed places, guests can use ten times what a local resident uses in a day. In Jamaica there is now a movement against the privatisation of beaches that local people can no longer reach. Afua has just come back from an Arawak village in the Guyanese Amazon where all-inclusive means something entirely different. Peter, who has enjoyed rather more package holidays than he lets on, is not convinced the answer is to take them away from people. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Sun lounger wars at dawn, and the buffet as a way of life [7:58] Gerard Blitz, a Belgian on a Majorcan beach, and the founding of Club Med [14:59] A hundred billion dollars a year, and the country where all-inclusives are seventy per cent of the rooms [16:39] Five dollars in every hundred — where the rest of your money actually goes [17:54] Ten times the water a local resident uses in a day [26:47] The beaches in Jamaica that Jamaicans can no longer reach [31:07] Plantations sold as celebratory places, and what the industry assumes you cannot handle [34:14] Afua in the Amazon: an all-inclusive of a completely different kind Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
August 20 · 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 Ningbo, it means a great deal. He trained as an electrical engineer, was expelled from the Communist Party for speaking approvingly of economic reform in Hungary and Yugoslavia, spent five years doing manual labour during the Cultural Revolution, and came back to run Shanghai. In 1989 he refused to send the army against the city's protesters and went on television to talk them down instead. Then, as premier, he dismantled the iron rice bowl and cost somewhere between thirty and forty million people their jobs. Peter thinks that took nerve. Afua thinks ruthless and callous are the better words. Neither quite talks the other round. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Three deaths in eight weeks, in Havana, Washington and Beijing — and why the deputy often tells you more [4:30] Zhu Rongji, dead at 97, and why a kettle costs less than ten pounds [6:08] Expelled from the Party, then five years of manual labour [8:38] Shanghai, 1989: the man who would not send in the army [11:47] Grasping the large, letting go of the small — and the end of the iron rice bowl [17:00] Brave or callous? Peter and Afua fail to agree Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#169
August 18 · 40 min
Modern Travel | The Age of the Skies | 4
When did flying stop being the most glamorous thing a person could possibly do? What kind of industry fixes its own prices by law, and then competes on how much champagne it can pour? And what happened to the man who broke it? Sir Freddie Laker swept floors at an aircraft factory, worked out that the entire airline business was upside down, and got taken apart for it — Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch on the man whose bankruptcy made your budget flight possible. For most of the twentieth century the airlines ran a legal cartel. IATA fixed the fares, so a London to New York ticket cost the same on Pan Am, TWA or BA, and the only thing left to compete on was luxury: forty inches of legroom, professional chefs, sterling silver, a side of beef carved in the aisle. It was magnificent, and roughly eighty-five per cent of people never got on a plane. Then Laker put a transatlantic seat on sale for fifty-nine pounds and let people queue on the pavement outside Victoria for it. The industry drove him under inside five years, then adopted everything he had done. What is left is a world where five billion people fly each year, three per cent of them internationally, and the seat in front of you gets a little closer every season. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Peter hates airports, Afua loves them, and the words "you're a Terminal Five girl" [5:19] The legal cartel — how IATA fixed every fare and left nothing to compete on but champagne [6:39] Forty inches of legroom, a chef, and a side of beef carved at your seat [8:13] Nail polish, posture, and the finishing-school standards applied to an air hostess [11:36] Freddie Laker, the Canterbury boy who swept factory floors and broke the cartel [13:23] Fifty-nine pounds to New York, and people sleeping on the pavement outside Victoria [21:57] Four per cent of climate change, and the cities buckling under weekend visitors [30:57] Why business class keeps improving while your seat keeps getting thinner Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
August 13 · 39 min
Inbox: Hecuba, Exile and Coming Home | Arwa Omaren
What happens to a person when the country they were born in decides they were never really from there? What does a play about the women of a sacked city, written 2,400 years ago, have to say to an actress walking out of Syria on foot? And how do you stand on a stage in Edinburgh and make an audience laugh about the worst thing that ever happened to you? At the Edinburgh Fringe, Peter Frankopan meets Arwa Omaren, whose one-woman show sets her own escape from Syria inside the story of Hecuba, Queen of Troy — along with William Stirling and Charlotte Eagar, who have spent a decade staging Euripides with refugees. Arwa Omaren found out she was a refugee at twelve, in a playground fight in Damascus. She graduated top of her class from Syria's leading drama school in 2011, signed a television contract, and then the war took all of it. She walked for five weeks through the mountains of Kurdistan. Britain granted her asylum, then she was evicted, and she slept on the street with her dog. Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? is what she made of it. Euripides wrote the first play about refugees in 415 BC, the year after Athens massacred the people of Melos. Twenty-four centuries later it is still the play that fits. Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? runs at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh Fringe, until 31 August: edfringe.com More on the Trojan Women Project: trojanwomenproject.org Peter has written about the play at peterfrankopan.substack.com Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Peter at the Fringe, and a performance he could not stop thinking about [3:23] Oxfam, 2013, and the Greek tragedy that turned out to be about refugees [9:50] Who Hecuba is, and why a queen reduced to nothing is the right story for now [16:18] A playground fight in Damascus, and the day Arwa found out she was a refugee [17:24] Five weeks walking, and the paperwork that told her she belonged nowhere [33:13] Jacko: the dog she left behind in Syria, and the charity that brought him back Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#168
August 11 · 43 min
Modern Travel | Rise Of The Seaside | 3
Who decided that the sea — cold, dangerous and full of smugglers — was somewhere you went for fun? What kind of doctor prescribes plunging into the Channel naked in the dead of winter, and then drinking it? And how did the towns Britain built to enjoy itself end up among the most deprived places in the country? The holiday — the whole idea that ordinary people are owed one — starts with a Brighton doctor, a shed on wheels and an Act of Parliament, and Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow it from there to the boarded-up promenades of the present. Dr Richard Russell published a book in the 1750s arguing that seawater cured everything from scrofula to melancholy, and that you ought to drink it by the pint, with milk or port to take the edge off. The elites followed him to a fishing village called Brighthelmstone, the Prince Regent built a pleasure palace there, and once the railways arrived the whole thing belonged to everybody. Then cheap flights took it away again. What the Victorians left behind is a coastline of magnificent architecture standing in some of the poorest wards in England — and, lately, the first signs of something coming back. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] From the Grand Tour to the stick of rock — the moment travel stopped belonging to the rich [8:52] Before the deckchairs: smugglers, pirates and a coastline you kept well away from [9:51] Dr Richard Russell, the eighteenth-century wellness influencer who told Britain to drink the sea [13:17] Peter jumps into the Antarctic in his swimming trunks, shamed into it by a woman in her eighties [17:57] The steam train, the Bank Holidays Act, and the week the mills shut down [20:53] The bathing machine: a shed, a horse, and a strong local person to dunk you [29:54] Clacton, Jaywick, and what happened to the towns Britain built to enjoy itself [35:09] Margate, Dreamland, and whether hipsters can fix a structural problem Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
August 6 · 38 min
Inbox: Why Dictators Love the World Cup | Feat. Karim Zidan
Why does every dictator, sooner or later, want to host the World Cup? What did a military junta that never wanted the tournament discover once the goals started going in? And when a hundred thousand people are dancing in the street, who is that actually working for? Peter Frankopan sits down with investigative journalist Karim Zidan, who has spent a decade tracking how autocrats turn football into propaganda — and who found his own way into the story as a teenager being dragged out of a stand by Egyptian riot police. Mussolini wrote the blueprint in 1934 and nobody has much improved on it since: host the tournament, invest in the team, let the collective joy do the rest. Videla's junta inherited a World Cup it didn't want and got away with it. Putin raised the pension age while Russia were in the quarter-finals. Qatar ended a Gulf blockade without conceding a thing. Zidan's argument isn't that you should stop watching. It's that escapism and willful ignorance are not the same thing — and that the people buying your club are not your friends. Karim Zidan's podcast series Power Plays, presented by the Human Rights Foundation, is at powerplays.xyz. His newsletter is at sportspolitika.news. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Why the world's game keeps ending up in the hands of people who don't much like the world [4:14] Cairo, 2007: a teenager in the Ultras section watches the police move in [8:36] Mussolini's blueprint, and why he preferred boxing to football [15:33] Argentina 1978: the junta that inherited a World Cup it never wanted [26:19] "A monstrous, cancerous, corrupt patronage system" — Zidan on FIFA [35:24] A message for Newcastle fans, and everyone else who welcomed the money in Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#167
August 4 · 43 min
Modern Travel | The Other Grand Tour | 2
What happened when the people written out of the Grand Tour wrote their own account of it? What did an eighteenth-century Bengali diplomat see in London that made him call the British a conceited race? And how did a man from Bihar end up as shampooing surgeon to the King of England? Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan follow the travellers the Grand Tour left out — enslaved servants, Black abolitionists, Indian intellectuals — and find them looking back at Europe with a colder eye than Europe ever turned on them. Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond met in Rome in 1868, two free Black Americans taking in the ruins of one slave society while campaigning against a living one. Mirza Abu Talib Khan toured Britain and reported home that its true religion was money. I'tesamuddin filled a notebook with the wonders of Europe and the conceit of its inhabitants. And Sake Dean Mahomed opened a vapour bath in Brighton and gave English the word shampoo. The Grand Tour was never only white men learning Latin — it was the moment the world started looking back. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] The Grand Tour you think you know — powdered wigs, Roman ruins, enough marble to fill a museum [3:01] The servants who weren't servants: enslaved Africans on the road to Italy and France [4:29] Frederick Douglass, viral superstar, meets Sarah Parker Remond in Rome [8:36] Ira Aldridge plays Shakespeare to the aristocrats who came for the ruins [13:40] Bihar to Brighton — and the word that came with him [17:54] Europe judged: spiritually hollow, morally compromised, excessively fond of luxury [25:24] The Maharajas whose Cartier and Rolls Royce orders kept European luxury solvent [36:24] What actually killed the Grand Tour, and whether Magaluf is its heir Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
July 30 · 31 min
Inbox: The Secret Global History of Bruges
What's a garnet mined in Sri Lanka two and a half thousand years ago doing in a silver hairpin dug up near Bruges? Why are the Duke of Burgundy and the conqueror of Constantinople staring each other down for the first time in history? And, how did most of Belgium forget that its own counts once sat on the throne of Constantinople? Afua turns interviewer as Peter opens the doors on Bigger Picture, the exhibition he has spent four years building to reframe Bruges as one of the great connected cities of the medieval world. It's the opening show at BRUSK, Bruges' vast new exhibition hall — 250 objects from 90 lenders, among them a Memling released from Turin, a Vatican portrait of Alexios I Komnenos that has never been lent before, and Gentile Bellini's Mehmed II brought face to face with Philip the Good. Along the way: a very Belgian silence, a wall of Bruce Springsteen memoirs, the price of medieval pepper — and Peter greeting visitors as a hologram. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Afua opens the Legacy inbox on Peter's four-year secret project [3:04] A very Belgian silence, a coffee break, and the job is Peter's [9:13] Asked to pick one object, Peter picks three [12:20] Philip the Good meets Mehmed the Conqueror, five centuries late [16:14] How the counts of Flanders ended up emperors of Constantinople [27:42] Hologram Peter, and how to see the show before 8 September Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#166
July 28 · 38 min
Modern Travel | The Original Gap Year | 1
What actually turned a teenage aristocrat into a "finished" gentleman in the 1700s? Why did one incredibly long, incredibly expensive holiday end up inventing the whole idea of "the West"? And why can you still trace a straight line from that holiday to Frankenstein, the contents of half of Britain's country houses, and this year's tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote? Send a nineteen-year-old aristocrat to Europe for three years with a credit line and a chaperone paid to keep him out of trouble, and what comes home is part fashion victim, part looter, part accidental philosopher — the invention of modern Western identity, Frankenstein, and a culture war about "the Continent" that's still running. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Peter admits his own anti-aging anxieties before Afua reveals what the new series is really about [3:34] Meet "The Original Gap Year" — and the ex-priest travel blogger who coined the term [13:51] The bear leader — the 18th-century minder whose entire job was damage control [15:51] The macaronis — home from Italy in silk and powder, mocked as "un-British" [21:19] Standing where Gibbon stood — how one ruin becomes an entire theory of civilisation [24:56] A wrecked holiday, a volcano, and a ghost story that becomes Frankenstein [25:37] Ten years since the Brexit vote — and the Grand Tour's fingerprints are still on it [31:09] Where Chatsworth's marble busts actually came from Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
July 23 · 28 min
Legacy Inbox: The Gold Britain Still Won't Return
What does it take to get a room of ex-military festival-goers in rural Wiltshire to agree Britain should return its stolen gold? And why does an obsolete Victorian law still make it a criminal offence for the British Museum to give any of it back? Afua Hirsch just spent a week testing both — with a Buckingham Palace thought experiment, a courtroom-style cross-examination, and a verdict on two centuries of looted treasure that even British Museum members found hard to argue with. Afua brings Peter inside two sold-out tents at the Chalke Valley History Festival — one on the Ashanti gold Britain still won't return, the other on the German peasants written out of history. Welcome to Legacy Inbox, a new lighter-touch addition to the feed. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] Afua's back from Chalke Valley, sold-out crowds and all [4:10] Barnaby Phillips and a sequel to Loot bring Ashanti gold into the tent [12:05] A sacked palace, a stolen throne, and a case Afua calls open and shut [18:55] Her answer to "it's illegal to give it back": test it in court [21:52] The 2024 loan Britain calls generosity — and Ghana calls something else [24:00] A blacked-out England XI, and what it says about the British Museum [25:38] Why a tent full of skeptics left more hopeful than they arrived Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#165
July 21 · 40 min
World Cup | Migration and the New Asia | 7
What does it mean when the sons of empire become the heroes of the nation that once ruled them? Four years later, what happens when one of those same colonies turns round and beats France on the biggest stage there is? And could two World Cups, played four years and one continent apart, actually tell you where the world's centre of gravity was heading next? Peter and Afua trace France '98 and the first World Cup ever held in Asia, from Zidane's headed goals to Senegal's shock win over the champions, to ask what football reveals about migration, empire and a shifting world order. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] A million people on the Champs-Élysées, and a face that didn't fit the old postcard of France [2:56] The Republic's beautiful idea, and the empire it was built on [6:06] Zidane, Thuram, Vieira — the team Le Pen said wasn't really French [9:53] Ronaldo's mystery fit, hours before the final [15:05] Iran and the USA, white flowers, and a photograph that stopped the world [23:14] The World Cup leaves the Atlantic world for the first time in 72 years [27:26] South Korea's run to the semi-finals, and the making of a soft-power superpower [34:20] Senegal 1, France 0 — what it meant to beat the empire Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
#164
July 15 · 33 min
World Cup | Big Business | 6
How does a country where football is a minority sport end up hosting — and cashing in on — the biggest World Cup in history? What happens when FIFA stops behaving like a sporting federation and starts behaving like a multinational? And when the tournament generates $14 billion in a single World Cup, who's actually footing the bill? Twelve global sponsors, three and a half million fans through the turnstiles, and a World Cup final so dull it needed penalties to save it — Peter and Afua follow the money to USA '94. Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm [0:00] A World Cup arrives in a country that doesn't even like football [3:56] João Havelange and the birth of FIFA's global sponsorship machine [9:54] Nigeria and Saudi Arabia arrive to rewrite the football map [19:24] The post-communist world gets its own flag on the pitch for the first time [20:49] Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi become the stars of the tournament [23:37] Andrés Escobar's own goal, and a tragedy nobody saw coming [25:47] Brazil finally get the ending football's most-loved nation deserved [27:00] Why an African team winning the World Cup would change everything Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. legacy.supportingcast.fm Stay connected with Legacy: Instagram: @originallegacypodcast TikTok: @legacy_productions Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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