5x15: History's Untold Stories

History is usually told through great events and famous names. But some of the most revealing moments lie in the stories that are overlooked, forgotten or pushed to the margins. Focusing on a single moment, character or decision, they will reveal a larger truth about power, belief and human behaviour.

These stories invite us to rethink the past. Join us to hear five unforgettable stories, told live on stage.

The historians and their stories:

Kate Williams on who really killed Anne Boleyn

Alice Loxton on England’s greatest love story and the building of the Eleanor Crosses

William Dalrymple on the story of zero: how Indian numbers conquered the world

Peter Frankopan on The United States at 250: the little-known background to the Declaration of Independence.

Gary Younge on the story of Georges Dukson, a Black resistance fighter erased from the Liberation of Paris

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College. He is also Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. His bookThe Silk Roads: A New History of the World became a global bestseller, topping charts in the UK, China and India, selling over 1.5 million copies and appearing in more than thirty languages. Its sequel, The New Silk Roads, won the 2019 Human Sciences Prize of the Carical Foundation. His most recent book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, reinterprets global history through climate and environmental change. Peter is a Fellow of multiple learned societies, a special adviser to the UN and a senior adviser to the World Bank. Prospect named him one of the world’s fifty leading thinkers.

Alice Loxton is a history broadcaster and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media (@history_alice), where she educates on British history, heritage and art. Her latest book is Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen. She has worked with many organisations to bring history to new audiences, including 10 Downing Street, DCMS, The National Trust, The Royal Academy, English Heritage, The National Gallery, Tate, The King’s Foundation, BBC, ITV, and Microsoft. She writes about history for publications such as The Times, Telegraph and Spectator. Alice is an ambassador for the National Trust, a mentor for The King’s Foundation 35 Under 35 Network, and a patron of The British Pilgrimage Trust.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian, he has written seven books, most recently Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (Faber, 2025). Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism and the 2025 Robert. B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ and New Statesman, among others. His fifth book, Another Day in the Death of America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation.

Professor Kate Williams is a historian and NYT bestselling author of eleven books. REGINA: A New History of Women and Power is out now. She has presented various shows on BBC and Channel 5, including Inside Versailles, Restoration Home and Secrets of the Royal Palaces. She is CNN's Historian and is Professor of History at the University of Reading. There is nothing she likes more than a dusty document.

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