Dan Snow and Alice Loxton

Historians Dan Snow and Alice Loxton discuss the rising interest in history and explain why it remains so important in understanding our lives today.  Conversation will include their television work, the rise of new streaming channels such as History Hit, and Loxton’s latest book, Uproar: Scandal, Satire and Printmakers in Georgian London. 

Snow is a popular historian and presenter of television documentaries. He presented his first documentary, El Alamein, 20 years ago with his father, the television journalist Peter Snow. Since then, he has made dozens of history programmes for the BBC and Channel 5, including documentaries about among others the dambusters, the Vikings, the Klondike gold rush, Tutankhamun and dinosaur fossil discoveries. His books include Battle Castles: 500 Years of Knights and Siege Warfare, Treasures of British History: The Nation’s Story Told Through Its 50 Most Important Documents, and On This Day in History.

Loxton was described by Dan Snow as ‘the next big thing in history’. She is a writer and presenter at History Hit TV, a new kind of history channel that has built a library of documentaries and is available through streaming channels, smart televisions and an app. She presents documentaries with an extra element of ‘pizazz and daring’, including recently abseiling down Wells Cathedral. She has also presented documentaries with Snow. Her new book is the story of three 18th-century printmakers and how they turned satire into an art form, shaped European politics, and changed the way we view power today. It is set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars.