History’s Greatest Fails
History’s Greatest Fails is a podcast hosted by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day that explores the role of failure in history. The series examines historical figures and events that are often considered failures, from Richard III to Vincent van Gogh, and asks why losers make history. Each episode dissects different types of failure, including troubled rulers and failures of remembrance, to uncover lessons for the present. The hosts draw on their backgrounds as historians and podcasters to provide insightful analysis.
Episodes
War — History’s Ultimate Failure
Elizabeth Day grew up in Belfast and would as a child walk past the most bombed hotel in Europe. Dan Jones recalls a Croatian widow whose husband went out for bread and never returned.
In this final episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan and Elizabeth name war as history's ultimate failure and reflect on the changes that follow societal collapse.
Together, they draw on conflicts that ha
Ear Today, Gone Tomorrow: Van Gogh’s Guide to Artistic Failure
If you’re an artist, when would you like recognition to strike? Do you want it to be in your lifetime, only to be forgotten decades after your death? Or do you want to remain undiscovered, with your story potentially echoing for centuries after you’ve been discovered posthumously?
These are some of the thorny questions Dan and Elizabeth consider in this episode about artistic failure. Together
Why isn’t Leonardo Da Vinci remembered as an engineer?
If you judge him by his own elaborate metrics, Leonardo da Vinci was a failure.
Long before the Mona Lisa became shorthand for genius, Leonardo imagined himself as something else entirely: a military engineer, a designer of bridges and armoured vehicles, a master of siegecraft and architecture.
In 1482, he wrote a breathless letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, itemising these talents with
How, exactly, does a woman ‘slip’ out of history?
What would you do if your life was omitted, reduced to an overlooked footnote, or filed away as an anomaly?
In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth turn a lens on the practice of history itself, interrogating the choices and power structures that have traditionally left women out of the history books.
They retrace the lives of three women who once stood firmly in their moment: Hatshepsut, a pharaoh
Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are the Ross and Rachel of history
To love is to risk heartbreak.
And while for some, breakups result in renewal, maybe some therapy (or a few months’ spent wallowing), for the historical figures of this episode… a relationship’s end has broken many more things than hearts.
In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth discover the lessons of history’s epic failed romances through three world-changing unions: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; M
Was Richard III a Failure?
He died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. And we haven’t been able to stop talking about him since.
Yes, it’s time to consider the story of England’s last Plantagenet king, Richard III — a centuries-old tangle involving alleged murder, Shakespeare, vanquish and one mighty rediscovery.
In this debut episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day argue that the story of Ri
Get in loser, we’re making history
We’re often taught that history’s written by the winners. But we’d like to argue that, in fact, it’s the losers who end up making history.
In this brand new miniseries from Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day, History’s Greatest Fails aims to answer the simple, but complex, question: Why do losers make history?
From Richard III, to Vincent Van Gough, to the purposefully forgotten female Pharaoh Hatshe
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