Legacy

Why are a million people about to queue at the British Museum for a strip of embroidered linen?
What if the most famous picture of 1066 isn't a tapestry, was probably stitched in England, and treats the losing king as a hero?
And, if the arrow in Harold's eye was stitched back in by 19th-century restorers, how sure are we of the one thing everyone knows about 1066?

With the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain for the first time in nearly a thousand years, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch sit down with Sue Brunning, the British Museum curator who helped bring it here and waved Sutton Hoo off to France in exchange.

Sue takes them through the bishop who probably paid for it and gave himself a starring role, the English women who likely stitched it, and a Harold who looks nothing like a villain. Then come six women in 68 metres, three of them naked; a cleric, a woman called Ælfgyva and a slap nobody can explain; and a battle sequence brutal enough to send visitors out shaken. And then there's the arrow.

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[0:00] 68 metres of linen, home after nearly a thousand years
[3:33] From a Sandhurst summit to Bloomsbury, with Sutton Hoo sent the other way
[7:53] Why it isn't a tapestry, and why 1066 changed everything
[11:55] Harold the hero, hauling Normans out of the quicksand
[13:14] Bishop Odo, Canterbury and the women with the needles
[17:39] Six women, three naked, and a slap nobody can explain
[21:43] The battle that leaves visitors shaken
[26:44] Restorers, fading dyes and the arrow in Harold's eye

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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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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
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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.

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[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
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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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.

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[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.
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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.

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.

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[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.
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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.

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.

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more.
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[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.