Holland and Murray continue their series on Japan's path to Pearl Harbor, here covering the military planning for attacking the United States and the final collapse of diplomatic negotiations. The interplay between European war developments and Pacific decision-making gets proper treatment, and Holland is good at explaining how institutional dynamics within the Japanese military shaped strategic choices. A series that keeps gaining momentum as it closes on the moment the Pacific became the centre of the war.

Part 3 examines how Japanese cultural norms around public versus private truth — honne and tatemae — contributed to the drift toward war, alongside the setting of hard deadlines for negotiations with the US. It's an unusual angle for a WWII podcast, connecting cultural dynamics to strategic decision-making in a way that doesn't feel gimmicky. Holland handles it with care, and Murray asks the right questions.

The Ancient Warfare team tackle one of the most debated topics in Roman military history — the Marian reforms and the shift from citizen militia to professional army. What makes this worth the time is the explicit focus on how far the traditional narrative of reform has been understood or misunderstood by modern historians. This is the kind of episode that rewards anyone who's read Goldsworthy or Keppie and wants to hear the arguments tested.

Robin Pierson covers 150 years of the Empire of Trebizond under the Grand Komnenoi, from 1297 through the Ottoman conquest in 1453. A solid continuation for anyone following this remarkable sequential history of Byzantium.

Lions Led By Donkeys covers the Fenian Ram — John Philip Holland's submarine built with Irish-American Fenian money to attack the Royal Navy. A good story about the intersection of revolutionary nationalism, early submarine technology, and naval warfare in the late 19th century.

Ray Harris Jr. gets into the opening exchanges of Midway — Fletcher's Yorktown versus Nagumo's First Air Fleet, covering the mistakes on both sides that shaped the Pacific War's most consequential carrier battle. Short at 25 minutes but squarely focused on the tactical detail of one of the conflict's decisive engagements.

Dan Snow and Crusades specialist Steve Tibble dig into the Assassins and Templars — their organisation, operations, and the reality behind the myth. Tibble is one of the better Crusades historians working today, and his focus on separating legend from documented history gives this more substance than the title suggests.

A book interview on the medical dimension of the Vicksburg campaign — how Union army medical officers innovated under siege conditions to sustain combat effectiveness across the 200-mile march and 47-day siege. Genuinely interesting intersection of logistics, medicine, and one of the Civil War's most important operations.