WW2 legacies and Magna Carta: history behind the headlines

Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month I'll be joined by our two regular panellists. I'm Hannah.

I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St. John's College in Oxford. I'm Rana Mitter. I'm SD Lee Chair in US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history. Hannah and Rana, it's great to be with you here in Oxford today for this episode of History Behind the Headlines.

We'll be talking through a couple of topics as usual. kicking off with the fact we're speaking at the very end of May, which marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day. And I believe there were a few things that you both wanted to explore in terms of parallels or in terms of connections to that. Rainer, do you want to kick us off? Absolutely, because as we're speaking, it's a couple of weeks since VE Day itself, 8th of May, 1945, and then of course eight years on, 2025.

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