Episode
You may also like: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
- Published
- Jun 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2678
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Summary
Hey Dan here. Here’s a podcast from none other than TIH alumna, producer Georgia Mills! If you can’t get enough of historical failure after History’s Greatest Fails, give Cautionary Tales a listen. My royal favourites get one month free of a free subscription — look out for the gift link on our Patreon Court Gossip thread. In the meantime, here’s a sample episode. It’s the tale of a poet who thought his poem about the Battle of Crecy was going to rival Shakespeare… evidently, it did not. William McGonagall's poems are something else. The jarring meter, the banal imagery, the awkward rhymes: they made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day. How does someone get that bad at poetry? Or have we been misunderstanding McGonagall all along? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices