News of the Times: Unlocking the Vaults of Historical Crime

Robin Coles has built something quietly remarkable with News of the Times. The premise is straightforward — pull cases from Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian Britain using authentic newspaper reports and court records — but the execution is unusually disciplined. There are no garish sound effects, no manufactured drama. Just careful narration drawn from primary sources that lets the stories speak for themselves. And the stories are genuinely wild: poisonings, disappearances, unsolved murders, and the occasional bizarre fraud, all pulled from the late 1700s through the early 1900s. The catalog is enormous. With over 780 episodes and a Patreon archive of 500+ more, Coles has essentially built a searchable database of historical British crime. Episodes tend to run 15-30 minutes, which makes them easy to stack during a commute. The show updates weekly and carries a near-perfect 4.9-star rating on Apple Podcasts, though with only 18 reviews — a sign that this is still a word-of-mouth discovery for most listeners. For Jack the Ripper fans specifically, the value here is context. The Whitechapel murders did not happen in a vacuum; they emerged from a world where violent crime in London was routinely sensationalized by the press. News of the Times reconstructs that world one case at a time, and hearing the broader pattern of Victorian crime reporting makes the Ripper case feel less like an anomaly and more like an inevitable product of its era.