European history with gossip, glamour, and bite.
EUROPHILE moves from Sunday catch-ups into stories about European figures, movements, fashion, films, food, and historical oddities. Its tone is conversational and bright, with room for hangovers, astrology, old-world glamour, and serious history in the same hour.
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EUROPHILE is a friendship-driven European culture show with a taste for biography, style, scandal, art, and historical weirdness. The conversations begin close to home. There may be a birthday dinner, a planned Irish breakfast, a winter complaint, travel packing stress, an Oscars catch-up, or a seasonal drink before the main story takes over. That looseness is part of the texture. The show does not flatten Europe into landmarks and dates; it follows people, objects, fashions, movements, myths, and moods. Recent episodes move through Helena Rubinstein’s business instincts and artistic circle, Lola Montez’s chaotic power around royalty, the Swing Youth’s rebellion against Nazi conformity, and the Fendi women’s generational command of Italian fashion. Other episodes open into Oscar Wilde, giallo cinema, The Nutcracker, the Milwaukee Film Festival, and the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain. It can be very funny. It can also become serious fast. Discussions of Kristallnacht, persecution, exile, censorship, monarchy, and political violence sit beside riffs on bags, fry-ups, Wuthering Heights, disco-era fittings, and spring weather. That tonal swing gives the show its identity. EUROPHILE likes glamour, but it is most interested when glamour reveals leverage: a woman buying back her business, a dancer destabilizing a king, teenagers using music and clothes as defiance, a family brand becoming cultural shorthand. The research favors vivid anecdotes over dry chronology. Names like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire appear because the stories pass through crowded rooms where art, money, power, and rumor keep colliding. Guest episodes widen the frame into film programming, ballet stage management, and horror-community culture. The result is cozy but not sleepy, polished in curiosity rather than format. It suits listeners who want European history to feel social, stylish, and alive.
Made for: For listeners who like European culture, biography, fashion, film, travel moods, and historical scandal told through warm, funny conversation. It especially fits people who want research without the stiffness of a formal lecture.
What sets it apart: EUROPHILE mixes researched European subjects with candid friend-to-friend rhythm, so fashion, monarchy, occult lore, resistance movements, and Sunday cravings can share the same episode. Its best moments make history feel like a vivid table conversation.
Join friends Kate Walker and Catherine Roehre as they chat, laugh, and learn together in Europhile - a podcast encompassing Europe and its appeal, cultural nuances, lifestyles, histories, figures, and any other topic that sparks their interest!
The Fendi baguette gets a backstory, and you get Kate Walker and Catherine Roehre's gleeful commentary.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Helena Rubinstein's beauty empire comes across through glamour, instinct, and one perfectly timed business reversal.
Helena Rubinstein's beauty empire lands as a story of motion, nerve, and appetite, with Rubinstein moving between Europe and the United States on luxury liners while staying relentlessly fixed on work.
Lola Montez turns exile, scandal, and royal devotion into a brisk study of charisma outrunning consequence.
Lola Montez gives the episode a clear shape: a life where romance, reputation, money, and respectability keep crashing into one another. It follows Ludwig still writing after she helped cost him his throne, the 70,000 gulden he sent while she was in exile, and the unapproved…
A vivid account of how swing music, style, and pleasure became a quiet refusal of Nazi discipline.
The Swing Youth of Nazi Germany are presented as teenagers whose taste for Britain, America, music, dancing, and sharp personal style set them against a regime demanding useful work, obedience, and social conformity.
A lively Fendi family history, from empty New York suitcases to the Baguette.
Fendi's family history comes through as a story of women turning a household name into a working design business. The episode moves from New York trunk shows, where collections sold out and the family returned with empty suitcases, to Sylvia Venturini Fendi joining the brand in…
A lively, slightly loose tour of Saint-Germain's legend, from occult circles and alchemy to a chilling French prophecy.
The Comte de Saint-Germain comes through as a durable 18th-century mystery, wrapped in revolution, occult orders, alchemy, and a prophecy of France's violent future.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Katherine Rory and Kate Walker trace Helena Rubinstein from Krakow to Melbourne, London, Paris, and New York, where she built the Helena Rubinstein Incorporated Cosmetics Company into a global cosmetics empire.
Europhile's Kate Walker and Katherine Rory trace Lola Montez from her birth as Elizabeth Gilbert in Sligo on February 17, 1821, through marriages at 16 and 25, a scandalous reinvention in Spain, and a brief but decisive role in Bavaria.
EUROPHILE episode 125 follows the Swingjugend, a group of 14-to-21-year-old jazz and swing fans in Hamburg and Berlin who used British and American style as a visible rejection of Nazi uniformity.
Europhile’s Italy episode focuses on the Fendi women, starting with Adele Casagrande opening a Rome shop for furs and leather goods in 1918 and later renaming the house after marrying Eduardo Fendi in 1925.
EUROPHILE episode 123 follows the Count de Saint-Germain, a 18th-century figure linked to London, Versailles, Holland, Vienna, and Altona, who was called 'the Wonder Man' by Voltaire.
John Blanke's successful request for a pay raise from Henry VIII anchors EUROPHILE's account of Black people working in Tudor England.
Kate Walker and Katherine Rory examine Irish cures passed through families, healers, and ritual, including a reported burn treatment involving breath on a wound.
Europhile hosts Katherine Rory and Kate Walker return after two months off with a Sunday 'tete tete' about their Greece trip, which covered Athens, Sifnos, Folegandros and Milos.
Europhile Episode 119 compares the French Jardin à la Française at Versailles (15,000 hectares, designed 1662-1700) with the English landscape garden that took over in the mid-18th century.
Kate and Katherine interview Milwaukee Film Festival Programming Director Kerstin Larson about how films are selected for the festival.
Kate and Katherine interview Kate's brother Eli, a stage manager for Houston Ballet, about his work on the Nutcracker production.
Clare Wright discusses her horror film club Sunday Scaries and the Italian giallo genre.
This episode explores the history of the Michelin Guide, from its origins as a tire company promotion to its evolution into a prestigious restaurant rating system.
Kate and Katherine interview Annie Replogle, a luxury travel designer and wine expert based in Rome, about her work and passion for Italian wine and food.