Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsOpening Radio and Podcast...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast shows and categories...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast episodes...
The story of our times told by the people who were there.
When Chief Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize he was living under a banning order in rural South Africa. His daughter Albertina talks...
*** Contains descriptions that some listeners may find upsetting *** Enslaved Africans are forced to work in sugar cane fields - the hours a...
People in the Chiapas region, led by the charismatic, ski-mask wearing, sub-commandante Marcos, rose up against the Mexican state. They call...
The play Hamlet can tell us a great deal about the time in which it was written. At the turn of the 16th century England was faced with many...
Hafez al Assad was the Syrian Defence Minister in the winter of 1970 when his struggle for power came to a head. His former friend, the hard...
The film, The Great Escape, has become an all-time favourite. It is about a mass breakout from a German prison camp during World War 2. Flig...
For several days over Christmas in 1914 the fighting stopped on the battlefields of the First World War. British and German soldiers left th...
The nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov had spent seven years in internal exile in the Soviet city of Gorky. His ret...
Christmas 1991 was a difficult time for the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Economic and political difficulties crippled the government....
On December 21 1988 a US passenger plane blew up over Scotland. Pan Am flight 103 was heading for the USA when a bomb exploded on board, kil...
On 20 December 1989 more than 20,000 US soldiers descended on Panama. General Manuel Noriega - the country's leader - sought refuge with the...
It is seven years since one of the Washington snipers, Lee Boyd Malvo, was convicted of murder. He and John Allen Muhammad had terrorised th...
On 16 December 1998 the US and Britain began a four day bombardment of Iraq. Their justification for Operation Desert Fox was Iraq's failure...
"The destruction of Grozny was apocalyptic... I saw a lot of deaths. I saw people who got wounded by shrapnel from mortar fire and they were...
Hiding in a hole in the ground, bearded and unkempt, the former President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was dragged blinking into the light by Am...
After eight years of military rule, thousands of mainly young, left-wing, Argentinians had gone missing - 'the disappeared'. Miriam Lewin wa...
Smallpox was once one of the most feared diseases in the world - disfiguring and often deadly. Donald Henderson is the American doctor who l...
It is exactly 30 years since the former Beatle, John Lennon, was shot dead in New York. Two days before John Lennon was killed, he spent sev...
When Japanese bombers and fighter planes attacked the US fleet in the Pacific it came as a huge surprise to many. Listen to some archive rec...
In December 1992, the US sent armed troops into Somalia to help protect aid convoys carrying food to the hungry. They called it Operation Re...
The first trains full of Jewish children left Berlin in early December - heading for sanctuary in Britain. The Kindertransports only stopped...
The killing of 4 American churchwomen brought to light the extent of the violence in El Salvador, and the ruthless military tactics used aga...
The first man to cross by land from Britain to France in 8000 years tells us what it was like.
Howard Carter was an English archaeologist who had searched the Valley of the Kings for years - hoping to find the burial place of Tutankham...
In 1532 a few hundred Spanish conquistadors took on tens of thousands of Inca warriors. As the two sides met, the Spanish governor Pisaro pu...
Freddie Mercury's personal assistant remembers the last days of the musician's battle with Aids.
The story of how acclaimed Japanese writer Yukio Mishima ended his life in a violent and bloody way.
We hear a graphic account of the killing of hundreds of captured Taliban after they rose up inside a prison in Mazar-e-Sharif in Northern Af...
It is over 60 years since men at the Roswell air base in New Mexico first reported strange lights above the desert. Then they found strange...
With Somali pirates on trial in the United States, we go back to the era of America's Civil War and a piracy trial that gripped the country.
Tank on Athens street. Getty Images The leader of a student protest in Greece nearly 40 years ago tells us of the moment when the country's...
What was Benazir Bhutto like as a young woman and why did she follow her father into politics? Victoria Schofield met her at Oxford universi...
In November 1940 sustained German bombing raids left the ancient English city of Coventry in ruins. Its medieval cathedral burned down and h...
World War I produced a generation of British poets like no other. Witness hears from the son of Robert Graves, about his father's wartime ex...
When Barack Obama was about six years old his mother remarried and the family moved to the Indonesian capital Jakarta. There, he learnt the...
Some listeners may find parts of this programme disturbing. With enough sex, violence, and swearing to outrage even London audiences, the pl...
When the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez canal in 1956, he took control of one of the main oil routes from the M...
It's twenty years since Burma last held a general election. We hear from someone who was there about the atmosphere, the excitement and the...
On 4 November 1995 the Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen sang at a peace rally in Tel Aviv alongside Israel's leader Yitzhak Rabin. Moments late...