Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution
As a schoolboy in communist China, Kim Gordon took part in huge rallies to praise Chairman Mao. But when Mao's so-called Cultural Revolution began to target intellectuals and foreigners, Kim's British...
13 Jul 20218min
The race for the jet engine
Using eyewitness recordings from the BBC archive we hear from the pioneers of the jet engine, Sir Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain, about the struggle to develop a revolutionary new engine in the 1930...
12 Jul 202113min
The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior
On 9 July 1985 the Greenpeace campaign ship was bombed by French secret agents in Auckland, New Zealand. One environmental campaigner was killed and the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. Claire Bowes heard fr...
9 Jul 20219min
The first World Romani Congress
Roma people from all over Europe met in England for a conference in 1971. The Roma, who migrated from India over a thousand years ago, often used to be called gypsies. Many Roma led a travelling life,...
8 Jul 20219min
The famine in North Korea
Communist North Korea suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been one of the country's main supporters. Hundreds of thousands of people died of sta...
7 Jul 20218min
Britain's wartime gold
When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 it had to find somewhere to keep its money. Because of the risk of invasion, a decision was made to send the country's gold reserves to Canada. Vincent Do...
6 Jul 20219min
Cuba's blindness epidemic
As Cuba faced a devastating economic crisis in the early 1990s, leading to severe food shortages and malnutritiion, some 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss. But health officia...
5 Jul 20219min
China's trailblazing foreign students
China has the largest number of overseas students in the world but when students first started venturing out of Communist China it was still a country feeling the aftereffects of the Cultural Revoluti...
2 Jul 202113min
