The Virgin Lands Campaign
To fight food shortages in the 1950s the USSR embarked on a major agricultural project to develop vast areas of previously uncultivated land in northern Kazakhstan. The project attracted hundreds of t...
17 Jul 20189min
The Killing of the Russian Tsar
The Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, four daughters and young son, were shot in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. Olga Romanoff is his great niece. She spoke to Olga Smirno...
16 Jul 20188min
Italy's 'Ghost Shipwreck'
In the summer of 2001, an Italian journalist used an underwater robot to find the remains of a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily which had killed nearly 300 migrants from South Asia. At the time this ...
13 Jul 20188min
The Spiegel Affair
In the early 1960s a magazine article about West Germany's defence capabilities led to the imprisonment of seven journalists, a vehement debate about press freedom and a full-blown government crisis....
12 Jul 20188min
Smiling Buddha: India's First Nuclear Test
The inside story of how India secretly developed and exploded an atomic device in 1974. India called it a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion, though the experimental device was in effect a plutonium bomb. The...
11 Jul 20189min
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
In 1958 Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, published his first book "Things Fall Apart". It was set in pre-colonial rural Nigeria and examines how the arrival of foreigners led to tensions within traditi...
10 Jul 20189min
Kosovo: 'Madeleine's War'
When war broke out in Kosovo in 1998, Nato intervened with air-strikes. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was the main proponent for military action. She explains to Rebecca Kesby why she argue...
5 Jul 201810min
Playgrounds Made of Junk
Post-war Britain saw a rise in makeshift adventure playgrounds born out of bomb sites. Children were provided with tools and raw materials, to build whatever they wanted to play with, using their own...
5 Jul 20189min
