Rewind: An author, his cellmate, and a new beginning
How a book-loving prisoner showed a young Alex Wheatle the path to self-belief.Alex had been born in London to Jamaican parents, but grew up in care in the notorious Shirley Oaks children’s home. As a...
30 Mar 202541min
My hunt for the Gutenberg – the rare book that solved a family mystery
Michael Visontay thought he knew everything about his family’s past, but there was one shadowy character he was aching to know more about: his grandfather’s second wife, Olga. As Michael went through ...
24 Mar 202540min
Rewind: The spy who wanted to bring down apartheid Part 2
ANC spy Sue Dobson infiltrated the South African government. Then her cover was blown. After training, Sue had got a job within the government's propaganda unit, and she was feeding back good intellig...
17 Mar 202541min
Rewind: The spy who wanted to bring down apartheid Part 1
Sue Dobson was a white South African who risked her life as an ANC secret agentSue was a student when she was first recruited as a spy for the African National Congress liberation movement in the 1980...
10 Mar 202540min
Held hostage by al-Qaeda: my desert odyssey
Edith Blais was kidnapped by armed militants and held captive in the Sahara for 450 days.As a young French-Canadian who had overcome her teenage agoraphobia, Edith took several years to work up the co...
3 Mar 20251h 2min
The unmaking of a child soldier
As a boy, Ishmael Beah was forced to kill. How do you turn a soldier back into a child? Ishmael Beah was just 13 when war reached his village in Sierra Leone and he was made to flee. In the chaos, he ...
24 Feb 202540min
The WW2 spy and the little leaf that saved her
In 1942, several years into the Second World War, the British government sent out a series of bulletins requesting any personal photos the public might have of the French coastline. Odette Hallowes, a...
17 Feb 202540min
How’d you get so rich? A dream to change my family’s fortune
Reggie Nelson grew up on an East London council estate in a British-Ghanaian family that struggled with alcoholism, domestic violence and money worries. After a brush with the law at a young age, he f...
10 Feb 202539min
