The invention of the balloon-expandable stent

In 1971 during the Cold War, the UK expelled 90 Soviet diplomats suspected of spying. They'd been allowed into Britain in an attempt to improve relations, but it had been discovered that they'd been carrying out espionage instead. George Walden was a young diplomat on the Soviet desk in the British Foreign Office at the time. Photo: British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home (left) shakes hands with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (right) at Heathrow Airport, 26th October 1970. (credit: Ian Showell/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

12 Apr 20188min

In 1983 Robert Mugabe’s government sent crack troops to put down opposition supporters in western Zimbabwe. The soldiers were nicknamed the Gukurahundi which means 'the wind that blows away the chaff'. Trained by North Koreans, they were zealous in their support for Mugabe and utterly ruthless in their methods. Thousands were killed and many were tortured. For years people were fearful of speaking out. One survivor has been telling Rebecca Kesby what it was like.Photo: Robert Mugabe. Credit: Getty Images.

10 Apr 20189min

Zoe Leyland was born in Australia on April 11th 1984. As an embryo, she'd been frozen for 8 weeks before being successfully implanted into her mother's womb. Dr Alan Trounson was part of the team who pioneered the technology to freeze embryos, he's been speaking to Ashley Byrne.Photo: In vitro fertilisation technician removing frozen embryos from storage. Credit: Science Photo Library

10 Apr 20188min

Woodfall Films changed British cinema. First established in 1958, it made films with working class actors about working class lives. The driving force behind it was the producer and director Tony Richardson. Vincent Dowd has been speaking to Rita Tushingham who starred in a classic Woodfall movie 'A Taste of Honey', and to Desmond Davis who filmed 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'.Photo: Actress Rita Tushingham in 'A Taste of Honey'. (Credit: Woodfall Films)

9 Apr 20189min

The 'emergency rescue committee' was set up by a group of American and exiled German liberals during the Second World War to help save some of Europe's leading intellectuals and artists from the Nazis. Among those the group rescued from German-occupied France were artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, surrealist leader Andre Breton and German novelist Heinrich Mann. Louise Hidalgo has been hearing from Justus Rosenberg who worked for the committee and had his own narrow escape from the Nazis.Picture; Justus Rosenberg on the streets of Marseille in the early 1940s (credit: Justus Rosenberg)

6 Apr 20189min

Communist forces overran the key southern city of Hue triggering one of the biggest battles of the war. The attack was part of the Tet Offensive in 1968, when North Vietnam launched surprise assaults on towns and cities across South Vietnam, with the support of its southern based guerrilla force, the Viet Cong. Alex Last spoke to Nguyen Dac Xuan, a former member of the Viet Cong which fought against American and South Vietnamese forces in Hue. Photo: American troops watch as a US plane bombs Communist positions in the city of Hue, February 1968 (BBC)

6 Apr 20189min

In April 1968 Stanley Kubrick's ground-breaking sci-fi movie was released in the US. The film had mixed early reviews but went on to be considered one of the great classics of all-time. Keir Dullea played the starring role of astronaut David Bowman in the film. He tells Mike Lanchin about working with Kubrick and with the famous space computer H.A.L.Photo credit: MGM / EMI

5 Apr 20189min

Chaos and hardship hit Russia with the rapid market reforms in early 1992, weeks after the collapse of the USSR. Dina Newman has been speaking to one of the architects of this "shock therapy", the economy minister Andrei Nechaev. Photo: an old woman outside McDonald's in Moscow, circa 1992. Credit: Dina Newman archive.

4 Apr 20189min