Podcast Episodes

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 agent

Sue was a student when she was first recruited as a spy for the African National Congress liberation movement in the 198…

Published on 9 months, 2 weeks ago

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 c…

Published on 9 months, 3 weeks ago

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…

Published on 10 months ago

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, …

Published on 10 months, 1 week ago

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 …

Published on 10 months, 2 weeks ago

The DNA request that revealed my child had gone missing

In April 2010, Cathy Terkanian received a letter that turned her world upside down. It revealed that her daughter, Alexis, whom she’d had to place for adoption in 1974, had gone missing. Then she was…

Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago

My 'miracle baby', born 15 months after I lost my love

In 2020, Ellidy Pullin’s life was turned upside down when her partner, Olympic snowboarder Alex ‘Chumpy’ Pullin, died in a tragic accident. The couple had been trying for a baby, so in the deeply dis…

Published on 11 months ago

Stolen as a baby, I called my abductor ‘Mom’

On the night of December 15th, 1997, a fire broke out in the home of Luz Cuevas and Pedro Vera, a couple living in Philadelphia with their two young sons and their ten-day-old daughter, Delimar. She…

Published on 11 months, 1 week ago

Black boy joy: defying stereotypes on the London stage

Ryan Calais Cameron dreamed of being an actor, but after a careers advisor told him this was unrealistic he took a different path as a tradesman. Unhappy, Ryan took a risk with acting and eventually …

Published on 11 months, 2 weeks ago

The long climb back

In 2017 Australian Gus Taylor lost his lower leg in a terrible climbing accident. The climbing community rallied, hauled him out of depression and got him back on the mountains again. But then in 202…

Published on 11 months, 3 weeks ago