Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
On 24th December 1979 Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan in support of an anti-government coup. The Soviet occupation would last for nine years.
P…
6 years, 3 months ago
The Romanian revolution
In this edition the fall of the Ceaușescus in Romania in December 1989, a global panic over bees in the early 2000s and WW2 black GIs finally recogni…
6 years, 3 months ago
The Cuban writer who defied Castro
On 7 December 1990 the dissident Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas killed himself in New York after years of suffering from AIDS. Before fleein…
6 years, 3 months ago
The man who gave his voice to Stephen Hawking
The story of the American scientist Dennis Klatt who pioneered synthesised speech. He used recordings of himself to make the sounds that gave physici…
6 years, 4 months ago
I saw the soldiers who killed El Salvador's priests
The woman who risked her life to reveal that the army, not left-wing rebels, were responsible for the murder of six Jesuit priests in 1980s El Salvad…
6 years, 4 months ago
Rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean
In 2004, a German aid agency ship, Cap Anamur, was sailing to the Suez Canal, when it came across 37 Africans on a sinking rubber boat. The captain, …
6 years, 4 months ago
Britain's secret propaganda war
Subversive warfare and 'fake news' in World War Two, the scandal which exposed horrific Indian police violence in the 1980s, two sides of the Iran ho…
6 years, 4 months ago
'Jane' - the underground abortion service
The feminist network that performed illegal abortions in the 1960s in Chicago, the Algerian nationals who fought alongside the French in Algeria’s wa…
6 years, 4 months ago
The fall of the Berlin Wall
1989 was a seismic year in world history and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clearest symbol of the Cold War. But it was a series of eve…
6 years, 5 months ago
An environmental history special
A pioneer of climate change science, UK's Windscale nuclear accident, Kenya's Green Belt heroine who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the man "who fed the …
6 years, 5 months ago