Between 1947 and 1949 the British government, desperately short of workers in the 'essential' industries of agriculture, coal mining and textiles, turned to the millions of East Europeans living...

Includes two programmes: 'Poppies are Red, Cornflowers are Blue' and 'The Art of Remembrance'. Poppies are Red, Cornflowers are Blue: It's not just about how the Poppy became the symbol of...

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg voyages to Tasmania to find out what a sentence of transportation to Van Diemen's Land really meant to those who survived the...

Wolfgang Stoecker is on a mission to explore the cultural meanings of dust. Cologne-based artist Stoecker has collected samples of dust from historic buildings across Europe and beyond. With the...

Tim Pigott-Smith presents a unique audio snapshot of the history of the Twentieth Century.Released in ten volumes, 'Eyewitness' provides a rare opportunity to hear the history of the 20th...

The story of how Britain's Olympic journey started 400 years ago - in the Cotswolds. It was once thought that the modern Olympics was the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin alone and put into...

Alistair Cooke presents his own personal selection of ‘Letter from America’ broadcasts from the turbulent years 1969-1978.Alistair Cooke is the microphone’s great observer, the doyen of...

The BBC’s Nick Robinson continues his fascinating and absorbing Radio 4 series featuring eight famous British Prime Ministers, which explores how Prime Ministers have used their power and...

In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of two million years of human history using one hundred objects selected from the Museum’s vast and...

An account of the astonishing exchange of letters between a very determined lady from Watford and some of the highest officials in the BBC that led on 2nd January 1928 to the first of 75 years of...

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg is in urban Lancashire to explore the warp and weft of the Industrial Revolution - how the upheavals of the new mechanisation...

From the BBC Radio 4 series presented and written by Nick Robinson that explores how prime ministers have used their power and responded to the great challenges of their time and how they made the...

The Royal Collection is one of the most wide-ranging collections of art and artefacts in the world and provides an intriguing insight into the minds of the monarchs who have assembled it. In this...

Russia is a country of cultural refinement; yet a country that rules by ‘the iron fist’, with an ingrained readiness to sacrifice the individual for the collectivist cause. In this riveting...

Continuing the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series of the story of Britain, from the start of the twentieth century to the present day.Christopher Lee's history of Britain, 'This Sceptred Isle',...