HistoryHistorical narrative
The Great Charter
In June 1215, in a riverside meadow in England, an unpopular king was forced to accept a list of promises. It failed within weeks, yet its ideas have outlived every king since.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The King Who Chose Peace
More than two thousand years ago, the most powerful ruler in India won a terrible war, and then did something almost no conqueror has ever done. He had his sorrow carved into stone for everyone to read.
True StoriesTrue story
The Little Ships of Dunkirk
In 1940, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were trapped on the beaches of northern France. To help bring them home, an extraordinary fleet set out across the Channel, of fishing boats, ferries, yachts and pleasure launches.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Milkmaid and the Cure
Country people in England said that milkmaids never caught smallpox. In 1796, a village doctor decided to find out whether they were right, and began the story of vaccines.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Stone That Spoke
For fourteen hundred years, nobody on Earth could read the writing of ancient Egypt. Then soldiers digging near the Nile found a broken slab of dark stone, and a young Frenchman made it speak.
KindnessTrue story
The Village That Hid Children
During the Second World War, the people of a poor mountain village in France opened their doors to strangers on the run. They hid thousands, and hardly ever spoke of it afterwards.
KindnessTrue story
The Visas of Chiune Sugihara
In the summer of 1940, a crowd of desperate refugees gathered at the gate of a small Japanese consulate in Lithuania. The diplomat inside had to choose between his orders and his conscience.
Famous LivesBiography
The Light in the Shed
Marie Curie studied in secret as a girl in Warsaw, worked in a leaky Paris shed and discovered two new elements. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
KindnessTrue story
The Man Who Saved 669 Children
In 1938 a young London stockbroker cancelled a skiing holiday and went to Prague instead. He told almost nobody what he did there, for fifty years.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Night the Wall Opened
For 28 years, a wall divided Berlin. On 9 November 1989, a confused answer at a press conference sent thousands of people to the border, and history changed overnight.
KindnessTrue story
The Names in the Jar
In occupied Warsaw, social worker Irena Sendler helped smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto, and buried their real names in jars so they could one day be found.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Press That Changed the World
Around 1450, in the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg found a way to print books quickly. Within fifty years, Europe was transformed.
ReflectionHistorical narrative
The Philosopher Who Asked a King to Move
The most powerful man in the world offered a poor philosopher anything he wanted. His answer has been remembered for more than two thousand years.
KindnessHistorical narrative
Carols in No Man's Land
At Christmas 1914, in the first winter of the First World War, soldiers on opposite sides of the trenches laid down their weapons and met as human beings, if only for a little while.