Silk routes: 2000 years of trading

Luxuries and everyday goods that travelled West and East

• 44 mins

Valkyries: Fierce women of war

Choosing dead heroes from the battlefield, to fight with Odin in the apocalyptic Ragnarok

• 44 mins

Up close with tango

The dance that seduced the world

• 44 mins

Chaucer, father of English poetry

The man who in the 14th Century made English a language fit for literature

• 44 mins

Tolstoy: War and Peace

An epic sweep of war and love and family life set in 19th century Russia

• 44 mins

Picasso, artist of reinvention

How an artist changed our way of seeing

• 44 mins

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Why did the once mighty Rome crumble and fall to invaders in 476AD?

• 44 mins

Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction

Celebrating the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles

• 44 mins

Secrets of the Great Pyramid

Exploring the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt

• 44 mins

Lal Ded, mystical Kashmiri poet

A free-spirited woman whose pithy words challenged social norms

• 39 mins

Smallpox: The defeat of the speckled monster

Exploring the 200 year campaign to wipe out a killer disease

• 44 mins

Who were the Huguenots?

The myths and mysteries surrounding French protestant refugees

• 44 mins

Queen Tamar: The myth of a perfect ruler

Georgia’s most iconic female sovereign

• 39 mins

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Investigating how a thriving African American community was razed to the ground

• 44 mins

Elizabeth Fry: 'The angel of prisons'

How a nineteenth century Quaker philanthropist shook up the prison system

• 39 mins

Writer Jorge Luis Borges: Mixing the magical with the mundane

Teasing and thought provoking: the works of the Argentinian master of pithy stories

• 44 mins

Telling the time: From sundials to satnav

A brief history of how we tell the time

• 44 mins

Paul Robeson: Singer, actor and civil rights activist

Exploring the life of a man who campaigned for disenfranchised people around the world

• 44 mins

Dido of Carthage: A love story gone wrong

What makes the legend of Dido so appealing to the arts and beyond?

• 39 mins

Comenius, a pioneer of lifelong learning

The life and work of the father of modern education

• 44 mins

The woman whose cells changed medical history

The story of Henrietta Lacks who unwittingly left behind an extraordinary medical legacy

• 39 mins

First impressions: The printing press

How the machine pioneered by 15th Century entrepreneur Johannes Gutenberg changed history

• 44 mins

Unlocking the mysteries of cuneiform tablets

We explore the system of writing that developed 5,000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia

• 44 mins

Alexandre Dumas: The man behind the Musketeers

The adventurous life of the much-loved French novelist

• 44 mins

Umm Kulthum: Egypt’s singing superstar

Exploring the life of a woman whose voice still captivates people across the Middle East

• 39 mins

The Kingdom of Aksum: Africa's trading empire

An ancient state in the Horn of Africa that is famed for its monumental stelae structures

• 44 mins

Mugham: the sound of Azerbaijan

Transcendental music from the Caucasus

• 44 mins

Famous hats in history

The uses and meanings of headwear from prehistory to today

• 44 mins

Alexandre Yersin and the race to fight the plague

The life and work of a pioneering Swiss microbiologist

• 44 mins

Olympe de Gouges: France’s forgotten revolutionary heroine

The French social activist, feminist and playwright who was executed at the guillotine

• 40 mins