Presidential diamonds and Tupperware parties

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.We hear how Norwegian teachers resisted peddling Nazi propaganda during the German occupation of the Second World War and our guest, Dr Rachel Pistol, talks us through other exampl ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.We hear how a French curator uncovered lost documents showing that the Nazis researched the Bayeux Tapestry during World War Two. Our guest, Professor Catherine Clarke, takes us th ...  Show more

In 1979, French journalist Claude Angeli and his colleagues discovered Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the French President, received gifts of diamonds worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the grisly and deposed former Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic. The scandal ...  Show more

As Orson Welles would say, "Ah, the French." Here, in a lead up to the French Revolution, we consider the tale of one randy Cardinal, one social climbing almost-noble, one doomed queen, and one hideous diamond necklace. C'est ridicule (especially Elizabeth butchering all French p ...  Show more

In this Diamond Jubilee year, BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz has been selecting some of the most revealing objects from the Royal Collection to see what they tell us about the monarchs who acquired them. It is one of the most wide-ranging collections of art and artefacts in the wo ...  Show more

An escape from war-torn Germany. Lavish dinners with Hollywood royalty. A Swedish baron and a dime-store heiress: we explore the long journey of a Van Gogh still life — and what it says about the real value of the things we treasure.Get Revisionist History updates first by signin ...  Show more