171. The Bengal Famine: Chaos in Calcutta

Did the CIA actually fund Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war? Who was Abdullah Azzam, the radical scholar who turned jihad into a global franchise? How did a bureaucratic office meeting create Al-Qaeda? In Episode 2 of this new series, William Dalrymple is joined by Jas ...  Show more

What were the building blocks of the rise of Radical Islamism that paved the road to the 9/11 terror attacks? How did the torture of radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood fan the flames of Islamist thought in the 1960s? Who were Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and how did ...  Show more

In the latest episode of History Behind the Headlines, Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter are joined by award-winning journalist and producer Kavita Puri to discuss the history of famine, and the challenges of tackling the contentious legacies of events such as the 1943 Bengal Famine – ...  Show more

Ravaged by a civil war, Sudan could see a <a href="https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/04/15/after-a-year-of-war-sudan-is-a-failing-state?utm_campaign=a.io&utm_medium=audio.podcast.np&utm_source=theintelligence&utm_content=discovery.content.anonymous.tr_shown ...

Mock cream. Lord Woolton Pie. For 14 years the government put draconian restrictions on how much Britons could eat. Each meal had to be carefully planned and every scrap of food eked out to avoid waste. But at the end of it, Britons were healthier than ever before. Was it the bes ...  Show more

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