The Last King of Bulgaria

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.Our guest is Michelle Meinhart, a reader in musicology and cultural history at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. We start by hearing about a Mexican song that captivated lov ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. First, the story of the Belgian teenager who exposed a scandal within the country’s Royal Family in 1999. Our guest, Professor Kate Williams takes us through some other royal sc ...  Show more

In June 2001, more than half a century after being driven into exile by communists, Bulgaria’s former King Simeon II made a dramatic comeback by winning the country’s parliamentary election. In 2018, Farhana Haider spoke to Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha about his remarkable journey fr ...  Show more

On November 4th 1956 Soviet tanks rolled into the Hungarian capital Budapest, crushing the country's short-lived popular uprising against Soviet rule. Nick Thorpe spoke to Miklos Gimes who was just six years old when the end of the revolution sent his father to his death, and Mik ...  Show more

The fate of Louis-Charles, son of the last king of France, was for years shrouded in rumour.The little boy was said to have died in prison in 1795. But for years, rumours spread that he had been swapped with an imposter.It wasn't until a team of scientists took DNA samples from t ...  Show more

Tens of thousands of Polish officers were secretly executed in the USSR during World War 2. The German occupying forces reported the first mass grave, in the village of Katyn in 1943, but Moscow only admitted to the killings in 1990. Dina Newman speaks to the son of one of the mu ...  Show more