Christopher Hilton – författare

The little band of Puritan emigres that left Southampton in 1620 to found a godly colony in Virginia (as the eastern seaboard of the North American continent was known at the time) carried with them the ideological seed-corn of a new nation. They were leaving England so that they could worship God in the way their conscience told them was right, but they were the forerunners of the greatest feat of nation building in the early modern world. The vibrant self-determination of these Protestant exiles would play an important part in precipitating the imperial conflict with Britain after 1763 and would later stand at the core of the American ideal during the centuries after Independence, providing a powerful pull factor for aspirant migrants around the world. Mayflower is the story of their voyage, their settlement in New England and the influence they had on the forging of a nation.

The 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 sent shockwaves across the world; they were the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in US history, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. For those whose lives it directly impacted, the effects are enduring and deeply felt.Women’s Stories of 9/11 observes the events that unfolded from a woman’s perspective. It is a series of interviews with eleven very different women – some from the West, some from Afghanistan – who each offer remarkably candid insights into their own personal experiences before, during and after the attacks. In the honest and heartfelt stories that emerge we hear the voices of women whose ordinary lives were suddenly changed, emotionally and physically, and who became actors in some of the most far-reaching events of the modern world.

Adolf Hitler understood the importance of sport, and exercised his malign and dangerous influence to try to co-opt it for the Nazi cause. He intended to own the Olympic movement, housing it permanently in Berlin from 1940 in a stadium seating 450,000 people. His hijack of the 1936 Games remains one of sport’s most controversial events, using it as he did to promote Aryan supremacy and showcase the Nazi state. Austria was forced to withdraw from the 1938 football World Cup just days before it started because the country no longer existed. The boxing matches between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938 came to represent democracy versus fascism. German technology crushed all comers in Grand Prix racing, as well as the Isle of Man TT. A government ministry was even set up to use physical fitness to prepare the population for war. Hitler understood that sport has many uses: this is how he used it.