Speechification

Good, old-school, paranoid stuff. Bears. Interceptors. Sovereign Airspace. Spies! [MP3]

Very much enjoying this short series on the British government and its ever-changing approach to "the Drink question". This episode focusses on 'Habitual Drunkards' and the asylums they were sentenced to at the turn of the Twentieth Century, while others have covered the 1830 Beer Act, the Temperance Movement, and the World War One nationalisation of the beer industry, most of which are still available on iPlayer. [MP3]

The excellent and excellently told story of the Makana Football Association, the league founded by political prisoners on Robben Island during Apartheid South Africa. The league's first president started with its constitution, and went on to draft that of the modern nation. [MP3]

In which Michael Goldfarb encounters the ghosts of Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine in Frankfurt - doubly punished, for being Jews, and for writing in German, and thus condemned by their own culture, and ignored as the rest of the world turned against it. A grand intellectual history, excellently told. [MP3]

Archive on 4 spends a good hour digging into the history of racial conflict in the East End of the 1970s. Bangladeshi community groups, right-wing thugs, Rock Against Racism. As ever with the Archive, it's the interviews that bring the period to life. [MP3]

Novelist Louise Welsh investigates the strange case of the Gorbals Vampire, an episode of mass hysteria from 1954 which led to changes in Britain's censorship laws. [MP3]

Maureen Freely explores a strange episode from history: Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller's ejection from a dinner in Istanbul (in Miller's honour) for questioning the repression being visited on their host country. We should know a lot more about Turkey, and this programme gives us a fascinating glimpse through a small window onto a wider history. [MP3]

Billy Childish is the permanent outsider, but a few more people are starting to hear his name and - if very lucky - his music, too. The ICA is about to launch a large exhibition of his work, so his reputation will only be growing. John Wilson explores his work and his world. [MP3]

In this brief extract from the new series of Saving Species, bonkers lepidopterist Matthew Oates introduces us to his butterflies. Just listen. [MP3]

In this short and sadly finished series, Mike Parker explored a number of avenues of modern cartography. In this programme: maps online, and how they have transformed and continue to transform mapping, and us. [MP3]