David W

Set over four days against the backdrop of the Munich Conference of September 1938, Munich follows the fortunes of two men who were friends at Oxford together in the 1920s. Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving in 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Paul von Hartmann is on the staff of the German Foreign Office - and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. They have not been in contact for more than a decade.

In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.

James Comey might best be known as the FBI director whom Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump presidency. In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works.

Father of cyberpunk William Gibson’s original script for Alien III, written in 1987 as a sequel to Aliens, never made it to our screens, although it went on to achieve cult status among fans as the third instalment that might have been after being leaked online. This terrifying, cinematic multicast dramatisation - directed by the multi-award-winning Dirk Maggs - is the chance to experience William Gibson’s untold story and its terrifying, claustrophobic and dark encounters between humans and aliens, as a completely immersive audio experience.

Broadcaster, writer, philanthroper and one of the first public figures to suggest high-visibility clothing for people manning temporary car parks, the public Alan Partridge is a cherished institution. But what of the unseen Alan? For the first time, this famously private man welcomes us into his home and audibly deshrouds himself for a fascinating series of podcasts.

Bletchley 1945: a place where nearly 10,000 people would contribute decisively to the Allied war effort. Their role? To decode the Enigma cypher used by the Germans for high-level communications. It is an astonishing story. A melting pot of Oxbridge dons, maverick oddballs and more regular citizens worked night and day at Station X, as Bletchley Park was known, to derive intelligence information from German coded messages.

We would all be better off if everyone saw mathematics as a practical ally. Sadly, most of us fear maths and seek to avoid it. This is because mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills' - it never hesitates to bluntly point out when we are wrong. But it is only trying to help! Mathematics is a friend which can fill the gaps in what our brains can do naturally. Luckily, even though we don't like sharing our own mistakes, we love to listen to tales about what happens when maths errors make the everyday go horribly wrong....

The Lord of the Rings is one of the most successful film franchises in cinematic history. Breaking box office records worldwide, capturing numerous Academy Awards, the trilogy is a breathtaking cinematic achievement and beloved by fans everywhere.

The definitive history of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga, Anything You Can Imagine takes us on a cinematic journey across all six films, featuring brand-new interviews with Peter, his cast and his crew. From the early days of daring to dream it could be done, through the highs and lows of making the films, to fan adoration and, finally, Oscar glory.

In Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means - or doesn’t - to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected president of the United States purely on showmanship.