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Yuri Gagarin before the first space flight, 12 April 1961. (Credit: RIA Novosti)

In pictures: Soviet cosmonauts and the birth of the space age

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Podcast Website Large Helen Fry - WWII Intelligence

Secret listeners . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

1651, Charles Prince of Wales (1630 - 1685) (later King Charles II of England) meets Sir Henry Lee near Oxford during the Civil War, while escaping after the Battle of Worcester.

How Charles II put Britain back together after the Civil War

Billy Fullerton, gang chief of the Glasgow gang the Billy Boys

Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders?

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Historian and writer William Dalrymple during the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2017 (Photo by Martina Bocchio / Awakening / Alamy)

William Dalrymple on the East India Company . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

War criminal? William the Conqueror shown on horseback in the Bayeux Tapestry. The king's Harrying of the North was a military success but a human catastrophe – one that even appalled chroniclers traditionally sympathetic to the Norman regime. (Photo by Bridgeman)

Was William the Conqueror a war criminal? The brutal story of the Harrying of the North

A cartoon from 1862 shows a pair 'garroters' attacking a victim. (Photo by The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Gangs and knife-crime fears: how has Britain responded through history?

Black and white portrait image of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

Who was Cardinal John Henry Newman?

Giant of literature: A page from the 'Beowulf' manuscript. The story is fictional but some of the characters within it were real people, and others were believed to be the ancestors of Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings. (Photo by Alamy)

Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxons’ action hero

Half-timbered medieval cottages, Water Street, Lavenham, Suffolk, England, (Photo by Getty Images)

History explorer A wealth of history: Laversham, Sulfolk

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William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer and historian based in India. (Photo by Bikramjt Bose)

“This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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British journalist Tom Wintringham (1898–1949), the candidate for the Christian Socialist Commonwealth Party. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

History hero Peter Tatchell chooses Tom Wintringham (1898–1949) . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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Catherine the Great: fact and fiction . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Cardinal John Henry Newman

How to become a saint

The murder of Thomas Becket

Q&A: What happened to the assassins who killed Thomas Becket?