All Episodes

An English gentleman, a crooked lawyer: the secrets of Stephen David Jones

From the archive: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: three days with a giant of African literature

Death, divorce and the magic of kitchen objects: how to find hope in loss

Missing in the Amazon: the disappearance – episode 1

A deadly mission: how Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira tried to warn the world about the Amazon’s destruction

From the archive: Alan Yentob: the last impresario

‘We know what is happening, we cannot walk away’: how the Guardian bore witness to horror in former Yugoslavia

The ancient psychedelics myth: ‘People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them’

From the archive: The lost Jews of Nigeria

‘We thought we could change the world’: how an idealistic fight against miscarriages of justice turned sour

‘All other avenues have been exhausted’: Is legal action the only way to save the planet?

From the archive: Super-prime mover: Britain’s most successful estate agent

A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right

‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son

From the archive: What lies beneath: the truth about France’s top serial killer expert

‘Why would he take such a risk?’ How a famous Chinese author befriended his censor

The mystery of the nameless girl found dead in a Spanish border town

From the archive: Food fraud and counterfeit cotton: the detectives untangling the global supply chain

From acid house to ancient rites: Jeremy Deller’s enormous, collaborative, unsellable art

What happens when the US declares war on your parents? The Black Panther Cubs know

From the archive: The last phone boxes: broken glass, cider cans and – amazingly – a dial tone

Many life-saving drugs fail for lack of funding. But there’s a solution: desperate rich people

In search of the South Pacific fugitive who crowned himself king

From the archive: ‘I pleaded for help. No one wrote back’: the pain of watching my country fall to the Taliban

The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image

Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics

From the archive: The great betrayal: how the Hillsborough families were failed by the justice system

My mother, the racist

The reluctant collaborator: surviving Syria’s brutal civil war – and its aftermath

From the archive: Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six

The Rainham volcano: a waste dump is constantly on fire in east London. Why will no one stop it?

It came from outer space: the meteorite that landed in a Cotswolds cul-de-sac

From the archive: ‘The treeline is out of control’: how the climate crisis is turning the Arctic green

Holidays in hell: summer camp with Russia’s forgotten children

The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat’

From the archive: Is society coming apart?

The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?

My life as a prison officer: ‘It wasn’t just the smell that hit you. It was the noise’

From the archive: The revolt against liberalism: what’s driving Poland and Hungary’s nativist turn?

‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?

Turkey said it would become a ‘zero waste’ nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe’s rubbish

From the archive: The end of Atlanticism: has Trump killed the ideology that won the cold war?

Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?

‘Here lives the monster’s brain’: the man who exposed Switzerland’s dirty secrets

From the archive: ‘In my 30 years as a GP, the profession has been horribly eroded’

Massacre in the jungle: how an Indigenous man was made the public face of an atrocity

Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’

From the archive: One drug dealer, two corrupt cops and a risky FBI sting

Innit innit boys and Super Eagles: how Nigerian Londoners found their identity through football

The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay

From the archive: Was it inevitable? A short history of Russia’s war on Ukraine

The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

How a young Dutch woman’s life began when she was allowed to die

From the archive: The knackerman: the toughest job in British farming

‘Bring me my tariffs’: how Trump’s China plan was 40 years in the making

Tokyo drift: what happens when a city stops being the future?

From the archive: The false positives scandal: how thousands of innocent Colombians were killed so soldiers could get more holiday

The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

Endless work, little money, occasional UFOs: my father’s five decades driving Brazil’s roads

From the archive: How one man spent 34 years in prison after setting fire to a pair of curtains

The man making a business out of China’s burnout generation

Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain

From the archive: Inspired by nature: the thrilling new science that could transform medicine

‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies?

Inside the Vatican’s secret saint-making process

From the archive: ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder

The inspiring scientists who saved the world’s first seed bank

The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia

From the archive: Cold comfort: how cold water swimming cured my broken heart

Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

The brain collector: the scientist unravelling the mysteries of grey matter

From the archive: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

The rollercoaster king: the man behind the UK’s fastest thrill-ride

Best of 2024: ‘If there’s nowhere else to go, this is where they come’: how Britain’s libraries provide much more than books

Best of 2024: As a teenager, John was jailed for assaulting someone and stealing their bike. That was 17 years ago – will he ever be released?

Best of 2024: ‘It comes for your very soul’: how Alzheimer’s undid my dazzling, creative wife in her 40s

Best of 2024: Nairobi to New York and back: the loneliness of the internationally educated elite

Revisited: Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison

10 years of the long read: Ukraine’s death-defying art rescuers (2024)

10 years of the long read: ‘All that we had is gone’: my lament for war-torn Khartoum (2023)

A new nuclear arms race is beginning. It will be far more dangerous than the last one

Revisited: Too much stuff: can we solve our addiction to consumerism?

The scandal of food waste – and how we can stop it

‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the tragedy of Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh

10 years of the long read: Seven stowaways and a hijacked oil tanker: the strange case of the Nave Andromeda (2022)

A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair

‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads?

10 years of the long read: The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship (2021)

The cement company that paid millions to Isis: was Lafarge complicit in crimes against humanity?

Journalist or Russian spy? The strange case of Pablo González

10 years of the long read: The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground (2020)

Has poppymania gone too far?

Slash and burn: is private equity out of control?

10 years of the long read: Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands (2019)

Hidden traces of humanity: what AI images reveal about our world

The other British invasion: how UK lingo conquered the US

10 years of the long read: Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand (2018)

‘Places to heal, not to harm’: why brutal prison design kills off hope

The trial of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right

10 years of the long read: How the sandwich consumed Britain (2017)