Chalke Talk

The podcast from the Chalke Valley History Festival
Released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings

Chalke Talks for THEME: Spies


  • 29. THE SECRET LIFE OF BLETCHLEY PARK
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    The code breakers of Bletchley Park played an absolutely crucial part in the Allied victory in the Second World War. Best-selling historian Sinclair McKay tackles the story of this iconic place, drawing on his conversations with many of the brilliant men and women who served there during the war.

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  • 33. SOLDIER, SPY: A SURVIVOR’S TALE
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    Victor Gregg (born 1919) had an extraordinary war and his adventures did not end in 1945. In this very special event, he discusses with Rick Stroud what it was like fighting in North Africa, escaping the ruins of Dresden where he had been a prisoner of war on the night the city was bombed, and […]

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  • 101. THE SECRET WORLD: THE LOST HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO THE 21st CENTURY
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    What difference have security and intelligence operations made to the course of history? Professor Christopher Andrew, Britain’s foremost intelligence scholar, provides the answers. Beginning with the shift in the ancient world from divination to recognisable attempts to gather intelligence, he charts the development of intelligence and security operations through Renaissance Venice, Elizabethan England and Napoleonic […]

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  • 139. SPIES AND SECRET AGENTS: IN FICTION AND REAL LIFE
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    Charlie Higson is the best-selling author of the Young Bond series of novels, and Ben Macintyre the author of a number of best-selling books about real spies of World War II and the Cold War. Here they come together with spy novelist Charlie Cumming to discuss secret agents, real and imaginary, in a highly entertaining […]

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  • 147. AGENT JACK: MI5’s SECRET NAZI HUNTER
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    In June 1940 Britain was Europe’s final bastion of freedom – and Hitler’s next target. But not everyone feared a Nazi invasion: in factories, offices and suburban homes people were determined to hasten it. Robert Hutton exposes the astonishing story of the MI5 agent at the heart of Operation Fifth Column, the covert wartime operation […]

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  • 160. A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: KIM PHILBY AND THE GREAT BETRAYAL
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    With access to newly released MI5 files, Ben Macintyre unlocks perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War. A story of intimate duplicity, loyalty, trust and treachery about the most notorious British defector and mole in history, Kim Philby is revealed as agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, and betrayer of secret Allied operations […]

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