Peaky Blinders has captivated audiences across the globe... but who were the Brummie criminals?

The gangsters on whom the show is based were an urban youth gang located in Birmingham in the late 19th century. Here's the lowdown on them.

Nothing can eclipse the 2005 fight for the Ashes as simply the grandest sporting occasion of recent times. Affectionatley, it is still known as the greatest Test series of all time.

No contest was ever so unreadable and so suffocatingly tense for so long. It offered everything; five dazzling matches, no-quarter-asked-or-given combat but heartwarming sportsmanship, great performers at their peak, outrageous denouements Test after Test and, if you were an Englishman, the right and only result.

Almost 50 years ago, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in a botched operation that would spark a chain of events that two years later would see Richard Nixon resign as the 37th president of the United States.

The Watergate scandal is widely considered to be the biggest in political history anywhere in the world. Here is the story.

On the 16th of August 1819 the huge open area around what's now St Peter's Square, Manchester, played host to an outrage against over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters; an event which became known as The Peterloo Massacre.

An estimated 18 people, including four women and a child, died from sabre cuts and trampling. Nearly 700 men, women and children received extremely serious injuries. All in the name of liberty and freedom from poverty.

The Massacre occurred during a period of immense political tension and mass protests. Fewer than 2% of the population had the vote, and hunger was rife with the disastrous corn laws making bread unaffordable.

In this episode, we interview Royal Navy and D-Day veteran Eric Gelder. He takes us through his experiences of the Second World War which included serving on the fleet minesweeper HMS Rifleman during D-day before spending the rest of the war in the Far East.

He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section which was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Counterfactual history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.

In this podcast, Historical Oracle discusses 13 of the most remarkable moments from the history of the Academy Awards (The Oscars).

Listen to the story of how American Football came into being and how the sporting phenomenon that is the Superbowl started.

It was a turning point in the Second World War. As the Allies prepared to invade Sicily in 1943, they wanted to dupe the Germans into thinking that their attack would be aimed elsewhere.

To carry out the deception, a plan was concocted in which a body was dumped in the sea, to be discovered by Axis forces, carrying fake 'secret documents' suggesting the invasion would be staged in Greece, 500 miles away.

Incredibly, the trick worked and the diversion of German troops to Greece has been credited by historians with playing a major part in the success of the Sicily invasion. The episode was later immortalised in the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was.

Listen to the full story here.

In this special three-part series, Historical Oracle takes you through the History of Britain's relationship with the EU from the end of the Second World War until Brexit.

Part 2 focuses on Britain's accession to the EU in 1972 under Edward Heath, the 1975 EU Referendum and Thatcher's uneasy relationship with the Union.