Who really was the 'Newgate monster'? Who was the person that actually organised the Great Train Robbery? Could Jack the Ripper have actually been a woman? What happened to the two princes that were help captive in the Tower of London? These are just some of the biggest mysteries from British History.

On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote UK colony in the South Atlantic. The move led to a brief, but bitter war.

Argentina's military junta hoped to restore its support at a time of economic crisis, by reclaiming sovereignty of the islands. It said it had inherited them from Spain in the 1800s and they were close to South America.

The UK, which had ruled the islands for 150 years, quickly chose to fight. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said the 1,800 Falklanders were "of British tradition and stock". A task force was sent to reclaim the islands, 8,000 miles away.

In the fighting that followed, 655 Argentine and 255 British servicemen lost their lives, as did three Falkland Islanders.

It is almost a century since Colonel Percy Fawcett lost contact with the world. One of Britain’s greatest explorers, Fawcett’s life is defined by a near-lifelong obsession – that an unknown, ancient civilisation lay lost in the Amazon: “the Lost City of Z”. But in 1925, he vanished, along with eldest son Jack, 22, taking any trace of Z with them.

It is his story that is said to have been the inspiration behind the character Indiana Jones.

When it comes to discussing the biggest cheating scandals in world sport, Lance Armstrong's doping normally makes it on the list.

However, since beginning in 1903, the Tour de France has had its fair share of strange cheating. Here is the story of some of the biggest.

Professor Stephen Hawking was a British scientist and was famed for his work with black holes and relativity, and several popular science books including A Brief History of Time.

At the age of 22 Prof Hawking was given only a few years to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease.

The illness left him in a wheelchair and largely unable to speak except through a voice synthesiser.

Prof Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics.

He also discovered that black holes leak energy and fade to nothing - a phenomenon that would later become known as Hawking radiation.

Through his work with mathematician Sir Roger Penrose he demonstrated that Einstein's general theory of relativity implies space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

The scientist gained popularity outside the academic world and appeared in several TV shows including The Simpsons, Red Dwarf and The Big Bang Theory.

Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times. Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for more than eleven years (1979-90), a record unmatched in the twentieth century.

During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.

In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill.

By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent.

Margaret Thatcher became one of the world's most influential and respected political leaders, as well as one of the most controversial, dynamic, and plain-spoken, a reference point for friends and enemies alike.

After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower and–by extension–its political-economic system.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection made us rethink our place in the world. The idea that humans shared a common ancestor with apes was a challenge to the foundations of western civilisation.

Darwin kept silent for 20 years before going public and was only half joking when he described writing his book 'On the Origin of Species' as 'like confessing a murder'. This is the story of one man’s struggle with the most radical idea of all time.

Not many people know the name Max Woosnam - but the man from Liverpool won tennis gold and silver medals at the 1920 Olympics, was a Wimbledon doubles champion, hit a century at Lords and played football for Manchester City and Chelsea.

He is arguably Britain's greatest sportsman.

On 28 March 1942, British forces launched one of the most daring operations of the Second World War. Now known as “The Greatest Raid of All”, Operation Chariot was an attack on the docks at St Nazaire in German-occupied France. It was a feat of cunning and daring that helped to shape the war at sea.