Movies: British history

The painful story of Ireland and the Irish people, who struggled for centuries to free themselves from the tyrannical clutches of the British Empire; an epic tale of poverty, hunger, despair, violence and unyielding courage....

INFINITY minus Infinity draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Deni...

Between January 1st and 31 December 2017, 768 people died as a result of murder or manslaughter in Britain - approximately 14 people a week. This powerful and original film tells the stories of some of those cases, exploring the human cost of murder ...

Caroline Sturdy Colls, a world leader in the forensic investigation of Nazi crime scenes, is chasing clues to an unsolved case: a concentration camp that existed on the British island of Alderney. Witnesses and survivors claimed that thousands died t...

Opera based on the story of Edward II and Piers Gaveston. Music by George Benjamin, libretto by Martin Crimp. BBC broadcast of the 2018 premiere at the Royal Opera House, the composer conducting, prefaced by commentary and interviews....

To mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Janina Ramirez tells the story of three books that defined this radical religious revolution in England....

Was the legendary playwright William Shakespeare really the author of his acclaimed plays? Or was he just a straw man working for a secret society? Norwegian organist and researcher Petter Amundsen claims to have a solid theory on the subject. Shakes...

Considers how Anglo-Saxon England was built by many different peoples and cultures. Re-enacts important historical events. Shows authentic landmarks and historical materials from 1900 B C to 1066 A D....

Built in 1923, the Flying Scotsman was the first steam locomotive to run at 100 miles an hour and to star in its own feature film. This is the untold story of the iconic Flying Scotsman-the very best in the engineering of its time....

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Professor Saul David examines Prince Albert's role in shaping British culture, governmental policy and international relations in Victorian Britain....

The history of Westminster Abbey and a tour of the monuments within it; accompanied by choral music and including footage of the coronation of King George VI in 1937....

A documentary on the surviving syncretic pagan midwinter customs of the British Isles, focusing on nine ritual celebrations ranging from the Moray Firth in the north, the Somerset Levels in the south, Humberside in the east, and County Kerry in the w...

The 43 Group was an English anti-fascist group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen in the immediate wake of World War II when, on their return to London, they encountered British fascist organisations such as Jeffrey Hamm’s “British League of Ex-Serviceme...

In this hour-long documentary, Oxford academic Janina Ramirez tours the country in search of Anglo-Saxon art treasures. Her basic thesis - and it is a plausible one - is that we should not look upon their era as a "dark age" as compared, for example,...

Lee Remick stars as Jennie Jerome, born in the United States in 1845, who eventually became Lady Randolph Churchill, and gave birth to Sir Winston Churchill in this seven-part, seven-hour biographical mini-series....

Long treated with indifference by critics and historians, British silent cinema has only recently undergone the reevaluation it has long deserved, revealing it to be far richer than previously acknowledged. This documentary, featuring clips from a re...

A psycho-geographic journey through London and its history, as undertaken by an unseen narrator and his companion, Robinson, at the time of the 1992 general election....

This biopic tells the story of the life of Pitt The Younger, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain at the age of 24....

Writer Broadcaster and Newsnight arts correspondent Stephen Smith finds out what it took to get ahead at the court of Richard II....