Nuclear diplomacy and Italo disco

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dina Esfandiary, Middle East Geo-economics Lead at Bloomberg.

We start in 2015 with insider accounts of the Iran nuclear deal and the Greek debt crisis.

Then, the 1995 'Turbot War' between Canada and Spain.

We hear how international broadcaster Voice of America was born during World War 2.

Finally, the rise of Italo disco in the early 1980s.

Contributors:

Baroness Catherine Ashton - EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Dina Esfandiary - Middle East Geo-economics Lead at Bloomberg. Euclid Tsakalotos - Greece's Finance Minister. Brian Tobin - Canada’s Minister for Fisheries and Oceans. Ryan Paris - singer of Dolce Vita.

(Photo: Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2015. Credit: Thomas Imo/Photothek via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get closer to the action with live commentary from the world's greatest sporting events on BBC Sounds.
0:06.1	It is all over!
0:08.4	Bulls are edge, caught behind.
0:10.6	Including cricket Super League, women's Euros 2025, Wimbledon, Formula One and much more.
0:17.6	It's all right to the lights and foot to the floor.
0:20.0	Oh, what a's done it!
0:21.3	Drop shots!
0:22.9	Winner!
0:23.6	On five sports extra,
0:25.0	Sports Extra 2 and Sports Extra 3.
0:27.6	Listen, only on BBC Sounds.
0:34.4	Hello and welcome to The History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:39.5	featuring interviews from the Witness History podcast with people who experienced major events firsthand.
0:45.5	This week, we're in the room as the Greek debt crisis nearly collapsed the Eurozone in 2015.
0:51.2	And Merkel gets up and says, I'm going. I can't accept this.
0:55.5	The German people won't accept this.
0:57.5	And Tusk, who was then president of the council, says, I'm locking the door.
1:01.8	Nobody's leaving.
1:03.2	Also, how Canada and Spain came to blows over fishing rights in the 1990s.
1:08.5	These are 50-caliber machine gun mounted on our vessel, which fired across the bow of their
1:14.3	vessel, which is, if you're at sea, quite a powerful warning shot.
1:18.9	And the history of the international broadcaster, Voice of America.
	...

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