Newscast is the unscripted chat behind the headlines.

It's informed, but informal.

We pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can really dig into them.

We use our colleagues in the newsroom and

our contacts. Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others.

We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests.

Join us for daily news chats to get you ready for today's conversations.

Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds. on May Day,

Day, 1935 in Moscow's Red Square, a crowd of thousands, in Moscow's Red Square, a crowd of thousands, including Joseph Stalin, stood and listened to a speech.

It was taped, the thin voice coming from loudspeakers on top of Lenin's mausoleum. The speaker was an elderly scientist,

Constantine Silkofsky, who lived in a log cabin 120 miles away.

Silkofsky was a shuffling bearded figure who'd grown up in a different

era, the czarist Russia of the mid and late 19th centuries. But he was a visionary and the subject of his speech was space exploration.

Now comrades, he said, I am finally convinced that a dream of mine, space travel, for which I have given the theoretical

foundations, will be realized. I believe that many of you will be witnesses of the first journey beyond the atmosphere.

In the Soviet Union we have many young pilots.

I place my most daring hopes in them.

Just a few months later after he made that recording,

Silkovsky died age 78.

Constantine Silkovsky is the choice of my guest Peter Francopan, who is the professor of global history at Oxford University and author of the international bestseller The Silk Roads, A New History of the World.

According to the New Statesman, Peter is The History Rockstar du Jure.

...