You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

A few times on this program, we've profiled people whose nomination as Great Lives has seemed a little contentious.

Richard Nixon and Ervin Rommel spring to mind,

or Alexander the Great perhaps,

or Attiller the Hun.

But never, I think, one whose reputation has oscillated so violently between villain and hero as today's

subject or inspired such passionate feelings about his personality and it's a long story too from his death in 1485 to the day in 2013

when this announcement was made.

Archaeologists say a skeleton found beneath a car park in Leicester is that of King Richard

the 3rd.

It is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that beyond reasonable doubt the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September 2012 is indeed

Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England.

That piece of archive from the World at One in February 2013 must still be ringing in the ears of today's guest,

...