Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week Darwin and the theory that changed the world.

At last gleams of light have come and I am almost convinced that

species are not. It is like confessing a murder, immutable.

He was impaled on the horns of a dilemma, a respectable man with a dangerous theory.

Plus, we remember Eve St Laurent and the mini two style icons from the 1960s,

and the personal impact of being accused during the McCarthy

era in America.

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

He aged, the sparkle was gone, he became very withdrawn.

That's all coming up.

But we begin with an event which is most likely etched into the memories of those of us who were alive at the time.

Exactly 30 years ago, the world was coming to terms with the full scale of the worst nuclear

accident there has ever been.

There had been accidents before, Sellafield in Britain, Three Mile Island

in the US, and there have been incidents since, perhaps most notably at Fukushima in Japan after

the 2011 tsunami. But nothing has ever been on the scale of what happened

when a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Soviet Ukraine.

Dina Newman has spoken to one of the engineers who helped in the effort to clean up the area after that

catastrophic leak of radioactive material.

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