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 how the Stasi in East Germany trapped unsuspecting school children through their handwriting.

I thought it was just ordinary homework.

The teacher asked us to write an essay about our personal development and explain what job we'd like to do.

Plus the Sabra and Chateila massacre in Lebanon, London's 1960s hippies and Nigeria's 2,500 year old archaeological treasure.

The lips were averted as if speaking. The hair was rather beautifully executed and had not shown any appreciable damage.

That's coming up later.

But we're going to begin with an event which was akin to a canary in the mine in that it was a harbinger of something much more serious to come.

This happened exactly 10 years ago this week and it shook the British financial system to its core and laid bare the seriousness

of the coming global financial crisis.

In a very real sense there is hardly any country in the world which was not affected by the

financial meltdown that spread

through the markets from 2008 onwards but the warning signs were evident

earlier particularly at one British bank known as Northern Rock.

Rob Young of our business unit reports.

In September 2007, investors were nervous.

Stock markets were on the slide.

US lenders had made risky loans, the now notorious subprime mortgages, and the terrible

state of their books was being revealed. A French bank admitted it was affected. No one knew

who else might be. There was a nervousness, I think, definitely, around the worries of the subprime market

that it could cause disruption in the financial markets in Europe,

but no one quite knew what.

...