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 we'll be retracing Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

We had supplies for a month or two when we left the ship,

but we used to kill Seale and Penguin as much as possible.

But as we got further north north they got more scarce. Consequently we had to rely on one or two of our huskies.

But you ate your huskies? Oh yes, very tough.

Also from the 1990s we'll join the hunt for the Colombian drug-bar

Pablo Escobar.

Nothing is too small when you're gathering intelligence.

Everything to do with the person you're concerned about, the clothes they wear,

wherever they go to eat, who are their friends.

Plus we'll get a taste of what it was like to be locked up in a post-Soviet brutal prison regime in Uzbekistan and will get an insight into the work of Henry

Moore, arguably one of the 20th century's greatest sculptors.

I work by a kind of likes and dislikes of shape. You think in shapes and not in words.

That's coming up later in the podcast.

And it's with another artist that we begin this week.

On December 7th, 1990, the dissident Cuban novelist

and poet Rinaldo Arenas took his own life in New York after years of suffering with AIDS.

Before fleeing Cuba, Arrenus had been jailed for his

homosexuality, sent to re-education camps and prevented from writing, but he left

behind his autobiography before Night Falls, a powerful denunciation of Fidel Castro's regime,

...