Winston Churchill has always been a figure of extraordinary fascination to me. When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these were the years of Churchillian apotheosis, and he was the most famous man alive. On his ninetieth birthday, greeting cards were sent, addressed to ‘The Greatest Man in the World, London’, and they were all delivered to Churchill’s home address.

As Lord Moran’s diaries would later make plain, Churchill’s last decade was in many ways a sad one: he was old and infirm, which meant he was no longer able to keep the ‘Black Dog’ of depression at bay; and as his own strength ebbed and failed, he also came to feel that his life’s work, to preserve and safeguard Britain as a great empire and a great power, had been in vain. ‘We passed all the tests, but it was useless’, he is alleged to have said, as the British Empire disappeared and Britannia ceased to rule the waves. ‘I have achieved so much’, he observed on another occasion, in what must surely rank as among the saddest words ever uttered by a great man in extremis, ‘to have achieved in the end NOTHING.’ Of course, he did himself less than justice: it had been an utterly extraordinary life, and the more it recedes into the distance, the more extraordinary it seems, not less.

As Roy Jenkins observed, having written the life of Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century prime minister (Gladstone), and its greatest twentieth-century premier (Churchill), and thus being uniquely placed to compare them: Churchill was the most remarkable human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, and whatever the verdict of the electorate this coming May, it seems inconceivable that it will be such as to cause anyone to modify, let alone overturn, that judgment.

Since Churchill’s death exactly fifty years ago, a great deal of material has come to light which makes possible a much more rounded and nuanced appreciation of his remarkable, controversial, versatile and lengthy life than anyone could have managed half a century ago. But on his death, as I well vividly remember, there were two sentiments uppermost, both of which were very powerful, but which were also in their way contradictory.

On the one hand, his magnificent state funeral was a final gesture of homage to a man widely regarded (in Isaiah Berlin’s unforgettable phrase) as ’the saviour of his country’. But there was also a very different sense that his obsequies were not only the last rites of the great man himself, but also the requiem of Britain as a great power – a sense that would later be vividly be caught by Bernard Levin in his book on the 1960s, ‘The Pendulum Years’; by Jonathan Dimbleby in his biography of his father Richard, who delivered his last great commentary on Churchill’s funeral; and by Jan Morris, who ended the final volume of his trilogy on the British Empire, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’, with an account of Churchill’s sad but spectacular send-off as the last great imperial pageant.

That he could be at once the saviour of his country, but also a figure who had failed to halt his nation’s decline was a paradox and a contradiction that few then wished to explore in detail. But as Churchill passes from memory into history, it is one of the many ways in which his life is becoming more remarkable and extraordinary, not less.”

Churchill’s Other Lives is written and presented by Professor Sir David Cannadine. It starts on 19 Jan at 13:45 and runs every day for two weeks.

Happy reading, and a happy New Year.

Jim

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Edward Stourton on the World War II Freedom Trail

It is a very good definition of what today we would call the "skill set" you need to accomplish the Chemin de la Liberte, the four day, forty mile trek across the Pyrenees which is walked each year to commemorate the escapers, evaders and helpers who made the journey during the dark days of the Nazi Occupation of France.

I am certainly not a he-man, and I hate discomfort, so there has never been any danger of me boasting about my capacity to endure it. I am cheerful by nature, endowed with a reasonable supply of common sense (I hope), and I like achieving my goals. The problem lay in that unassuming little word "fit"; I am fifty-three years old, most of my work involves sitting in studios or at desks, and I like the good things in life.

The BBC agreed to my proposal for a series of programmes on walking the Chemin back in the spring, and immediately sent me off to an extreme sports clinic in Harley Street, where I was put through a human version of an MOT.

It involved attaching a great number of electrodes to my chest and strapping a strangely fashioned respirator to my mouth. I was then required to peddle away on an exercise bike until I reached near collapse. A group of technicians monitored the behaviour of my heart and lungs, chatting away calmly as I huffed and puffed to the point where both seemed ready to explode.

Over the past decade I have developed a passion for programmes built around journeys. It began in 2001 with an odyssey around the Mediterranean in the Footsteps of St Paul, a journey I made with a producer from the BBC's Religion and Ethics department, Phil Pegum.

Since then Phil and I have made radio pilgrimages in the footsteps of Mohammed, Moses and Jesus, and negotiated the waters of the Jordan and the Bosphorus. Every time we do it I am more convinced that travelling helps bring history alive. For my generation it requires a huge imaginative effort to get inside the mind of someone who lived through the Second World War (let alone someone who lived in St Paul's time) but seeing what they saw and going to the places they would have passed through brings their experience that bit closer.

We were well equipped and well fed and watered; those who walked the Chemin "for real" would have had little more than a pair of espadrilles and a stick by way of equipment, and they were often malnourished (almost everyone in Europe was short of food during that period, and it is striking how large the eating issue looms in evader and escaper memoirs). But I suffered enough to be able to get some sense of what they went through.

Phil is as thin as a whip and during the weeks leading up to the walk he was often spotted walking up and down the staircase of the BBC's Manchester officers with a rucksack full of bricks. He brought along another producer to help; Graham Hoyland is an experienced mountaineer and Everest veteran, and polished his fitness with a few days yomping over the Scottish Highlands.

I, on the other hand, found it extremely difficult to keep up the fitness regime I had been given, simply because I was so busy with other projects. There was no doubt about who was the weak link in the chain, and I was duly punished by pain.

On the Freedom Trail

I discovered that a really tough walk like this is, oddly, not a very good way of appreciating nature or views; you tend to keep your head down and your eyes on the boots in front, concentrating on each step, and when we stopped for a break I usually found myself flat on my back staring at the sky. But the trance-like state you hit as you plod along is very good for encouraging reflection.

I also realised how clever Chaucer was to set his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales, in an inn full of pilgrims. The Chemin is a kind of pilgrimage, and, like Chaucer's, it brings together people who might never otherwise have met, but who share a common purpose. Whenever we could, we talked, and as I listened to my fellow-walkers explain why they had come and what the Chemin meant to them, I came to understand why remembering matters so much.

Edward Stourton presents The Freedom Trail

• Episode 2 of The Freedom Trail is on next Monday, 21 November at 11am. You can catch up with episode 1 of the Freedom Trail on the Radio 4 website.
• You can also download Ed Stourton's report as part of the From Our Own Correspondent podcast - go to the 12 November download

[L to R] Barry Letts as Joseph and Frazer Hines as Jan in the 1957 BBC serialisation of The Silver Sword

The first time I saw my father's book The Silver Sword being transferred to another medium was in 1957. I was 7, and Dad took me and my older sister Helen up to Shepherd's Bush, where a black-and-white television version was being filmed. We watched the young actors scrabbling through the studio rubble, and I remember being completely astonished that the producer called everybody "Darling".

Over 50 years later, a question was sent to the Daily Mail's 'Answers to Correspondents' page: "Does anyone remember a TV programme from the Fifties about children looking for their parents in war-torn Europe? I think it was called The Silver Sword". One of the excellent replies came from Frazer Hines, who wrote, "I played Jan, a ten-year-old Polish tearaway. This was in the days when families sat down together for Sunday lunch then watched the afternoon serial. The Silver Sword was a popular show, and even today people will come up to me and say, 'Aren't you off the TV?' When I say, 'What, Emmerdale?', they say, 'No, that thing about the sword.'"

So I was excited when I and my brother Andrew were invited to Manchester to watch the recording of a new radio adaptation by Chris Wallis. "You probably know the book better than anyone else," said Charlotte Riches, the producer. "We want you to tell us if anything doesn't ring true."

I watched fascinated as the group worked fast to get the three episodes recorded in three days. Stage Managers hunted for - or created - sounds of houses being blown up, dogs barking, dustbin lids banging, a silver sword falling to the ground. In any scene involving the youngest child 'Bronia', Charlotte ran quickly between the actors by their microphone and her chair in the darkened studio (the number of minutes children can work without a break are strictly timed). Accuracy was a priority: the Polish children called their father "Tatush", and Jimpy the cockerel was "Yimpy".

In the small actors' room I met the cast and discovered that when not acting, 'Edek' is a carpenter and 'Ruth' a writer; 'Jan', who had starred in West is West, had just got off a plane from America, and 'Bronia' (always accompanied by one parent) much preferred a day at the studio to a day in school. I even got to act one line where a 'woman' was needed! - while my brother became a lorry driver and then provided his beautiful warm voice as the announcer at the beginning and end of each episode.

But all was not straightforward. I felt that one scene in Chris's script clashed badly with the spirit of the book. Chris had inserted a very explicit scene where Ivan takes the children, who need shoes for the next stage of their journey, to a huge dark warehouse, containing 'a mountain of shoes' next to a 'mountain of teeth' and 'a mountain of spectacles.' I felt that this graphic concentration camp image had no place in a play that was otherwise very faithful to the gentle spirit of the original. I wonder what you will think of the compromise we reached in Episode 2.

There seems to be much interest in The Silver Sword at the moment - a year before the centenary of Dad's birth. Perhaps this story about refugees, and the courage of children in perilous circumstances they cannot control, is as relevant as ever. Options are out for a stage version and a TV film, and it is currently featured as one of five classic war stories for children in Once Upon a Wartime, an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.

It could be that this new radio version will bring the story to new young listeners, and will remind their parents of a book they may remember as having been important to them in their own childhood. Oh - and during the making of this version, nobody called anybody "Darling"!

Jane Serraillier is the daughter of Ian Serraillier, author of The Silver Sword

• The Silver Sword starts on Radio 4 Extra on Sunday 1 May.

I am staring at a pile of papers on my desk. It's 5 inches high. To anyone passing by, it's just a rather tedious heap of orange and blue folders. But to me, it represents a period in my life when I became utterly obsessed with making a single radio documentary. So obsessed that at one point my boss feared that I was losing my marbles.

It all started about 5 years ago. I heard about a legendary tale of escape and endurance, a book called The Long Walk. It tells the story of Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer captured by the Soviets in 1939. He was tortured and sent to Siberia then made a dramatic escape from the gulag and started a mind-boggling trek south. He and his companions walked 4000 miles across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and even traversing the Himalayas before reaching the safety of British India.

The book had been a bestseller and stunned readers across the globe. But there was one niggling question. Was it true? Perhaps arrogantly, I thought with the BBC's investigative resources we could find out. And so the madness began...

Radio 4 commissioned a documentary, and I started work early, looking up databases, sending out letters and emails and visiting potential interviewees. The brilliant reporter Tim Whewell was presenting the programme and as a Russian speaker, he had access to further sources. There were leads everywhere. The Polish museum in London? Check. A high school in Warsaw? Check. State archives in Belarus? Check. A veterans association in Latvia? Check. Human rights groups in Moscow? Check. US Army Department? Check.

And on it went. More leads. More dead ends. Lists of phone numbers. Conversations with elderly survivors of appalling atrocities - but of no relevance to our story. Leads. Dead ends. Some of the blind alleys were not surprising - such as the polite but firm rejection of requests for information from the French Foreign Legion. Others were entertaining - such as a sheaf of confidential wartime intelligence reports from across South Asia. As I leafed through the documents at the National Archive, I noticed that each month's despatch was accompanied by a comic poem written by the anonymous compiler.

And then there were some results. A bundle of documents from Pinsk! A hand-written note in a card file in Hammersmith! An amnesty paper from a Californian library! Amazing! Amazing! I remember jumping up from my desk and charging into my boss's office, eyes flashing as I told her the earth-shattering news of our latest discovery... and her gazing at me sadly, as she wondered when the mania would end.

The whole thing was probably made worse by the fact I had a comrade in madness. An independent American researcher called Linda Willis was on the same trail. Was it her incredible energy and resourcefulness that led her to write to hundreds of people, email many more and dig around in dusty archives across the globe over the course of 10 years?

Hugh Levinson - driven to the edge.

Or was she as bonkers as I was?

Well, we did find out some facts in the end. Linda wrote a book, Looking for Mr. Smith. And I finally managed to produce a documentary, which aired in 2006. Now Tim and I have made a new version of the programme.

One reason is that the great director Peter Weir has made a film inspired by The Long Walk. He decided to direct his movie after listening to our documentary and consulting us about what was true and what wasn't.

The other reason for a new programme, is that since 2006 we have made some tantalising new discoveries.

New discoveries? I can feel the madness starting again...

Hugh Levinson is producer of The Long Walk

• Listen to The Long Walk at 1330 on Sunday December 5th
• Spoiler alert: Hugh wrote an article for the BBC News web site in 2006 at the height of his madness. Don't read it if you'd rather not know the outcome of his original research before you've heard the programme.
• Rawicz's book, The Long Walk, was published in 2006.
• The film of the book is called The Way Back and is due for release at Christmas. The picture shows the stack of papers that torments Hugh.

Editor's note: Sometimes the decision to commission a programme about events from recent history is a complicated one. Samir Shah lays out the many factors that contributed to one such decision - SB.

Fascination with the Second World War and Nazism is one of the abiding characteristics of post war Britain. By 2010, you'd think that almost every conceivable topic and angle has been covered. But not so. Programmes on television and radio continue to be made and books by distinguished historians about the period continue to come off the printing presses. Recently one such caught my eye. It was by Jonathan Trigg and entitled 'Hitler's Jihadis.' I knew nothing of this story and wondered how it came about, how many were involved, how this could be reconciled with Hitler's Aryan fantasies. Questions came tumbling out and I turned that into a proposal for a radio documentary.

Later this month Radio 4 will broadcast a programme called Hitler's Muslim Legions. A clue as to the care and attention taken in producing this programme was the discussion surrounding the title. Was it right to juxtapose Hitler and Muslims like this? Is the word legions appropriate - especially the use of the plural?

The story reveals that over 70,000 Muslims fought for Hitler, many in the Waffen SS. There are photographs of Himmler visiting these Muslim soldiers and an extraordinary photograph of Hitler in conversation with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (although not a figure of lasting significance, he was central to the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims). The title is undoubtedly accurate.

However the debate illustrates some of the care taken in making what is nevertheless a challenging documentary. As story it fits comfortably within a tradition on Radio 4 of exploring little known aspects of the war: Document, for example, reported how thousands of Sikhs renounced allegiances with Britain and instead fought for Hitler; Secret Warriors looked at the involvement of British Jews in the 1947 War of Independence and militant activity against British forces; France's Forgotten Concentration Camps investigated French collaboration with the Germans; Crossing Continents (Reopening Lithuania's old wounds) reported on allegations that Holocaust survivors had committed war crimes. So the basic idea for the programme was not exceptional.

What of the story itself? Well, with over 70,000 people involved, it was clearly a significant enough number for it to be of import. However, of course, many more Muslims fought for the Allies - and this is made clear in the programme. But there are other fascinating aspects of the story: how did they reconcile their vision of a master race made of Aryans with using Muslims to fight for them? And what motivated the Muslims to join up? The answers reveal much about the contradictions and absurdities of Nazism. The motivations of the Muslims themselves ("starve or join") are telling about the realities of war.

Inevitably a little-known story such as this restricts the cast list of contributors. In fact we found a number of serious historians who did know something of the story. What was surprising - well, perhaps not altogether surprising - was the paucity of Muslim scholarship. We did try a range of Muslim academics and organisations and all but one felt they did not know enough about the subject to contribute . But the programme did pull off a coup - an eyewitness account: a German, now in his 80s, lived and worked with Muslim soldiers when he was 19.

Indeed, thanks to the journalistic diligence of the producer Jenny Chryss and the measured commentary of seasoned reporter, Julian O'Halloran, Hitler's Muslim Legions throws an illuminating light on a remarkable chapter in the continuing story of the Second World War.

Samir Shah is Executive Producer of Hitler's Muslim Legions

• Hitler's Muslim Legions is on BBC Radio 4 at 2000 on Mon 26th.
• The picture shows Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (ca. 1895 - 4 July 1974). The picture is from the Wikimedia Commons. He has a detailed Wikipedia entry.