大象传媒

From Neville Chamberlain's dramatic flights to meet Hitler in 1938 to Blair and Bush's negotiations on Iraq, summits have seen world leaders forging intense personal relationships that have had far-reaching consequences. Historian DAVID REYNOLDS analyses how world leaders from Kennedy to Gorbachev regarded their opponents and how the disastrous meetings of Munich and Moscow still hold lessons for successful summitry today. Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century is published by Allen Lane and the accompanying TV series starts on 大象传媒 Four on 30 January.

The playwright PENNY GOLD is also interested in how we view historical events. In her latest play, The President's Holiday, she uses extracts from Raisa Gorbachev's diary to gain an insight into the attempted coup in 1991 that saw the family confined to their Black Sea dacha. The story explores the crumbling of Mikhail Gorbachev's political ideals and the betrayal of political allies. The President's Holiday opens at Hampstead Theatre, London on 17 January. It then moves to the Nuffield Theatre Southampton from 20 February.

Our images of Iraq are largely those on our news programmes of politicians, soldiers and insurgents. We see explosions and killings and follow the political wrangling. But the film maker IVAN O'MAHONEY and his co-director Laura Winter have instead given air time to The Boys of Baghdad High, 17-year-old boys who film their own lives for a year. We see them take substantial risks to attend school every day and chart the growing tensions as the security and economic situation deteriorates. The Boys from Baghdad High will be shown on 大象传媒 Two on Tuesday 8 January at 9.00pm.

The US Government was behind 9/11, a Chinese fleet reached America before Columbus and the structure of a cell is too complex to have evolved through natural selection: all examples of what journalist and writer DAMIAN THOMPSON has classed as 'counterknowledge.' And, he argues, we're facing a pandemic of it as, helped by the internet, spurious claims and unproven theories are blurring the distinction between truth and fiction to dangerous effect. Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history is published by Atlantic Books.