Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering.

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear.

Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres.

If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century.

Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday.

From Roman marbles and Egyptian mummies to Renaissance masterpieces and African sculptures, in this special accompanying programme to Civilisations, Mary Beard goes in search of extraordinary works of art from all over the world that can be seen here in Britain.

Niall Ferguson explores how Western civilization - a clear minority of mankind - secured a lion\'s share of the world\'s resources, and examines whether the West is about to be overtaken by the rest.

Series focusing on albums that have influenced the course of music. This edition looks at the 1973 Wailers album Catch a Fire, which brought international fame to Bob Marley.

Dr Jonathan Foyle, architectural historian and novice climber, scales Britain's most iconic structures to reveal the buildings' secrets

The next step in Jonathan\'s journey takes him to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

The next step in Jonathan\'s journey takes him to Burghley House in Lincolnshire. Built to impress Queen Elizabeth I on her many trips around the country, it\'s the finest example of an Elizabethan house in Britain.

Dr Jonathan Foyle, architectural historian and novice climber, scales Britain\'s most iconic structures, to reveal the buildings\' secrets, his journey begins in the North East of England at Durham Cathedral.

Jonathan\'s journey takes him to New College in Oxford. Built in 1379, this college set the blueprint for universities all over the world for the next 600 years.

Nick Crane and the team take a fascinating journey around the coast of the United Kingdom, uncovering stories that have made us the island nation we are today.

The nation's love affair with the coast will be reawakened for this entertaining and ambitious exploration of the entire UK coastline. Across 13 programmes Coast celebrates the unique character of the UK's coastal communities, exploring a wealth of fascinating human stories through a mixture of expert comment, contemporary storytelling and computer-generated images. This is the coast as never seen before.

The South Wales coast, by the Second Severn Bridge, has the second highest tidal range in the world, at around 14.5 metres (the highest is the Bay of Fundy, located off the northern coast of Maine, USA). It's also home to an extraordinary tidal phenomenon - the Severn Bore.

The coast of North West England covers some classic industrial landscapes and playgrounds, and a dangerous world of shifting sands.

Scotland's west coast has the most jagged and dramatic coastline in Great Britain. It's only 300 miles as the seagull flies, but once you add in the dozens of islands anchored off this rugged coastline it is thousands of miles.

This is a coast of two halves, divided by the broad Humber. We start on the craggy grandeur of the Yorkshire coast and finish by wading through the vast salt marshes and mudflats of the Wash.

Every beach, bay and cliff edge along this stretch of coast has a story to tell of people who struggled with changing sea levels, the perils of flooding, subsidence and erosion. Whole towns have been lost to the sea, houses teeter on cliff tops... the very land is crumbling away.

In this programme we look back at some of the highlights of our journey, exploring the future of our coast and what it'll mean for us as an island nation.

This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age.

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts.

A trip through the BBC archives from programmes such as Whistle Test, the Oxford Road Show, Top of the Pops and Later with Jools Holland to find some rare and some familiar footage of the bands who were on one of the UK's most seminal and important record

Adventurer and journalist Simon Reeve heads to Cuba to find a communist country in the middle of a capitalist revolution. Two years ago Cuba announced the most sweeping and radical economic reforms the country has seen in decades.

Special programme telling the dramatic story of Cutty Sark, the world famous clipper ship, from her launch in 1869 to the modern-day conservation work to save her.

In-depth examinion of the biggest surprise invasion of World War II, presented by Richard Holmes.

Dr Helen Czerski looks at the latest scientific insight into the aurora - dancing lights in the night sky that have fascinated cultures throughout our history. From the networks of cameras now capturing its vast scale, to novel experiments that probe the threat it poses to modern technology,

Since he was a teenager, Dara O Briain has been fascinated with professor Stephen Hawking, the world's most celebrated scientist. In this special film, Dara spends time with his boyhood hero as he attends the world premiere of The Theory of Everything, the movie made about his life, and then at Professor Hawking's home and place of work in Cambridge.

Andrew Marr discovers something surprising about his own evolutionary history as this epic series continues with an exploration of Darwin\'s impact on politics and society.