Steered by his Bradshaw’s guide, Michael Portillo heads for the Hertfordshire village of Perry Green, where, in 1940, a young couple fleeing the bombing of London chose to make their home. Henry Moore became one of the defining artists of British modernism, and his sculptures were set in wonderful landscaped grounds and gardens created by his wife, Irina. Michael explores the monumental Reclining Figure and finds out about the artist’s life and work.

In Cambridge, Michael revisits his former university to hear about a treacherous time in its past. In Trinity Lane, he learns how during the 1920s and 30s, students of Trinity College were recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. Michael remembers his own reaction while he was working for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, when the fourth man was unmasked.

Across the city, at the Cavendish Laboratory, Michael meets a man with a job like no other. Lab director Andy Parker smashes particles with the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. He shows Michael the LHC’s forerunner, the accelerator with which John Cockroft and Ernest Walton made the first controlled splitting of the atom in 1932.

In Impington, to the north of Cambridge, Michael investigates the progressive architecture of the village school and finds it was built by the founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius, in the 1930s. Show less