Reputations

General Dwight D Eisenhower and Field-Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery may have been comrades-in-arms but private correspondence reveals a bitter conflict between them. Ike and Monty - Generals at War is the first of four biographical documentaries investigating the image of five of this century's most powerful figures.

Dr Schweitzer became a 20th century hero when he turned his back on a brilliant career in Europe to run a jungle hospital in the heart of Africa. But in the 1960s the controversy started: was he a saint or racist, a colonialist or a humanitarian? This film visits Schweitzer's hospital in the African jungle to hear from his daughter and people who worked with him. It also explores the radically different views of Schweitzer today - views which reflect the problematic relationship between Africa and the West.

Husband of Jacqueline Kennedy , lover of Maria Callas and many others, Aristotle Onassis knew many beautiful women. But gossip column headlines and paparazzi photographs tell only one part of his remarkable story. A brilliant businessman he foresaw the importance of world oil and was the first to risk building supertankers. But when this bold gambler tried to seize a monopoly for the shipment of Saudi oil, he found himself in conflict with rivals, who were backed by the CIA and the full might of US power. His tale is one of high drama, black comedy and Greek tragedy.

As Stalin's chief of secret police, Lavrenti Beria was the most feared man in the Soviet Union, with a reputation for cruelty. Like Stalin, Beria came from a poor peasant village in Georgia, and his working life was devoted to making real Stalin's vision of a strong Soviet state. Forty years after his death, extensive new research has uncovered an even more complex and horrifying picture of a man who manipulated and murdered his way to the top. Beria's relationship with Stalin was the key to his success, and ultimately his undoing, as former colleagues and victims reveal for the first time on television in the last in the series.