Forum - A World of Ideas

The quality of customer service can make or break a company. That has always been true but the kind of customer experience we now expect when things go wrong with our purchases is vastly different from what we wanted half a century ago. 1960s answering services, the new organisations managing calls on behalf of businesses, relied on a single technology: the telephone. Now a firm needs to offer its customers multiple ways to contact it. But which one should a company prioritise, especially in these financially straitened times? The latest AI-enabled chatbots? Well-trained, empowered people in call centres? Or something else entirely? And how do these changes impact customer service representatives, the people who actually deliver the service to us every day?

Iszi Lawrence discusses these questions with Jo Causon, CEO of the Institute of Customer Service in the UK; call centre researchers Professors Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad; Franco-American service designer Matthew Marino and World Service listeners.

(Photo: A woman in jeans interacting with virtual contact icons on a screen. Credit: Umnat Seebuaphan/iStock/Getty Images)

Nostalgia is one of those complicated emotions: we long to be transported to a place or moment in the past that we have loved but at the same time feel sad that it has gone forever. It is also a bit of a slippery intellectual concept: regarded as a malady when the term was first coined in the 17th century, nostalgia is now thought to be benign or even mildly therapeutic. And beyond personal recollections, business uses it to sell all manner of things and some politicians skilfully deploy it to hide their real objectives. So what actually is nostalgia?

Iszi Lawrence explores the past and present of nostalgia with Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster , author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Prof. Krystine Batcho who devised the Nostalgia Inventory and Dr. Tobias Becker author of Yesterday, A New History of Nostalgia. We also hear WS listeners’ views on nostalgia.

(Photo: Vintage photographs with a dried rose. Credit: Alicia Llop/Getty Images)

Airports: at their most basic level places to fly from to reach destinations near and far. And yet so much more. Iszi Lawrence and guests take a look at the evolution of airports, from their beginnings as military airstrips to the modern-day behemoths with their luxury shopping outlets, gardens and art galleries.

The early European airports were modelled on railway stations, as that was the only blueprint for a transport hub. The public became so enthralled by air travel that airports eventually became popular as destinations in themselves. Airports today are places filled with emotion: the scene of farewells and arrivals, as well as the stress of international travel in an age of terrorism.

Iszi is joined by cultural historian Alastair Gordon, author of Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure; Lilia Mironov, an architectural historian and air steward who wrote Airport Aura: A Spatial History of Airport Infrastructure; and architect and airport planner Su Jayaraman who teaches at the University of Westminster in London. Plus a range of Forum listeners from around the world contribute their personal experiences of airports.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

(Photo: John F. Kennedy International Airport, the TWA Flight Center, terminal 5, designed by Eero Saarinen. Credit: Lehnartz/ullstein bild/Getty Images)

What is the purpose of libraries in the era of the internet and AI? Whether at a school or in a community, libraries used to be key providers of information and enjoyment for many. But now, in a digital age, more books and periodicals are available online than even the biggest library can hold. If terabytes of text can now be stored on a single laptop, do we need to think differently about the way we access and navigate books? Could well-designed AI tools be trusted to make sense of this information abundance in a similar way that a good librarian can?

Rajan Datar discusses the past, present and future of libraries with Randa Chidiac, Director of Library Services at the American University in Dubai; Dr. Andrew Hui, Head of Literature Studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore; and Brewster Kahle, computer engineer and digital librarian, founder of the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. We also hear from World Service listeners.

(Photo: An artist's impression of a digital book. Credit: Alengo/Getty Images)

From Colombia to Vietnam and beyond, the US dollar is the currency in which much of international business is conducted, and which many people outside the US use as a means of exchange and a store of value. So how did a country with just over 4 percent of the world’s population come to dominate global banking and trade? When the position of the US dollar as the linchpin of global commerce was confirmed at the end of the Second World War, not everyone was happy with this state of affairs: the French soon spoke of the Americans having an ‘exorbitant privilege’. Did they have a point? And what of the more recent efforts to replace the Greenback with other currencies?

Iszi Lawrence follows the history of the US dollar from its origins to today with H W Brands Jr., Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin; Barry Eichengreen, Professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley; Carola Frydman, Professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Evanston; Perry Mehrling, Professor of international political economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University and World Service listeners.

[Photo: A roll of US dollar notes. Credit: Getty Images]

Where do charismatic personalities come from? Are they people born with special or even divine gifts? Or have they simply mastered a few effective techniques for cordial social interaction that anyone can learn? As business, entertainment and politics increasingly turn into popularity contests conducted through social media and TV, charisma seems to matter more and more: hence the proliferation of companies offering to teach aspiring leaders how to acquire it. But the influence that magnetic personalities can have on an audience long predates modern screen media: in 1896, a speech brimming with charisma earned one little-known young orator a not just a 20-minute standing ovation but also a US presidential nomination.

Iszi Lawrence explores the role of charisma in politics and business with Julia Sonnevend, Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research in New York and author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics; John Antonakis, Professor of Organizational Behaviour in the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, and co-author of a political charismometer that predicts US presidential elections among other things; Jeremy C. Young, historian of political culture and social movements, author of The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society; as well as World Service listeners.

(Photo: Smiling businessman in discussion. Credit: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images)

When the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, readers were so angry that thousands cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the stories appeared. The editor and Conan Doyle himself were overwhelmed with letters from a furious public - fans who instead of accepting the death of their favourite fictional character then started to write and share their own stories featuring Holmes. They eventually formed clubs and appreciation societies, brought together by a common interest.

This practice is something we recognise today across the globe. In areas as diverse as sport, music, film and TV (to mention just a few), fans are not just passive consumers as the recent activities of Swifties (Taylor Swift fans) demonstrate. They’re actively engaged, creating content of their own and connecting with others to nurture a shared identity. The internet has made that easier than ever before, with fans now using their platform to influence political discourse too.

Iszi Lawrence discusses the history and inexorable rise of fandom, with guests Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University in Chicago in the United States; Areum Jeong, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University in the US and Corin Throsby from the University of Cambridge in the UK, whose research focuses on Romantic literature and early celebrity culture.
The programme also includes contributions from Julian Wamble, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and the creator of Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast, and listeners around the world share their fan stories.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Fans wait to pay for items of merchandise as they visit a pop-up store of South Korean K-pop sensation BTS. Credit: ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Jewellery can enthral us in many ways: it can delight, inspire and uplift us or it can transport us to the place where we acquired it. It can also make us avaricious or jealous. But why? What explains our enduring fascination with shiny metal and colourful stones?

Iszi Lawrence is joined by Dr. Emily Stoehrer, Senior Curator of Jewelry at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and author of several books on American jewellery and fashion; Dr. Petra Ahde-Deal, a Finnish gemmologist and jeweller who currently lectures at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and at the DIS Study Abroad Program in Copenhagen; Emefa Cole, jewellery maker originally from Ghana who is also the Curator of Diaspora Jewellery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Mansi Rao, Curator of the South Asia Collection in Norwich and World Service listeners.

Some of the questions discussed include: gold has been the top choice both for jewellery makers and for buyers in many cultures all over the world. But there are similar metals which are more scarce - and more expensive - than gold, so it’s not exclusivity that makes it popular. And why do men wear flamboyant jewellery at some Indian weddings?

(Photo: Gold Indian wedding bracelet. Credit: Neha S/Getty Images)

Do you find it difficult to get a good night's sleep? If you do, you are not alone. According to the US National Institutes of Health, between 6 and 30 per cent of adults suffer from insomnia or lack of restorative sleep. Since the establishment of sleep medicine a century ago, we have learnt a lot about the causes of sleeplessness. And yet, as the continuing development of new sleep aids demonstrates, its prevalence remains high.

Persistent lack of sleep can have serious consequences for your health but despite this some writers, and other creative people, seem to welcome it. Franz Kafka famously claimed that if he couldn't pursue his stories through the night, they would "break away and disappear".

Iszi Lawrence discusses our changing understanding of insomnia, and its hold over our imagination, with Dr. Manvir Bhatia, the vice-president of Indian Society for Sleep Research; science journalist Kenneth Miller, author of Mapping the Darkness; the Scottish writer – and self-confessed ‘intermittent insomniac’ - A L Kennedy; and World Service listeners.

(Photo: A woman lying awake on a bed at night. Credit: Pony Wang/Getty Images.)

The first public run of the Japanese ‘bullet train’, the Shinkansen, on the 1st of October 1964, captured public imagination worldwide. And it wasn’t just the train’s sleek look or its high speed that made the headlines. Behind the train’s futuristic exterior lay a whole host of engineering innovations: new pantographs, automatic signalling, revolutionary drive units. Since then, very fast train travel has become available in over a dozen other countries. Places such as China and Spain have overtaken Japan when it comes to top train speed or the extent of the high-speed network. But the recent rise in remote working has reduced the demand for business rail travel and commuting. So what does the future hold for high-speed rail?

Iszi Lawrence talks about the origins of high-speed rail and its current state to historian of modern Japan, Prof. Jessamyn Abel from Penn State university, civil engineering professor Amparo Moyano from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Consultant Editor of the Railway Gazette Murray Hughes, poet Jan Ducheyne and World Service listeners.

(Photo: A Shinkansen train arrives at a Tokyo station. Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people found that keeping a diary was one way of reducing stress during uncertain times. They also felt that it was important to chart their day to day experience of a historic moment in world history. Such diaries will be valuable sources in years to come for historians, providing future scholars with a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people.

These diaries form part of a long tradition of people chronicling their own stories, whether intended for publication or purely to put thoughts down on paper. One of the earliest texts we could describe as a diary was written by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose musings were influenced by Stoic philosophy. Later diaries, such as those by or the African American naval yard worker Michael Shiner or the teenage Anne Frank, have been important in helping us understand society and events from ‘the bottom up’ during a given period.

Iszi Lawrence explores what motivates people to keep diaries. She’s joined by a panel of experts including Dr Polly North, Founding Director of the Great Diary Project at Bishopsgate Institute in the UK; Julie Rak, the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta who's an expert on what’s known as life writing; and Sergio da Silva Barcellos who’s published widely on diary keeping in Brazil, including a chapter in The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

(Photo: A diary. With kind permission of Forum listener Dorothy.)

Humans have always co-existed with mountains, as ancient remains found in glaciers prove. But our interest in them may have been more spiritual or religiously motivated, rather than as a place to go to improve our health and wellbeing. In some cultures today, mountains are still considered to be the home of deities. So when did mountaineering become a popular pastime and how did the obsession with bagging summits start? Iszi Lawrence investigates our evolving relationship with the planet’s highest peaks.

Iszi is joined by Dawn Hollis, author of Mountains before Mountaineering: The Call of the Peaks before the Modern Age; Peter Hansen, Professor of History and Director of International and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US, and author of various books on mountaineering including The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment; and anthropologist and mountaineer Young Hoon Oh. The programme will also hear from blogger Andrew Szalay, otherwise known as the Suburban Mountaineer. And a range of Forum listeners from around the world contribute their personal experiences of mountains.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service

(Photo: Mountaineer with ice pick ascending Hintertux Glacier in Austria. Credit: David Trood/Getty Images)

Many of us remember the first portable music device we owned: a transistor radio, a boombox, a Walkman or perhaps an iPod. We might even recall the songs we played on it. But we might be less aware of how profoundly audio technology developments from the 1950s to 2000s changed the ways in which we consume music and other audio outside of the home or concert venue. Transistor radios allowed outdoor sounds and noises to mix and compete with those coming over the airwaves, creating new auditory experiences; the cassette player gave the listener a cheap way of making and re-making their own playlists; and the advent of digital music players encouraged us to ‘own’ music recordings without possessing a physical copy of the audio.

Iszi Lawrence discusses the history of portable music with Dr. Annie Jamieson, Curator of Sound Technologies at Bradford’s National Science and Media Museum; American drummer and writer Damon Krukowski; Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey, science historian and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, India; Karin Bijsterveld, Professor of Science, Technology and Modern Culture at Maastricht University; and World Service listeners.

(Photo: Andrii Iemelyanenko/ Getty Images)

Among all the talk about ‘knowledge economy’ it is easy to forget that universal schooling is a relatively new phenomenon. Mandated first in a few European countries in the 18th century, it did not reach many others until the 20th. And the idea that women have an equal right to be educated frequently encountered stiff opposition, often from the privileged who feared that knowledgeable females would upset the social status quo.

Just about everywhere, the right to women’s education was hard won: for instance Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the influential leaders of Indian independence movement, campaigned vociferously for decades against sending girls to school, complaining that it would lead to increased competition for jobs and to women neglecting their ‘domestic duties’. Mary Carpenter, the acclaimed Victorian education reformer, maintained that neatness and needlework, rather than a full academic curriculum, were ‘essential to a woman’.

Fast forward to 2024 and even though the gap between male and female educational attainment has narrowed world-wide, there are still many places where women lag behind, even in something as basic as literacy. According to UNESCO, women today account for almost two-thirds of all adults unable to read.

So how did we get here? And how can we close this gap? Iszi Lawrence follows the story of women’s education with Jane Martin, Professor of Social History of Education at Birmingham University; Parimala V. Rao, Professor of the History of Education at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi; Dr. Karen Teoh, Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard and World Service listeners.

(Photo: Teenage girls and boys learning in classroom. Credit: Maskot/Getty Images)

In February 2024, the renowned Indian geneticist Dr. MS Swaminathan was posthumously awarded the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna. This was in recognition of the dramatic increase in the yields of food staples, such as rice and wheat, that Indian agriculture experienced under his stewardship of the ‘green revolution’ in the 20th century. That revolution is credited with saving many people from hunger and malnutrition across Asia and Latin America. And yet, half-a-century on farmers’ incomes in Africa, Asia and Europe are falling and in many countries farmers are on the streets protesting. At the same time, the environmental impacts of intensive food production are becoming increasingly clear. So do we need a new ‘green revolution’? And is the use of the latest agricultural technology, from robots to AI the answer?

Rajan Datar discusses the past and present of food growing with Professor of Economics Douglas Gollin, crop scientist Professor Nigel Halford, historian of science Dr. Madhumita Saha, robotics project manager Andreas Hofland and listeners from around the world.

(Photo: Green ear of wheat. Credit: binabina/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

‘Always pass the salt and pepper together, even if your fellow diner has asked just for one of them’. That’s the standard advice given by countless dining etiquette manuals, one of the many rules regarding proper manners that have been handed down from generation to generation. But what if some of the rules have become outdated, silly or just wrong? And why do we have etiquette in the first place? Where do the rules of polite conduct come from and are they the same the world over?

Iszi Lawrence follows the story of etiquette across time and over several continents with the help of Annick Paternoster, Lecturer at the University of Lugano in Switzerland who has a special interest in the history of politeness; Professor Daniel Kadar from Dalian University of Foreign Languages in China, the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, and the University of Maribor in Slovenia; Courtney Traub, author and editor of the travel website Paris Unlocked; Japanese writer and cultural commentator Manami Okazaki; former Chief of Protocol at the Foreign Ministry of Grenada Alice Thomas-Roberts; and Forum listeners from around the world.

(Photo: Business people shake hands. Credit: iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Supermarkets: they are ubiquitous yet hard to define, lauded and vilified in roughly equal measures, and in many countries they have a huge influence on what we eat. Technological innovations, big social changes and new shopping habits have all shaped their development and today’s megastores are a far cry from their small-scale ancestors of the 1930s. And yet, some quirks of supermarket design remain constant: for instance, why are the eggs always so hard to locate in the stores?

Iszi Lawrence navigates supermarket aisles with the help of historian and economist Marc Levinson; Aarti Krishnan, Lecturer in Sustainability at Manchester University; Simona Botti, professor of marketing at London Business School and Forum listeners from around the world.

(Photo: A customer in a supermarket. Credit: Adene Sanchez/ Getty Images)

In the 1990s, an advert for a brand of chocolate depicted a sophisticated gathering hosted by the foreign ambassador of an unspecified country. It hinted at a gilded existence of cocktail parties and small talk among influential, wealthy guests. Iszi Lawrence finds out how the stereotype of the diplomatic world compares with the reality of international relations. Who does the real work behind the scenes and who has the power? When we see powerful leaders on the world stage shaking hands and signing treaties, what has led up to that moment?

Iszi discusses first hand experiences of the diplomatic world with the American diplomat Maryum Saifee and the former High Commissioner of Maldives to the UK, Farah Faizal. They are joined by Dr. Lorena de Vita, a historian of diplomatic relations to explain how their work impacts all of us. Plus World Service listeners from across the globe share their thoughts on what diplomats actually do.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

The humble plastic bag is actually a marvel of engineering: it is cheap, light, strong, waterproof and it has conquered the world. In countries where plastic bags have been banned, they are still being smuggled in. The environmental pollution and other problems that discarded plastic can cause has made it a focus of passionate debate. But is plastic really the problem or is it our increasing use of disposable and single-use items?

The popularity of disposable products predates the invention of the plastic bag in the 1960s or even the advent of Western consumer society in the aftermath of the Second World War. And in the last three decades, so many new single-use items have been produced that we increasingly cannot imagine our lives without them, and not just in the festive season. So what is the way forward?

Iszi Lawrence talks about all manner of disposable and single-use objects with Jennifer Argo, Professor of Marketing at the School of Business, Alberta University; Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials & Society at University College London; Katherine Grier, Professor Emerita of History at the University of Delaware and founder of the online Museum of Disposability; space archaeologist Dr. Alice Gorman from Flinders University in Australia and listeners from around the world.

(Photo: Digital image of plastic waste and a city skyline. Credit: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images)

Political parties come in all shapes and sizes and their ideas are just as varied. But what kind of parties best reflect 21st-century society? How do we, as voters, choose between them at elections? What are their ever-increasing expenses spent on? And - perhaps most importantly - how well do political parties respond to the needs and views of the public?

Iszi Lawrence discusses these questions with Professor Leonie Huddy from Stony Brook University who studies the psychology of politics, Associate Professor Karina Kosiara-Pedersen who researches party membership at the University of Copenhagen, Professor Paula Muñoz Chirinos who works on political finance at the University of the Pacific in Peru, Catherine Mayer co-founder of the Women's Equality Party in the UK, as well as student Luke Louis Ow from Singapore and other listeners from around the globe.

(Photo: A sign in Dublin directing voters where to go in 2021. Credit: Artur Widak/Getty Images)

We can probably all think of examples of bad bosses – the people who we love to gossip about with our colleagues outside work. And even if you’re lucky enough to have had good experiences of management, you may be familiar with bad bosses from popular culture. But what makes a good manager and how can you inspire people in the workplace?

It’s a question that’s been debated since the Industrial Revolution when rapidly expanding companies needed a way of controlling their workers. From there developed various theories of management, some of which drew on aspects of sociology and psychology.

Rajan Datar is joined by Ann Francke, the chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute in the UK; Monica Musonda, the CEO of Java Foods in Zambia; and Todd Bridgman, Professor of Management Studies and Head of the School of Management at Victoria University of Wellington / Te Herenga Waka in New Zealand. We’ll also present a selection of comments and experiences sent in by Forum listeners.

Produced by Fiona Clampin

(Photo credit: Getty/Luis Alvarez)

Whether we are pedestrians, cyclists or drivers, roads play a crucial role in our everyday lives. But where and how should we build any new ones? What kind of roads do we need? And how did we end up with the ones we have?

Rajan Datar talks about the past and present of roads and roadbuilding with anthropologist Traci Ardren from the University of Miami, civil engineer Kate Castle, historians Alexis DeGreiff from the National University of Colombia in Bogota and Aparajita Mukhopadhyay from Kent University, literary scholar Stephanie Ponsavady from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and journalist Karim Waheed from Dhaka. Plus World Service listeners from around the globe share their road-trip joys and frustrations.

(Photo: Road construction, worker with a shovel. Credit: blyjak/Getty Images)

For every young American under the age of 18, there are about two cats or dogs receiving free food and lodgings in US homes and that pattern is replicated in many other countries. So why do so many of us keep pets? Why do we name them, consider them part of the family? Companionship, pleasure, status symbol and kinship with all life have been offered as explanations but it's easy to forget that mass keeping of pets - as opposed to working animals - is a recent development of the last two centuries or so.

Iszi Lawrence talks about our evolving relationship with pets with Dr. Anindita Bhadra from the Dog Lab at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research in Kolkata; Dr. Erin Hecht, evolutionary biologist from Harvard; Dr. Margo DeMello, anthrozoologist from Carroll College in Montana; writer and cultural commentator from Japan Manami Okazaki; Durham University historian Professor Julie-Marie Strange; and Rachel Williams, neuroscientist at UCL and comedian. We also sift through the dozens of comments and pet stories sent in by Forum listeners.

(Photo: A young woman with her pet dog. Credit: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images)

In some ways the 21st century is a very unusual time when it comes to adolescence - a study in the US found that teenagers smoke less, drink less and have less sex than the previous generation. And worldwide young people are coming of age in a digital era, with the dangers and opportunities that represents. Our expectations of teenagers vary hugely depending on the social, historical and cultural context. Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi takes us through the big evolutionary questions about adolescence: Why do humans go through this developmental stage? What's the point of all that teenage angst? And how come every generation stubbornly repeats the same mistakes?

She is joined by a panel of experts:

Laurence Steinberg is one of the world's leading experts on adolescence. He is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. His latest book is called, 'You and Your Adult Child'.

Emily Emmott is a lecturer in biological anthropology at University College London. She's currently researching the implications of the social environment around us during our teenage years.

Jon Savage is a British writer and music journalist, best known for his history of the Sex Pistols and punk music. He's the author of 'Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture'.

Brenna Hassett is a bioarchaeologist at University College London and the author of 'Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood'.

Presented by Ella Al-Shamahi
Produced by Jo Impey

Image: Teenagers dance the twist around a radio cassette recorder in a street in the Harajuku district of Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, 1978 (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

From Bhutan to The Bahamas and Iceland to Indonesia, mass tourism has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last few decades. Today’s top destinations are struggling with the sheer numbers of visitors and the United Nations has called for a total rethink on how the industry operates.

The origins of travel for pleasure go back centuries and package holidays in the 1960s made it accessible to many in the West but it’s only the combination of cheap flights and the advent of the internet that has led to truly global tourism on a mass scale. Whilst the industry now generates huge income for many companies and individuals around the globe, critics point to the cost to both the environment and humankind.

Drawing on listeners’ questions and comments, Rajan Datar examines the way mass tourism has impacted people’s lives, both positively and negatively, and asks if the enforced pause in tourism caused by Covid was utilised as an opportunity for a re-think. He is joined by Sihle Khumalo, a popular South African travel writer; Shazia Mirza, a renowned British comedienne and writer; Qupanuk Olsen, originally a mining engineer but now Greenland’s leading travel influencer; Prof. Noel Salazar, anthropologist of tourism from KU Leuven in Belgium; Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, senior researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council and Dr. Birgit Trauer, tourism consultant and educator from Australia.

[Photo: El Postiguet Beach in Alicante, Spain in the summer of 2022. Credit: Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images.]

Are we in a new age of information warfare? The technology to create deepfakes has progressed steadily over the past decade and enables anyone to create videos of people saying and doing things they didn’t actually say or do. But the idea of manipulating video to spread misinformation is almost as old as film itself.

Presenter Iszi Lawrence invites a panel of experts to tackle your questions about AI technology and the uses of deepfakes. Is this something we should be concerned or excited about? What can be done to detect and block malicious content? And what does this mean for our understanding of truth and reality?

Iszi is joined by Francesca Panetta, Director of the AKO Storytelling Institute at the University of the Arts, London; Joshua Glick, Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, NY and Samantha Cole, senior Editor at Motherboard/Vice and author of 'How Sex Changed the Internet'. We also hear from artist and technologist Halsey Burgund and from listeners Brandy and Ahmad.

Image: A digitised face
Image Credit: Getty Images

When telecoms engineer Martin Cooper first chatted in public on a mobile phone 50 years ago few would have predicted that this brief telephone call would be the start of a revolution that would change the lives of billions. Over the last half a century, the mobile has transformed not just how we communicate with each other but also how we view and interact with the world around us. However, recent research suggests that this may not all be for the best.

Drawing on listeners comments and questions, Rajan Datar explores what sets the mobile phone apart from previous communication devices. Why did SMS messaging take off so quickly after a slow start in the 1990s? And how did the morphing of a portable phone into a pocket computer a decade later lead to a situation where many people now interact with their phone more than with any human?

Rajan is joined by Scott Campbell, Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on meanings, uses and consequences of mobile communication in everyday life; behavioural psychologist Dr. Daria Kuss from Nottingham Trent University who specialises in cyberpsychology, technology use and addictive behaviours; and comedienne and PhD. candidate at Exeter University Helen Keen who is researching social connections at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. We also hear from educator Wong Fung Sing from Singapore and other listeners from around the world.

(Photo: mobile phones in a stack on a table. Credit: iStock/Getty images)

Given the submarine's importance to many of the world's navies, it's perhaps surprising to learn that for many years it was considered an inventor's folly and of little use in maritime warfare. Indeed the submarine had a difficult birth because of the technical challenges involved in putting a moving vessel underwater, challenges that could only be overcome once the technology became available.

The submarine eventually proved its potential in World War I, where its ability to pass undetected ushered in a new era of ‘unrestricted warfare’. Since then, it has never looked back and today’s submarines are capable of remaining submerged for months at a time – the ultimate stealth weapon. As navies modernise, what has traditionally been an exclusively male service is now opening up to women in some countries.

Rajan Datar prowls the ocean's depths to find out more about the 'silent service', along with submarine designer Professor David Andrews from the Mechanical Engineering department of University College London; historian Axel Niestlé, author of German U-boat Losses in World War II; George Malcolmson, the curator of the British Royal Navy's submarine museum; and author Eric Wertheim, editor of the US Naval Institute’s reference book Combat Fleets of the World.

Image: Karelia nuclear-powered submarine, Murmansk, Russia, 2018
Credit: Lev Fedoseyev/Getty Images

A child prodigy on the piano, then a glamorous jazz and popular music entertainer, a civil rights campaigner and the first black American woman to host her own TV show: for the first three decades of her life, Hazel Scott’s rise to fame was vertiginous.

Born in Trinidad in 1920, Scott was the headliner in some of New York’s most fashionable clubs by the time she was twenty. A couple of years later she became one of Hollywood’s highest paid entertainers and then married one of the most high-profile US Congressmen of her day. Their celebrity lifestyle regularly featured on newspaper front pages, Scott’s records were selling well and her syndicated TV show was given double airtime because it was so popular. And then, almost overnight, she vanished from public view. What happened?
That's one of the questions Rajan Datar discusses with Scott's biographer and actor Karen Chilton; Loren Schoenberg, saxophonist, bandleader and Senior Scholar of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; and playwright, lyricist and broadcaster Murray Horwitz.

(Image: Hazel Scott in the 1950s. Credit: Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Do you like cocoa? You are in good company: in South and Central America people have been enjoying the fruit of the cacao tree - the source of cocoa, chocolate and much else - for thousands of years. Ancient empires fought battles for the control of the best trees, cacao beans were used as currency, and being able to make a tasty cacao drink could even save your life. To trace the history of cacao in Latin America, Bridget Kendall is joined by archaeologist Cameron McNeil, chef and food historian Maricel Presilla and geneticist and cacao researcher Juan Carlos Motamayor. The reader is Joseph Balderama.

(Photo: A cropped cocoa pod lies over dried cacao beans. Credit: Getty Images)

The Hoover Dam in the US, the Aswan Dam in Egypt and the recently opened, and sumptuously named, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam. Since modern times, huge mega dams like these to tame rivers, create water storage and hydropower, have become a symbol of nationhood used to create national pride and bolster political power, from the Cold War to today. Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, called dams the temples of modern India. But dams have also been highly controversial, displacing rural populations, disrupting local ecology and more recently it’s been shown that dams can increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. So why are so many countries like China still highly involved in dam building, and will they need to change tack in the future? And, could the humble beaver offer a solution?

To discuss the past, present, and future of dam building, Rajan Datar is joined by Nikita Sud, Professor of the Politics of Development at Oxford University; Donald C. Jackson the Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at La Fayette University in the US and author of many books on the history of dam building, including Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West; and Dr Majed Akhter, a political geographer who is senior lecturer in Geography at King’s College London. With the contribution of Dr Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist with an expertise in beaver activity and beaver dams from California State university Channel Islands in the US.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River straddling Nevada and Arizona at dawn. Credit: Sean Pavone via Getty Images)

From Persia to India to Greece – they called him The Great – that is Alexander the Great. Also known as Alexander III of Macedon, he was one of the most successful military leaders of all time. Undefeated by the time of his death in 323 BCE, he is still a go-to figure when people want to define an empire builder. But how should we view this often cruel and destructive militarist today in the light of current world events? And, despite his brutality, like his ransacking of the beautiful capital city of Persepolis, is there a more progressive side to Alexander, his desire for cultural assimilation for instance, that explains why he became an inspiration not just to nationalists and imperialists but also to writers, poets, and the gay community?

To discuss the relevance of Alexander the Great today, Rana Mitter is joined by James Romm, Professor of Classics at Bard College in New York state whose latest book is Demetrius: Sacker of Cities, the failed but would-be successor to Alexander the Great; Dr Haila Manteghi from the University of Münster in Germany who’s the author of Alexander the Great in the Persian tradition; Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews in the UK; and Meg Finlayson, a specialist on the evolution of the queer Alexander, from the University of Durham in the UK.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: The Alexander mosaic, a Roman floor mosaic from Pompei that dates from circa 100 BCE. Credit: Simone Crespiatico via Getty images)

From coronations to cup finals, many of us love a big event, a ceremony with age-old observances. Indeed rituals, whether public spectaculars or more personal ones, such as a particular daily routine, have been part of human experience since time began. But why do rituals persist even though so many of them seem to serve no obvious practical purpose?
Rajan Datar looks for clues in our past with the help of Egyptologist Dr. Elizabeth Frood and historian of Venice Prof. Edward Muir. It turns out that non-human animals – for instance elephants - also display ritual-like behaviour and not always for practical reasons. We hear from a leading behavioural ecologist, Dr. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell.
We examine whether rituals really do remain unchanging through time: it might seem to be their essential characteristic but in reality they continuously evolve. And what about the power of contemporary collective ceremonies and the strong emotions that swell inside us from being part of a huge crowd? Anthropologist Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas gives us his insights.

(Photo: Shinto priests conduct the Oharae ritual in Tokyo. Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

Drawing on traditional music, pop culture, kitsch, rock and modernist poetry to mention just a few of their sources of inspiration, the short-lived Tropicália movement in late 1960s Brazil was provocative and anti-authoritarian. Perhaps most importantly it represented a uniquely Brazilian aesthetic that could only have emerged from that country’s specific culture and history.

The movement’s leading lights were eventually arrested by the military regime that governed Brazil at the time, and exiled to London. But Tropicália paved the way for other performers to demand artistic freedom.

With the help of musical examples, Rajan Datar and guests will explore what made Tropicália so disruptive.

Joining Rajan will be singer Mônica Vasçoncelos and guitarist Gui Tavares, social scientist Professor Liv Sovik from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who’s published widely on Tropicália, including a collection of essays entitled Tropicália Rex: Popular music and Brazilian culture; and David Treece, Emeritus professor of Portuguese at King’s College, London, who’s written extensively on Brazilian popular music, including the book Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Image: Gilberto Gil in The Unique Concert at The Reunion in France. Credit: IMAZ PRESS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Nearly everything we consume is transported by ship. The biggest container ships in the world are among the largest moving structures made by man and can carry over 24,000 20-foot container units. The standardisation of these simple metal containers in the 1950s and 60s marked a turning point in world trade, driving down costs and ultimately fuelling globalisation. Now that supply chains have become ever more complex and been put under increasing strain, we take a look at the history of the shipping container.

Joining Rajan Datar are Marc Levinson, American historian and economist and author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger; Alan McKinnon, professor of Logistics at Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg and author of Decarbonising Logistics: Distributing Goods in a Low Carbon World; Yash Gupta, shipping industry expert with over 20 years’ experience in vessel management and logistics.

Presenter: Rajan Datar
Producer: Jo Impey for BBC World Service

(Photo: Aerial view of a container ship passing under a suspension bridge with truck crossing above. Credit: Shaul/Getty Images)

Developments in new technology such as DNA sequencing have transformed our understanding of the Neanderthals, one of a group of archaic humans who occupied Europe, the Middle East and Western Asia more than 300,000 years ago.

First identified by fossil remains in 1856 in a German quarry, the Neanderthals led an extremely physical existence as hunter-gatherers. They were stronger than us, adaptable as a species to huge variations in climate, with brains as large as ours and sophisticated ways of creating tools.

Many of us carry some of the DNA of Neanderthals, thanks to interbreeding with homo sapiens. Although the Neanderthals today are no longer with us, their story has a lot to tell us about ourselves and our future survival on the planet.

Rajan Datar is joined by Janet Kelso, a computational biologist and Group Leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She specialises in the analysis of DNA sequencing of ancient people such as Neanderthals; Katerina Harvati, the Senckenberg Professor for Paleoanthropology and Director of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen. Her work focuses on the origins of modern humans and Neanderthal evolution; and archaeologist and writer Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Honorary Fellow in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Her award-winning book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art was published in 2020.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Image: Neanderthal Female, re-created by artists Andrie and Alfons Kennis. Photo: Joe McNally/Getty Images)

A Russian army stands at the gates of the capital of another country, a country that Russia has previously occupied and one that, according to Russian politicians, has no right to independent existence. Sounds familiar? That capital city was Warsaw and the year was 1920. But what happened in Poland just after the end of World War One bears strong similarities to what went on near Kyiv in 2022.

After the First World War, Russian Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular, wanted to reoccupy Poland, and indeed Ukraine, Belarus and some other countries, so that they could serve as a bridge for exporting communist revolution to Western Europe. The Poles resisted even though at first they were outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians. The result was the Polish-Bolshevik war which was not fully resolved until 1921 and which had a big impact on the future shape of inter-war Europe.

To guide us through the Polish-Bolshevik war are three distinguished historians: Dr. Pawel Duber, researcher at Nottingham Trent University whose work focuses on Poland in the first half of the 20th Century; Anita Prazmowska, professor of International History at London School of Economics and the author of many publications on Polish history in the last century and beyond; Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian history at Oxford University, whose books cover Russia from the Mongol conquest to Putin.

(Photo: Red Army on the Polish front, c.1920. Credit: Photo 12/Getty Images)

The pandemic has made us all rethink how we work. Where once millions of people used to travel into work in tall glass buildings in big cities every day, now our idea of the office has come to include the kitchen table or maybe even a coffee shop. Yet despite the temptation to shift permanently to remote working, many organisations say the events of the past few years have actually underlined the importance of offices as spaces that connect people. So what are offices for? We are delving back into the history of the modern office to learn how past designs could help us in the future.

Presenter Rajan Datar is joined by three guest experts:

Nigel Oseland is an environmental psychologist and consultant at Workplace Unlimited in the UK. He's the author of Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office.

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler is Associate Professor of Design History at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She's the author of Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office.

And Agustin Chevez is a workplace researcher and architect, and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He's the author of The Pilgrim's Guide to the Workplace.

Producer: Jo Impey

(Photo: Modern coworking interior with an open-plan office lounge and plants; Credit: ExperienceInteriors/Getty Images)

In the summer of 1946 inflation in Hungary reached 41.9 quadrillion per cent. That’s 41.9 followed by 14 zeros – the highest rate of inflation ever recorded anywhere in the world. It meant prices of everyday goods and services doubled, on average, every 15 hours.

As the shattered country struggled to get to its feet after World War Two, weighed down by a Soviet occupation and punishing reparations, its government had little choice but to print more and more money, further fuelling the price spiral.

The hyperinflation stripped wages of almost all their value and plunged millions of Hungarians into a new fight for survival, but as they lost all faith in banknotes they turned to ever more inventive ways to trade and earn a living. We discuss how life for ordinary Hungarians changed amidst the chaos, what caused and eventually halted the economic disaster, and what the whole episode can tell us about the meaning of money.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Béla Tomka, professor of modern social and economic history at the University of Szeged, in Hungary; László Borhi, the Peter A Kadas Chair and associate professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies in the Hamilton-Lugar School at Indiana University, USA; and Pierre Siklos, professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: Hungarian pengo banknotes lying on the ground in Budapest. Credit: Louis Foucherand/AFP via Getty Images)

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring has probably done more than any other to raise concerns about the damage that uncontrolled use of chemicals can cause to the natural world. Carson imagined a ‘silent spring’ in a world where birds no longer sang, killed off by indiscriminate spraying of pesticides. Her plea for caution when using insecticides led to major changes in government regulation of agrochemicals both in the United States and elsewhere.

So who was Rachel Carson? How did this scientist with a passionate interest in marine biology turn first into a best-selling author and then into an environmental campaigner? And - six decades on - have the warnings of Silent Spring been heeded?

Bridget Kendall is joined by Dr. Sabine Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at University of York with a particular interest in the history of synthetic insecticides; Michelle Ferrari, an award-winning film maker who directed a documentary about Rachel Carson's life for the American public broadcaster PBS; and Professor David Kinkela, an environmental historian and chair of the Department of History at Fredonia, State University of New York whose books include 'DDT and the American Century'. The reader is Ina Marie Smith.

(Photo: Airplane dusting a field with DDT. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Why do we divide our lives into 7-day chunks? Unlike the day, month or year, there’s no natural reason for this cycle, but nevertheless the week is now deeply ingrained in us and has proven very resistant to change.

We explore the pagan, religious and early scientific roots of this man-made rhythm, the ideological battles fought over it, and the reason why the number seven came out on top. Our expert guests explain where the names of our days come from, why the weekend was born, and how the week has come to dominate our economic and social lives.

There have, however, been several radical attempts to rip up the 7-day week – we hear about these alternatives and why they ultimately failed.

Rajan Datar is joined by Eviatar Zerubavel, distinguished professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and author of ‘The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week’; Ilaria Bultrighini, honorary research fellow in ancient history at University College London; and David Henkin, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of ‘The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are’.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: A signpost with the seven days of the week on the directional arrows against a bright blue cloudy sky. Credit: Getty Images)

Forugh Farrokhzad burst into the public consciousness with a series of poems that sent shockwaves through Persian society in the mid-1950s. Her early poetry focused on the female experience and female desire, overturning – in the words of one biographer – 1,000 years of Persian literature.

Her critics sought to dismiss her skills as a writer by seeing her poetry purely as a confessional outburst of a divorced woman. That attitude has tended to overshadow her achievements, although her private life is so compelling it’s perhaps inevitable. Since her early death in a car accident, Forugh’s life and poetry have been inspirational for many Iranians, who see in her an artist who was prepared to defy authority and convention to speak out.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Sholeh Wolpé, a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She’s a poet, playwright, librettist and translator of Forugh’s work; author Jasmin Darznik, associate professor and chair of the creative writing progamme at California College of the Arts. Her novel, Song of a Captive Bird, is a re-imagining of Forugh’s life inspired by her poetry, interviews and correspondence; and Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s the author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: Forugh Farrokhzad. Credit: Courtesy of Farrokhzadpoem.com)

Today’s counter-culture and alternative movements question mainstream norms, such as putting too much value on material possessions. The Cynics, practical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, also rejected conventional desires to seek wealth, power and fame. They were not your usual kind of philosophers: rather than lecturing or writing about their ideas, they acted out their beliefs by denying themselves worldly possessions and tried to live as simply as possible. Their leader, Diogenes of Sinope, allegedly slept in a ceramic jar on the streets of Athens and ate raw meat like a dog, flouting convention to draw attention to his ideas.

So who were the Cynics? How influential was their movement? What made it last some 900 years? And why does the term 'cynicism' have a different meaning today?

Bridget Kendall is joined by three eminent scholars of Greek philosophy:
Dr. William Desmond, Senior Lecturer in Ancient Classics at Maynooth University in Ireland and author of several books on the Cynics;
Dr. Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi, Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at University College London;
and Mark Usher, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Vermont and author of new Cynic translations into English.

(Image: The meeting of Alexander and Diogenes, detail from a tapestry, Scotland. Credit: DEA/S. Vannini/Getty Images)

Calories are fundamental to the way many of us view food and our own bodies - you’ll find them on supermarket shelves, restaurant menus, and in cookbooks. But they didn’t start out that way.

Originally coined during the study of steam engines and industrial energy, the term ‘calorie’ was transformed into a measurement of food as ‘fuel’ for humans, influencing industrial, public health and even foreign policies for more than 100 years.

It’s also spawned a multi-billion dollar diet industry – we learn about the author whose battle with her weight introduced the world to calorie counting.

But should we be paying the calorie so much attention? There are growing concerns that it’s a misleading, perhaps even dangerous guide to how our bodies digest food and burn energy.

Bridgett Kendall is joined by Dr Giles Yeo, professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge and author of ‘Why Calories Don’t Count: How we got the science of weight loss wrong’; Adrienne Rose Bitar, a specialist in the history and culture of American food and health at Cornell University, New York, and author of ‘Diet and the Disease of Civilization’; and Nick Cullather, professor of history and international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: A smartphone showing a calorie counting app and surrounded by fresh vegetables, donuts and other snacks on a table. Credit: Getty Images)

Belarusian lands have seen dramatic upheavals throughout the twentieth century and today, like its neighbour Ukraine to the south, Belarus finds itself on the cusp, in between the countries of the European Union on one side and Putin’s Russia on the other. While Belarus often features in the news, its history is less well known. So how far back does the story of Belarus go? How was its sense of national identity forged? And how did it survive the traumas and repressions that it has been subjected to by various invaders and imperial powers?

Three historians of Eastern Europe join Bridget Kendall to answer these questions:
Dr. Nelly Bekus, Lecturer at the University of Exeter who studies post-Soviet nations;
Dr. Natalya Chernyshova, Senior Lecturer in modern history at Winchester University who researches the 20th century in Belarus and beyond;
and Dr. Andrej Kotljarchuk, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden who focuses on the Second World War in Eastern Europe.

(Photo: Mir Castle in Belarus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Credit: tbralnina/Getty Images)

Activist Margaret Sanger is responsible for one of the most significant medical and social changes of the 20th Century – giving women the means to control the size of their families.

The former nurse, who’d witnessed the aftermath of backstreet abortions and her own mother’s premature death after 18 pregnancies, founded the birth control movement in the United States and helped to spread it internationally. She was also instrumental in developing the pill, now one of the world’s most popular contraceptives.

Her campaign was enormously controversial – she faced fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and was arrested several times for breaking strict anti-contraception laws. And her legacy is contested today – her association with the then powerful eugenics movement has thrown doubt on her motives and drawn allegations of racism by some. Even Planned Parenthood, the organisation she helped create, has distanced itself from her.

Bridget Kendall discusses her inspiration and battle against the powerful status quo with Ellen Chesler, a biographer of Margaret Sanger from New York; Elaine Tyler May, professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation; Sanjam Ahluwalia, professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947; and Dr Caroline Rusterholz, a historian of populations, medicine and sexuality at the University of Cambridge.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Photo: Margaret Sanger circa 1915. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the late 19th Century, when the motion picture camera was invented and cinema was born, a young French woman called Alice Guy ended up becoming the first ever woman film-maker; rising from being a lowly young secretary to a prolific and pioneering director, producer and entrepreneur. Yet at her death in 1968, she was barely known, most of her thousand or so films had been lost and her crucial role in the history of the film industry was forgotten. In the past few decades, Alice Guy’s reputation has been gradually revived, and today she is recognised as a creative visionary and inspiration to many women film directors.

Joining Rajan Datar to track the career of Alice Guy, or Alice Guy Blaché as she was also known by her married name, is the film scholar, Dr Anthony Slide, the editor of The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché; Dr Alison McMahan, the author of Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, and the novelised biography WonderShadows; and Caroline Rainette who performed, wrote, and directed, Alice Guy: Mademoiselle Cinema. With the contribution of Pamela Green, the director and producer of Be Natural: the untold story of Alice Guy Blaché.

The reader is Félicité du Jeu.

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Photo: Alice Guy at her Solax film studios in Fort Lee New Jersey USA, in 1914. Credit: By kind permission of Dr Anthony Slide)

Unearthed from the ruins of ancient cities in modern-day Iraq, the reconstruction of the epic from fragments of clay tablets has been a labour of love for scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. This painstaking work has brought to life a sophisticated story of adventure, heroism and friendship, as well as a reflection on the human condition.

Today, experts are uncovering additional fragments of cuneiform script and using artificial intelligence to decipher the text and fill in the gaps of this and other stories. Professor Anmar Fadhil from the University of Baghdad tells the programme about the latest discoveries.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Andrew George, Emeritus Professor of Babylonian at SOAS at the University of London and author of an acclaimed English translation of the epic; Professor Enrique Jiménez, chair of Ancient Near Eastern Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany who has published widely on Babylonian literature of the first millennium BC; and Dr Louise Pryke, Honorary Associate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney in Australia who is the author of Gilgamesh, a guide to the epic which was published in 2019.

Producer: Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet. Credit: Wisam Zeyad Mohammed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Image)

As the spotlight falls on Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we tell the story of how the world's biggest sporting spectacle began, in Uruguay in 1930.

How did a small South American nation of just two million people, thousands of miles from football's centre of power in Europe, come to launch this major global competition? We discuss the fractious international relations, the political cunning, and the sporting excellence behind the successful bid.

We learn how football helped shape a nation riven by civil war for much of its short existence, and hear about the tournament itself - the unfinished stadium, the dodgy refereeing decisions and, for some of the teams, the sheer ordeal of just getting there.

Rajan Datar is joined by Andreas Campomar, a writer and publisher from London and author of Golazo! A History of Latin American Football; Dr Philippe Vonnard, a historian specialising in the internationalisation of sport at the University of Fribourg and the University of Lausanne, both in Switzerland; and Brenda Elsey, a professor of Latin American sports and cultural history at Hofstra University, New York.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: Stamp issued by the Hungarian Post to commemorate the 1930 World Cup final between Uruguay and Argentina. Credit: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

The moth is an insect that’s almost 200 million years old. Throughout human history, its attraction to light, its amazing ability to camouflage, and its nocturnal activity have given rise to myths, spiritual beliefs and been the inspiration for art and literature – especially the genres of horror and the supernatural.

In the natural world, moths also play a hugely important role in promoting global diversity as prolific pollinators. Yet, this ancient insect is often regarded as little more than the poor relation of the butterfly, an annoying creature that feeds on our favourite clothes and eats crops. Today, the moth is under threat from light pollution and climate change. So is it time we re-evaluate our views on moths?

Rajan Datar is joined by Professor Matthew Gandy, from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge in the UK; Dr Alma Solis, research scientist on moths for the US department of Agriculture, and curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC; Dr Franziska Kohlt, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of York who has studied the history of insects in literature and science; and the Estonian artist Liina Lember, creator of a moths art installation. With the contribution of Shirley Camia, whose poetry collection is called “The Significance of Moths”.

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Picture: The Death's-head Hawkmoth, with its characteristic skull-shaped pattern on the thorax. Credit: Choia/Getty Images)

More than 3,000 years ago a group of powerful and intricately connected Mediterranean kingdoms collapsed over the course of just a few decades.

The palaces of Mycenaean Greece were destroyed, entire cities in Hittite Turkey were abandoned, and whole empires disintegrated. Some civilisations disappeared completely. But what caused the so-called Bronze Age collapse - climate change, trade breakdown, internal rebellion, or a mysterious group of invaders known as the ‘Sea Peoples'?

Some historians have called the aftermath a 'dark age', but was it really as gloomy as that, and might this period of wealth, pressure, and decline offer us any lessons today?

Rajan Datar is joined by İlgi Gerçek, assistant professor of ancient Near Eastern languages and history at Bilkent University, in Ankara; Eric Cline, professor of classics, history, and anthropology at The George Washington University, in Washington DC, and author of ‘1177BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed’; and Marc van de Mieroop, professor of history at Columbia University, in New York.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Photo: The ancient site of Patara in Turkey's Antalya province. Patara (Patar in Hittite language), was once the capital of the Lycian Union. Credit: Mustafa Ciftci/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Today, we can’t imagine an election without an opinion poll gauging public opinion on who’s leading, who’s won a debate or who’s more popular with a specific group of voters. Even our favourite chocolate bars and footballers are subject to a poll. But how did straw polls evolve into the scientific number crunching we know now? What is their purpose and impact? How differently are they used around the world? And just how reliable are they?

Bridget Kendall is joined by economist and chairman of Gallup Pakistan, Dr. Ijaz Shafi Gilani; Scott Keeter, Senior Survey Advisor for the Pew Research Center in Washington; and Sir John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde.

(Photo: American President Harry S. Truman smiles and waves to the excited Kansas City crowd after hearing the news that he had won the United States elections in 1948, despite what the polls had predicted. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

The 46-year reign of Süleyman the Magnificent across central Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East was defined by territorial expansion and economic growth, as well as a flowering of art, architecture and culture.

The epithet ‘magnificent’ invites us to believe the Ottoman sultan could do no wrong. But he broke with precedent on several occasions and his private life came in for criticism. So how much does he owe his reputation to his advisers?

Bridget Kendall is joined by Gábor Ágoston, professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington DC and author of many books on the Ottomans, including The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe; Ebru Turan, assistant professor of History at Fordham University. She’s writing a book entitled Last World Emperor: The Origins of Ottoman-Habsburg Imperial Rivalry in the Apocalyptic Mediterranean, 1516-1527; and Marc David Baer, professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He’s published widely on the Ottoman empire, including The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs, which was published in 2021.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Picture: Suleyman the Magnificent. Credit: Hasan Esen/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

William Cobbett was a 19th century English writer, politician and campaigner, at a time when England was on the verge of riots and revolution, and many lived in extreme poverty. Born in 1763, Cobbett started off as a ploughboy, educated himself to run a best-selling newspaper, wrote beautifully accurate descriptions of the countryside which were to form his classic book Rural Rides, and later in life, even became a member of parliament. But it was for his sharp-tongued criticism of the British establishment that William Cobbett became most famous, exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of a system that favoured the rich over the poor, and in 1810, Cobbett was even jailed for his writings for two years, when he condemned the flogging of soldiers who were protesting about their pay. William Cobbett was often greeted by adoring crowds wherever he went, but some of his populist ideas and his dream of a return to an idealised vision of England’s past, also makes him a controversial and divisive figure today.

Joining Bridget Kendall is Ruth Livesey, Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; Dr Richard Thomas, chairman of the William Cobbett society and co-editor of “The Opinions of William Cobbett” with James Grande and John Stevenson; and Katharine Stearn, the editor of “Cobbett’s New Register” and lecturer on Cobbett for the Workers’ Educational Association. With the participation of Dr Mihika Chatterjee, lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath in the UK.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Picture: The General of Patriotism, - or -The Bloomsbury Farmer, Planting Bedfordshire Wheat, James Gillray. Credit: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

They are the bane of every celebrity’s life: that pack of press photographers who stake out the homes, hotels and other haunts of the rich and famous in the hope of bagging a revealing and lucrative image to sell to newspapers and magazines around the world. Known as paparazzi, these photo journalists stop at nothing to catch their prey – climbing trees, hiding in cars and chasing after their quarry on motor scooters at high speed.

But where does the term ‘paparazzi’ come from? When did these celebrity snappers first appear? And why were the most famous of them almost all Italian to start with? To seek out the origins of the paparazzi, the Forum takes you back to the glitzy world of film stars in 1950s Rome.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Antonella Pelizzari, professor of the history of photography at Hunter College in New York and author of many books on Italian photography; the film critic Shawn Levy whose books include Dolce Vita Confidential about film and photography in 1950s Rome; and cultural historian and photographer Giuliana Minghelli whose books, including Stillness in Motion, look at the interaction between Italian film, photography and the wider arts world. With a contribution from cultural historian Luca Cottini from Villanova University. The readers are Giovanni Noto and David McGuire.

Image: English rock 'n' roll star Wee Willie Harris (right) brawls with a persistent photographer on the Via Veneto in Rome in 1962 (Credit: Keystone Features/Getty Images)

The sun might not shape the pattern of our daily lives to the extent it did in the past. But understanding its behaviour is a focus of scientific research to grasp how activity on the surface of the sun - such as geomagnetic storms - can affect life on earth. "Space weather" can take out whole power networks, damage satellites and disrupt communication lines – the technology on which so many people rely.

Bridget Kendall and guests examine the sun's impact throughout history, and discuss what we know about its internal structure and magnetic fields.

Claire Raftery is a solar physicist and the Head of Education and Outreach at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado; Philip Judge is a senior scientist at the High Altitude Observatory also in Boulder, Colorado. He’s written many papers on aspects of solar physics, as well as a book entitled The Sun: A Very Short Introduction; and philosopher Emma Carenini is the author of The Sun: Myths, History and Societies which considers how the sun has shaped philosophy and thought.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Photo: Post-Flare Loops Erupt From Suns Surface. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)

Eunice Newton Foote was the first person to suggest that an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide would lead to a warmer planet, but her discovery was largely ignored and her name disappeared for more than 150 years. She fell into such obscurity that there’s no known picture of her.

Bridget Kendall explores the life of this American scientist and inventor and asks why her ground-breaking research, carried out in the 1850s, was overlooked for so long. Discrimination against women, especially in the sciences, was a major reason, but might a transatlantic power struggle and even a case of intellectual theft have played their parts?

Eunice was also one of the founding members of the women’s rights movement in the United States – we discuss how she helped launch a campaign that would eventually win women the right to vote.

Plus, the story of how her work was recently re-discovered, and the quest to ensure her name gains greater recognition.

For more on Eunice and other key figures in the history of climate change visit https://bbc.in/3QXkiru

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:

John Perlin, a research scholar in the department of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, who is working on what’s thought to be the first biography of Eunice Newton Foote;

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, a recently retired professor of history from the University of Minnesota, USA, and expert on women and gender in the history of science;

Roland Jackson, a historian of nineteenth century science, honorary research Fellow in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, and author of ‘The Ascent of John Tyndall’;

Ray Sorenson, retired petroleum geologist, Oklahoma, USA;

Judith Wellman, professor emerita at the State University of New York at Oswego, USA.

(Picture: Smoke billowing from chimneys at the coal-fired Bełchatów Power Station, Poland, in 2009. Credit: Peter Andrews/Reuters).

The images, sensations and emotions we experience during sleep were once seen as the gateway to the gods and had the power to alter lives and even whole societies.

Rajan Datar explores the way dreams, and their interpretation, have shaped beliefs and actions for thousands of years – from their role as a connection to the dead and the spirit world, to their ability to predict the future.

We hear how these seemingly involuntary visions inspired key historical figures, changed the course of major events, and were used by many rulers as a propaganda tool.

Plus, we discuss what’s really happening in our brains when we have dreams and ask whether 21st-century life is placing them under threat.

Contributors:
Sidarta Ribeiro, professor of neuroscience and founder of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, in Brazil, and also the author of ‘The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams’;
Scott Noegel, professor of biblical and ancient near eastern languages and literatures at the University of Washington, in the United States;
Özgen Felek, lector of Ottoman and modern Turkish in the department of near eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University, in the US.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: Dreamlike scene of a woman standing at fork in a stone pathway in a calm lake with clouds reflecting in the water. Credit: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images)

Since his death in 2008, the impact of designer Yves Saint Laurent on women’s fashion remains undimmed. The pea coat, the trench, the trouser suit – many of his designs are now staples of the modern Western woman’s wardrobe. So how did this famously shy and retiring man achieve global success? And did his fashion innovations for women shape social change in the 1960s, or were they a response to his times?

Bridget Kendall looks back at Saint Laurent’s life and legacy with former director of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, Olivier Flaviano, fashion historian Emilie Hammen and one of Saint Laurent’s last assistants, designer Charles Sébline. First broadcast in 2018.

(Photo: Yves Saint Laurent, French designer, with two fashion models, Betty Catroux [left] and Loulou de la Falaise, outside his 'Rive Gauche' shop. Credit: John Minihan, Getty Images)

As Brazil celebrates 200 years of independence from Portugal, we look at the 17th-century community of people seeking freedom from slavery in the north-east of the country known as Palmares. It lasted longer and was larger than other settlements of this type and it withstood repeated attempts by European colonialists to destroy it.

So how did Palmares keep going for over a century when so many other communities like it in Latin America vanished after a few years?
Who were the inhabitants? And what do we really know about them when there is no reliable history of the settlements: almost all the surviving documents are from people intent on destroying Palmares.

To help us sift through what we do know about Palmares, Bridget Kendall is joined by archaeologist Professor Pedro Paulo Funari from the University of Campinas in Brazil; Dr. José Lingna Nafafé, Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at Bristol University; and Dr. Maria Fernanda Escallon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. The reader is Natan Barreto.

(Photo: The monument to Zumbi, leader of Palmares, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/Getty Images)

It is rare in music history that scholars can point to the beginning of a particular style, but bluegrass would appear to be the exception to the rule. Mandolin player Bill Monroe from rural Kentucky had so much clout in the music business that some scholars have suggested that it was he who defined the sound which came to be known as bluegrass. He was certainly protective; Monroe is quoted as saying “the biggest job of bluegrass is to keep out what don’t belong in it.”

Played initially in America's rural south, bluegrass was later adopted by the counter-cultural college kid scene in the 1950s and '60s. And today the music is flourishing all over the world in the most unlikely places.

Rajan Datar is joined by Dan Boner, director of the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies programme at East Tennessee State University, who demonstrates how bluegrass works; writer and historian Tony Russell, whose publications on music include Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records; and Dr Lydia Hamessley, professor of music at Hamilton College whose research concentrates on old-time and bluegrass music. She is the author of Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Photo: Lester Flatt (right) and Earl Scruggs (left) perform with The Foggy Mountain Boys at the Grand Ole Opry circa 1960. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

The Art of War is one of the most important military strategy texts ever written, and it has become just as influential, perhaps even more so, in the worlds of business, sport, and politics.

Bridget Kendall learns what the 2,000-year-old treatise has to say about deception, spying, and ruthlessness, and asks why it has come to be viewed as a guide to success in life in general.

But has it been misunderstood? We discuss whether it’s better viewed as a guide to avoiding war and conflict, rather than a manual for how to fight.

Plus, we try to get to the bottom of who really wrote it and learn about the blood-soaked period of Chinese history in which it’s believed to have been created.

Producer: Simon Tulett

Credit: Excerpts from the text were based on translations from Michael Nylan's book (see below), published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

Contributors:

Michael Nylan, professor of early Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, and author of 'The Art of War: A New Translation by Michael Nylan';

Derek Yuen, a scholar of strategy and international relations from Hong Kong, and author of ‘Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read the Art of War’;

Peter Lorge, associate professor of pre-modern Chinese and military history at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, in the United States, and author of ‘Sun Tzu in the West’.

(Picture: Terracotta warriors - sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China who unified the country after the Warring States period. Credit: Getty Images)

Mohandas K Gandhi’s decades-long campaign against British rule was the driving force behind Indian independence in August 1947.

The way he did it - through ‘satyagraha’, or non-violent resistance - made him one of the most famous and revered thinkers of the 20th century, and has inspired protest movements around the world.

Rajan Datar explores the experiences, ideas and people that turned Gandhi from a timid schoolboy and failed lawyer into a man bold enough to take on the might of the British Empire.

Plus, we ask whether he achieved the kind of Indian independence he really wanted, and find out why his legacy is the subject of intense debate in India to this day.

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:

Tridip Suhrud, a professor at CEPT university, in Ahmedabad, India, and a Gandhi scholar who has translated many of his works into English, including the first critical edition of Gandhi’s autobiography, ‘My Experiments with Truth’;
Karuna Mantena, a professor of political science at Columbia University in the US, currently working on a book about Gandhi’s political thought;
Anil Nauriya, a writer on freedom struggles in India and Africa and a lawyer based at the Supreme Court in New Delhi.

(Picture: A photo of Gandhi taken around 1940. Credit: Dinodia Photos/Getty Images)

Throughout history, fragrance has been used to scent both the body and our surroundings. With just one drop, perfume has the potential to stir memories, awaken the senses and even influence how we feel about ourselves. But what’s the story behind this liquid luxury in a bottle, now found on the shelves of bathrooms and department stores worldwide?

In this programme, Bridget Kendall and guests explore the modern history of perfume, including its flowering in France and the explosive chemical discoveries that helped to make fine fragrance what it is today. They also explore perfume’s ancient roots and ask: what’s in a name?

Bridget is joined by scientist and critic Luca Turin, writer and curator Lizzie Ostrom and the perfumer Thomas Fontaine. Also featuring William Tullett and James McHugh.

(Photo: Perfume bottle and flowers. Credit: Brian Hagiwara/Getty Images)

Eleonora Duse was an actress ahead of her time. As a performer in the late 19th century when elaborate gestures, exotic costumes and lavish decors were the norm, Eleonora Duse stunned audiences with her truthfulness and intense absorption in the characters she played. She wore no make-up, you could see her blush or turn pale, she was a master of subtle body language and vocal modulation, and her aim was to eliminate the self and become her characters. Today she is often credited with having inspired modern acting, and the Russian theatre director Stanislavsky saw her as the perfect actress, and was greatly influenced by her when he created his acting method. Born in 1858 in what is now northern Italy, Eleonora Duse started acting at the age of four years old with her family’s touring theatre troupe. By her twenties, working as both a theatre manager and a performer, she began to achieve worldwide popularity, travelling all over the world, from South America to Russia to Egypt. She was soon acknowledged as one of the greatest actresses of her generation and her independent lifestyle turned her into an early feminist icon. So what was the secret of her genius and why is she largely forgotten today? And with no recordings of her voice, how do we know she was such a great performer?

Joining Bridget Kendall is Dr Anna Sica, Professor of Theatre at the University of Palermo in Italy, author of The Murray Edwards Duse Collection, and D’Amore e D’Arte, the letters written to Duse from her Russian lover Alexander Wolkoff, soon to be published in English. Professor Paul Fryer, the co-editor of an essay collection on Eleonora Duse and Cenere (Cenere is the Italian word for Ashes, the title of the silent film Duse made in 1916, and the only record of Duse actually performing). Paul Fryer also directs the Stanislavsky research centre at the University of Leeds. And Dr Enza de Francisci, lecturer in Translation studies at the University of Glasgow, who specialises in the critical reception of Duse’s plays, and is the author of A 'New' Woman in Verga and Pirandello: From Page to Stage.

The reader is Cecilia Gragnani.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Eleonora Duse in “Lady of the Camelias” by Alexandre Dumas Fils. Credit: ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

In Mexico the name La Malinche has become synonymous with treachery and betrayal - it even forms one of the country’s most vicious insults. Some have described its owner, an indigenous slave who became the interpreter and mistress of conquistador Hernán Cortés, as the most hated woman in Mexico’s history.

But by helping the Spanish topple the Aztecs in the early sixteenth century was she really guilty of selling out her own people, or simply doing everything she could to survive? Might we credit her with limiting the lives lost in the bloody conflict – one she knew her people could not hope to win?

Bridget Kendall explores the little-known life, and hotly-contested legacy of one of the most controversial figures in Latin American history, and the role she played in the meeting of the Old World and the New.

We hear how La Malinche’s story, and motives, have been re-interpreted over the last 500 years, and learn why she remains important in discussions of national identity, gender, culture and politics in Mexico to this day.

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:
Camilla Townsend, distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, USA, and author of ‘Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico’;
Dr Fernando Cervantes, a historian of early modern Spain and Spanish America at the University of Bristol, UK, and author of ‘Conquistadores: A New History’;
Sandra Messinger Cypess, professor emerita of Latin American literature at the University of Maryland, USA, and author of ‘La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth’.

(Picture: La Malinche – a Mexican engraving, 1885, from the library of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. Credit: Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

There are hundreds of monuments to the poet and painter Taras Shevchenko not just in Ukraine but all over the world. It is hard to overstate the importance of Shevchenko for most Ukrainians. For them he is not just the national poet who breathed new life into the Ukrainian language but a symbol of their country’s independence. His words kept the national spirit alive during the decades of forced Russification in the 19th Century and they found renewed resonance during the 2014 Maidan uprising. But Shevchenko's work is less well known beyond eastern Europe.

To remedy this Bridget Kendall is joined by Ukrainian writers and literary scholars Olha Poliukhovych from the National University of Kyiv - Mohyla Academy and Mykhailo Nazarenko from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, and by professor of Slavonic studies at Vienna University Michael Moser. The reader is Ivantiy Novak.

(Photo: A monument to Taras Shevchenko by Igor Grechanyk in Kyiv, Ukraine. Credit: Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Corbis/Getty Images)

Oranges have long represented love, wealth and status - since they originated in South East Asia, around the 8th Century BCE. The orange tree's ability to carry fruit and blossom at the same time made it a symbol of fertility and purity in religious art and painting, and the intoxicating fragrance of the blossom, the perfect sphere of the mature fruit and its sensuously refreshing taste inspired writers and artists, as well as growers to produce ever more spectacular creations. With the advent of artificial refrigeration in the 19th Century, oranges then became big business and widely available to all. By the mid 1880’s it’s said more than 2.5 million cases of Italian citrus fruit arrived in New York every year. Today, while oranges are enjoyed by many, their production also has a bitter side – the sad plight of many of the orange pickers, and the impact of the orange juice industry affecting the diversity of orange trees and profit margins of the growers.

Joining Bridget Kendall is Cristina Mazzoni, professor of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont, and the author of Golden Fruit: A Cultural History of Oranges in Italy; the food and travel writer Clarissa Hyman, who has written Oranges: A Global History; and Dr Alissa Hamilton, the author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Photo: Orange cross section on top of a pile of oranges. Credit: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images)

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath: a physicist, biologist and early writer of science fiction. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics. He made significant contributions to plant science, designing ingenious devices to measure plant growth and responsiveness. He founded one of India’s oldest and most distinguished research institutes. During his life he was honoured at home and in Britain he was knighted for his achievements and made a Fellow of the Royal Society. So why, outside India and his native Bangladesh, is J C Bose not better known?

Bridget Kendall asks four historians of science: Bose's biographer Subrata Dasgupta from Lafayette in the United States where he is emeritus professor at the University of Louisiana; Christin Hoene who is assistant professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands where one of her research interests is the cultural history of radio in colonial India; author, film-maker and historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey who is the Founding Director of Science Gallery in Bangalore, India; and James Poskett who is associate professor at the University of Warwick and author of Horizons: A Global History of Science.
The reader is Madhav Vasantha.

[Photo: Sir JC Bose, c.1920. Credit: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images]

The reality behind the stereotypical image of Japan’s fearsome elite warriors is more nuanced than we are led to believe. It is thought the samurai developed as a social class in medieval Japan, when the term could encompass lowly foot soldiers or mercenaries, and often untrustworthy ones at that. A far cry from the skilled fighters who supposedly pledged undying loyalty to their lord, and followed a code of honour.

In fact, it was during peacetime that the image of the samurai came to be defined when their role as warriors was no longer necessary. During Japan’s aggressive imperial expansion in the early 20th Century, the samurai ideal was once again manipulated for nationalistic purposes.

Rajan Datar’s guests include Michael Wert, who has published several books on Japan’s warrior class, including Samurai: A Concise History. He is associate professor of East Asian History at Marquette University in Milwaukee; Marcia Yonemoto, professor and hair of the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan, which examines the role of women in Japan’s military-bureaucratic state; and Polina Serebriakova, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge in the UK focuses on warrior leaders in medieval Japan.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Image: Illustration portrait of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

There are almost as many ice cream origin stories as there are flavours, but where did the frozen treat really come from, and who invented it?

Rajan Datar explores the dessert’s murky history, from the harvesting and flavouring of snow in China and the Middle East thousands of years ago, to the experimental kitchens of the European aristocracy.

Ice cream’s evolution has, of course, closely followed that of refrigeration – we learn why salt was crucial for keeping early versions cold, and hear about the daring entrepreneur who began the global ice trade. Plus, who really invented the ice cream cone?

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:

Robin Weir, author of ‘Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide’;
Najmieh Batmanglij, Iranian-American chef and cookbook author;
Dr Melissa Calaresu, Cambridge University;
Farid Rostami, co-founder of Silk Road ice cream.

(Picture: A woman licking an ice cream. Credit: Getty images)

To find out how to make ice cream yourself visit www.bbc.co.uk/food/ice_cream

Mythological sagas are often fantastical and push the imagination to the limit but the Popol Vuh, which originates in what is Guatemala today, has a gallery of extraordinary characters both good and bad. They get involved in a series of mind-boggling battles and challenges and this eventually leads to the creation of the human race. The Maya K’iche’ story of the Popol Vuh has come down to us in an 18th-Century transcription and Spanish translation by a priest called Francisco Ximenez, and as with many ancient stories, there are tantalising questions about the history of the manuscript and the origins of the tale itself.

Rajan Datar traces the meanings and significance of the Popol Vuh with the help of Frauke Sachse who is director of Pre-Columbian Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington DC; Iyaxel Cojti Ren, professor at the University of Texas; Allen Christenson who is professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah as well as an ethnographer and author of a new translation and critical edition of the Popol Vuh.
The reader is Florencia Cordeu.

(Image: A Mayan ball player at the Great Ball Court in Chichen-Itza. Credit: Independent Picture Service/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Today Korea is divided between North and South, but the founding of the Koryo Kingdom in the 10th Century was the first time the peninsula was truly united and when a sense of nationhood emerged. The Koryo Kingdom is remembered for some of the finest cultural achievements in the country’s history; it developed the world’s first printing press – 200 years before the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg came up with his own version, and it is also a period marked by beautiful ceramics and art. But what is less well known is how progressive its politics and society were; promotion was based on merit, women were given greater rights, and monarchs ruled through co-operation. It was also a turbulent time with personal intrigue and back stabbing at court, and constant threats of foreign invasion.

Rajan Datar finds out more about the Koryo Kingdom. He is joined by Sang’ah Kim, the Korean Collections’ Curator at the British Museum in London; Dr Charlotte Horlyck, reader in Korean Art History at SOAS, University of London, who has written about the collecting of Koryo Art in the early 20th Century; Edward (Ned) Shultz, professor emeritus in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, and Dr Juhn Ahn, associate professor in Buddhism and Korean studies at the University of Michigan in the United States and author of Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in 14th Century Korea.

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Photo: Trinity, gilded bronze statues from Goryeo dynasty, 10th-11th Century, Korean civilisation. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)

The story of the discovery and development of insulin is a tale full of twists and turns, Nobel prizes and fierce rivalries. Scientists in the late 19th Century established the connection between the pancreas and diabetes, isolated the hormone insulin, and even patented the extract that lowered blood sugar. But it was not until a Canadian team published results in 1922 of their attempts to inject insulin into a patient that diabetes was transformed from a fatal condition to a manageable one.

Bridget Kendall is joined by science historian Dr Alison Li, who has studied the life of one of insulin's early pioneers in her book J.B. Collip and the development of medical research in Canada; Dr Viktor Joergens, a retired diabetologist who for more than two decades was the executive director of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. He is also the co-author of Unveiling Diabetes: Milestones in Diabetology; and Dr Kersten Hall, visiting fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, and the author of Insulin - The Crooked Timber: A History From Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Photo: Charles Herbert Best, Canadian physiologist who assisted Frederick Banting to isolate Insulin, in his laboratory. Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Since ancient times the practice of castrating pre-pubescent boys, and sometimes men, was thought to make them loyal servants, suitable for roles at the heart of many imperial courts. Some historians believe this began with human slaves who were treated in the same way as animals – as lesser beings to be managed and controlled – with no free choice.

The effects of castration on the male body – the loss of testosterone being the principal one – had a huge impact on how eunuchs have been viewed throughout history. Being unable to father children who could threaten lines of succession, certain eunuchs rose to power precisely because of their exclusive access to the inner workings of empires. Castrated men were also prized for their singing voices in 17th and 18th century Europe, as Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland explains.

Bridget Kendall discusses this painful episode with Norman Kutcher, Professor in the Department of History at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in the US. He specialises in imperial Chinese history, and he’s the author of Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule; Dr Kathryn Reusch, conservation technician at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who's published widely on the topic of castration in relation to archaeological remains; and Shaun Tougher, Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Cardiff University. He’s written many books and articles on eunuchs, including The Roman Castrati: Eunuchs in the Roman Empire.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: A group of court eunuchs in a Tang Dynasty mural from the tomb of Prince Zhanghuai (circa 618-907). Credit: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Vikings were addicted to silver; they collected it as coins, as ingots, arm-rings, jewellery. On one Swedish island alone archaeologists and metal detectorists found some 200,000 silver coins and there is a silver hoard there for almost every Viking farm. Why? What can the coins, many of which came from Asia, tell us not just about the huge Viking trading area but also about their society? And how did this influx of silver transform European economy and life in the early Middle Ages? These questions have occupied historians and archaeologists for a long time but now advanced scientific techniques such as DNA analysis and microscopic laser sampling are yielding new, more detailed and sometimes surprising answers.

Rajan Datar gets an update on Viking research from archaeologist Marianne Hem Eriksen from the University of Leicester; Anders Winroth, historian from the University of Oslo; Soren Sindbaek, archaeologist from Aarhus University; and sound archaeologist Rupert Till from Huddersfield University.

(Photo: A horn of plenty from a Viking grave. Credit: Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

German chemist Fritz Haber's discovery of how to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia is seen as one of the most significant of 20th century science - it enabled the industrial manufacture of fertilisers, which now provide food for up to half the planet's people.

But he was also responsible for the development and deployment of poison gas on the battlefields of World War One and is remembered by some as the 'father of chemical warfare'. His was also a life touched by personal tragedy and a struggle against a Jewish heritage that at first threatened to hold back his career, and would later send him into exile.

Bridget Kendall examines a life that epitomises science’s capacity to create and to destroy.

Contributors:

Dan Charles, US journalist and author of ‘Master Mind: The Rise And Fall Of Fritz Haber, The Nobel Laureate Who Launched The Age Of Chemical Warfare’;
Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of European and especially German History at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel;
Dr Anthony Travis, senior researcher in the history of technology at the Sidney M. Edelstein Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of ‘Nitrogen Capture: The Growth of an International Industry’.

(Image: A portrait photograph of Fritz Haber, dated around 1920. Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, didn’t he? At least, that’s what the history books tell us. Nero’s image as a depraved tyrant has been handed down to us by three biased sources, written after the emperor’s suicide in 68AD. These sources have informed interpretations of Nero’s legacy ever since, so much so that his involvement in the Great Fire of Rome has become a meme.

Recent scholarship has sought to rehabilitate Nero to a certain extent, to try to understand him in the context of his time. He was indeed a man who succeeded in shocking the Roman elite, but also someone who could strike a chord with the public and was well thought of outside the centre of political intrigue.

Rajan Datar attempts to separate fact from fiction, with guests Dr Ginna Closs, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and author of While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination which was published in 2020; and Dr Evan Jewell, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden. He’s writing a book entitled Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire; and Dr Shushma Malik, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Roehampton. She’s the author of The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

(Image: Nero and the burning of Rome, July 18-27, 64 A.D. Coloured woodcut by Conti. Credit: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

For the Ancient Egyptians they were seen as receptacles for the soul, for the Aztecs they were used to tell the future and for the early Christians, they were an aid for reaching self-knowledge. And mirrors’ key role in the reflection of light led to the development of high-powered telescopes to explore the universe. No human invention has been so closely tied with our sense of self and the world around us. And yet mirrors also have a capacity to deceive us – so how much attention should we give them in our lives, and are we overly obsessed with our image in the mirror?

Joining Rajan Datar to find out more about the history of mirrors is Dr Elizabeth Baquedano, a specialist in the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica and Senior Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London. Dr Franziska Kolt, a post-doctoral research fellow in the history of science at the University of York in England, who’s written Alice Through the Wonderglass: the Surprising Histories of a children's classic. And Mark Pendergrast, the author of Mirror Mirror: a history of the human love affair with reflection. With the contribution of Professor Serpil Bagci from Hacettepe university in Ankara in Turkey.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Mirror reflecting blue sky in digital landscape. Credit: Artur Debat via Getty Images)

Kwame Nkrumah was considered by some as a visionary hero who urged would-be leaders in Africa to embrace the idea of unity for the continent, and led Ghana to independence from British colonial rule in 1957.

But in becoming Ghana’s first prime minister, and then president, he was criticised for his autocratic style of government and the way in which he pursued his Pan-African ideology seemingly at the expense of his own people. In 1966 Nkrumah was removed from power in a coup, and never returned to Ghana.

Bridget Kendall’s guests include Ghanaian journalist-turned-historian, AB Assensoh, who interviewed Nkrumah in exile. Assensoh is emeritus professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Courtesy Emeritus Professor in the History Department of University of Oregon. He’s the author of many books on Nkrumah, including a collaboration with his wife Yvette entitled Kwame Nkrumah’s Political Kingdom and Pan-Africanism Reinterpreted, 1909–1972. Joining them are Kwasi Konadu, Professor in Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University in the US. He’s published widely on African history, including The Ghana Reader: History, Culture and Politics; and Matteo Grilli, senior researcher at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He’s the author of Nkrumaism and African Nationalism: Ghana’s Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Kwame Nkrumah addresses the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, 1960. Credit: Underwood Archives via Getty Images)

President Harry Truman's address to the United States Congress, and the world, in March 1947 is seen by some historians as marking the start of the Cold War.

In it, the President committed the USA to the role of defender of global democracy, and pledged to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, led to the establishment of NATO and, later, US involvement in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

But, as Bridget Kendall discovers, the speech and the policy it set out were by no means inevitable - both were shaped as much by misunderstandings and exaggerated fears as they were conflicting ideologies and the actions of the former World War Two allies.

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:

Melvyn Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, USA;
Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, UK;
Denise Bostdorff, professor of communication studies at The College of Wooster, in Ohio, USA.

Credits:

Recording of the The RT Hon Winston Churchill extracts from a speech made at Westminster College Fulton Missouri;
Truman's address courtesy of the Harry S Truman Library and Columbia Broadcasting System.

(Image: Close-up of President Harry Truman as he delivers a speech to Congress. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

In in her 1843 essay The Great Lawsuit, the American journalist and early feminist Margaret Fuller forcefully argued for the rights of women to work, think and live on their own terms, not just as companions and foils for men. She was one of the first Americans to do so. Fuller was a pioneer in other respects too: a trail blazer for advocacy journalism and for unrestricted female education. In the 1840s she became the first paid US war correspondent, reporting from Rome besieged by the French army.

Fuller packed a lot into a life of just 40 years; so much so that after her tragic death in a shipwreck, the men around her - some of them rather famous - did their best to diminish her memory. They exaggerated what they saw as her personal failings and in some instances even falsified her record. As a consequence, we are still discovering the true extent of her life and work.

Bridget Kendall talks to three Fuller experts: Megan Marshall, Professor at Emerson College in Boston whose book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Professor Katie Kornacki, Chair of the English department at Caldwell University in New Jersey and the founding editor of the Margaret Fuller Society's Conversations magazine; and the cultural critic Judith Thurman, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and an award-winning biographer focusing on female authors.

The reader is Ina Marie Smith.

(Image: Margaret Fuller Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

From Mesopotamian loan records which are over 4,000 years old to the cryptocurrencies of today, money has been with us for a long time. But how did we get from exchanging bits of metal or cowrie shells to the algorithmic trading of shares? Why did paper money originate in Song-dynasty China? Why was the Gold Standard adopted in the 19th Century? And what is money anyway?
These are some of the questions that Bridget Kendall investigates with the help of three financial historians: Ute Wartenberg, president of the American Numismatic Society; William Goetzmann, professor of Finance and Management Studies at Yale University; and Christian de Pee, professor of History at the University of Michigan. They also answer listeners' questions about the history of finance.

(Photo: Roman gold coins found in Corbridge, UK in 1911. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Pinocchio is a cultural icon. He is the wooden puppet who can talk and walk. A cheerful headstrong character who keeps breaking the rules, and whose dream is to become a real boy. His story has been the subject of many retellings, and his growing nose when he lies has become a way to satirise politicians the world over. But Pinocchio’s origins are largely unknown outside Italy, and couldn’t be more different from his portrayal in the 1940 Disney film.

The original novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by the 19th century Italian writer Carlo Collodi is much darker and brutal, and originally ended with Pinocchio’s execution, but it was also a way of educating the children of a newly unified Italy. The actual literary text also provided a model, which is still used today, for a more standardised form of the Italian language. So why has Collodi’s original – which is one of the most translated books in the world and one of the most adapted – been largely ignored and why should we go back to it?

Joining Bridget Kendall is Dr Katia Pizzi, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, who is the editor and co-author of Pinocchio, puppets and modernity: the mechanical body; Cristina Mazzoni, Professor of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont, and editor and translator of The Pomegranates and other Modern Italian Fairy Tales; and Dr Georgia Panteli, Lecturer in Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and University College London, and author of From Puppet to Cyborg. Pinocchio’s Posthuman Journey.

The readings from The Adventures of Pinocchio were by Marco Gambino.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: The long nose of the liar Pinocchio, Florence, Italy. Credit: broadcastertr via Getty Images)

Try and imagine a world without numbers. Telling people how many siblings you have, counting your wages or organising to meet a friend at a certain time would all be much more difficult. If you’re reading this on a digital screen, even these words are produced through a series of zero and one symbols. We take them so much for granted yet some cultures don’t count and some languages don’t have the words or symbols for numbers. This programme looks at when and why humans first started start to count, where the symbols many of us use today originate from and when concepts like zero and infinity came about.

Joining Bridget Kendall to explore the history of numbers and counting are anthropological linguist Caleb Everett from the University of Miami, writer and historian of mathematics Tomoko Kitagawa, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University in the UK, Ian Stewart.

Photo: An abacus on a table.(CaoChunhai//Getty Images)

The Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh is one of the most influential painters in western art. His series of still life sunflowers are known around the world today but during his lifetime in the 1800s he lived in poverty, selling very little of his work, some say just one painting, and suffered several serious breakdowns. One of his most famous works, The Starry Night, is said to be the view from his room in a French psychiatric hospital where he’d admitted himself shortly after severing his own left ear. This programme looks at the man behind these iconic paintings, explores how and why he became a painter and picks apart the various theories around his death from a gunshot wound at the age of just 37.
Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss van Gogh’s life and work are Louis van Tilborgh, Senior Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam; van Gogh biographer and co-author of Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh; and British art historian Lucrezia Walker.

(Image: Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh. Credit:Getty Images)

A proud Hungarian by birth, Franz Liszt was a pioneer both in his piano playing and in his compositions. He was also the nearest thing to a rock star that classical music had in the 19th century. Fans would reportedly swarm over him, try and grab his gloves, even smoke his discarded cigars!
Liszt lived up to his public image in his private life, with hectic touring schedules and colourful relationships with numerous women. But he was also generous to a fault – for example, frequently teaching for free - and he was a great champion of other composers.

Rajan Datar is joined by three people for whom Liszt and his music occupy a central position in their professional lives:
Dr. Rena Mueller, a musicologist emerita at New York University who is working on a complete thematic catalogue of Liszt's music;
Dr. Éva Polgár who teaches at Azusa Pacific University in California and is a pianist noted for her championing of not just Liszt's works but all the music from her native Hungary;
and professor Kenneth Hamilton, Head of School of Music at Cardiff University, who is not just a distinguished pianist but also an author and broadcaster.

Examples from Liszt’s works used in the programme:
Mazeppa (S.138) played by Leslie Howard
Totentanz performed by Krystian Zimerman , Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa
La Campanella (Études d'exécution transcendente d'après Paganini, S.140) played by Leslie Howard
Apparition No. 2 played by Ashley Wass
Sonetto 123 del Petrarca (Années de pèlerinage II) played by Wilhelm Kempff
Chase Neige (12 Études d'exécution transcendante, S.139) played by Boris Berezovsky
Wilde Jagd (Études d'exécution transcendante, S.139 ) played by Daniil Trifonov
Mazeppa (orchestral version, S. 100) performed by Wiener Philharmoniker, Giuseppe Sinopoli
Ballade No. 2 played by Kenneth Hamilton
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 played by Arcadi Volodos
Csardas Obstinée played by Éva Polgár
Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este (Années de pèlerinage III) played by Egon Petri

(Image: Detail from a 19th-century caricature of Franz Liszt, Bibliothèque-Musée De L'Opéra National De Paris-Garnier. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)

"That’s some Catch, that Catch 22". It’s a novel that gave rise to a new term in the English language and gave voice to American soldiers serving in Vietnam in the 1960s. Since its publication in 1961, Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s best-selling novel, has not only come to symbolise the cynical self-serving aspect of war run as a business, but also the way an ordinary person can be trapped and controlled by bureaucracy and social rules, in whatever area of life. It’s a novel that’s sold tens of millions of copies, and it continues to engage new readers. So, what is the secret of its success? Bridget Kendall is joined by the American novelist and friend of Joseph Heller, Christopher Buckley; Dr Beci Carver, lecturer in 20th century literature at Exeter University, whose forthcoming book is Modernism’s Whims; and Tracy Daugherty, author of Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, and Emeritus Professor at Oregon State University in the US. With the contribution of Patricia Chapman Meder, the author of The True Story of Catch-22, whose father was the inspiration for Colonel Cathcart, Heller’s commander who kept increasing the number of flight missions.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: An early edition of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22. Credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

If you were a woman in the mid-19th century, some universities might let you attend public lectures on science, but very few would enrol women as regular students. The number of women allowed to sit exams and get academic degrees was vanishingly small. In mathematics it was almost unheard of.
But the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya changed all that. She was one of the first women in modern Europe both to gain a doctorate in mathematics and become a tenured professor. She was also the first woman to be part of the editorial committee of a leading mathematics journal and the publicity around her achievements helped pave the way for women to play a greater role in university life. Above all, she was an outstanding mathematician with at least one theorem bearing her name still used to this day.

So how did Kovalevskaya do it? How much was talent? How much luck and opportunity? And how much just sheer force of character?

To guide us through Sofya Kovalevskaya’s eventful life - and her equations – Bridget Kendall is joined by three experts:
Ann Hibner Koblitz, professor emerita at Arizona State University and the author of A Convergence of Lives: Sofya Kovalevskaya - Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary;
June Barrow-Green, professor of the history of mathematics at the Open University in the UK and chair of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics;
and Elena Arsenyeva, associate professor at St. Petersburg State University in Russia and the coordinator of the Leonhard Euler International Mathematical Institute.

(Photo: Sofya Kovalevskaya Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The ancient Inca town Machu Picchu is now the most visited tourist attraction in Peru – and yet it lay nearly forgotten for over three centuries until American and Peruvian explorers drew the world's attention to it in the 1910s. And despite a century of excavations at the site, there are still many unanswered questions about Machu Picchu: why was it built in the first place, who were the immigrants that made up a large proportion of the town’s population, and why was it abandoned so quickly.

To find out more about Machu Picchu, Bridget Kendall is joined by leading archaeologists of the Inca civilisation Lucy Salazar and Michael Malpass, the celebrated mountaineer and explorer Johan Reinhard and by writer Mark Adams who retraced the steps of the 1911 expedition led by Hiram Bingham that put Machu Picchu back on the map.

(Photo: Machu Picchu, Peru. Credit: Eitan Abramovich/Getty Images)

How do you approach the decisions you make in life? Do you think about them in terms of the maximum pleasure and minimum pain that any choice would lead to for yourself and others around you? If so, you are beginning to think along similar lines to the influential British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham with his concept of Utilitarianism. This was not Bentham’s only contribution to radical thought. With the prison and judicial systems, with education, women’s suffrage, animal rights and the monarchy, throughout his life he came up with a huge body of work that challenged the status quo and still feels relevant today.

Rajan Datar is joined by three expert guests to guide us through the life and work of this remarkable thinker: professor Philip Schofield from University College London who is both the director of the Bentham Project and the general editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham; Emmanuelle de Champs who is professor of British history and civilisation at CY Cergy Paris University, and Jeffrey Kaplan who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

(Image: Coloured engraving of Jeremy Bentham, early 19th century. Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Copper is a metal that has been with us since the dawn of civilisation. The Romans used it to build their empire, and its high thermal and electrical conductivity led to the 19th century discovery of how to generate electricity and a revolution in telecommunications. Copper was even used to build the Statue of Liberty in New York, and it’s because of copper’s tendency to oxidise that the statue is no longer shiny brown but green. Today we still depend on this 'eternal metal', so called because it doesn’t decay or rust, and it has become a staple and necessary component in new green technologies like solar power and electric cars. But extracting copper has always been very damaging to human health and the environment - so how has our relationship with copper changed over the centuries?

Joining Rajan Datar to find out more about copper past and present is Nikita Sud, Professor of Development studies at Oxford University and the author of The Making of Land and The Making of India; the archaeologist Dr William Parkinson, who is a curator at the Field Museum, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College, London.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Image: Stripped copper cables. Credit: Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library via Getty Images)

Agatha Christie put her decision to become a writer down to a lack of education and a capacity for day-dreaming. Her murder mysteries, full of ingenious plot twists, are still regarded by many as the finest examples of crime fiction and have sold in their billions in the English language and in translation.

Although the world she depicts is considered by some to be cosy and genteel, and her plots formulaic, a new generation of screenwriters is bringing out the darker side of Christie’s imagination. So what accounts for her continuing global success, when today’s crime fiction tends to be grittier and more realist?

Bridget Kendall is joined by Dr Michelle Kazmer, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University, who’s combined a lifelong passion for crime fiction with study into how we use information – such as clues or evidence; Dr Mark Aldridge, Associate Professor of Film and Television at Solent University and the author of Agatha Christie on Screen and Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World; and James Prichard, Agatha Christie’s great-grandson. Award-winning crime writer Ragnar Jónasson also explains how Agatha Christie's novels influenced his own work.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

Boudica, also known as Boadicea, was a member of Iron Age aristocracy in Roman occupied England and her husband was the ruler of the Iceni people. When he died in around 60AD, Boudica, driven by Roman brutality, led a rebellion against the Roman army and marched on London. It was a ferocious attack that nearly drove the Romans out of Britain before Boudica was finally defeated. Today, she is an iconic and sometimes controversial figure. To explore Boudica, Bridget Kendall is joined by professors Richard Hingley and Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Dr. Jane Webster.

(Image: Detail from Boadicea Haranguing the Britons by William Sharp, after John Opie, line engraving, published 1793. Credit: by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Harry Houdini’s story is the classic American tale of an immigrant who from impoverished beginnings made it big in the United States. Perhaps it is this early hand to mouth existence in a large family which explains his extraordinary drive to succeed. Captivated by magic shows, he began performing tricks on stage with one of his brothers, and then with his wife.

Houdini’s decision to make escape the focus of his act was well-timed, chiming with the public mood for sensational trickery. Whether it was escaping from handcuffs, a straitjacket or from a box filled with water, Houdini wowed audiences with his seemingly death-defying performance. So what motivated this complex man who spent a lifetime ‘deluding’ the public with his illusions, and how did he reconcile that with his campaign against the Spiritualist movement which he regarded as a racket?

Rajan Datar charts the life and career of the legendary Houdini, with writer and biographer Adam Begley, whose book Houdini: The Elusive American was published in 2020; Dr Matthew Solomon, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century; and Dr Katharina Rein from the University of Potsdam in Germany, who’s published widely on stage magic in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Techniques of Illusion which will be available in 2022.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Harry Houdini chained up ready to jump into Charles River, Boston, Massachusetts in 1906. Credit: Bettmann via Getty Images)

It’s widely regarded as the most successful treaty in the world, and it was the first arms control agreement established during the Cold War. The Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in 1961, protects what is one of the most unspoilt places on earth, from mining, from military activity and allows only scientific exploration and peaceful pursuits. It was thanks to the treaty and research carried out in Antarctica that scientists identified a hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s, but it’s been most powerful as a symbol of what can be achieved to create peace between nations and give wilderness protection. So what has made this treaty so effective, and can it still hold up today in a world which is hungry for minerals and where an increasing number of states are seeking to project their technological and scientific prowess in Antarctica?

Joining Bridget Kendall is Birgit Njaastad, the Chair of the Committee for the Environmental Protection of the Antarctic, and for more than 25 years a Norwegian Polar Institute environmental expert; Professor Alan Hemmings, a specialist on the geopolitics of the Antarctic from the University of Canterbury New Zealand; and Dr Jessica O’Reilly, Associate Professor of International Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington in the United States, and the author of The Technocratic Antarctic. With poetry and song about the Antarctic by the New Zealand poet Bill Manhire.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Chinstrap Penguins on Half Moon Island, South Shetlands, Antarctica. Credit: V Stokes/ iStock/ Getty Images Plus)

With its multiple narrators, superb and complex characterisation, the influence of Don Quixote de la Mancha has been acknowledged by great writers through the ages as a masterpiece, and hailed as one of the most important novels in the history of literature.

On the surface the novel appears to be a comedy – of situation, of language and of character – but its author Cervantes succeeds in making Don Quixote so much more than a series of slapstick episodes. It was written during a particularly turbulent time in Spanish politics, when both Jews and Muslims were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, and this finds its way into the novel.

Bridget Kendall explores the tale of the self-styled knight Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza with Cervantes experts Ruth Fine, the Salomon and Victoria Cohen Professor in Iberian and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Carolyn Nadeau, the Byron S. Tucci Professor of Hispanic Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University; and Edwin Williamson, the King Alfonso XIII Professor Emeritus of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford.

(Photo: Cervantes Monument in Madrid, Spain showing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Credit: Sylvain Sonnet via Getty Images)

They’re slimy and slippery. They’re part of the green film you see on garden ponds. They can clump together and wash up on the shores of beautiful beaches. A lot of them are invisible to the naked eye. These underappreciated organisms called algae are indispensable to the presence of life on earth but not all is straightforward about them. They can be single celled or multi cellular. They can be ugly and slimy or sometimes beautiful: indeed are even a tourist attraction. They may be found in the sea or on land. They can be life-creating and yet life-destroying and toxic in excess. So perhaps it’s time we paid more attention to algae and their evolution.
Rajan Datar is joined by Ruth Kassinger, author of Slime: How algae created us, plague us and just might save us; Dr Brenda Soler-Figueroa, a marine scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre; Dr Gothamie Weerakoon Senior Curator of Lichens and Slime Moulds at the Natural History Museum of London and author of Fascinating Lichens of Sri Lanka; and Stefan Bengtson, emeritus professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

(Photo: Volvox algae colonies, spherical forms outlined by biflagellate cells interconnected by cytoplasmic bridges. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)

The Goths were a Germanic tribe infamous for their brief sack of Rome in 410 AD but their cultural and political influence was felt throughout Europe for centuries. They re-shaped the Balkans, preserved the Roman way of life in Italy and presided over a cultural flourishing in Spain. But how, many centuries after their demise, did they come to give their name to an important architectural style in medieval Europe and, in the 20th century, to a subculture popular all over the world?

Bridget Kendall talks all things Gothic with David Gwynn, historian at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Goths, the Lost Civilisation. Also on the panel are Janina Ramirez, a cultural historian, broadcaster and author who focuses on the Middle Ages, based at the University of Oxford, and Mischa Meier, professor of ancient history at the University of Tubingen in Germany.

The 1821 Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire became an inspiration for people all over Europe who wanted to dismantle the old multi-ethnic empires. But it is less well known that a number of women played key roles in the uprising. In this programme, Bridget Kendall and guests focus on Laskarina Bouboulina, perhaps the best known of Greek women freedom fighters. For the last two centuries, Bouboulina's deeds as as a brave sea captain and a generous financier of the uprising have enthralled people in Greece and elsewhere but how many of these stories are based in fact? And what is the significance of Bouboulina today?

To find out Bridget is joined by:
Dr. Margarite Poulos, a historian of modern Greece from Western Sydney University whose book Arms and the Woman surveys the role of Greek women in the country's military struggles;
Dr. April Kalogeropoulos Householder from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has not only written about Laskarina Bouboulina but also made a documentary film about her;
and Pavlos Demertzis-Bouboulis, who is a descendant of Bouboulina as well as the director of a museum dedicated to her on the island of Spetses.

[Image: Portrait of Laskarina Bouboulina, 1830, by Adam Friedel. From the collection of Bouboulina Museum, Spetses. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

For someone who was largely self-taught, Mary Somerville's rise to renown in the male-dominated world of science was quite remarkable. Although women were barred from being members of the learned societies where knowledge was shared in the early 19th-Century, Somerville found alternative ways to become one of the most respected figures in maths and science of her day.

Scottish-born Somerville played a crucial role in communicating the latest findings in science through a series of successful books. She regretted never making any original discoveries herself however, so does her experience suggest we should re-evaluate the role of originality in science?

Bridget Kendall is joined by Jim Secord, emeritus professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, who has edited the works of Mary Somerville; Dr Brigitte Stenhouse, lecturer in the History of Mathematics at the University of Oxford whose doctoral thesis looked at the mathematical work of Mary Somerville; and Ruth Boreham, former project curator at the National Library of Scotland, who is writing a biography of Mary Somerville.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Photo: Royal Bank of Scotland £10 note featuring Mary Somerville)

One of the earliest Cold War conflicts was a 12-year guerrilla war commonly known as the Malayan Emergency and fought from 1948 in the jungles of what is now Malaysia. This communist insurgency was fuelled not only by ideology but also by the desire for Malayan independence from British colonial rule. There have been a number of books and documentaries devoted to the subject but relatively few in English capture the experiences of the Chinese community in Malaya that was at the centre of the Emergency.

Rajan Datar is joined by three guests, all with family links to the Emergency:
Sim Chi Yin, a photographer and artist from Singapore whose book She Never Rode that Trishaw Again tells the story of her grandmother widowed during the war in Malaya;
Show Ying Xin, a postdoctoral fellow at the at the Australian National University’s Malaysia Institute in Canberra;
and Rachel Leow, Associate Professor in Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge and author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia.

[Photo: Malayan police officers keeping watch from the Pengkalan police station in 1950. Credit: Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

The Devils, The Possessed, or Demons, as it’s also known in translation, is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most political novel but it’s also his bleakest and funniest. It’s a hundred and fifty years since its publication and two hundred years since its author’s birth. The novel tells the story of a group of young revolutionaries who run riot in a small provincial town in Russia, all under the indulgent eye of their elders, the liberal and progressively minded elite. It is a grim prophecy of totalitarian rule in the 20th century in what is a penetrating psychological study of the human consequences of extreme philosophical ideas.

Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss Dostoevsky and his novel The Devils or Demons, is Tatyana Kovalevskaya, Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow and the author of the bilingual edition Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Dignity of the Human Person; Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University in the United States and President of the International Dostoevsky Society; and Dr Sarah Hudspith, Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds, and author of Dostoevsky and the idea of Russianness.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

[Image: A production of The Devils staged at the Union Theatre, London. Credit: Stagephoto (Perri Snowdon as Stavrogin), Matt Link (Tara Quinn as the little girl Matryoshka). Design by Spiff]

If you had to name the innovations that have transformed human civilisation, you might suggest the printing press or the Internet, but the humble pair of spectacles has also revolutionised the way many of us experience the world. It's said that an astonishing three quarters of those in the US use glasses or contact lenses to correct their vision. And the World Health Organisation estimates that more than a billion people in low-and-middle income countries are living with sight problems that could be corrected by the right pair of specs. But how and when were glasses first invented? What impact have they had on societal development? And what are some of the ways we've stigmatised, or even elevated, people who wear them?

Joining Rajan Datar to explore the history of spectacles are Travis Elborough, a historian of popular culture from the UK. He’s recently published a book called Through The Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles; Stefana Sabin, a German literary scholar and the author of In The Blink of an Eye – A Cultural History of Spectacles – which has just been translated into English; and Professor Kovin Naidoo, Senior Vice President in social impact at the French-based optics company, Essilor. He’s also former CEO of the Brien Holden Vision Institute. He originally trained as an optometrist in his native South Africa.

[Image: Hugh of Saint-Cher, 1351-1352. Found in the Collection of Chiesa di San Nicolò, Treviso; Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

Whether photographed in a coffin or depicted on an Art Nouveau poster, the French actor Sarah Bernhardt knew exactly how to get maximum publicity. Although her first outings on the stage were unremarkable, she refined her skills and rose to become the leading actor of her generation and a world-famous name. Her life off-stage was a further source of endless fascination, her eccentric and occasionally arrogant behaviour only adding to her allure. Her critics saw her as manipulative and hackneyed. For her admirers, seeing Bernhardt ‘die’ on stage was a moment to be treasured for ever.

Bridget Kendall charts Sarah Bernhardt’s life and career with John Stokes, emeritus professor of modern British literature at King’s College London and author of The French Actress and Her English Audience; Victoria Duckett, senior lecturer in screen and design at Deakin University in Melbourne and the author of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film; and Sharon Marcus, the Orlando Harriman professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her 2019 book The Drama of Celebrity is an exploration of the processes that propel a figure such as Sarah Bernhardt to global fame.

Producer: Fiona Clampin

(Photo: Posters showing Sarah Bernhardt as Camille in La Dame Aux Camelias (Lady of the Camellias) by Alphonse Mucha. Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG/DeAgostini/Getty Images)

We seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for the glitter and sparkle of diamonds. Yet transforming these stones into jewels fit for princesses and film stars involves a long chain of production and distribution. And the diamond industry has long been bound up with a much darker side: the exploitation of workers, environmental damage, all-powerful monopolies and violent mafias, not to mention the so-called Blood Diamonds used to finance armed conflict. So how is the industry trying to clean up its image and regulate the trade?

Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss the history of the diamond trade are:

Dr. Lansana Gberie, former coordinator for the UN Security Council Panel of Experts on Liberia. He is the author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone. He’s also Sierra Leone’s current Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva and the Sierra Leonean Ambassador to Switzerland - though his contributions to this programme are in a personal capacity.

Ian Smillie, founder of the Diamond Development Initiative, now DDI at Resolve, an organisation which works to improve conditions for small-scale miners. He is the author of several books, including Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade. He is based in Canada.

Dr. Tijl Vanneste, researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations at Nova University in Lisbon. He is the author of Blood, Sweat and Earth: The Struggle for Control over the World's Diamonds Throughout History.

[Image: Examining a gem diamond in Antwerp, Belgium; Credit: Paul O'Driscoll/Getty Images]

Eva Peron rose from a childhood of poverty to become one of the most powerful figures in Latin America. An illegitimate small town girl, she smashed class and gender barriers to become Argentina’s controversial First Lady. Loved and loathed, Rajan Datar discusses her life, work and remarkable afterlife with biographer Jill Hedges, historian Ranaan Rein, and cultural theorist Claudia Soria.

[Photo: Eva Peron in 1951. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images]

It’s one of the most popular dishes in the world today, but the story of sushi can be traced back more than 2,000 years. The earliest records document a preserved fish dish in ancient China and it later became a medieval luxury in Japan, before evolving into a variety of different regional styles and recipes. Today, thanks to waves of migration from Japan, there is a veritable smorgasbord of international varieties… California roll, anyone?

Joining Rajan Datar to discuss the history of sushi are James Farrer, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Graduate Programme in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is the author of Globalisation and Asian Cuisines; Eric C. Rath is Professor of Premodern Japanese History at the University of Kansas in the US. He’s the author of Oishii: The History of Sushi; and Michelin-starred Japanese sushi master, Endo Kazutoshi, who is head chef at The Rotunda in London.

Presenter: Rajan Datar

[Image: Young woman eating sushi; Credit: Getty Images]

The American writer Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” It was an urge which in her case yielded a rich array of novels, children’s books, plays and essays. Toni Morrison stands tall, as the first black woman of any nationality to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Celebrated for her masterpiece Beloved, she remains a towering figure, one of the most well-known and oft-taught authors of our age. Since her death in August 2019, many have been reassessing her multiple legacies: as a novelist, cultural critic, and editor.

Joining Bridget Kendall to explore the life, work and impact of Toni Morrison are Dana Williams, Professor of African American Literature at Howard University in Washington DC and current President of the Toni Morrison Society; Janis A. Mayes, Emerita professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University, US; and Aretha Phiri, Associate Professor at Rhodes University in Grahamstown / Makhanda, South Africa.

Produced by Jo Impey for BBC World Service
Additional research by Tessa Roynon

[Photo: Toni Morrison in Chicago, Illinois in 2010. Credit: Getty Images / Daniel Boczarski / FilmMagic]

Hidden from view, complex to understand and often controversial, algorithms are at the heart of computer coding that underpins modern society. Every time we search the internet, every time we pay by credit card, even the romantic partners suggested to us by online dating sites – they’re all powered by algorithms. And their reach is growing all the time, as some societies use them to automate decisions regarding criminal justice, mortgage applications and job recruitment.

The history of algorithms is surprisingly ancient, stretching back to the Babylonian empire where large societies required a systematic way to count and order different aspects of citizens’ lives. Today some people are questioning their use, as some algorithms have been shown to replicate bias and there are fears that algorithms have the potential to undermine democracy.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles and the author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow; the French computational scientist, consultant and entrepreneur Aurélie Jean, who’s published From the Other Side of the Machine: A scientist’s journey in the land of algorithms; and Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University who’s written more than 120 books on aspects of mathematics and science.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

[Image: Digital data and binary code. Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images]