In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg (Cult.-Art)

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore typology, a method of biblical interpretation that aims to meaningfully link people, places, and events in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, with the coming of Christ in the New Testament. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah, and King David were regarded by Christians as being ‘types’ or symbols of Jesus.

This way of thinking became hugely popular in medieval Europe, Renaissance England and Victorian Britain, as Christians sought to make sense of their Jewish inheritance - sometimes rejecting that inheritance with antisemitic fervour. It was a way of seeing human history as part of a divine plan, with ancient events prefiguring more modern ones, and it influenced debates about the relationship between metaphor and reality in the bible, in literature, and in art. It also influenced attitudes towards reality, time and history.

With

Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London

Harry Spillane, Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge and Research Fellow at Darwin College

And

Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Associate Professor in Patristics at Cambridge.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

A. C. Charity, Events and their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (first published 1966; Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Margaret Christian, Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: The Context for 'The Faerie Queene' (Manchester University Press, 2016)

Dagmar Eichberger and Shelley Perlove (eds.), Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion (Brepols, 2018)

Tibor Fabiny, The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992)

Tibor Fabiny, ‘Typology: Pros and Cons in Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Criticism’ (Academia, 2018)

Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (first published 1982; Mariner Books, 2002)

Leonhard Goppelt (trans. Donald H. Madvig), Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1982)

Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (first published in 1983; Princeton University Press, 2014)

Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (T & T Clark International, 1999)

Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee (University of California Press, 1999)

Montague Rhodes James and Kenneth Harrison, A Guide to the Windows of King's College Chapel (first published in 1899; Cambridge University Press, 2010)

J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known events and figures in Irish history. In 1014 Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, defeated the Hiberno-Norse forces of Sigtrygg Silkbeard and allies near their Dublin stronghold, with Brian losing his life on the day of battle. Soon chroniclers in Ireland and abroad were recording and retelling the events, raising the status of Brian Boru as one who sacrificed himself for Ireland, Christ-like, a connection reinforced by the battle taking place on Good Friday. While some of the facts are contested, the Battle of Clontarf became a powerful symbol of what a united Ireland could achieve by force against invaders.

With

Seán Duffy
Professor of Medieval Irish and Insular History at Trinity College Dublin

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh
Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge

And

Alex Woolf
Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Howard B. Clarke, Sheila Dooley and Ruth Johnson, Dublin and the Viking World (O'Brien Press Ltd, 2018)

Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson (ed.), The Vikings in Ireland and Beyond: Before and After Clontarf (Four Courts Press, 2015)

Clare Downham, ‘The Battle of Clontarf in Irish History and Legend’ (History Ireland 13, No. 5, 2005)

Seán Duffy, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Gill & Macmillan, 2014)

Seán Duffy (ed.), Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014–2014: National Conference Marking the Millennium of the Battle of Clontarf (Four Courts Press, 2017)

Colmán Etchingham, ‘North Wales, Ireland and the Isles: The Insular Viking Zone’ (Peritia 15, 2001)

Colmán Etchingham, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World (Brepols N.V., 2019)

David Griffiths, Vikings of the Irish Sea (The History Press, 2nd ed., 2025)

James Henthorn Todd (ed. and trans.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, or, the Invasions of Ireland by the Danes and other Norsemen (first published 1867; Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Brian Boru: Ireland's greatest king? (The History Press, 2006)

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Tales of Three Gormlaiths in Medieval Irish Literature’ (Ériu 52, 2002)

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib: Some Dating Consierations’ (Peritia 9, 1995)

Brendan Smith, The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 1, 600–1550 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially ‘The Scandinavian Intervention’ by Alex Woolf

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus whose names are entwined with the end of Rome's Republic and the rise of the Roman Emperors. As tribunes, they brought popular reforms to the Roman Republic at the end of the 2nd century BC. Tiberius (c163-133BC) brought in land reform so every soldier could have his farm, while Gaius (c154-121BC) offered cheap grain for Romans and targeted corruption among the elites. Those elites saw the reforms as such a threat that they had the brothers killed: Tiberius in a shocking murder led by the Pontifex Maximus, the high priest, in 133BC and Gaius 12 years later with the senate's approval. This increase in political violence was to destabilise the Republic, forever tying the Gracchi to the question of why Rome’s Republic gave way to the Rome of Emperors.

With

Catherine Steel
Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow

Federico Santangelo
Professor of Ancient History at Newcastle University

And

Kathryn Tempest
Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Leicester

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Appian (trans. John Carter), The Civil Wars (Penguin Classics, 2005)

Valentina Arena, Jonathan R. W. Prag and Andrew Stiles, A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), especially the chapter by Lea Beness and Tom Hillard

R. Cristofoli, A. Galimberti and F. Rohr Vio (eds.), Costruire la Memoria: Uso e abuso della storia fra tarda repubblica e primo principato (L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2017), especially ‘The 'Tyranny' of the Gracchi and the Concordia of the Optimates: An Ideological Construct.’ by Francisco Pina Polo

Suzanne Dixon, Cornelia: Mother of the Gracchi, (Routledge, 2007)

Peter Garnsey and Dominic Rathbone, ‘The Background to the Grain Law of Gaius Gracchus’ (Journal of Roman Studies 75, 1985)

O. Hekster, G. de Kleijn and D. Slootjes (eds.), Crises and the Roman Empire (Brill, 2007), especially ‘Tiberius Gracchus, Land and Manpower’ by John W. Rich

Josiah Osgood, Rome and the Making of a World State, 150 BCE-20 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert and Christopher Pelling), Rome in Crisis (Penguin Classics, 2010)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield, ed. Philip A. Stadter), Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Nathan Rosenstein, ‘Aristocrats and Agriculture in the Middle and Late Republic’ (Journal of Roman Studies 98, 2008)

A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘The Lex Repetundarum and the Political Ideas of Gaius Gracchus’ (Journal of Roman Studies 72, 1982)

Catherine Steel, The End of the Roman Republic, 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)

David Stockton, The Gracchi (Oxford University Press, 1979)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who was part of the movement known as phenomenology. While less well-known than his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his popularity has increased among philosophers in recent years. Merleau-Ponty rejected Rene Descartes’ division between body and mind, arguing that the way we perceive the world around us cannot be separated from our experience of inhabiting a physical body. Merleau-Ponty was interested in the down-to-earth question of what it is actually like to live in the world. While performing actions as simple as brushing our teeth or patting a dog, we shape the world and, in turn, the world shapes us.

With

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield

Thomas Baldwin
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York

And

Timothy Mooney
Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College, Dublin

Produced by Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of
Knowledge (Ohio University Press, 2021)

Dimitris Apostolopoulos, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (Chatto and Windus, 2016)

Thomas Baldwin (ed.), Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings (Routledge, 2004)

Thomas Baldwin (ed.), Reading Merleau-Ponty (Routledge, 2007)

Renaud Barbaras (trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor), The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004).

Anya Daly, Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Northwestern University Press, 1998, 2nd ed.)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Alden L. Fisher), The Structure of Behavior (first published 1942; Beacon Press, 1976)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Donald Landes), Phenomenology of Perception (first published 1945; Routledge, 2011)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (first published 1948; Northwestern University Press, 1964)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (first published 1960; Northwestern University Press, 1964)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (first published 1964; Northwestern University Press, 1968)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Oliver Davis with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin), The World of Perception (Routledge, 2008)

Ariane Mildenberg (ed.), Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Timothy Mooney, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Katherine J. Morris, Starting with Merleau-Ponty (Continuum, 2012)

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2011)

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, The Routledge Guidebook to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2011)

Jean-Paul Sartre (trans. Benita Eisler), Situations (Hamish Hamilton, 1965)

Hilary Spurling, The Girl from the Fiction Department (Penguin, 2003)

Jon Stewart (ed.), The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Northwestern University Press, 1998)

Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern University
Press, 2009)

Kerry Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton University Press, 1988)

Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2005)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) worked across the London stages both alone and with others from Dekker and Rowley to Shakespeare and more. Middleton’s range included raucous city comedies such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy, some with the main adult companies and some with child actors playing the scheming adults. Middleton seemed to be everywhere on the Jacobean stage, mixing warmth and cruelty amid laughter and horror, and even Macbeth’s witches may be substantially his work.

With

Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Lucy Munro
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London

And

Michelle O’Callaghan
Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Reading

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 1996)

Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

R.V. Holdsworth (ed.), Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Selection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1990), especially ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’ by John Stachniewski

Mark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham, Middleton and His Collaborators (Northcote House, 2007)

Gordon McMullan and Kelly Stage (eds.), The Changeling: The State of Play (The Arden Shakespeare, 2022)

Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (The Arden Shakespeare, 2020)

David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (University of Toronto Press, 2012)

Michelle O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)

Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford University Press, 2012)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the history and reputation of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Second of Persia as he was known then was born in the sixth century BCE in Persis which is now in Iran. He was the founder of the first Persian Empire, the largest empire at that point in history, spanning more than two million square miles.

His story was told by the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon, and in the Hebrew bible he is praised for freeing the Jewish captives in Babylon.

But the historical facts are intertwined with fiction.

Cyrus proclaimed himself ‘king of the four corners of the world’ in the famous Cyrus Cylinder, one of the most admired objects in the British Museum. It’s been called by some the first bill of human rights, but that’s a label which has been disputed by most scholars today.

With

Mateen Arghandehpour, a researcher for the Invisible East Project at Oxford University,

Lindsay Allen, Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek and Near Eastern History at King’s College London,

And

Lynette Mitchell, Professor Emerita in Classics and Ancient History at Exeter University.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Pierre Briant (trans. Peter T. Daniels), From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002)

John Curtis and Nigel Tallis (eds.), Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (The British Museum Press, 2005)

Irving Finkel (ed.), The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia’s Proclamation from Ancient Babylon (I.B.Tauris, 2013)

Lisbeth Fried, ‘Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1’ (Harvard Theological Review 95, 2002)

M. Kozuh, W.F. Henkelman, C.E. Jones and C. Woods (eds.), Extraction and Control: Studies in Honour of Matthew W. Stolper (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014), especially the chapter ‘Cyrus the Great, exiles and foreign gods: A comparison of Assyrian and Persian policies in subject nations’ by R. J. van der Spek

Lynette Mitchell, Cyrus the Great: A Biography of Kingship (Routledge, 2023)

Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts On File, 1990)

Vesta Sarkosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds.), Birth of the Persian Empire (I.B.Tauris, 2005), especially the chapter ‘Cyrus the Great and the kingdom of Anshan’ by D.T. Potts

Matt Waters, King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great (Oxford University Press, 2022)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Since plants have to mate and produce offspring while rooted to the spot, they have to be pollinated – by wind, water, or animals – most commonly insects. They use a surprising array of tricks to attract pollinators: striking colours, iridescent light effects, and enticing scents, to name but a few.

Insects, on the other hand, do not seek to pollinate plants – they are looking for food; so plants make sure it’s worth their while. Insects are also remarkably sophisticated in their ability to find, recognise and find their way inside flowers.

So pollination has evolved as a complex dance between plants and pollinators that is essential for life on earth to continue.

With

Beverley Glover, Director of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden

Jane Memmott, Professor of Ecology at the University of Bristol

And

Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary, University of London.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Stephen L Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, The Forgotten Pollinators (Island Press, 1997)

Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2023)

Steven Falk, Field Guide to the Bees of Britain and Ireland (British Wildlife Publishing, 2015)

Francis S. Gilbert (illustrated by Steven J. Falk), Hoverflies: Naturalists' Handbooks vol. 5 (Pelagic Publishing, 2015)

Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees (Vintage, 2014)

Edwige Moyroud and Beverley J. Glover, ‘The evolution of diverse floral morphologies’ (Current Biology vol 11, 2017)

Jeff Ollerton, Birds and Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship (Pelagic Publishing, 2024)

Alan E. Stubbs and Steven J. Falk, British Hoverflies (‎British Entomological & Natural History Society, 2002)

Timothy Walker, Pollination: The Enduring Relationship Between Plant and Pollinator (Princeton University Press, 2020)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Hindu goddess Kali, often depicted as dark blue, fierce, defiant, revelling in her power, and holding in her four or more arms a curved sword and a severed head with a cup underneath to catch the blood. She may have her tongue out, to catch more blood spurting from her enemies, be wearing a garland of more severed heads and a skirt of severed hands and yet she is also a nurturing mother figure, known in West Bengal as ‘Maa Kali’ and she can be fiercely protective. Sometimes she is shown as young and conventionally beautiful and at other times as old, emaciated and hungry, so defying any narrow definition.

With

Bihani Sarkar
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Non-Western Thought at Lancaster University

Julius Lipner
Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge

And

Jessica Frazier
Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

During this discussion, Julius Lipner reads a translation of a poem by Kamalakanta (c.1769–1821) "Is my black Mother Syama really black?" This translation is by Rachel Fell McDermott and can be found in her book Singing to the Goddess, Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Mandakranta Bose (ed.), The Goddess (Oxford University Press, 2018)

John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (eds.), Devi: Goddesses of India (University of California Press, 1996)

Knut A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism, vol 1 (Brill, 2025)

David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (University of California Press, 1986), especially chapter 8

Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.), Encountering Kālī in the margins, at the center, in the west (University of California Press, 2003)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

With

David O’Shaughnessy
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway

Judith Hawley
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

And

Michael Griffin
Professor of English at the University of Limerick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale University Press, 2019)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross), The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (first published 1766; Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Vicar of Wakefield (first published 1766; Oxford University Press, 2008)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, 1966)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Robert L. Mack), Oliver Goldsmith: Everyman’s Poetry, No. 30 (Phoenix, 1997)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden), She Stoops to Conquer (first performed 1773; Methuen Drama, 2003)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt), The Citizen of the World (first published 1762; Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood), She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies (first performed 1773; Oxford University Press, 2007)

Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), Oliver Goldsmith in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longmans, 1969)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), the youngest child of the newly dominant Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella. When she was 3, her parents contracted her to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales, the heir to the Tudor king Henry VII in order to strengthen Spain's alliances, since Henry's kingdom was a longstanding trade partner and an enemy of Spain's greatest enemy, France. For the next decade Catherine had the best humanist education available, preparing her for her expected life as queen and drawing inspiration from her warrior mother. She arrived in London to be married when she was 15 but within a few months she was widowed, her situation uncertain and left relatively impoverished for someone of her status. Rather than return home, Catherine stayed and married her late husband's brother, Henry VIII. In her view and that of many around her, she was an exemplary queen and, even after Henry VIII had arranged the annulment of their marriage for the chance of a male heir with Anne Boleyn, Catherine continued to consider herself his only queen.

With

Lucy Wooding
Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, University of Oxford and Professor of Early Modern History at Oxford

Maria Hayward
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton

And

Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer
Lecturer in Global Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Bristol

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Michelle Beer, Queenship at the Renaissance Courts of Britain: Catherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor, 1503-1533 (Royal Historical Society, 2018)

G. R. Bernard, The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (Yale University Press, 2007)

José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo (eds.), Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica, 2014), especially vol 2, 'Spanish Princess or Queen of England? The Image, Identity and Influence of Catherine of Aragon at the Courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII' by Maria Hayward

Theresa Earenfight, Catherine of Aragon: Infanta of Spain, Queen of England (Penn State University Press, 2022)

John Edwards, Ferdinand and Isabella: Profiles In Power (Routledge, 2004)

Garrett Mattingley, Catherine of Aragon (first published 1941; Random House, 2000)

J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (first published 1968; Yale University Press, 1997)

David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004)

Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry's Spanish Queen (Faber & Faber, 2011)

Juan Luis Vives (trans. Charles Fantazzi), The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual (University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Patrick Williams, Catherine of Aragon: The Tragic Story of Henry VIII's First Unfortunate Wife (Amberley Publishing, 2013)

Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (Routledge, 2009)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the architect Sir John Soane (1753 -1837), the son of a bricklayer. He rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect to see many of his designs realised to great acclaim, particularly the Bank of England and the Law Courts at Westminster Hall, although his work on both of those has been largely destroyed. He is now best known for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, which he remodelled and crammed with antiquities and artworks: he wanted visitors to experience the house as a dramatic grand tour of Europe in microcosm. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and in a series of influential lectures he set out his belief in the power of buildings to enlighten people about “the poetry of architecture”. Visitors to the museum and his other works can see his trademark architectural features such as his shallow dome, which went on to inspire Britain's red telephone boxes.

With:

Frances Sands, the Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum

Frank Salmon, Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture

And

Gillian Darley, historian and author of Soane's biography.

Producer: Eliane Glaser
In Our time is a BBC Studios Audio production.

Reading list:

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Bruce Boucher, John Soane's Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (Yale University Press, 2024)

Oliver Bradbury, Sir John Soane’s Influence on Architecture from 1791: An Enduring Legacy (Routledge, 2015)

Gillian Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999)

Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Ashgate, 1999)

Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and London (Lund Humphries, 2006)

Helen Dorey, John Soane and J.M.W. Turner: Illuminating a Friendship (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007)

Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum (Merrell, 2015)

Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (Thames and Hudson, 2006)

Susan Palmer, At Home with the Soanes: Upstairs, Downstairs in 19th Century London (Pimpernel Press, 2015)

Frances Sands, Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces at Sir John Soane’s Museum (Batsford, 2021)

Sir John Soane’s Museum, A Complete Description (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2018)

Mary Ann Stevens and Margaret Richardson (eds.), John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light (Royal Academy Publications, 1999)

John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (9th edition, Yale University Press, 1993)

A.A. Tait, Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

John H. Taylor, Sir John Soane’s Greatest Treasure: The Sarcophagus of Seti I (Pimpernel Press, 2017)

David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

David Watkin, Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum & Soane (Prestel, 2013)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a story that circulated widely in the middle ages about a highly learned woman who lived in the ninth century, dressed as a man, travelled to Rome, and was elected Pope.

Her papacy came to a dramatic end when it was revealed that she was a woman, a discovery that is said to have occurred when she gave birth in the street. The story became a popular cautionary tale directed at women who attempted to transgress traditional roles, and it famously blurred the boundary between fact and fiction. The story lives on as the subject of recent novels, plays and films.

With:

Katherine Lewis, Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research
Associate at the University of York

Laura Kalas, Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Swansea University

And

Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of
Cambridge and Fellow of Girton College.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Alain Boureau (trans. Lydia G. Cochrane), The Myth of Pope Joan (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grisby (eds.), Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2008), especially 'The Medieval Popess' by Vincent DiMarco

Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 1996)

Jacques Le Goff, Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2020), especially the chapter ‘Pope Joan’

Marina Montesano, Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2024)

Joan Morris, Pope John VIII - An English Woman: Alias Pope Joan (Vrai, 1985)

Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Why Pope Joan?’ (Catholic Historical Review, vol. 99, no.2, 2013)

Craig M. Rustici, The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England (University of Michigan Press, 2006)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's Crito and Phaedo, his accounts of the last days of Socrates in prison in 399 BC as he waited to be executed by drinking hemlock. Both works show Socrates preparing to die in the way he had lived: doing philosophy. In the Crito, Plato shows Socrates arguing that he is duty bound not to escape from prison even though a bribe would open the door, while in the Phaedo his argument is for the immortality of the soul which, at the point of death, might leave uncorrupted from the 'prison' of his body, the one escape that truly mattered to Socrates. His example in his last days has proved an inspiration to thinkers over the centuries and in no small way has helped ensure the strength of his reputation.

With

Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield

Fiona Leigh
Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College London

And

James Warren
Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Ebrey, Plato’s Phaedo: Forms, Death and the Philosophical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Dorothea Frede, ‘The Final Proof of the Immortality of the Soul in Plato’s Phaedo 102a-107a’ (Phronesis 23, 1978)

W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4, Plato: The Man and his Dialogues, Earlier Period (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Verity Harte, ‘Conflicting Values in Plato’s Crito’ (Archiv. für Geschichte der Philosophie 81, 1999)

Angie Hobbs, Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025), especially chapter 5

Rachana Kamtekar (ed.), Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology and Crito: Critical Essays (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004)

Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton University Press, 1984)

Melissa Lane, ‘Argument and Agreement in Plato’s Crito’ (History of Political Thought 19, 1998)

Plato (trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy), Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo and Phaedrus (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2017)

Plato (trans. G. M. A. Grube and John Cooper), The Trial and Death of Socrates: Euthyphro Apology, Crito, Phaedo (Hackett, 2001)

Plato (trans. Christopher Rowe), The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (Penguin, 2010)

Donald R. Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

David Sedley and Alex Long (eds.), Plato: Meno and Phaedo (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

James Warren, ‘Forms of Agreement in Plato’s Crito’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 123, Issue 1, April 2023)

Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths (Faber and Faber, 2010)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most consequential battles of recent centuries. On 20th September 1792 at Valmy, 120 miles to the east of Paris, the army of the French Revolution faced Prussians, Austrians and French royalists heading for Paris to free Louis XVI and restore his power and end the Revolution. The professional soldiers in the French army were joined by citizens singing the Marseillaise and their refusal to give ground prompted their opponents to retreat when they might have stayed and won. The French success was transformative. The next day, back in Paris, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and declared the new Republic. Goethe, who was at Valmy, was to write that from that day forth began a new era in the history of the world.

With

Michael Rowe
Reader in European History at King’s College London

Heidi Mehrkens
Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen

And

Colin Jones
Professor Emeritus of History at Queen Mary, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list

T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787-1802 (Hodder Education, 1996)

Elizabeth Cross, ‘The Myth of the Foreign Enemy? The Brunswick Manifesto and the Radicalization of the French Revolution’ (French History 25/2, 2011)

Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792-1801 (Routledge, 2018)

John A. Lynn, ‘Valmy’ (MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History, Fall 1992)

Munro Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the
baron de Breteuil (Macmillan, 2002)

Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Penguin Books, 1989)

Samuel F. Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy: The Transformation of the French Army in an Age of Revolution (University Press of Colorado, 1998)

Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1792–1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss slime mould, a basic organism that grows on logs, cowpats and compost heaps. Scientists have found difficult to categorise slime mould: in 1868, the biologist Thomas Huxley asked: ‘Is this a plant, or is it an animal? Is it both or is it neither?’ and there is a great deal scientists still don’t know about it.

But despite not having a brain, slime mould can solve complex problems: it can find the most efficient way round a maze and has been used to map Tokyo’s rail network. Researchers are using it to help find treatments for cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, and computer scientists have designed an algorithm based on slime mould behaviour to learn about dark matter. It’s even been sent to the international space station to help study the effects of weightlessness.

With

Jonathan Chubb
Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology at University College, London

Elinor Thompson
Reader in microbiology and plant science at the University of Greenwich

And

Merlin Sheldrake
Biologist and writer

Producer: Eliane Glaser

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.

With

Jenny Uglow
Writer and Biographer

Rosemary Sweet
Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester

And

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (Phoenix, 2002)

Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021)

Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (British Museum Press, 1996)

Berg Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Iris Moon, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024)

Rosemary Sweet, Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (Faber and Faber, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work 'Parallel Lives' which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world. Plutarch was clear that he was writing lives, not histories, and he wrote these very focussed accounts in pairs to contrast and compare the characters of famous Greeks and Romans, side by side, along with their virtues and vices. This focus on the inner lives of great men was to fascinate Shakespeare, who drew on Plutarch considerably when writing his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. While few followed his approach of setting lives in pairs, Plutarch's work was to influence countless biographers especially from the Enlightenment onwards.

With

Judith Mossman
Professor Emerita of Classics at Coventry University

Andrew Erskine
Professor of Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh

And

Paul Cartledge
AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Mark Beck (ed.), A Companion to Plutarch (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)

Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6

Raphaëla Dubreuil, Theater and Politics in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Brill, 2023)

Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Noreen Humble (ed.), Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (Classical Press of Wales, 2010)

Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (Yale University Press, 2002)

Hugh Liebert, Plutarch's Politics: Between City and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales, 2002)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Greek Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Hellenistic Lives (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2023)

Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2011)

Plutarch (trans. Richard Talbert), On Sparta (Penguin, 2005)

Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), The Rise of Rome (Penguin, 2013)

Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), Rome in Crisis: Nine Lives (Penguin, 2010)

Plutarch (trans. Rex Warner), The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives (Penguin, 2006)

Plutarch (trans. Thomas North, ed. Judith Mossman), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Wordsworth, 1998)

Geert Roskam, Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

D. A. Russell, Plutarch (2nd ed., Bristol Classical Press, 2001)

Philip A. Stadter, Plutarch and his Roman Readers (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Frances B. Titchener and Alexei V. Zadorojnyi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the great unanswered questions in science: how and where did life on Earth begin, what did it need to thrive and could it be found elsewhere? Charles Darwin speculated that we might look for the cradle of life here in 'some warm little pond'; more recently the focus moved to ocean depths, while new observations in outer space and in laboratories raise fresh questions about the potential for lifeforms to develop and thrive, or 'habitability' as it is termed. What was the chemistry needed for life to begin and is it different from the chemistry we have now? With that in mind, what signs of life should we be looking for in the universe to learn if we are alone?

With

Jayne Birkby
Associate Professor of Exoplanetary Sciences at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Brasenose College

Saidul Islam
Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Kings College, London

And

Oliver Shorttle
Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Grinspoon, Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet (Basic Books, 1998)

Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos (Allen Lane, 2024)

Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (‎Princeton University Press, 2004)

Charles H. Langmuir and Wallace Broecker, How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind (Princeton University Press, 2012)

Joshua Winn, The Little Book of Exoplanets (Princeton University Press, 2023)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. Nizami Ganjavi (c1141–1209) is was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan and his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian-speaking lands and beyond. Nizami is best known for his Khamsa, a set of five epic poems that contains a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Khosrow II (c570-628) and the Christian princess Shirin (unknown-628) and the legend of Layla and Majnun. Not only did he write romances: his poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany and the life of Alexander the Great.

With

Christine van Ruymbeke
Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge

Narguess Farzad
Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at SOAS, University of London

And

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Laurence Binyon, The Poems of Nizami (The Studio Limited, 1928)

Barbara Brend, Treasures of Herat: Two Manuscripts of the Khamsah of Nizami in the British Library (Gingko, 2020)

Barbara Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, 1995)

J-C. Burgel and C. van Ruymbeke, A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (Leiden University Press, 2011)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. P.J. Chelkowski), Mirror of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Dick Davis), Layli and Majnun (Penguin Books, 2021)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of Layla and Majnun (first published 1966: Omega Publications, 1997)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of the Seven Princesses (Bruno Cassirer Ltd, 1976)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Julie Scott Meisami, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Colin Turner), Layla and Majnun (Blake Publishing, 1997)

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance (Brill, 2003)

Kamran Talattof, Jerome W. Clinton, and K. Allin Luther, The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (Palgrave, 2000)

C. van Ruymbeke, Science and Poetry in Medieval Persia: The Botany of Nizami's Khamsa (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the intense political activity at the turn of the 18th Century, when many politicians in London went to great lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and others went to equal lengths to oppose them. Queen Anne had no surviving children and, following the old rules, there were at least 50 Catholic candidates ahead of any Protestant ones and among those by far the most obvious candidate was James, the only son of James II. Yet with the passing of the Act of Settlement in 1701 ahead of Anne's own succession, focus turned to Europe and to Princess Sophia, an Electress of the Holy Roman Empire in Hanover who, as a granddaughter of James I, thus became next in line to be crowned at Westminster Abbey. It was not clear that Hanover would want this role, given its own ambitions and the risks, in Europe, of siding with Protestants, and soon George I was minded to break the rules of succession so that he would be the last Hanoverian monarch as well as the first.

With

Andreas Gestrich
Professor Emeritus at Trier University and Former Director of the German Historical Institute in London

Elaine Chalus
Professor of British History at the University of Liverpool

And

Mark Knights
Professor of History at the University of Warwick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

J.M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (Cambridge University Press, 1967)

Jeremy Black, The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty (Hambledon Continuum, 2006)

Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture 1696-1722 (Manchester University Press, 2003), especially his chapter ‘Anglia libera: Protestant liberties and the Hanoverian succession, 1700–14’

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 – 1837 (Yale University Press, 2009)

Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (‎Ashgate, 2015)

Ragnhild Hatton, George I: Elector and King (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1979)

Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Mark Knights, Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell (Blackwell, 2012)

Joanna Marschner, Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court (Yale University Press, 2014)

Ashley Marshall, ‘Radical Steele: Popular Politics and the Limits of Authority’ (Journal of British Studies 58, 2019)

Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture 1714-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (Yale University Press, 2006)

A.C. Thompson, George II : King and Elector (Yale University Press, 2011)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

With

Guido Bonsaver
Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford

Jennifer Burns
Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick

And

Beatrice Sica
Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Elio Baldi, The Author in Criticism: Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020)

Elio Baldi and Cecilia Schwartz, Circulation, Translation and Reception Across Borders: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Around the World (Routledge, 2024)

Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially the chapter ‘Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco: Postmodern Masters’

James Butler, ‘Infinite Artichoke’ (London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 12, 15 June 2023)

Italo Calvino (trans. Martin McLaughlin), The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (first published 1947; Penguin Classics, 2009)

Italo Calvino (trans. Mikki Taylor), The Baron in the Trees (first published 1957; Vintage Classics, 2021)

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo (first published 1963; Vintage Classics, 2023)

Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver and Ann Goldstein), Difficult Loves and Other Stories (first published 1970; Vintage Classics, 2018)

Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), Invisible Cities (first published 1972; Vintage Classics, 1997)

Italo Calvino (trans. Patrick Creagh), The Uses of Literature (first published 1980; Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Italo Calvino (trans. Geoffrey Brock), Six Memos for the Next Millennium (first published 1988; Penguin Classics, 2016)

Italo Calvino (trans. Tim Parks), The Road to San Giovanni (first published 1990; HMH Books, 2014)

Italo Calvino (trans. Ann Goldstein), The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays (Mariner Books Classics, 2023)

Kathryn Hume, Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos (Clarendon Press, 1992)

Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press, 1998)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 2000-year-old device which transformed our understanding of astronomy in ancient Greece. In 1900 a group of sponge divers found the wreck of a ship off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the items salvaged was a corroded bronze object, the purpose of which was not at first clear. It turned out to be one of the most important discoveries in marine archaeology. Over time, researchers worked out that it was some kind of astronomical analogue computer, the only one to survive from this period as bronze objects were so often melted down for other uses. In recent decades, detailed examination of the Antikythera Mechanism using the latest scientific techniques indicates that it is a particularly intricate tool for showing the positions of planets, the sun and moon, with a complexity and precision not surpassed for over a thousand years.

With

Mike Edmunds
Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University

Jo Marchant
Science journalist and author of 'Decoding the Heavens' on the Antikythera Mechanism

And

Liba Taub
Professor Emerita in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Scholar at the Deutsches Museum, Munich

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Derek de Solla Price, Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism (American Philosophical Society Press, 1974)

M. G. Edmunds, ‘The Antikythera mechanism and the mechanical universe’ (Contemp. Phys. 55, 2014)

M.G. Edmunds, ’The Mechanical Universe’ (Astronomy & Geophysics, 64, 2023)

James Evans and J. Lennart Berggren, Geminos's Introduction to the Phenomena: A Translation and Study of a Hellenistic Survey of Astronomy (Princeton University Press, 2006)

T. Freeth et al., ‘Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera mechanism’ (Nature 454, 2008)

Alexander Jones, A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer (Windmill Books, 2009)

J.H. Seiradakis and M.G. Edmunds, ‘Our current knowledge of the Antikythera Mechanism’ (Nature Astronomy 2, 2018)

Liba Taub, Ancient Greek and Roman Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who, according to the French philosopher Simone Weil, wrote ‘the most beautiful poem in the world’. Herbert gave his poems on his relationship with God to a friend, to be published after his death if they offered comfort to any 'dejected pour soul' but otherwise be burned. They became so popular across the range of Christians in the 17th Century that they were printed several times, somehow uniting those who disliked each other but found a common admiration for Herbert; Charles I read them before his execution, as did his enemies. Herbert also wrote poems prolifically and brilliantly in Latin and these he shared during his lifetime both when he worked as orator at Cambridge University and as a parish priest in Bemerton near Salisbury. He went on to influence poets from Coleridge to Heaney and, in parish churches today, congregations regularly sing his poems set to music as hymns.

With

Helen Wilcox
Professor Emerita of English Literature at Bangor University

Victoria Moul
Formerly Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at UCL

And

Simon Jackson
Director of Music and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Cornell University Press, 1977)

Thomas M. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Penguin, 2014)

George Herbert (eds. John Drury and Victoria Moul), The Complete Poetry (Penguin, 2015)

George Herbert (ed. Helen Wilcox), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Simon Jackson, George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (first published by Chatto and Windus, 1954; Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New York, 1981)

Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Harvard University Press, 1975)

James Boyd White, This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert (University of Michigan Press, 1995)

Helen Wilcox (ed.), George Herbert. 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable rise of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike other Italian cities of the early medieval period, Venice had not been settled during the Roman Empire. Rather, it was a refuge for those fleeing unrest after the fall of Rome who settled on these boggy islands on a lagoon and developed into a power that ran an empire from mainland Italy, down the Adriatic coast, across the Peloponnese to Crete and Cyprus, past Constantinople and into the Black Sea. This was a city without walls, just one of the surprises for visitors who marvelled at the stability and influence of Venice right up to the 17th Century when the Ottomans, Spain, France and the Hapsburgs were to prove too much especially with trade shifting to the Atlantic.

With

Maartje van Gelder
Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Amsterdam

Stephen Bowd
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh

And

Georg Christ
Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Manchester

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Michel Balard and Christian Buchet (eds.), The Sea in History: The Medieval World (Boydell & Brewer, 2017), especially ‘The Naval Power of Venice in the Eastern Mediterranean’ by Ruthy Gertwagen

Stephen D. Bowd, Venice's Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Harward University Press, 2010)

Frederic Chapin Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)

Georg Christ and Franz-Julius Morche (eds.), Cultures of Empire: Rethinking Venetian rule 1400–1700: Essays in Honour of Benjamin Arbel (Brill, 2020), especially ‘Orating Venice's Empire: Politics and Persuasion in Fifteenth Century Funeral Orations’ by Monique O'Connell

Eric R. Dursteler, A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 (Brill, 2013), especially ‘Venice's Maritime Empire in the Early Modern Period’ by Benjamin Arbel

Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (Yale University Press, 2007)

Joanne M. Ferraro, Venice: History of the Floating City (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Maria Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Maartje van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchant Community in Early Modern Venice, 1590-1650 (Brill, 2009)

Deborah Howard, The Architectural History of Venice (Yale University Press, 2004)

Kristin L. Huffman (ed.), A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City (Duke University Press, 2024)

Peter Humfrey, Venice and the Veneto: Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

John Jeffries Martin and Dennis Romano (eds.), Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

Erin Maglaque, Venice’s Intimate Empire: Family Life and Scholarship in the Renaissance Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2018)

Michael E Mallett and John Rigby Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State Venice, c.1400 to 1617 (Cambridge University Press, 1984)

William Hardy McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe (The University of Chicago Press, 1974)

Jan Morris, The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (Faber & Faber, 1980)

Monique O'Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)

Dennis Romano, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (Oxford University Press, 2023)

David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

David Sanderson Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580 (Thames and Hudson, 1970)

Sandra Toffolo, Describing the City, Describing the State: Representations of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma in the Renaissance (Brill, 2020)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction. When Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women, she only did so as her publisher refused to publish her father's book otherwise and as she hoped it would make money. It made Alcott's fortune. This coming of age story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, each overcoming their own moral flaws, has delighted generations of readers and was so popular from the start that Alcott wrote the second part in 1869 and further sequels and spin-offs in the coming years. Her work has inspired countless directors, composers and authors to make many reimagined versions ever since, with the sisters played by film actors such as Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson.

With

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Erin Forbes
Senior Lecturer in African American and U.S. Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric and Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Louisa May Alcott (ed. Madeline B Stern), Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (William Morrow & Co, 1997)

Kate Block, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley, March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women (Library of America, 2019)

Anne Boyd Rioux, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)

Azelina Flint, The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti (Routledge, 2021)

Robert Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007)

Bethany C. Morrow, So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix (St Martin’s Press, 2021)

Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (eds.), Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott (Grey House Publishing Inc, 2016)

Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (Picador, 2010)

Daniel Shealy (ed.), Little Women at 150 (University of Mississippi Press, 2022)

Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago, 2009)

Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson (eds.), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave, 2016), especially “The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls” by Hilary Emmett

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (first published 1950; Northeastern University Press, 1999)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead to tyranny. His target was centralised planning, arguing this disempowered individuals and wasted their knowledge, while empowering those ill-suited to run an economy. He was concerned about the support for the perceived success of Soviet centralisation, when he saw this and Fascist systems as two sides of the same coin. When Reader's Digest selectively condensed Hayek’s book in 1945, and presented it not so much as a warning against tyranny as a proof against socialism, it became phenomenally influential around the world.

With

Bruce Caldwell
Research Professor of Economics at Duke University and Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy

Melissa Lane
The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the 50th Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London

And

Ben Jackson
Professor of Modern History and fellow of University College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Bruce Caldwell, ‘The Road to Serfdom After 75 Years’ (Journal of Economic Literature 58, 2020)

Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life 1899-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

M. Desai, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002)

Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (Polity, 1996)

Friedrich Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning (first published 1935; Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2015), especially ‘The Nature and History of the Problem’ and ‘The Present State of the Debate’ by Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek (ed. Bruce Caldwell), The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition (first published 1944; Routledge, 2008. Also vol. 2 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Condensed Version (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2005; The Reader’s Digest condensation of the book)

Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (American Economic Review, vol. 35, 1945; vol. 15 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press)

Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (first published 1948; University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially the essays ‘Economics and Knowledge’ (1937), ‘Individualism: True and False’ (1945), and ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (1945)

Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (first published 1960; Routledge, 2006)

Friedrich Hayek, Law. Legislation and Liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy (first published 1973 in 3 volumes; single vol. edn, Routledge, 2012)

Ben Jackson, ‘Freedom, the Common Good and the Rule of Law: Hayek and Lippmann on Economic Planning’ (Journal of the History of Ideas 73, 2012)

Robert Leeson (ed.), Hayek: A Collaborative Biography Part I (Palgrave, 2013), especially ‘The Genesis and Reception of The Road to Serfdom’ by Melissa Lane

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills and that he bred the pedigree dogs of his prose to feed the cats of his poetry. Yet it’s for his prose that he’s most famous today, including 'I Claudius', his brilliant account of the debauchery of Imperial Rome, and 'Goodbye to All That', the unforgettable memoir of his early life including the time during the First World War when he was so badly wounded at the Somme that The Times listed him as dead.

With

Paul O’Prey
Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Roehampton, London

Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast

And

Bob Davis
Professor of Religious and Cultural Education at the University of Glasgow

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Robert Graves (ed. Paul O'Prey), In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914-1946 (Hutchinson, 1982)

Robert Graves (ed. Paul O'Prey), Between Moon and Moon: Selected letters of Robert Graves 1946-1972 (Hutchinson, 1984)

Robert Graves (ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward), The Complete Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2003)

Robert Graves, I, Claudius (republished by Penguin, 2006)

Robert Graves, King Jesus (republished by Penguin, 2011)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess (republished by Faber, 1999)

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (republished by Penguin, 2017)

Robert Graves (ed. Michael Longley), Selected Poems (Faber, 2013)

Robert Graves (ed. Fran Brearton, intro. Andrew Motion), Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography: The Original Edition (first published 1929; Penguin Classics, 2014)

William Graves, Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves (Pimlico, 2001)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 (Macmillan, 1986, vol. 1 of the biography)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (Viking, 1990, vol. 2 of the biography)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940-1985 (Orion, 1995, vol. 3 of the biography)

Miranda Seymour: Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (Henry Holt & Co, 1995)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious attack of 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago when somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, Mathias J. Degan. The chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an eight hour working day following a call for a general strike and the police killing of striking workers the day before, at a time when labour relations in America were marked by violent conflict. The bomber was never identified but two of the speakers at the rally, both of then anarchists and six of their supporters were accused of inciting murder. Four of them, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and August Spies were hanged on 11th November 1887 only to be pardoned in the following years while a fifth, Louis Ling, had killed himself after he was convicted. The May International Workers Day was created in their memory.

With

Ruth Kinna
Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University

Christopher Phelps
Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham

And

Gary Gerstle
Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 1984)

Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (Collier Books, 1963)

James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon, 2006)

Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), especially 'Haymarket and the Rise of Syndicalism' by Kenyon Zimmer

Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, Haymarket Scrapbook: 125th Anniversary Edition (AK Press, 2012)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tantalising idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies, somewhere out there in the universe. The idea emerged in the context of Einstein's theories and the challenge has been not so much to prove their unlikely existence as to show why they ought to be impossible. The universe would have to folded back on itself in places, and there would have to be something to make the wormholes and then to keep them open. But is there anywhere in the vast universe like that? Could there be holes that we or more advanced civilisations might travel through, from one galaxy to another and, if not, why not?

With

Toby Wiseman
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London

Katy Clough
Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London

And

Andrew Pontzen
Professor of Cosmology at Durham University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Jim Al-Khalili, Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Machines (Taylor & Francis, 1999)

Andrew Pontzen, The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos (Riverhead Books, 2023)

Claudia de Rham, The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Carl Sagan, Contact (Simon and Schuster, 1985)

Kip Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994)

Kip Thorne, Science of Interstellar (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014)

Matt Visser, Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking (American Institute of Physics Melville, NY, 1996)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the major figures in Victorian British politics. Disraeli (1804 -1881) served both as Prime Minister twice and, for long periods, as leader of the opposition. Born a Jew, he was only permitted to enter Parliament as his father had him baptised into the Church of England when he was twelve. Disraeli was a gifted orator and, outside Parliament, he shared his views widely through several popular novels including Sybil or The Two Nations, which was to inspire the idea of One Nation Conservatism. He became close to Queen Victoria and she mourned his death with a primrose wreath, an event marked for years after by annual processions celebrating his life in politics.

With

Lawrence Goldman
Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter's College, University of Oxford

Emily Jones
Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester

And

Daisy Hay
Professor of English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Robert Blake, Disraeli (first published 1966; Faber & Faber, 2010)

M. Dent, ‘Disraeli and the Bible’ (Journal of Victorian Culture 29, 2024)

Benjamin Disraeli (ed. N. Shrimpton), Sybil; or, The Two Nations (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Daisy Hay, Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance (Chatto & Windus, 2015)

Douglas Hurd and Edward Young, Disraeli: or, The Two Lives (W&N, 2014)

Emily Jones, ‘Impressions of Disraeli: Mythmaking and the History of One Nation Conservatism, 1881-1940’ (French Journal of British Studies 28, 2023)

William Kuhn, The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (Simon & Schuster, 2007)

Robert O'Kell, Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2013)

J.P. Parry, ‘Disraeli and England’ (Historical Journal 43, 2000)

J.P. Parry, ‘Disraeli, the East and Religion: Tancred in Context’ (English Historical Review 132, 2017)

Cecil Roth, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (New York Philosophical library, 1952)

Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC, 1967)

John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford University Press, 1990)

P.J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987), especially the chapter ‘Style and Substance in Disraelian Social Reform’ by P. Ghosh

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that 'eat' bacteria. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their Petri dishes was making bacteria disappear and they called these bacteriophages, things that eat bacteria. From studying these phages, it soon became clear that they offered countless real or potential benefits for understanding our world, from the tracking of diseases to helping unlock the secrets of DNA to treatments for long term bacterial infections. With further research, they could be an answer to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

With

Martha Clokie
Director for the Centre for Phage Research and Professor of Microbiology at the University of Leicester

James Ebdon
Professor of Environmental Microbiology at the University of Brighton

And

Claas Kirchhelle
Historian and Chargé de Recherche at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research’s CERMES3 Unit in Paris.

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

James Ebdon, ‘Tackling sources of contamination in water: The age of phage’ (Microbiologist, Society for Applied Microbiology, Vol 20.1, 2022)

Thomas Häusler, Viruses vs. Superbugs: A Solution to the Antibiotics Crisis? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Tom Ireland, The Good Virus: The Untold Story of Phages: The Mysterious Microbes that Rule Our World, Shape Our Health and Can Save Our Future (Hodder Press, 2024)

Claas Kirchhelle and Charlotte Kirchhelle, ‘Northern Normal–Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939-2000)’ (SocArXiv Papers, 2024)

Dmitriy Myelnikov, ‘An alternative cure: the adoption and survival of bacteriophage therapy in the USSR, 1922–1955’ (Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73, no. 4, 2018)

Forest Rohwer, Merry Youle, Heather Maughan and Nao Hisakawa, Life in our Phage World: A Centennial Field Guide to Earth’s most Diverse Inhabitants (Wholon, 2014)

Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson (2019) The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir (Hachette Books, 2020)

William C. Summers, Félix d`Herelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology (Yale University Press, 1999)

William C. Summers, The American Phage Group: Founders of Molecular Biology (University Press, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the great French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) in London, initially in 1870 and then from 1899. He spent his first visit in poverty, escaping from war in France, while by the second he had become so commercially successful that he stayed at the Savoy Hotel. There, from his balcony, he began a series of almost a hundred paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city at that time, with fog and smoke almost obscuring the bridges, boats and Houses of Parliament. The pollution was terrible for health but the diffraction through the sooty droplets offered an ever-changing light that captivated Monet, and he was to paint the Thames more than he did his water lilies or haystacks or Rouen Cathedral. On his return to France, Monet appeared to have a new confidence to explore an art that was more abstract than impressionist.

With

Karen Serres
Senior Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, London
Curator of the exhibition 'Monet and London. Views of the Thames'

Frances Fowle
Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Curator of French Art at the National Galleries of Scotland

And

Jackie Wullschläger
Chief Art Critic for the Financial Times and author of ‘Monet, The Restless Vision’

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Producer: Simon Tillotson
Studio production: John Goudie

Reading list:

Caroline Corbeau Parsons, Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904 (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Frances Fowle, Monet and French Landscape: Vétheuil and Normandy (National Galleries of Scotland, 2007), especially the chapter ‘Making Money out of Monet: Marketing Monet in Britain 1870-1905’

Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (Harry N. Abrams, 1983)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Yale University Press, 1990)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century (Yale University Press, 1998)

Katharine A. Lochnan, Turner, Whistler, Monet (Tate Publishing, 2005)

Nicholas Reed, Monet and the Thames: Paintings and Modern Views of Monet’s London (Lilburne Press, 1998)

Grace Seiberling, Monet in London (High Museum of Art, 1988)

Karen Serres, Frances Fowle and Jennifer A. Thompson, Monet and London: Views of the Thames (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2024 – catalogue to accompany Courtauld Gallery exhibition)

Charles Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective (Random House, 1985)

Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: The Triumph of Impressionism (first published 1996; Taschen, 2022)

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the doctrine of Karma as developed initially among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists in India from the first millennium BCE. Common to each is an idea, broadly, that you reap what you sow: how you act in this world has consequences either for your later life or your future lives, depending on your view of rebirth and transmigration. From this flow different ideas including those about free will, engagement with the world or disengagement, the nature of ethics and whether intention matters, and these ideas continue to develop today.

With

Monima Chadha
Professor of Indian Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

Jessica Frazier
Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

And

Karen O’Brien-Kop
Lecturer in Asian Religions at Kings College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

J. Bronkhorst, Karma (University of Hawaii Press, 2011)

J. H. Davis (ed.), A Mirror is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2017), especially ‘Buddhism Without Reincarnation? Examining the Prospects of a “Naturalized” Buddhism’ by J. Westerhoff

J. Ganeri (ed.), Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002), especially ‘Karma and the Moral Order’ by B. K. Matilal

Y. Krishan, The Doctrine of Karma: Its Origin and Development in Brāhmaṇical, Buddhist and Jaina Traditions (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1997)

N.K.G. Mendis (ed.), The Questions of King Milinda: An Abridgement of Milindapañha (Buddhist Publication Society, 1993)

M. Siderits, How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022)

M. Vargas and J. Dorris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (Oxford Univesrity Press, 2022), especially ‘Karma, Moral Responsibility and Buddhist Ethics’ by B. Finnigan

J. Zu, 'Collective Karma Cluster Concepts in Chinese Canonical Sources: A Note' (Journal of Global Buddhism, Vol.24: 2, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" (1749) by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), one of the most influential of the early English novels and a favourite of Dickens. Coleridge wrote that it had one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned'. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays that were so painful for their targets in government that, from then until the 1960s, plays required approval before being staged; seeking other ways to make a living, Fielding turned to law and to fiction. 'Tom Jones' is one of the great comic novels, with the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest raconteur. While other authors might present Tom as a rake and a libertine, Fielding makes him the hero for his fundamental good nature, so offering a caution not to judge anyone too soon, if ever.

With

Judith Hawley
Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Henry Power
Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter

And

Charlotte Roberts
Associate Professor of English Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge, 1989)

J. M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2012)

S. Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

J.A. Downie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Henry Fielding (ed. John Bender and Simon Stern), The History of Tom Jones (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Henry Fielding (ed. Tom Keymer), The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin Classics, 1996)

Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Wiley Blackwell, 2000)

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (first published 1972; Routledge, 2021)

Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander. This was the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking world, when the Earls controlled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts, from Dublin round to Lindisfarne. The Saga combines myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, plotted and fought.

With

Judith Jesch
Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham

Jane Harrison
Archaeologist and Research Associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities

And

Alex Woolf
Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Theodore M. Andersson, The Growth of Medieval Icelandic Sagas, 1180-1280, (Cornell University Press, 2012)

Margaret Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Robert Cook (trans.), Njals Saga (Penguin, 2001)

Barbara E. Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness from AD 870 to 1470 (John Donald Short Run Press, 2013)

Shami Ghosh, Kings’ Sagas and Norwegian History: Problems and Perspectives (Brill, 2011)

J. Graham-Campbell and C. E. Batey, Vikings in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)

David Griffiths, J. Harrison and Michael Athanson, Beside the Ocean: Coastal Landscapes at the Bay of Skaill, Marwick, and Birsay Bay, Orkney: Archaeological Research 2003-18 (Oxbow Books, 2019)

Jane Harrison, Building Mounds: Orkney and the Vikings (Routledge, forthcoming)

Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (Routledge, 2017)

Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015)

Judith Jesch, ‘Earl Rögnvaldr of Orkney, a Poet of the Viking Diaspora’ (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 4, 2013)

Judith Jesch, The Poetry of Orkneyinga Saga (H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures, University of Cambridge, 2020)

Devra Kunin (trans.), A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Olafr (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001)

Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)

Tom Muir, Orkney in the Sagas (Orkney Islands Council, 2005)

Else Mundal (ed.), Dating the Sagas: Reviews and Revisions (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013)

Heather O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction, (John Wiley & Sons, 2004)
Heather O'Donoghue and Eleanor Parker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), especially 'Landscape and Material Culture' by Jane Harrison and ‘Diaspora Sagas’ by Judith Jesch

Richard Oram, Domination and Lordship, Scotland 1070-1230, (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)

Olwyn Owen (ed.), The World of Orkneyinga Saga: The Broad-cloth Viking Trip (Orkney Islands Council, 2006)

Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (trans.), Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (Penguin Classics, 1981)

Snorri Sturluson (trans. tr. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes), Heimskringla, vol. I-III (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2011-2015)

William P. L. Thomson, The New History of Orkney (Birlinn Ltd, 2008)

Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), especially chapter 7

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the canonical figures from the history of political thought. Marsilius of Padua (c1275 to c1343) wrote 'Defensor Pacis' (The Defender of the Peace) around 1324 when the Papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor and the French King were fighting over who had supreme power on Earth. In this work Marsilius argued that the people were the source of all power and they alone could elect a leader to act on their behalf; they could remove their leaders when they chose and, afterwards, could hold them to account for their actions. He appeared to favour an elected Holy Roman Emperor and he was clear that there were no grounds for the Papacy to have secular power, let alone gather taxes and wealth, and that clerics should return to the poverty of the Apostles. Protestants naturally found his work attractive in the 16th Century when breaking with Rome. In the 20th Century Marsilius has been seen as an early advocate for popular sovereignty and republican democracy, to the extent possible in his time.

With

Annabel Brett
Professor of Political Thought and History at the University of Cambridge

George Garnett
Professor of Medieval History and Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford

And

Serena Ferente
Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Sounds Audio Production

Reading list:

Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially 'Popolo and law in Marsilius and the jurists' by Serena Ferente

J. Canning, Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296-1417 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

H.W.C. Davis (ed.), Essays in Mediaeval History presented to Reginald Lane Poole (Clarendon Press, 1927), especially ‘The authors cited in the Defensor Pacis’ by C.W. Previté-Orton

George Garnett, Marsilius of Padua and ‘The Truth of History’ (Oxford University Press, 2006)

J.R. Hale, J.R.L. Highfield and B. Smalley (eds.), Europe in the Late Middle Ages (Faber and Faber, 1965), especially ‘Marsilius of Padua and political thought of his time’ by N. Rubinstein

Joel Kaye, 'Equalization in the Body and the Body Politic: From Galen to Marsilius of Padua’ (Mélanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome 125, 2013)

Xavier Márquez (ed.), Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts (Bloomsbury, 2018), especially ‘Consent and popular sovereignty in medieval political thought: Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis’ by T. Shogimen

Marsiglio of Padua (trans. Cary J. Nederman), Defensor Minor and De Translatione Imperii (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Marsilius of Padua (trans. Annabel Brett), The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Gerson Moreño-Riano (ed.), The World of Marsilius of Padua (Brepols, 2006)

Gerson Moreno-Riano and Cary J. Nederman (eds), A Companion to Marsilius of Padua (Brill, 2012)

A. Mulieri, S. Masolini and J. Pelletier (eds.), Marsilius of Padua: Between history, Politics, and Philosophy (Brepols, 2023)

C. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)

Vasileios Syros, Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2012)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.

With

Yangwen Zheng
Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester

Rana Mitter
The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School

And

Ronald Po
Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China (first published 1956; Open Road Media, 2013)

Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (first published 1906; General Books LLC, 2009)

Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, 2013)

Princess Der Ling, Old Buddha (first published 1929; Kessinger Publishing, 2007)

Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987)

John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.), Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2002)

Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)

Keith Laidler, The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (Wiley, 2003)

Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)

Anchee Min, The Last Empress (Bloomsbury, 2011)

Ying-Chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making (Yale University Press, 2023).

Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (first published 1910; Forgotten Books, 2024)

Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Atlantic Books, 2019)

Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow), Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023)

Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Vintage, 1993)

Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (first published 1991; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)

X. L. Woo, Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine (Algora Publishing, 2003)

Zheng Yangwen, Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History (Manchester University Press, 2018)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010). Her central question was, “Why be moral?” Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foot spent her life working through her instinct that there was something lacking in the prevailing philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s which held that values could only be subjective. Could there really be no objective response to the horrors of the concentration camps that she had seen on newsreels, no way of saying that such acts were morally wrong? Foot developed an ethics based on virtues, in which humans needed virtues to flourish as surely as plants needed light and water. While working through her ideas she explored applied ethics and the difference between doing something and letting it happen, an idea she illustrated with what became The Trolley Problem.

With

Anil Gomes
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of Oxford

Sophie Grace Chappell
Professor of Philosophy at the Open University

And

Rachael Wiseman
Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford University Press, 1978)

Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001)

John Hacker-Wright, Philippa Foot's Moral Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up To Something (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Chatto, 2022)

Dan Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press), especially ‘Virtue Ethics in the Twentieth Century’ by Timothy (now Sophie Grace) Chappell

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the greatest poet of his age', Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt's poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.

With

Brian Cummings
50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York

Susan Brigden
Retired Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford

And

Laura Ashe
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Routledge, 2016)

Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (Faber, 2012)

Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy (Short Books, 2011)

Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Patricia Thomson (ed.), Thomas Wyatt: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1995)

Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Thomas Wyatt (ed. R. A. Rebholz), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1978)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet which is closest to our Sun. We see it as an evening or a morning star, close to where the Sun has just set or is about to rise, and observations of Mercury helped Copernicus understand that Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun, so displacing Earth from the centre of our system. In the 20th century, further observations of Mercury helped Einstein prove his general theory of relativity. For the last 50 years we have been sending missions there to reveal something of Mercury's secrets and how those relate to the wider universe, and he latest, BepiColombo, is out there in space now.

With

Emma Bunce
Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics and Director of the Institute for Space at the University of Leicester

David Rothery
Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University

And

Carolin Crawford
Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Reading list:

Emma Bunce, ‘All (X-ray) eyes on Mercury’ (Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 64, Issue 4, August 2023)

Emma Bunce et al, ‘The BepiColombo Mercury Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer: Science Goals, Instrument Performance and Operations’ (Space Science Reviews: SpringerLink, volume 216, article number 126, Nov 2020)

David A. Rothery, Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2014)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest European playwrights of the twentieth century. The aim of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was to make the familiar ‘strange’: with plays such as Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle he wanted his audience not to sit back but to engage, observe and discover the contradictions in life, and act on what they learnt. He developed this approach in turbulent times, from Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazis, to exile in Scandinavia and America and then post-war life in East Berlin, and he has since inspired dramatists around the world.

With

Laura Bradley
Professor of German and Theatre at the University of Edinburgh

David Barnett
Professor of Theatre at the University of York

And

Tom Kuhn
Professor of Twentieth Century German Literature, Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh's College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Reading list:

David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014)

David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Laura Bradley and Karen Leeder (eds.), Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity (Camden House, 2015)

Laura Bradley, ‘Training the Audience: Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship’ (The Modern Language Review, 111, 2016)

Bertolt Brecht (ed. Marc Silberman, Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles), Brecht on Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Bertolt Brecht (ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman), Brecht on Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Bertolt Brecht (trans. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine), The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Norton Liveright, 2018) which includes the poem ‘Spring 1938’ read by Tom Kuhn in this programme

Stephen Brockmann (ed.), Bertolt Brecht in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (Routledge, 2009)

Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Ronald Speirs, Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

David Zoob, Brecht: A Practical Handbook (Nick Hern Books, 2018)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Napoleon Bonaparte's temporary return to power in France in 1815, following his escape from exile on Elba . He arrived with fewer than a thousand men, yet three weeks later he had displaced Louis XVIII and taken charge of an army as large as any that the Allied Powers could muster individually. He saw that his best chance was to pick the Allies off one by one, starting with the Prussian and then the British/Allied armies in what is now Belgium. He appeared to be on the point of victory at Waterloo yet somehow it eluded him, and his plans were soon in tatters. His escape to America thwarted, he surrendered on 15th July and was exiled again but this time to Saint Helena. There he wrote his memoirs to help shape his legacy, while back in Europe there were still fears of his return.

With

Michael Rowe
Reader in European History at Kings College London

Katherine Astbury
Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick

And

Zack White
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth

Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production.

Reading list:

Katherine Astbury and Mark Philp (ed.), Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy (Palgrave, 2018)

Jeremy Black, The Battle of Waterloo: A New History (Icon Books, 2010)

Michael Broers, Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Philip Dwyer, Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in power 1799-1815 (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Charles J. Esdaile, Napoleon, France and Waterloo: The Eagle Rejected (Pen & Sword Military, 2016)

Gareth Glover, Waterloo: Myth and Reality (Pen & Sword Military, 2014)

Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (Granta, 2014)

John Hussey, Waterloo: The Campaign of 1815, Volume 1, From Elba to Ligny and Quatre Bras (Greenhill Books, 2017)

Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great (Penguin Books, 2015)

Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Zack White (ed.), The Sword and the Spirit: Proceedings of the first ‘War & Peace in the Age of Napoleon’ Conference (Helion and Company, 2021)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristophanes' comedy in which the women of Athens and Sparta, led by Lysistrata, secure peace in the long-running war between them by staging a sex strike. To the men in the audience in 411BC, the idea that peace in the Peloponnesian War could be won so easily was ridiculous and the thought that their wives could have so much power over them was even more so. However Aristophanes' comedy also has the women seizing the treasure in the Acropolis that was meant to fund more fighting in an emergency, a fund the Athenians had recently had to draw on. They were in a perilous position and, much as they might laugh at Aristophanes' jokes, they knew there were real concerns about the actual cost of the war in terms of wealth and manpower.

With

Paul Cartledge
AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge

Sarah Miles
Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University

And

James Robson
Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Lysistrata (Oxford University Press, 1987)

Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women (Routledge, 2010)

Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Birds; Lysistrata; Women at the Thesmophoria (Loeb Classical Library series, Harvard University Press, 2014)

Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata and Other Plays: The Acharnians; The Clouds; Lysistrata (Penguin, 2002)

Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata (Aris & Phillips, 1998)

Paul Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (Bristol Classical Press, 1999)

Kenneth Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (University of California Press, 1972)

Germaine Greer, Lysistrata: The Sex Strike: After Aristophanes (Aurora Metro Press, 2000)

Tony Harrison, The Common Chorus: A Version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Faber & Faber, 1992)

Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995)

S. Douglas Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson (De Gruyter, 2013), especially 'She (Don't) Gotta Have It: African-American reception of Lysistrata' by Kevin Wetmore

James Robson, Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions (Bloomsbury, 2023)

James Robson, Aristophanes: An Introduction (Duckworth, 2009)

Ralph M. Rosen and Helene P. Foley (eds.), Aristophanes and Politics. New Studies (Brill, 2020)

Donald Sells, Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2018)

David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Lysistrata: Eight Essays and a New Version of Aristophanes' Provocative Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2010)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and his role in the development of electrical systems towards the end of the nineteenth century. He made his name in New York in the contest over which current should flow into homes and factories in America. Some such as Edison backed direct current or DC while others such as Westinghouse backed alternating current or AC and Nikola Tesla’s invention of a motor that worked on AC swung it for the alternating system that went on to power the modern age. He ensured his reputation and ideas burnt brightly for the next decades, making him synonymous with the lone, genius inventor of the new science fiction.

With

Simon Schaffer
Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge

Jill Jonnes
Historian and author of “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World”

And

Iwan Morus
Professor of History at Aberystwyth University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, Tesla: Master of Lightning (Barnes & Noble Books, 1999)

Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Open University Press, 1988)

Iwan Rhys Morus, Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (Icon Books, 2019)

Iwan Rhys Morus, How The Victorians Took Us To The Moon (Icon, 2022)

David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1991)

John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (first published 1944; Cosimo Classics, 2006)

Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, Biography of a Genius (first published 1996; Citadel Press, 2016)

Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (first published 1919; Martino Fine Books, 2011)

Nikola Tesla, My Inventions and other Writings (Penguin, 2012)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Finnish epic poem that first appeared in print in 1835 in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire and until recently part of Sweden. The compiler of this epic was a doctor, Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who had travelled the land to hear traditional poems about mythical heroes being sung in Finnish, the language of the peasantry, and writing them down in his own order to create this landmark work. In creating The Kalevala, Lönnrot helped the Finns realise they were a distinct people apart from Sweden and Russia, who deserved their own nation state and who came to demand independence, which they won in 1917.

With

Riitta Valijärvi
Associate Professor in Finnish and Minority Languages at University College London

Thomas Dubois
The Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

And

Daniel Abondolo
Formerly Reader in Hungarian at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Nigel Fabb, What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio and Jarkko Niemi (eds), Versification: Metrics in Practice (Finnish Literature Society, 2021)

Riho Grünthal et al., ‘Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread’ (Diachronica, Volume 39, Issue 4, Aug 2022)

Lauri Honko (ed.), The Kalevala and the World's Traditional Epics (Finnish Literature Society, 2002)

The Kalevala Heritage: Archive Recordings of Ancient Finnish Songs. Online Catalogue no. ODE8492.

Mauri Kunnas, The Canine Kalevala (Otava Publishing, 1992)

Kuusi, Matti, et al. (eds.), Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic (Finnish Literature Society, 1977)

Elias Lönnrot (trans. John Martin Crawford), Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland (first published 1887; CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017)

Elias Lönnrot (trans. W. F. Kirby), Kalevala: The Land of the Heroes (first published by J.M. Dent & Sons, 1907, 2 vols.; ‎ Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2000)

Elias Lönnrot (trans. Francis Peabody Magoun Jr.), The Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District (Harvard University Press, 1963)

Elias Lönnrot (trans. Eino Friberg), The Kalevala: Epic of the Finnish People (Otava Publishing, 1988)

Elias Lönnrot (trans. Keith Bosley), The Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Kirsti Mäkinen, Pirkko-Liisa Surojegin, Kaarina Brooks, An Illustrated Kalevala: Myths and Legends from Finland (Floris Books, 2020)

Sami Makkonen, Kalevala: The Graphic Novel (Ablaze, 2024)

Juha Y. Pentikäinen (trans. Ritva Poom), Kalevala Mythology, (Indiana University Press, 1999)

Tina K. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Jonathan Roper (ed.), Alliteration in Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), especially chapter 12 ‘Alliteration in (Balto-) Finnic Languages’ by Frog and Eila Stepanova

Karl Spracklen, Metal Music and the Re-imagining of Masculinity, Place, Race and Nation (Emerald Publishing, 2020), especially the chapter ‘Finnish Folk Metal: Raising Drinking Horns in Mainstream Metal’

Leea Virtanen and Thomas A. DuBois, Finnish Folklore: Studia Fennica Folkloristica 9 (Finnish Literature Society, 2000)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire. Fifty years after Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and introduced a policy of tolerating the faith across the empire, Julian (c.331 - 363 AD) aimed to promote paganism instead, branding Constantine the worst of all his predecessors. Julian was a philosopher-emperor in the mould of Marcus Aurelius and was noted in his lifetime for his letters and his satires, and it was his surprising success as a general in his youth in Gaul that had propelled him to power barely twenty years after a rival had slaughtered his family. Julian's pagan mission and his life were brought to a sudden end while on campaign against the Sasanian Empire in the east, but he left so much written evidence of his ideas that he remains one of the most intriguing of all the Roman emperors and a hero to the humanists of the Enlightenment.

With

James Corke-Webster
Reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College, London

Lea Niccolai
Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Trinity College

And

Shaun Tougher
Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Cardiff University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Polymnia Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography (first published 1981; Routledge, 2014)

Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (eds.), Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate (Classical Press of Wales, 2012)

Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (eds.), The Sons of Constantine, AD 337-361: In the Shadows of Constantine and Julian, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

G.W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (first published 1978; Harvard University Press, 1997)

Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (University of California Press, 2012)

Ari Finkelstein, The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch (University of California Press, 2018)

David Neal Greenwood, Julian and Christianity: Revisiting the Constantinian Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2021)

Lea Niccolai, Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power: Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Stefan Rebenich and Hans-Ulrich Wiemer (eds), A Companion to Julian the Apostate (Brill, 2020)

Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (Routledge, 1995)

H.C. Teitler, The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)

W. C. Wright, The Works of Emperor Julian of Rome (Loeb, 1913-23)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years. While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round a room to new lighter music popularised by Johann Strauss, father and son, such as The Blue Danube. Soon the Waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas and music, from the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev to Moon River and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

With

Susan Jones
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Derek B. Scott
Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Leeds

And

Theresa Buckland
Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of Roehampton

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski, and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Open Book Publishers, 2020)

Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing. Part One: Waltzing Under Attack’ (Dance Research, 36/1, 2018); ‘Part Two: The Waltz Regained’ (Dance Research, 36/2, 2018)

Theresa Jill Buckland, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Erica Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Paul Cooper, ‘The Waltz in England, c. 1790-1820’ (Paper presented at Early Dance Circle conference, 2018)

Sherril Dodds and Susan Cook (eds.), Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Dance and Music (Ashgate, 2013), especially ‘Dancing Out of Time: The Forgotten Boston of Edwardian England’ by Theresa Jill Buckland

Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (first published 1932; Vintage Classics, 2001)

Hilary French, Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (McFarland, 2009)

Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (first published 1932; Virago, 2006)

Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Indiana University Press, 2012)

Eduard Reeser, The History of the Walz (Continental Book Co., 1949)

Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2000), especially ‘Waltz’ by Andrew Lamb

Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz’

Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (Putnam, 1973)

Cheryl A. Wilson, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (first published 1915; William Collins, 2013)

Virginia Woolf, The Years (first published 1937; Vintage Classics, 2016)

David Wyn Jones, The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Sevin H. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Pendragon Press, 2002)

Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. It began with the powerful Cheikh Mokrani and his family and was taken up by hundreds of thousands, becoming the last major revolt there before Algeria’s war of independence in 1954. In the wake of its swift suppression though came further waves of French migrants to settle on newly confiscated lands, themselves displaced by French defeat in Europe and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and their arrival only increased tensions. The Mokrani Revolt came to be seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity, an inspiration to nationalists in the 1950s.

With

Natalya Benkhaled-Vince
Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World, Fellow of University College, University of Oxford

Hannah-Louise Clark
Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow

And

Jim House
Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone History at the University of Leeds

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria: 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters, Algeria and Tunisia 1800–1904 (University of California Press, 1994)

Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘The Islamic Origins of the French Colonial Welfare State: Hospital Finance in Algeria’ (European Review of History, vol. 28, nos 5-6, 2021)

Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘Of jinn theories and germ theories: translating microbes, bacteriological medicine, and Islamic law in Algeria’ (Osiris, vol. 36, 2021)

Brock Cutler, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria (University of Nebraska Press, 2023)

Didier Guignard, 1871: L’Algérie sous Séquestre (CNRS Éditions, 2023)

Idir Hachi, ‘Histoire social de l’insurrection de 1871 et du procès de ses chefs (PhD diss., University of Aix-Marseille, 2017)

Abdelhak Lahlou, Idir Hachi, Isabelle Guillaume, Amélie Gregório and Peter Dunwoodie, ‘L'insurrection kabyle de 1871’ (Etudes françaises volume 57, no 1, 2021)

James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press (2017)

John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2005, 2nd edition)

Jennifer E Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011)

Samia Touati, ‘Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, 1830–1863: Spirituality, Resistance and Womanly Leadership in Colonial Algeria (Societies vol. 8, no. 4, 2018)

Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2015)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what’s known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.

With

Fay Dowker
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London

Harry Cliff
Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge

And

Frank Close
Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Philip Ball, Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (Vintage, 2018)

John Bell, ‘Against 'measurement'’ (Physics World, Vol 3, No 8, 1990)

Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, And The Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2010)

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (first published 1958; Penguin Classics, 2000)

Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (Penguin, 2022)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the infamous assault of an army of the Holy Roman Emperor on the city of Rome in 1527. The troops soon broke through the walls of this holy city and, with their leader shot dead early on, they brought death and destruction to the city on an epic scale. Later writers compared it to the fall of Carthage or Jerusalem and soon the mass murder, torture, rape and looting were followed by disease which was worsened by starvation and opened graves. It has been called the end of the High Renaissance, a conflict between north and south, between Lutherans and Catholics, and a fulfilment of prophecy of divine vengeance and, perhaps more persuasively, a consequence of military leaders not feeding or paying their soldiers other than by looting.

With

Stephen Bowd
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh

Jessica Goethals
Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama

And

Catherine Fletcher
Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Stephen Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (Penguin Classics, 1999)

Benvenuto Cellini (trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella), My Life (Oxford University Press, 2009)

André Chastel (trans. Beth Archer), The Sack of Rome 1527 (Princeton University Press, 1983

Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020)

Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (eds), The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture (Routledge, 2005)

Francesco Guicciardini (trans. Sidney Alexander), The History of Italy (first published 1561; Princeton University Press, 2020)

Luigi Guicciardini (trans. James H. McGregor), The Sack of Rome (first published 1537; Italica Press, 2008)

Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome (2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Lewis Carroll's book which first appeared in print in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. It has since become one of the best known works in English, captivating readers who follow young Alice as she chases a white rabbit, pink eyed, in a waistcoat with pocket watch, down a rabbit hole that becomes a well and into wonderland. There she meets the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and more, all the while growing smaller and larger, finally outgrowing everyone at the trial of Who Stole the Tarts from the Queen of Hearts and exclaiming 'Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!'

With

Franziska Kohlt
Leverhulme Research Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Leeds and the Inaugural Carrollian Fellow of the University of Southern California

Kiera Vaclavik
Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of London

And

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Kate Bailey and Simon Sladen (eds), Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (V&A Publishing, 2021)

Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Will Brooker, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Popular Culture (Continuum, 2004)

Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (first published 1985; Faber and Faber, 2009)

Lewis Carroll (introduced by Martin Gardner), The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)

Gavin Delahunty and Christoph Benjamin Schulz (eds), Alice in Wonderland Through the Visual Arts (Tate Publishing, 2011)

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, 2015)

Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion (Yale University Press, 2016)

Franziska Kohlt, Alice through the Wonderglass: The Surprising Histories of a Children's Classic (Reaktion, forthcoming 2025)

Franziska Kohlt and Justine Houyaux (eds.), Alice: Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2024)

Charlie Lovett, Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith (University of Virginia Press, 2022)

Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (first published 1952; Dalkey Archive Press, 2016)

Kiera Vaclavik, 'Listening to the Alice books' (Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 26, Issue 1, January 2021)

Diane Waggoner, Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press 2020)

Edward Wakeling, The Man and his Circle (IB Tauris, 2014)

Edward Wakeling, The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonné (University of Texas Press, 2015)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the chemical signals coursing through our bodies throughout our lives, produced in separate areas and spreading via the bloodstream. We call these 'hormones' and we produce more than 80 of them of which the best known are arguably oestrogen, testosterone, adrenalin, insulin and cortisol. On the whole hormones operate without us being immediately conscious of them as their goal is homeostasis, maintaining the levels of everything in the body as required without us having to think about them first. Their actions are vital for our health and wellbeing and influence many different aspects of the way our bodies work.

With

Sadaf Farooqi
Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge

Rebecca Reynolds
Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh

And

Andrew Bicknell
Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading

Produced by Victoria Brignell

Reading list:

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (first published 1962; Penguin Classics, 2000)

Stephen Nussey and Saffron Whitehead, Endocrinology: An Integrated Approach (BIOS Scientific Publishers; 2001)

Aylinr Y. Yilmaz, Comprehensive Introduction to Endocrinology for Novices (Independently published, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Hanseatic League or Hansa which dominated North European trade in the medieval period. With a trading network that stretched from Iceland to Novgorod via London and Bruges, these German-speaking Hansa merchants benefitted from tax exemptions and monopolies. Over time, the Hansa became immensely influential as rulers felt the need to treat it well. Kings and princes sometimes relied on loans from the Hansa to finance their wars and an embargo by the Hansa could lead to famine. Eventually, though, the Hansa went into decline with the rise in the nation state’s power, greater competition from other merchants and the development of trade across the Atlantic.

With

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz
Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam

Georg Christ
Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Manchester

And

Sheilagh Ogilvie
Chichele Professor of Economic History at All Souls College, University of Oxford

Producer: Victoria Brignell

Reading list:

James S. Amelang and Siegfried Beer, Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations (Plus-Pisa University Press, 2006), especially `Trade and Politics in the Medieval Baltic: English Merchants and England’s Relations to the Hanseatic League 1370–1437`

Nicholas R. Amor, Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry (Boydell & Brewer, 2011)

B. Ayers, The German Ocean: Medieval Europe around the North Sea (Equinox, 2016)

H. Brand and P. Brood, The German Hanse in Past & Present Europe: A medieval league as a model for modern interregional cooperation? (Castel International Publishers, 2007)

Wendy R. Childs, The Trade and Shipping of Hull, 1300-1500 (East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1990)

Alexander Cowan, Hanseatic League: Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Macmillan, 1970)

John D. Fudge, Cargoes, Embargoes and Emissaries: The Commercial and Political Interaction of England and the German Hanse, 1450-1510 (University of Toronto Press, 1995)

Donald J. Harreld, A Companion to the Hanseatic League (Brill, 2015)

T.H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157 – 1611: A Study of their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy (first published 1991; Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Giampiero Nigro (ed.), Maritime networks as a factor in European integration (Fondazione Istituto Internazionale Di Storia Economica “F. Datini” Prato, University of Firenze, 2019), especially ‘Maritime Networks and Premodern Conflict Management on Multiple Levels. The Example of Danzig and the Giese Family’ by Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

Sheilagh Ogilvie, Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Paul Richards (ed.), Six Essays in Hanseatic History (Poppyland Publishing, 2017)

Paul Richards, King’s Lynn and The German Hanse 1250-1550: A Study in Anglo-German Medieval Trade and Politics (Poppyland Publishing, 2022)

Stephen H. Rigby, The Overseas Trade of Boston, 1279-1548 (Böhlau Verlag, 2023)

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds.), The Hanse in Medieval & Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2012)

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘The late medieval and early modern Hanse as an institution of conflict management’ (Continuity and Change 32/1, Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that some kind of consciousness is present not just in our human brains but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons. This is panpsychism and its proponents argue it offers a compelling alternative to those who say we are nothing but matter, like machines, and to those who say we are both matter and something else we might call soul. It is a third way. Critics argue panpsychism is implausible, an example of how not to approach this problem, yet interest has been growing widely in recent decades partly for the idea itself and partly in the broader context of understanding how consciousness arises.

With

Tim Crane
Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Rector at the Central European University
Director of Research, FWF Cluster of Excellence, Knowledge in Crisis

Joanna Leidenhag,
Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leeds

And

Philip Goff
Professor of Philosophy at Durham University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Anthony Freeman (ed.), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Imprint Academic, 2006), especially 'Realistic Monism' by Galen Strawson

Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for A New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019)

Philip Goff, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023)

David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem (Wipf & Stock, 2008)

Joanna Leidenhag, Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Joanna Leidenhag, ‘Panpsychism and God’ (Philosophy Compass Vol 17, Is 12, e12889)

Hedda Hassel Mørch, Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially the chapter 'Panpsychism'

David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2007)

James van Cleve, 'Mind-Dust or Magic? Panpsychism versus Emergence' (Philosophical Perspectives Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1990)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who inspired one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt. The Bust of Nefertiti is multicoloured and symmetrical, about 49cm/18" high and, despite the missing left eye, still holds the gaze of onlookers below its tall, blue, flat topped headdress. Its discovery in 1912 in Amarna was kept quiet at first but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation, with replicas sent out across the world. Ever since, as with Tutankhamun perhaps, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have barely kept up with the theories, the legends and the speculation, reinvigorated with each new discovery.

With

Aidan Dodson
Honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol

Joyce Tyldesley
Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester

And

Kate Spence
Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Dorothea Arnold (ed.), The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996)

Norman de Garis Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna (6 vols. Egypt Exploration Society, 1903-1908)

Aidan Dodson, Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb and the Egyptian Counter-reformation. (American University in Cairo Press, 2009

Aidan Dodson, Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt: her life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2020)

Aidan Dodson, Tutankhamun: King of Egypt: his life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2022)

Barry Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (Thames and Hudson, 2012)

Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2002)

Friederike Seyfried (ed.), In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussamlung Staatlich Museen zu Berlin/ Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013)

Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma (Headline, 2022)

Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon (Profile Books, 2018)

Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (Viking, 1998)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94), known as the Last of the Philosophes, the intellectuals in the French Enlightenment who sought to apply their learning to solving the problems of their world. He became a passionate believer in the progress of society, an advocate for equal rights for women and the abolition of the slave trade and for representative government. The French Revolution gave him a chance to advance those ideas and, while the Terror brought his life to an end, his wife Sophie de Grouchy 91764-1822) ensured his influence into the next century and beyond.

With

Rachel Hammersley
Professor of Intellectual History at Newcastle University

Richard Whatmore
Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History

And

Tom Hopkins
Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (University of Chicago Press, 1974)

Keith Michael Baker, ‘On Condorcet’s Sketch’ (Daedalus, summer 2004)

Lorraine Daston, ‘Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment’ (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2009)

Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago University Press, 2010)

Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially ‘Ideology and the Origins of Social Science’ by Robert Wokler

Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1985)

Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), Condorcet: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Kathleen McCrudden Illert, A Republic of Sympathy: Sophie de Grouchy's Politics and Philosophy, 1785-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt (eds.), Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 1994)

Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, (Harvard University Press, 2001)

Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 2023)

David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s great comedies, which plays in the space between marriage, love and desire. By convention a wedding means a happy ending and here there are three, but neither Orsino nor Viola, Olivia nor Sebastian know much of each other’s true character and even the identities of the twins Viola and Sebastian have only just been revealed to their spouses to be. These twins gain some financial security but it is unclear what precisely the older Orsino and Olivia find enduringly attractive in the adolescent objects of their love. Meanwhile their hopes and illusions are framed by the fury of Malvolio, tricked into trusting his mistress Olivia loved him and who swears an undefined revenge on all those who mocked him.

With

Pascale Aebischer
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter

Michael Dobson
Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham

And

Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Produced by Simon Tillotson, Victoria Brignell and Luke Mulhall

Reading list:

C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (first published 1959; Princeton University Press, 2011)

Simone Chess, ‘Queer Residue: Boy Actors’ Adult Careers in Early Modern England’ (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.4, 2020)

Callan Davies, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 (Routledge, 2023)

Frances E. Dolan, Twelfth Night: Language and Writing (Bloomsbury, 2014)

John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (Psychology Press, 2002), especially ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’ by Catherine Belsey

Bart van Es, Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian and Justin P. Shaw (eds.), Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), especially ‘”I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too”: Genderfluid Potentiality in As You Like It and Twelfth Night’ by Eric Brinkman

Ezra Horbury, ‘Transgender Reassessments of the Cross-Dressed Page in Shakespeare, Philaster, and The Honest Man’s Fortune’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 73, 2022)

Jean Howard, ‘Crossdressing, the theatre, and gender struggle in early modern England’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 39, 1988)

Harry McCarthy, Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

William Shakespeare (eds. Michael Dobson and Molly Mahood), Twelfth Night (Penguin, 2005)

William Shakespeare (ed. Keir Elam), Twelfth Night (Arden Shakespeare, 2008)

Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright (Pelican, 2019)

Victoria Sparey, Shakespeare’s Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Dutch artist famous for starry nights and sunflowers, self portraits and simple chairs. These are images known the world over, and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painted them and around 900 others in the last decade of his short, brilliant life and, famously, in that lifetime he made only one recorded sale. Yet within a few decades after his death these extraordinary works, with all their colour and life, became the most desirable of all modern art, propelled in part by the story of Vincent van Gogh's struggle with mental health.

With

Christopher Riopelle
The Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery

Martin Bailey
A leading Van Gogh specialist and correspondent for The Art Newspaper

And

Frances Fowle
Professor of Nineteenth Century Art at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Curator at National Galleries Scotland

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Martin Bailey, Living with Vincent Van Gogh: The Homes and Landscapes that shared the Artist (White Lion Publishing, 2019)

Martin Bailey, Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln, 2021)

Martin Bailey, Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln, 2021)

Nienke Bakker and Ella Hendriks, Van Gogh and the Sunflowers: A Masterpiece Examined (Van Gogh Museum, 2019)

Nienke Bakker, Emmanuel Coquery, Teio Meedendorp and Louis van Tilborgh (eds), Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months (Thames & Hudson, 2023)

Frances Fowle, Van Gogh's Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid, 1854-1928 (National Galleries of Scotland, 2010)

Bregje Gerritse, The Potato Eaters: Van Gogh’s First Masterpiece (Van Gogh Museum, 2021)

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (Random House, 2012)

Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (eds), Vincent van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2009)

Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (eds), Vincent van Gogh, A Life in Letters (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2020)

Hans Luitjen, Jo van Gogh Bonger: The Woman who Made Vincent Famous Bloomsbury, 2022

Louis van Tilborgh, Martin Bailey, Karen Serres (ed.), Van Gogh Self-Portraits (Courtauld Institute, 2022)

Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Van Gogh. The Complete Paintings (Taschen, 2022)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman emperor Tiberius. When he was born in 42BC, there was little prospect of him ever becoming Emperor of Rome. Firstly, Rome was still a Republic and there had not yet been any Emperor so that had to change and, secondly, when his stepfather Augustus became Emperor there was no precedent for who should succeed him, if anyone. It somehow fell to Tiberius to develop this Roman imperial project and by some accounts he did this well, while to others his reign was marked by cruelty and paranoia inviting comparison with Nero.

With

Matthew Nicholls
Senior Tutor at St. John’s College, University of Oxford

Shushma Malik
Assistant Professor of Classics and Onassis Classics Fellow at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge

And

Catherine Steel
Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Edward Champlin, ‘Tiberius the Wise’ (Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 57.4, 2008)

Alison E. Cooley, ‘From the Augustan Principate to the invention of the Age of Augustus’ (Journal of Roman Studies 109, 2019)

Alison E. Cooley, The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre: text, translation, and commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Eleanor Cowan, ‘Tiberius and Augustus in Tiberian Sources’ (Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 58.4, 2009)

Cassius Dio (trans. C. T. Mallan), Roman History: Books 57 and 58: The Reign of Tiberius (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Rebecca Edwards, ‘Tacitus, Tiberius and Capri’ (Latomus, 70.4, 2011)

A. Gibson (ed.), The Julio-Claudian Succession: Reality and Perception of the Augustan Model (Brill, 2012), especially ‘Tiberius and the invention of succession’ by C. Vout

Josephus (trans. E. Mary Smallwood and G. Williamson), The Jewish War (Penguin Classics, 1981)

Barbara Levick, Tiberius the Politician (Routledge, 1999)

E. O’Gorman, Tacitus’ History of Political Effective Speech: Truth to Power (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Velleius Paterculus (trans. J. C. Yardley and Anthony A. Barrett), Roman History: From Romulus and the Foundation of Rome to the Reign of the Emperor Tiberius (Hackett Publishing, 2011)

R. Seager, Tiberius (2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

David Shotter, Tiberius Caesar (Routledge, 2005)

Suetonius (trans. Robert Graves), The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics, 2007)

Tacitus (trans. Michael Grant), The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin Classics, 2003)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) rejected the liberal theology of his time which, he argued, used the Bible and religion to help humans understand themselves rather than prepare them to open themselves to divine revelation. Barth's aim was to put God and especially Christ at the centre of Christianity. He was alarmed by what he saw as the dangers in a natural theology where God might be found in a rainbow or an opera by Wagner; for if you were open to finding God in German culture, you could also be open to accepting Hitler as God’s gift as many Germans did. Barth openly refused to accept Hitler's role in the Church in the 1930s on these theological grounds as well as moral, for which he was forced to leave Germany for his native Switzerland.

With

Stephen Plant
Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

Christiane Tietz
Professor for Systematic Theology at the University of Zurich

And

Tom Greggs
Marischal Professor of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Karl Barth, God Here and Now (Routledge, 2003)

Karl Barth (trans. G. T. Thomson), Dogmatics in Outline (SCM Press, 1966)

Eberhard Busch (trans. John Bowden), Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids, 1994)

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Routledge, 2004)

Paul T. Nimmo, Karl Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2021)

John Webster, Karl Barth: Outstanding Christian Thinkers (Continuum, 2004)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

With

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Erin Forbes
Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)

Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)

Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)

Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp’ (Modern Philology, 2016)

Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)

Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)

Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Marguerite, Queen of Navarre (1492 – 1549), author of the Heptaméron, a major literary landmark in the French Renaissance. Published after her death, The Heptaméron features 72 short stories, many of which explore relations between the sexes. However, Marguerite’s life was more eventful than that of many writers. Born into the French nobility, she found herself the sister of the French king when her brother Francis I came to the throne in 1515. At a time of growing religious change, Marguerite was a leading exponent of reform in the Catholic Church and translated an early work of Martin Luther into French. As the Reformation progressed, she was not afraid to take risks to protect other reformers.

With

Sara Barker
Associate Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of Leeds

Emily Butterworth
Professor of Early Modern French at King’s College London

And

Emma Herdman
Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn), The Decameron (Norton, 2013)

Emily Butterworth, Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion (Boydell &Brewer, 2022)

Patricia Cholakian and Rouben Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2006)

Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1992)

Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (Brill, 2013)

Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (John Wiley & Sons, 1987)

R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (Fontana Press, 2008)

R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), Critical Tales: New Studies of the ‘Heptaméron’ and Early Modern Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)

Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Paul Chilton), The Heptameron (Penguin, 2004)

Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp), Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Coach and The Triumph of the Lamb (Elm Press, 1999)

Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Prisons (Whiteknights, 1989)

Marguerite de Navarre (ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani), L’Heptaméron (Libraririe générale française, 1999)

Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and her Evangelical Network (Brill, 2009)

Paula Sommers, ‘The Mirror and its Reflections: Marguerite de Navarre’s Biblical Feminism’ (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5, 1986)

Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most influential work of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). In 1899, during America’s Gilded Age, Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class as a reminder that all that glisters is not gold. He picked on traits of the waning landed class of Americans and showed how the new moneyed class was adopting these in ways that led to greater waste throughout society. He called these conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption and he developed a critique of a system that favoured profits for owners without regard to social good. The Theory of the Leisure Class was a best seller and funded Veblen for the rest of his life, and his ideas influenced the New Deal of the 1930s. Since then, an item that becomes more desirable as it becomes more expensive is known as a Veblen good.

With

Matthew Watson
Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick

Bill Waller
Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York

And

Mary Wrenn
Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of the West of England

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist who Unmade Economics (Harvard University Press, 2021)

John P. Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton University Press, 1999)

John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Seabury Press, 1978)

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Penguin, 1999)

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (Penguin, 2000), particularly the chapter ‘The Savage Society of Thorstein Veblen’

Ken McCormick, Veblen in Plain English: A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen’s Economics (Cambria Press, 2006)

Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen (Yale University Press, 2012)

Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (William Morrow & Company, 1999)

Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2005)

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (first published 1899; Oxford University Press, 2009)

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (first published 1904; Legare Street Press, 2022)

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (first published 2018; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)

Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (first published 1923; Routledge, 2017)

Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption (Penguin, 2005)

Thorstein Veblen, The Complete Works (Musaicum Books, 2017)

Charles J. Whalen (ed.), Institutional Economics: Perspective and Methods in Pursuit of a Better World (Routledge, 2021)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the North African privateers who, until their demise in the nineteenth century, were a source of great pride and wealth in their home ports, where they sold the people and goods they’d seized from Christian European ships and coastal towns. Nominally, these corsairs were from Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, outreaches of the Ottoman empire, or Salé in neighbouring Morocco, but often their Turkish or Arabic names concealed their European birth. Murad Reis the Younger, for example, who sacked Baltimore in 1631, was the Dutchman Jan Janszoon who also had a base on Lundy in the Bristol Channel. While the European crowns negotiated treaties to try to manage relations with the corsairs, they commonly viewed these sailors as pirates who were barely tolerated and, as soon as France, Britain, Spain and later America developed enough sea power, their ships and bases were destroyed.

With

Joanna Nolan
Research Associate at SOAS, University of London

Claire Norton
Former Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham

And Michael Talbot
Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970)

Des Ekin, The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (O’Brien Press, 2008)

Jacques Heers, The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1450-1580 (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018)

Colin Heywood, The Ottoman World: The Mediterranean and North Africa, 1660-1760 (Routledge, 2019)

Alan Jamieson, Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs (Reaktion Books, 2013)

Julie Kalman, The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023)

Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of the Barbary Corsairs (T. Unwin, 1890)

Sally Magnusson, The Sealwoman’s Gift (A novel - Two Roads, 2018)

Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (John Murray, 2010)

Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999)

Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (University Press of Florida, 2005)

Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves (Hodder and Stoughton, 2004)

Claire Norton (ed.), Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Lure of the Other (Routledge, 2017)

Claire Norton, ‘Lust, Greed, Torture and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern 'Renegade' (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29/2, 2009)

Daniel Panzac, The Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800-1820 (Brill, 2005)

Rafael Sabatini, The Sea Hawk (a novel - Vintage Books, 2011)

Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th century (Vintage Books, 2010)

D. Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2001)

J. M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2018)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristotle's ideas on what happiness means and how to live a good life. Aristotle (384-322BC) explored these almost two and a half thousand years ago in what became known as his Nicomachean Ethics. His audience then were the elite in Athens as, he argued, if they knew how to live their lives well then they could better rule the lives of others. While circumstances and values have changed across the centuries, Aristotle's approach to answering those questions has fascinated philosophers ever since and continues to do so.

With

Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield

Roger Crisp
Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

And

Sophia Connell
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

J.L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 1981)

Aristotle (ed. and trans. Roger Crisp), Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Aristotle (trans. Terence Irwin), Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett Publishing Co., 2019)

Aristotle (trans. H. Rackham), Nicomachean Ethics: Loeb Classical Library (William Heinemann Ltd, 1962)

Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle: Past Masters series (Oxford University Press, 1982)

Gerard J. Hughes, Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Routledge, 2013)

Richard Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

Michael Pakaluk, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (University of California Press, 1981)

Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue (Clarendon Press, 1989)

J.O. Urmson, Aristotle’s Ethics (John Wiley & Sons, 1988)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's greatest literary success, his thirteenth novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. The relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola’s readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree and his story is set in Northern France. It opens with Etienne trudging towards a coalmine at night seeking work, and soon he is caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle and then strike, as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change.

With

Susan Harrow
Ashley Watkins Chair of French at the University of Bristol

Kate Griffiths
Professor in French and Translation at Cardiff University

And

Edmund Birch
Lecturer in French Literature and Director of Studies at Churchill College & Selwyn College, University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (eds.), The Cambridge History of French Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2011), particularly ‘Naturalism’ by Nicholas White

Kate Griffiths, Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation (Legenda, 2009)

Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio, and Print (University of Wales Press, 2013)

Anna Gural-Migdal and Robert Singer (eds.), Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation (McFarland & Co., 2005)

Susan Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda, 2010)

F. W. J. Hemmings, The Life and Times of Emile Zola (first published 1977; Bloomsbury, 2013)

William Dean Howells, Emile Zola (The Floating Press, 2018)

Lida Maxwell, Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Brian Nelson, Emile Zola: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Brian Nelson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Sandy Petrey, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Cornell University Press, 1988)

Arthur Rose, ‘Coal politics: receiving Emile Zola's Germinal’ (Modern & contemporary France, 2021, Vol.29, 2)

Philip D. Walker, Emile Zola (Routledge, 1969)

Emile Zola (trans. Peter Collier), Germinal (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Emile Zola (trans. Roger Pearson), Germinal (Penguin Classics, 2004)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the anchoress and mystic who, in the late fourteenth century, wrote about her visions of Christ suffering, in a work since known as Revelations of Divine Love. She is probably the first named woman writer in English, even if questions about her name and life remain open. Her account is an exploration of the meaning of her visions and is vivid and bold, both in its imagery and theology. From her confined cell in a Norwich parish church, in a land beset with plague, she dealt with the nature of sin and with the feminine side of God, and shared the message she received that God is love and, famously, that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

With

Katherine Lewis
Professor of Medieval History at the University of Huddersfield

Philip Sheldrake
Professor of Christian Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology, Texas and Senior Research Associate of the Von Hugel Institute, University of Cambridge

And

Laura Kalas
Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Swansea University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

John H. Arnold and Katherine Lewis (eds.), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (D.S. Brewer, 2004)

Ritamary Bradley, Julian’s Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich (Harper Collins, 1992)

E. Colledge and J. Walsh (eds.), Julian of Norwich: Showings (Classics of Western Spirituality series, Paulist Press, 1978)

Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed.), A Companion to Julian of Norwich (D.S. Brewer, 2008)

Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (D.S. Brewer, 2004)

Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (new edition, Paulist Press, 2010)

Julian of Norwich (trans. Barry Windeatt), Revelations of Divine Love (Oxford World's Classics, 2015)

Julian of Norwich (ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins), The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love, (Brepols, 2006)

Laura Kalas, Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course (D.S. Brewer, 2020)

Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (eds.), Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe (Manchester University Press, 2021)

Laura Kalas and Roberta Magnani (eds.), Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age: 1000-1500 (Routledge, forthcoming 2024)

Ken Leech and Benedicta Ward (ed.), Julian the Solitary (SLG, 1998)

Denise Nowakowski Baker and Sarah Salih (ed.), Julian of Norwich’s Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Joan M. Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (Crossroad Publishing, 1999)

Philip Sheldrake, Julian of Norwich: “In God’s Sight”: Her Theology in Context (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019)

E. Spearing (ed.), Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Books, 1998)

Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (Yale University Press, 2011)

Wolfgang Riehle, The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2014)

Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California Press, 1982)

Ann Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (University of California Press, 1985)

Hugh White (trans.), Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses (Penguin Classics, 1993)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay's essays written in 1787/8 in support of the new US Constitution. They published these anonymously in New York as 'Publius' but, when it became known that Hamilton and Madison were the main authors, the essays took on a new significance for all states. As those two men played a major part in drafting the Constitution itself, their essays have since informed debate over what the authors of that Constitution truly intended. To some, the essays have proved to be America’s greatest contribution to political thought.

With

Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh and Interim Saunders Director of the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at Monticello

Kathleen Burk
Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London

And

Nicholas Guyatt
Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (Knopf, 2003)

Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2015)

Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017)

Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison (eds. George W. Carey and James McClellan), The Federalist: The Gideon Edition (Liberty Fund, 2001)

Alison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010)

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Penguin, 1987)

Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (Simon and Schuster, 2010)

Michael I. Meyerson, Liberty's Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World (Basic Books, 2008)

Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996)

Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan, The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tiny drifting organisms in the oceans that sustain the food chain for all the lifeforms in the water and so for the billions of people who, in turn, depend on the seas for their diet. In Earth's development, the plant-like ones among them, the phytoplankton, produced so much oxygen through photosynthesis that around half the oxygen we breathe today originated there. And each day as the sun rises, the animal ones, the zooplankton, sink to the depths of the seas to avoid predators in such density that they appear on ship sonars like a new seabed, only to rise again at night in the largest migration of life on this planet.

With

Carol Robinson
Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of East Anglia

Abigail McQuatters-Gollop
Associate Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth

And

Christopher Lowe
Lecturer in Marine Biology at Swansea University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Juli Berwald, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone (Riverhead Books, 2018)

Sir Alister Hardy, The Open Sea: The World of Plankton (first published 1959; Collins New Naturalist Library, 2009)

Richard Kirby, Ocean Drifters: A Secret World Beneath the Waves (Studio Cactus Ltd, 2010)

Robert Kunzig, Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science (Sort Of Books, 2000)

Christian Sardet, Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022)

In an extended version of the programme that was broadcast, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential book John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 after he resigned in protest from his role at the Paris Peace Conference. There the victors of World War One were deciding the fate of the defeated, especially Germany and Austria-Hungary, and Keynes wanted the world to know his view that the economic consequences would be disastrous for all. Soon Germany used his book to support their claim that the Treaty was grossly unfair, a sentiment that fed into British appeasement in the 1930s and has since prompted debate over whether Keynes had only warned of disaster or somehow contributed to it.

With

Margaret MacMillan
Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford

Michael Cox
Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Founding Director of LSE IDEAS

And

Patricia Clavin
Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House, 2020)

Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Patricia Clavin et al (eds.), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Patricia Clavin, ‘Britain and the Making of Global Order after 1919: The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture’ (Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 31:3, 2020)

Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man; The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (William Collins, 2015)

R. F. Harrod, John Maynard Keynes (first published 1951; Pelican, 1972)

Jens Holscher and Matthias Klaes (eds), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace: A Reappraisal (Pickering & Chatto, 2014)

John Maynard Keynes (with an introduction by Michael Cox), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (John Murray Publishers, 2001)

Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1946)

D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (Routledge, 1992)

Alan Sharp, Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective (Haus Publishing Ltd, 2018)

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946 (Pan Macmillan, 2004)

Jürgen Tampke, A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Success of the Nazis (Scribe UK, 2017)

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Penguin Books, 2015)

In the 1000th edition of In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most celebrated film of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). It begins with an image that, once seen, stays with you for the rest of your life: the figure of Death playing chess with a Crusader on the rocky Swedish shore. The release of this film in 1957 brought Bergman fame around the world. We see Antonius Block, the Crusader, realising he can’t beat Death but wanting to prolong this final game for one last act, without yet knowing what that act might be. As he goes on a journey through a plague ridden world, his meeting with a family of jesters and their baby offers him some kind of epiphany.

With

Jan Holmberg
Director of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, Stockholm

Claire Thomson
Professor of Cinema History and Director of the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London

And

Laura Hubner
Professor of Film at the University of Winchester

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Alexander Ahndoril (trans. Sarah Death), The Director (Granta, 2008)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Marianne Ruuth), Images: My Life in Film (Faber and Faber, 1995)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (Viking, 1988)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Best Intentions (Vintage, 2018)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Sunday’s Children (Vintage, 2018)

Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Private Confessions (Vintage, 2018)

Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima (trans. Paul Britten Austin), Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman (Da Capo Press, 1993)

Melvyn Bragg, The Seventh Seal: BFI Film Classics (British Film Institute, 1993)

Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius (eds.), The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Taschen/Max Ström, 2018)

Erik Hedling (ed.), Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy (Lund University Press, 2021)

Laura Hubner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Daniel Humphrey, Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2013)

Maaret Koskinen (ed.), Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema, and the Arts (Wallflower Press, 2008)

Selma Lagerlöf (trans. Peter Graves), The Phantom Carriage (Norvik Press, 2011)

Mariah Larsson and Anders Marklund (eds.), Swedish Film: An Introduction and Reader (Nordic Academic Press, 2010)

Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Birgitta Steene (ed.), Focus on The Seventh Seal (Prentice Hall, 1972)

Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam University Press, 2014)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the man who, in 1905, produced several papers that were to change the world of physics and whose name went on to become a byword for genius. This was Albert Einstein, then still a technical expert at a Swiss patent office, and that year of 1905 became known as his annus mirabilis ('miraculous year'). While Einstein came from outside the academic world, some such as Max Planck championed his theory of special relativity, his principle of mass-energy equivalence that followed, and his explanations of Brownian Motion and the photoelectric effect. Yet it was not until 1919, when a solar eclipse proved his theory that gravity would bend light, that Einstein became an international celebrity and developed into an almost mythical figure.

With

Richard Staley
Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Professor in History of Science at the University of Copenhagen

Diana Kormos Buchwald
Robert M. Abbey Professor of History and Director and General Editor of The Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology

And

John Heilbron
Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (first published 1971; HarperPaperbacks, 2011)

Albert Einstein (eds. Jurgen Renn and Hanoch Gutfreund), Relativity: The Special and the General Theory - 100th Anniversary Edition (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (first published 1950; Citadel Press, 1974)

Albert Einstein (ed. Paul A. Schilpp), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist: The Library of Living Philosophers Volume VII (first published 1949; Open Court, 1970)

Albert Einstein (eds. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden), Einstein on Peace (first published 1981; Literary Licensing, 2011)

Albrecht Folsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (Viking, 1997)

J. L. Heilbron, Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2008)

Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton University Press, 2002)

Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Einstein (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance (Viking, 2000)

Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford University Press, 1982)

David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann (eds.), Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Matthew Stanley, Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I (Dutton, 2019)

Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (Princeton University Press, 1999)

A. Douglas Stone, Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Milena Wazeck (trans. Geoffrey S. Koby), Einstein's Opponents: The Public Controversy About the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and it’s hard to imagine a world more alien and different from Earth. It’s known as a Gas Giant, and its diameter is eleven times the size of Earth’s: our planet would fit inside it one thousand three hundred times. But its mass is only three hundred and twenty times greater, suggesting that although Jupiter is much bigger than Earth, the stuff it’s made of is much, much lighter. When you look at it through a powerful telescope you see a mass of colourful bands and stripes: these are the tops of ferocious weather systems that tear around the planet, including the great Red Spot, probably the longest-lasting storm in the solar system. Jupiter is so enormous that it’s thought to have played an essential role in the distribution of matter as the solar system formed – and it plays an important role in hoovering up astral debris that might otherwise rain down on Earth. It’s almost a mini solar system in its own right, with 95 moons orbiting around it. At least two of these are places life might possibly be found.

With

Michele Dougherty, Professor of Space Physics and Head of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, and principle investigator of the magnetometer instrument on the JUICE spacecraft (JUICE is the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a mission launched by the European Space Agency in April 2023)

Leigh Fletcher, Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Leicester, and interdisciplinary scientist for JUICE

Carolin Crawford, Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

In 1956 Oxford University awarded an honorary degree to the former US president Harry S. Truman for his role in ending the Second World War. One philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 – 2001), objected strongly.

She argued that although dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have ended the fighting, it amounted to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. It was therefore an irredeemably immoral act. And there was something fundamentally wrong with a moral philosophy that didn’t see that.

This was the starting point for a body of work that changed the terms in which philosophers discussed moral and ethical questions in the second half of the twentieth century.

A leading student of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anscombe combined his insights with rejuvenated interpretations of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that made these ancient figures speak to modern issues and concerns. Anscombe was also instrumental in making action, and the question of what it means to intend to do something, a leading area of philosophical work.

With

Rachael Wiseman, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool

Constantine Sandis, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, and Director of Lex Academic

Roger Teichmann, Lecturer in Philosophy at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella.
Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession.
It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.

With

Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford

Erica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge

Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield

Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4

Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex begins with a warning: the murderer of the old king of Thebes, Laius, has never been identified or caught, and he’s still at large in the city. Oedipus is the current king of Thebes, and he sets out to solve the crime.

His investigations lead to a devastating conclusion. Not only is Oedipus himself the killer, but Laius was his father, and Laius’ wife Jocasta, who Oedipus has married, is his mother.

Oedipus Rex was composed during the golden age of Athens, in the 5th century BC. Sophocles probably wrote it to explore the dynamics of power in an undemocratic society. It has unsettled audiences from the very start: it is the only one of Sophocles’ plays that didn’t win first prize at Athens’ annual drama festival. But it’s had exceptionally good write-ups from the critics:
Aristotle called it the greatest example of the dramatic arts. Freud believed it laid bare the deepest structures of human desire.

With:

Nick Lowe, Reader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Fiona Macintosh, Professor of Classical Reception and Fellow of St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford

Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the power-packs within cells in all complex life on Earth.

Inside each cell of every complex organism there are structures known as mitochondria. The 19th century scientists who first observed them thought they were bacteria which had somehow invaded the cells they were studying. We now understand that mitochondria take components from the food we eat and convert them into energy.

Mitochondria are essential for complex life, but as the components that run our metabolisms they can also be responsible for a range of diseases – and they probably play a role in how we age. The DNA in mitochondria is only passed down the maternal line. This means it can be used to trace population movements deep into human history, even back to an ancestor we all share: mitochondrial Eve.

With

Mike Murphy
Professor of Mitochondrial Redox Biology at the University of Cambridge

Florencia Camus
NERC Independent Research Fellow at University College London

and

Nick Lane
Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London

Producer Luke Mulhall

In 1661 the 23 year-old French king Louis the XIV had been on the throne for 18 years when his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, died. Louis is reported to have said to his ministers, “It is now time that I govern my affairs myself. You will assist me with your counsels when I ask for them [but] I order you to seal no orders except by my command… I order you not to sign anything, not even a passport, without my command, and to render account to me personally each day”

So began the personal rule of Louis XIV, which lasted a further 54 years until his death in 1715. From his newly-built palace at Versailles, Louis was able to project an image of himself as the centre of gravity around which all of France revolved: it’s no accident that he became known as the Sun King. He centralized power to the extent he was able to say ‘L’etat c’est moi’: I am the state. Under his rule France became the leading diplomatic, military and cultural power in Europe.

With

Catriona Seth
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford

Guy Rowlands
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of St Andrews

and

Penny Roberts
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Warwick

Producer: Luke Mulhall

In the year 29 BC the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines:
Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy too is he who knows the rural gods…

They’re from his poem the Georgics, a detailed account of farming life in the Italy of the time. ‘Georgics’ means ‘agricultural things’, and it’s often been read as a farming manual. But it was written at a moment when the Roman world was emerging from a period of civil war, and questions of land ownership and management were heavily contested. It’s also a philosophical reflection on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the ravages of time, and the politics of Virgil’s day.

It’s exerted a profound influence on European writing about agriculture and rural life, and has much to offer environmental thinking today.

With

Katharine Earnshaw
Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter;

Neville Morley
Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter

and

Diana Spencer
Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Christian uprising in Japan and its profound and long-term consequences.

In the 1630s, Japan was ruled by the Tokagawa Shoguns, a military dynasty who, 30 years earlier, had unified the country, ending around two centuries of civil war. In 1637 a rebellion broke out in the province of Shimabara, in the south of the country. It was a peasants’ revolt, following years of bad harvests in which the local lord had refused to lower taxes. Many of the rebels were Christians, and they fought under a Christian banner.

The central government’s response was merciless. They met the rebels with an army of 150 000 men, possibly the largest force assembled anywhere in the world during the Early Modern period. Once the rebellion had been suppressed, the Shogun enforced a ban on Christianity and expelled nearly all foreigners from the country. Japan remained more or less completely sealed off from the rest of the world for the next 250 years.

With

Satona Suzuki
Lecturer in Japanese and Modern Japanese History at SOAS, University of London

Erica Baffelli
Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester

and

Christopher Harding
Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revelatory collection of Biblical texts, legal documents, community rules and literary writings.

In 1946 a Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for a goat he’d lost in the hills above the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave and heard a hollow sound. He’d hit a ceramic jar containing an ancient manuscript. This was the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of about a thousand texts dating from around 250 BC to AD 68. It is the most substantial first hand evidence we have for the beliefs and practices of Judaism in and around the lifetime of Jesus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of how the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible were edited and collected. They also offer a tantalising window onto the world from which Christianity eventually emerged.

With

Sarah Pearce
Ian Karten Professor of Jewish Studies and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton

Charlotte Hempel
Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham

and

George Brooke
Rylands Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the highly influential American poet Walt Whitman.

In 1855 Whitman was working as a printer, journalist and property developer when he published his first collection of poetry. It began:

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

The book was called Leaves of Grass. In it, Whitman set out to break away from European literary forms and traditions. Using long lines written in free verse, he developed a poetry meant to express a distinctively American outlook.

Leaves of Grass is full of verse that celebrates both the sovereign individual, and the deep fellowship between individuals. Its optimism about the American experience was challenged by the Civil War and its aftermath, but Whitman emerged as a celebrity and a key figure in the development of American culture.

With

Sarah Churchwell
Professor of American Literature and the Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London

Peter Riley
Lecturer in 19th Century American Literature at the University of Exeter

and

Mark Ford
Professor of English and American Literature at University College London

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth".

The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe.

With

Staffan Muller-Wille
University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge

Stella Sandford
Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London

and

Steve Jones
Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, London

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the brutal events of 26 August 1346, when the armies of France and England met in a funnel-shaped valley outside the town of Crécy in northern France.

Although the French, led by Philip VI, massively outnumbered the English, under the command of Edward III, the English won the battle, and French casualties were huge. The English victory is often attributed to the success of their longbowmen against the heavy cavalry of the French.

The Battle of Crécy was the result of years of simmering tension between Edward III and Philip VI, and it led to decades of further conflict between England and France, a conflict that came to be known as the Hundred Years War.

With

Anne Curry
Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton

Andrew Ayton
Senior Research Fellow in History at Keele University

and

Erika Graham-Goering
Lecturer in Late Medieval History at Durham University

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Danish prince who became a very effective King of England in 1016.

Cnut inherited a kingdom in a sorry state. The north and east coast had been harried by Viking raiders, and his predecessor King Æthelred II had struggled to maintain order amongst the Anglo-Saxon nobility too. Cnut proved to be skilful ruler. Not only did he bring stability and order to the kingdom, he exported the Anglo-Saxon style of centralised government to Denmark. Under Cnut, England became the cosmopolitan centre of a multi-national North Atlantic Empire, and a major player in European politics.

With

Erin Goeres
Associate Professor of Old Norse Language and Literature at University College London

Pragya Vohra
Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York

and

Elizabeth Tyler
Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay on women and literature, which considers both literary history and future opportunity.

In 1928 Woolf gave two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newnham College, she delivered the following words: “All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved”.

These lectures formed the basis of a book she published the following year, and Woolf chose A Room Of One’s Own for its title. It is a text that set the scene for the study of women’s writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women’s history too.

With

Hermione Lee
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Michele Barrett
Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London

and

Alexandra Harris
Professor of English at the University of Birmingham

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Solon, who was elected archon or chief magistrate of Athens in 594 BC: some see him as the father of Athenian democracy.

In the first years of the 6th century BC, the city state of Athens was in crisis. The lower orders of society were ravaged by debt, to the point where some were being forced into slavery. An oppressive law code mandated the death penalty for everything from murder to petty theft. There was a real danger that the city could fall into either tyranny or civil war.

Solon instituted a programme of reforms that transformed Athens’ political and legal systems, its society and economy, so that later generations referred to him as Solon the Lawgiver.

With

Melissa Lane
Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University

Hans van Wees
Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London

and

William Allan
Professor of Greek and McConnell Laing Tutorial Fellow in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at University College, University of Oxford

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, between the 16th and 18th centuries, Europe was dominated by an economic way of thinking called mercantilism. The key idea was that exports should be as high as possible and imports minimised.

For more than 300 years, almost every ruler and political thinker was a mercantilist. Eventually, economists including Adam Smith, in his ground-breaking work of 1776 The Wealth of Nations, declared that mercantilism was a flawed concept and it became discredited. However, a mercantilist economic approach can still be found in modern times and today’s politicians sometimes still use rhetoric related to mercantilism.

With

D’Maris Coffman
Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at University College London

Craig Muldrew
Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a Member of Queens’ College

and

Helen Paul, Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton.

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic which is regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature. Its importance in Indian culture has been compared to that of the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and it’s still seen as a sacred text by Hindus today.

Written in Sanskrit, it tells the story of the legendary prince and princess Rama and Sita, and the many challenges, misfortunes and choices that they face. About 24,000 verses long, the Ramayana is also one of the longest ancient epics. It’s a text that’s been hugely influential and it continues to be popular in India and elsewhere in Asia.

With

Jessica Frazier
Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University

and

Naomi Appleton
Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Edinburgh

The image above shows Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Lakshmana and devotees, from the Shree Jalaram Prarthana Mandal, Leicester.

Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.

Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.

With

Vicki Cummings
Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire

Julian Thomas
Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester

and

Susan Greaney
Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.

Paul Erdős (1913 – 1996) is one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the 20th century. During his long career, he made a number of impressive advances in our understanding of maths and developed whole new fields in the subject.

He was born into a Jewish family in Hungary just before the outbreak of World War I, and his life was shaped by the rise of fascism in Europe, anti-Semitism and the Cold War. His reputation for mathematical problem solving is unrivalled and he was extraordinarily prolific. He produced more than 1,500 papers and collaborated with around 500 other academics.

He also had an unconventional lifestyle. Instead of having a long-term post at one university, he spent much of his life travelling around visiting other mathematicians, often staying for just a few days.

With

Colva Roney-Dougal
Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews

Timothy Gowers
Professor of Mathematics at the College de France in Paris and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

and

Andrew Treglown
Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham

The image above shows a graph occurring in Ramsey Theory. It was created by Dr Katherine Staden, lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the Open University.

In 1957 Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning – and its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language.

Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems, printed with her pen and ink sketches, can seem simple and comical, but often beneath the surface lurk themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and death.

With
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia

Noreen Masud
Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol

and

Will May
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Southampton

The photograph above shows Stevie Smith recording her story Sunday at Home, a finalist in the BBC Third Programme Short Story competition in 1949.

On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote.

The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact.

With

Joan Allen
Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History

Emma Griffin
Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society

and

Robert Saunders
Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

The image above shows a Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in London in April 1848.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) whose charts offered an unprecedented level of accuracy.

In 1572 Brahe's observations of a new star challenged the idea, inherited from Aristotle, that the heavens were unchanging. He went on to create his own observatory complex on the Danish island of Hven, and there, working before the invention of the telescope, he developed innovative instruments and gathered a team of assistants, taking a highly systematic approach to observation. A second, smaller source of renown was his metal prosthetic nose, which he needed after a serious injury sustained in a duel.

The image above shows Brahe aged 40, from the Atlas Major by Johann Blaeu.

With

Ole Grell
Emeritus Professor in Early Modern History at the Open University

Adam Mosley
Associate Professor of History at Swansea University

and

Emma Perkins
Affiliate Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the discovery made in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926). He came to call it Superconductivity and it is a set of physical properties that nobody predicted and that none, since, have fully explained. When he lowered the temperature of mercury close to absolute zero and ran an electrical current through it, Kamerlingh Onnes found not that it had low resistance but that it had no resistance. Later, in addition, it was noticed that a superconductor expels its magnetic field. In the century or more that has followed, superconductors have already been used to make MRI scanners and to speed particles through the Large Hadron Collider and they may perhaps bring nuclear fusion a little closer (a step that could be world changing).

The image above is from a photograph taken by Stephen Blundell of a piece of superconductor levitating above a magnet.

With

Nigel Hussey
Professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Bristol and Radbout University

Suchitra Sebastian
Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge

And

Stephen Blundell
Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Mansfield College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1921 - 2002) which has been called the most influential book in twentieth century political philosophy. It was first published in 1971. Rawls (pictured above) drew on his own experience in WW2 and saw the chance in its aftermath to build a new society, one founded on personal liberty and fair equality of opportunity. While in that just society there could be inequalities, Rawls’ radical idea was that those inequalities must be to the greatest advantage not to the richest but to the worst off.

With

Fabienne Peter
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick

Martin O’Neill
Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York

And

Jonathan Wolff
The Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.

The image above is from a miniature in the Royal Collection and was painted in 1616 by Isaac Oliver (1565-1617)

With

Mary Ann Lund
Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester

Sue Wiseman
Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

And

Hugh Adlington
Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the stench from the River Thames in the hot summer of 1858 and how it appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, including those in the new Houses of Parliament which were still under construction. There had been an outbreak of cholera a few years before in which tens of thousands had died, and a popular theory held that foul smells were linked to diseases. The source of the problem was that London's sewage, once carted off to fertilise fields had recently, thanks to the modern flushing systems, started to flow into the river and, thanks to the ebb and flow of the tides, was staying there and warming in the summer sun. The engineer Joseph Bazalgette was given the task to build huge new sewers to intercept the waste, a vast network, so changing the look of London and helping ensure there were no further cholera outbreaks from contaminated water.

The image above is from Punch, July 10th 1858 and it has this caption: The 'Silent Highway'-Man. "Your Money or your Life!"

With

Rosemary Ashton
Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London

Stephen Halliday
Author of ‘The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis’

And

Paul Dobraszczyk
Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was engaged to, 8 years before – an engagement she broke off under pressure from her father and godmother. When Wentworth, by chance, comes back into Anne Elliot's life, he is still angry with her and neither she nor Austen's readers can know whether it is now too late for their thwarted love to have a second chance.

The image above is from a 1995 BBC adaptation of the novel, with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds

With

Karen O’Brien
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University

Fiona Stafford
Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford

And

Paddy Bullard
Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orson Welles' film, released in 1941, which is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made. Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac. The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.

The image above is of Kane addressing a public meeting while running for Governor.

With

Stella Bruzzi
Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London

Ian Christie
Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London

And

John David Rhodes
Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the momentum behind rebellion in Ireland in 1798, the people behind the rebellion and the impact over the next few years and after. Amid wider unrest, the United Irishmen set the rebellion on its way, inspired by the French and American revolutionaries and their pursuit of liberty. When it broke out in May the United Irishmen had an estimated two hundred thousand members, Catholic and Protestant, and the prospect of a French invasion fleet to back them. Crucially for the prospects of success, some of those members were British spies who exposed the plans and the military were largely ready - though not in Wexford where the scale of rebellion was much greater. The fighting was initially fierce and brutal and marked with sectarianism but had largely been suppressed by the time the French arrived in August to declare a short-lived republic. The consequences of the rebellion were to be far reaching, not least in the passing of Acts of Union in 1800.

The image above is of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763 - 1798), prominent member of the United Irishmen

With

Ian McBride
Foster Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Catriona Kennedy
Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York

And

Liam Chambers
Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Song of the Nibelungs, a twelfth century German epic, full of blood, violence, fantasy and bleakness. It is a foundational work of medieval literature, drawing on the myths of Scandinavia and central Europe. The poem tells of two couples, Siegfried and Kriemhild and Gunther and Brunhilda, whose lives are destroyed by lies and revenge. It was extremely popular in its time, sometimes rewritten with happier endings, and was rediscovered by German Romantics and has since been drawn from selectively by Wagner, Fritz Lang and, infamously, the Nazis looking to support ideas on German heritage.

The image above is of Siegfried seeing Kriemhild for the first time, a miniature from the Hundeshagenschen Code manuscript dating from 15th Century.

With

Sarah Bowden
Reader in German and Medieval Studies at King’s College London

Mark Chinca
Professor of Medieval German and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge

And

Bettina Bildhauer
Professor of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the voyage of HMS Challenger which set out from Portsmouth in 1872 with a mission a to explore the ocean depths around the world and search for new life. The scale of the enterprise was breath taking and, for its ambition, it has since been compared to the Apollo missions. The team onboard found thousands of new species, proved there was life on the deepest seabeds and plumbed the Mariana Trench five miles below the surface. Thanks to telegraphy and mailboats, its vast discoveries were shared around the world even while Challenger was at sea, and they are still being studied today, offering insights into the ever-changing oceans that cover so much of the globe and into the health of our planet.

The image above is from the journal of Pelham Aldrich R.N. who served on the Challenger Surveying Expedition from 1872-5.

With

Erika Jones
Curator of Navigation and Oceanography at Royal Museums Greenwich

Sam Robinson
Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute Research Fellow at the University of Southampton

And

Giles Miller
Principal Curator of Micropalaeontology at the Natural History Museum London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the speeches that became a byword for fierce attacks on political opponents. It was in the 4th century BC, in Athens, that Demosthenes delivered these speeches against the tyrant Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, when Philip appeared a growing threat to Athens and its allies and Demosthenes feared his fellow citizens were set on appeasement. In what became known as The Philippics, Demosthenes tried to persuade Athenians to act against Macedon before it was too late; eventually he succeeded in stirring them, even if the Macedonians later prevailed. For these speeches prompting resistance, Demosthenes became famous as one of the Athenian democracy’s greatest freedom fighters. Later, in Rome, Cicero's attacks on Mark Antony were styled on Demosthenes and these too became known as Philippics.

The image above is painted on the dome of the library of the National Assembly, Paris and is by Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). It depicts Demosthenes haranguing the waves of the sea as a way of strengthening his voice for his speeches.

With

Paul Cartledge
A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge

Kathryn Tempest
Reader in Latin Literature and Roman History at the University of Roehampton

And

Jon Hesk
Reader in Greek and Classical Studies at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Bauhaus which began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, as a school for arts and crafts combined, and went on to be famous around the world. Under its first director, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and extended its range to architecture and became associated with a series of white, angular, flat-roofed buildings reproduced from Shanghai to Chicago, aimed for modern living. The school closed after only 14 years while at a third location, Berlin, under pressure from the Nazis, yet its students and teachers continued to spread its ethos in exile, making it even more influential.

The image above is of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau, designed by Gropius and built in 1925-6

With

Robin Schuldenfrei
Tangen Reader in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art

Alan Powers
History Leader at the London School of Architecture

And

Michael White
Professor of the History of Art at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rebellion that broke out in Jamaica on 11th October 1865 when Paul Bogle (1822-65) led a protest march from Stony Gut to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay. There were many grounds for grievance that day and soon anger turned to bloodshed. Although the British had abolished slavery 30 years before, the plantation owners were still dominant and the conditions for the majority of people on Jamaica were poor. The British governor suppressed this rebellion brutally and soon people in Jamaica lost what right they had to rule themselves. Some in Britain, like Charles Dickens, supported the governor's actions while others, like Charles Darwin, wanted him tried for murder.

The image above is from a Jamaican $2 banknote, printed after Paul Bogle became a National Hero in 1969.

With

Matthew J Smith
Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London

Diana Paton
The William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh

And

Lawrence Goldman
Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated British poet of World War One. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) had published only a handful of poems when he was killed a week before the end of the war, but in later decades he became seen as the essential British war poet. His works such as Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est went on to be inseparable from the memory of the war and its futility. However, while Owen is best known for his poetry of the trenches, his letters offer a more nuanced insight into him such as his pride in being an officer in charge of others and in being a soldier who fought alongside his comrades.

With

Jane Potter
Reader in The School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University

Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast

And

Guy Cuthbertson
Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest changes in the history of life on Earth. Around 400 million years ago some of our ancestors, the fish, started to become a little more like humans. At the swampy margins between land and water, some fish were turning their fins into limbs, their swim bladders into lungs and developed necks and eventually they became tetrapods, the group to which we and all animals with backbones and limbs belong. After millions of years of this transition, these tetrapod descendants of fish were now ready to leave the water for a new life of walking on land, and with that came an explosion in the diversity of life on Earth.

The image above is a representation of Tiktaalik Roseae, a fish with some features of a tetrapod but not one yet, based on a fossil collected in the Canadian Arctic.

With

Emily Rayfield
Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol

Michael Coates
Chair and Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago

And

Steve Brusatte
Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.

With

Tamar Garb
Professor of History of Art at University College London

Lois Oliver
Curator at the Royal Academy and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Notre Dame London.

And

Claire Moran
Reader in French at Queen's University Belfast

Producer: Simon Tillotson