Melvyn Bragg
speaker
1,061 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3d ago
Melvyn Bragg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It was a it was a very startling way for a northern lad to start the day but it's
I think uh your your taste is about to be tested as the producer comes in.
Hello, Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright for the restoration stage, a poet, a writer of fiction, and a sometimes spy, and her life spanned one of the most turbulent times in English history.
She was born as the Civil War started in 1640, flourished under the restored Stuart monarchy, and stayed loyal to James II after the Glorious Revolution, right up to her death in 1689.
and she was the first English woman to make her living from writing.
As tastes changed, she was dismissed as too bawdy, but Virginia Woolf wrote, All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Afra Ben, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
With me to discuss Afra Ben are Janet Todd, former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, Ross Ballester, professor of 18th century literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford,
and Claire Burditch, Postdoctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University.
Jan Todd, how much do we know about AfroVen's early life?
But in terms of her childhood, Germaine Greer said we must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her early years.
Is it sure that her father was a barber in Kent?
It seems to be more sure that her mother was a wet nurse, doesn't it?
That was the question I was going to ask you.
Where did she learn it?
Somehow through the wet nurse she got into the libraries of one of the great big houses with libraries and took to reading books.
That's the best we can do, is it?
And this is in the terrible Civil War period, masses of deaths, and then in the Cromwellian period, the period of what was called the Commonwealth and so on.
And she's doing that then.
But we do know she was a spy in Antwerp.
How did you get to be a spy in Antwerp?
Showing 901–920 of 1,061 · page 46 of 54
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