In Our Time: Culture
Episodes
Hamlet
28 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599 - 1602 and rewritten throughout his lifetime. It...
Beethoven
21 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great composers, who was born into a family of musicians in Bonn. His grandfather was an eminent musician a...
Moby Dick
07 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great ...
Germaine de Stael
16 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and impact of Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) who Byron praised as Europe's greatest living writer, and was at...
Picasso's Guernica
02 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso's iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that oblitera...
Aphra Behn
12 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aphra Behn (1640-1689), who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction under the Restora...
Wuthering Heights
28 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name ...
al-Biruni
31 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Central Asian polymath al-Biruni and his eleventh-century book the India.Born in around 973 in the central Asi...
Eugene Onegin
22 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, the story of Eugene Onegin, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Pushkin (pictured abo...
Christine de Pizan
08 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Christine de Pizan, who wrote at the French Court in the late Middle Ages and was celebrated by ...
Emily Dickinson
11 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Emily Dickinson, arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. Accordin...
Hokusai
30 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the Japanese artist whose views of Mt Fuji such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa (pictur...
North and South
09 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South, published in 1855 after serialisation in Dickens' Household Words magazine....
Seneca the Younger
23 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca the Younger, who was one of the first great writers to live his entire life in the world of the new Roman empir...
John Clare
09 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests ...
Four Quartets
22 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot's last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as...
The Fighting Temeraire
10 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, LondonMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting ...
Epic of Gilgamesh
03 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
"He who saw the Deep" are the first words of the standard version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the subject of this discussion between Melvyn Bragg and hi...
The 12th Century Renaissance
20 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changes in the intellectual world of Western Europe in the 12th Century, and their origins. This was a time of Cru...
Animal Farm
29 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Animal Farm, which Eric Blair published under his pen name George Orwell in 1945. A biting critique of totalitarianism...
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
23 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocenc...
The Muses
19 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greek...
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
05 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, originally serialised in The Graphic in 1891 and, with some significant cha...
Aurora Leigh
24 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic "Aurora Leigh" which was published in 1856. It is the story of an orphan, Aurora, bo...
Rumi's Poetry
11 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry of Rumi, the Persian scholar and Sufi mystic of the 13th Century. His great poetic works are the Masnavi or...
Tristan and Iseult
31 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tristan and Iseult, one of the most popular stories of the Middle Ages. From roots in Celtic myth, it passed into writ...
Emma
19 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; a...
Holbein at the Tudor Court
15 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) during his two extended stays in England, when he worked at ...
Frida Kahlo
09 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Born near Mexico City in 1907, Frida Kahlo is considered one of Mexico's greatest artists. She took up painting after a bus accident left her severely...
Jane Eyre
18 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gat...
Tagore
07 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been called one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th cen...
Fanny Burney
23 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the 18th-century novelist, playwright and diarist Fanny Burney, also known as Madame D'Arblay...
Sappho
09 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Greek poet Sappho. Born in the late seventh century BC, Sappho spent much of her life on the island of Lesbos....
Beowulf
05 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an ...
Bruegel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent
15 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of 1559, 'The Fight Between Carnival And Lent'. Created in Antwerp at a time of re...
Kafka's The Trial
27 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Franz Kafka's novel of power and alienation 'The Trial', in which readers follow the protagonist Joseph K into a bizar...
Aesop
20 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aesop. According to some accounts, Aesop was a strikingly ugly slave who was dumb until granted the power of speech by...
Rudyard Kipling
16 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, ce...
Mrs Dalloway
03 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. First published in 1925, it charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dallo...
The Bluestockings
05 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Bluestockings. Around the middle of the eighteenth century a small group of intellectual women began to meet r...
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
22 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1859 the poet Edward FitzGerald published a long poem based on the verses of the ...
The Tale of Sinuhe
01 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss The Tale of Sinuhe, one of the most celebrated works of ancient Egyptian literature. Written around four thousand ...
Tristram Shandy
24 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne's comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was h...
The Tempest
14 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Written in around 1610, it is thought to be one of the playwright's final works an...
Pascal
19 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests begin a new series of the programme with a discussion of the French polymath Blaise Pascal. Born in 1623, Pascal was a bri...
The Invention of Radio
04 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the invention of radio. In the early 1860s the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell derived four equations which...
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
27 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, widely regarded as one of the greatest works of Chinese literature. Written 600...
Queen Zenobia
30 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Queen Zenobia, a famous military leader of the ancient world. Born in around 240 AD, Zenobia was Empress of the Pa...
Lévi-Strauss
23 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France's most celebrated intellectua...
Icelandic Sagas
09 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Icelandic Sagas. First written down in the 13th century, the sagas tell the stories of the Norse settlers of I...
Montaigne
25 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Born near Bordeaux in 1533, Montaigne retired from a life of public service age...
The Amazons
11 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Amazons, a tribe of formidable female warriors first described in Greek literature. They appear in the Homeric...
Chekhov
14 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov. Born in 1860, Chekhov trained as a doctor and for most of his adult life divi...
Decline and Fall
21 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh's comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substand...
Le Morte d'Arthur
10 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur", the epic tale of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Sir Thomas Ma...
Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
13 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the 'Book of Kings', which has been at the heart of Persian culture for t...
The Anarchy
01 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss The Anarchy, the civil war that took place in mid-twelfth century England. The war began as a succession dispute b...
Caxton and the Printing Press
18 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and influence of William Caxton, the merchant who brought the printing press to the British Isles. After ...
Gerald of Wales
04 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the medieval scholar Gerald of Wales. Born around the middle of the twelfth century, Gerald was a cleric and court...
The Druids
20 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Druids, the priests of ancient Europe. Active in Ireland, Britain and Gaul, the Druids were first written abou...
Annie Besant
21 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life of the prominent 19th-century social reformer Annie Besant. Born in 1847, Annie Besant espoused a range o...
James Joyce's Ulysses
14 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's novel Ulysses. First published ninety years ago in Paris, Joyce's masterpiece is a sprawling and sta...
Voltaire's Candide
03 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Voltaire's novel Candide. First published in 1759, the novel follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, and h...
Moses Mendelssohn
22 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work and influence of the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A prominent figure at the court of...
Benjamin Franklin
01 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Benjamin Franklin. A printer, statesman, diplomat, writer and scientist, Franklin was one of ...
The Kama Sutra
02 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Kama Sutra, one of the most celebrated and often misunderstood texts of Indian literature. Probably composed d...
The Safavid Dynasty
12 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Safavid Dynasty, rulers of the Persian empire between the 16th and 18th centuries.In 1501 Shah Ismail, a boy o...
Robinson Crusoe
22 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe. Published in 1719, it was an immediate success and is considered the classic...
Christina Rossetti
01 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Rossetti was born into an artistic family and her sibl...
Tennyson's In Memoriam
29 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Alfred, Lord Tennyson's long poem In Memoriam.In 1850, shortly before his appointment as Poet Laureate, Tennyson p...
The Anatomy of Melancholy
12 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton's masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a boo...
The Medieval University
17 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the medieval universities.In the 11th and 12th centuries a new type of institution started to appear in the major ...
Aristotle's Poetics
27 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Aristotle's Poetics. The Poetics is, as far as we know, the first ever work of literary theory. Written in the 4th...
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
06 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.In 1812 the 24-year-old Lord Byron published the first part of a long narr...
History of Metaphor
25 Nov 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of metaphor. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques declares: "All the world's a stage...
The Unicorn
28 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the unicorn. In the 5th century BC a Greek historian, Ctesias, described a strange one-horned beast which he belie...
Sturm und Drang
14 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the artistic movement known as Sturm und Drang.In the 1770s a small group of German writers started to produce pla...
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists
27 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg discusses 'Lives of the Artists' - the great biographer Giorgio Vasari's study of Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects. In 1550...
Roman Satire
22 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Roman Satire. Much of Roman culture was a development of their rich inheritance from the Greeks. But satire was a form...
Munch and The Scream
18 Mar 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests David Jackson, Dorothy Rowe and Alastair Wright discuss the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, focusing on his most fa...
Silas Marner
28 Jan 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests Rosemary Ashton, Dinah Birch and Valentine Cunningham discuss George Eliot's novel Silas Marner.Published in 1861, Silas Marne...
The Samurai
24 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests Gregory Irvine, Nicola Liscutin and Angus Lockyer discuss the history of the Samurai and the role of their myth in Japanese na...
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
26 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests Roy Foster, Jeri Johnson and Katherine Mullin discuss A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's groundbreaking 19...
Elizabethan Revenge
18 Jun 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Bate, Julie Sanders and Janet Clare discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. From Thomas Kyd's The Spanish T...
The Whale - A History
21 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests Steve Jones, Bill Amos and Eleanor Weston discuss the evolutionary history of the whale. The ancestor of all whales alive toda...
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
09 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick and Michele Barrett discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World. In Act V Scene ...
The School of Athens
26 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The School of Athens – the fresco painted by the Italian Renaissance painter, Raphael, for Pope Julius II’s privat...
The Waste Land and Modernity
26 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests, including Steve Connor and Lawrence Rainey, discuss TS Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land and its ambivalence to the modern ...
The Brothers Grimm
05 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg discusses the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm with Juliette Wood, Marina Warner and Tony Phelan. The German siblings who in 1812 publis...
Swift's A Modest Proposal
29 Jan 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most brilliant and shocking satires ever written in English – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Masqu...
The Baroque Movement
23 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque. What do the music of Bach, the Colonnades of St Peter’s, the paintings of Caravaggio and...
Dante's Inferno
03 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante’s ‘Inferno’ - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”...
The Music of the Spheres
19 Jun 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the music of the spheres, the elegant and poetic idea that the revolution of the planets generates a celestial harmony...
The Metaphysical Poets
19 Jun 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Metaphysical poets, a diffuse group of 17th century writers including John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herber...
The Riddle of the Sands
12 Jun 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the prescient thriller ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ about the decline Anglo-German relations before the First World...
The Library at Nineveh
15 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Library at Nineveh, a treasure house of Assyrian ideas from the 7th Century BC. In 1849 a young English adventurer...
Yeats and Irish Politics
17 Apr 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet W.B. Yeats and Irish politics. Yeats lived through a period of great change in Ireland from the collapse of t...
The Greek Myths
13 Mar 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek myths from Achilles to Zeus. Are you a touch narcissistic? Do you have the body of an Adonis? Are you willin...
Lear
28 Feb 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss King Lear. Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the we...
Rudolph II
31 Jan 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the coterie of brilliant thinkers gathered in 16th century Prague by the melancholic emperor Rudolph II. In 1606 the ...