In Our Time
Episodes
Shakespeare's Life
15 Mar 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines what we know about the life of William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens said of the deeply enigmatic Shakespeare, “It is a great c...
Money
01 Mar 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the power of Money. In the Bible the Old Testament and the New Testament appear to agree about the power of money: Ecc...
Quantum Gravity
22 Feb 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines Quantum Gravity. Early in the 20th century physicists were startled by the realisation that the smallest things in the universe ...
The Restoration
15 Feb 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Restoration. On 29th May 1660, on his thirtieth birthday, Charles II rode into London on horseback and was restore...
Humanism
08 Feb 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Humanism. On the 3rd January 106 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer, politician, Roman philosopher and the founding fath...
Imperial Science
01 Feb 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what drove the British Empire, especially in Victoria’s century. Was it science, more specifically, the science of p...
Science and Religion
25 Jan 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the areas of conflict and agreement between science and religion.What space should science leave to religion? What gro...
The Enlightenment in Britain
18 Jan 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Enlightenment. In Germany it's called Aufklarung, in France it's the Siecle De Lumieres, and in Britain it's calle...
Mathematics and Platonism
11 Jan 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg looks at the deep claims made for mathematics, the discipline some believe to be the soul and true key to the understanding of all life, ...
Gothic
04 Jan 2001
Contributed by Lukas
Horace Walpole and then Anne Radcliffe appeared to have triggered an anti-enlightenment movement: the Gothic that swept in Coleridge, two Shelleys, By...
Nihilism
16 Nov 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Nihilism. The nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote, “There can be no doubt that...
Psychoanalysis and Literature
09 Nov 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers be...
Evolutionary Psychology
02 Nov 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They sw...
The Tudor State
26 Oct 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the Tudor State. In 1485 Henry Tudor slew Richard III and routed his army at The Battle of Bosworth Field. It was a...
Laws of Nature
19 Oct 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Laws of Nature. Since ancient times philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principle...
The Romantics
12 Oct 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideals, exponents and legacy of Romanticism. In the space of a few years around the start of the nineteenth centur...
Hitler in History
05 Oct 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how history has struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler: we have had t...
London
28 Sep 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of London. To T.S.Eliot it was the “Unreal City”, to Wordsworth “Earth has not anything to show more...
Imagination and Consciousness
29 Jun 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the question of consciousness, our sense of self, and how we are able to imagine things when they are not there, which...
Biography
22 Jun 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss biography which sells more books now than ever before; last year people in this country spent 115 million pounds on 12...
Inspiration and Genius
15 Jun 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg explores genius and inspiration. “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in co...
The Renaissance
08 Jun 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Renaissance, which was first given its role as the birth place of modern man by the nineteenth century historian J...
The American Ideal
01 Jun 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American Ideal. The Twentieth Century has been called the American Century, and you don’t have to look very far ...
Chemical Elements
25 May 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the chemical elements. The aim and challenge in chemistry, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the understan...
The Wars of the Roses
18 May 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Wars of the Roses which have been the scene for many a historical skirmish over the ages: The period in the fiftee...
Shakespeare's Work
11 May 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of William Shakespeare. He was nominated as the Man of the last Millennium and he steps into this one - on fi...
Death
04 May 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Death, what the 16th century philosopher Frances Bacon called, ‘the least of all evils’. A subject which has provo...
Human Origins
27 Apr 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of the human species. Where did we come from - we being Homo Sapiens? Let’s not go back to the Big Ba...
Englishness
20 Apr 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the characteristics of the English identity. “An Englishman’s word is his bond”, “An Englishman’s home is h...
New Wars
13 Apr 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of modern warfare. In the early nineteenth century the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz seemed to defi...
The Natural Order
06 Apr 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the science of taxonomy. The Argentinean author Jose Luis Borges illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification...
History and Understanding the Past
30 Mar 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what can be learnt from history. Many of us were taught that an understanding of the past was essential to a knowledge...
Materialism and the Consumer
23 Mar 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines materialism and the consumer. Does consumerism - as a cult, a fact, a need, a religion - threaten culture as we have known it, i...
Lenin
16 Mar 2000
Contributed by Lukas
For some time, in some intellectual quarters in the West, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov - also known as Lenin - was regarded as an understandable revolutiona...
The Age of Doubt
09 Mar 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the spread of religious doubt over the last three centuries. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead in 1882, Hegel in fact beat ...
Metamorphosis
02 Mar 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’...
Grand Unified Theory
24 Feb 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines 20th century physics’ quest for the ultimate theory of everything. Einstein left us with his theory of General Relativity, whi...
Reading
17 Feb 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the politics and practice of reading. Gustave Flaubert’s sage advice to us was: “Do not read, as ch...
Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment
10 Feb 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great poet and dramatist, famous for Faust, for The Sorrows of Young Werther, for Stor...
Republicanism
03 Feb 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines how English republicanism has developed from Cromwell to the present day. Before the French Revolution, before the American Decl...
Economic Rights
27 Jan 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss economic rights. Is democracy the truest conduit of capitalism, or do the forces that make us rich run counter to the ...
Masculinity in Literature
20 Jan 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg investigates masculinity in literature. Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Old Man and the Sea, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated”....
Information Technology
13 Jan 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg discusses the social and economic consequences of the information revolution. There are now more than 200 million people connected to the...
Climate Change
06 Jan 2000
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg discusses climate change. In 1999 the weather gave the planets occupants a terrible beating: 16,000 people lost their lives as a result...
Time
30 Dec 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of mankind’s attempt to understand the nature of time. At the end of the 19th century, H.G.Wells imagine...
Prayer
23 Dec 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the purpose and effects of prayer. Why do people pray? What did prayer ever do, the cry goes up, for those millions upon million...
Medical Ethics
16 Dec 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the technological advances and ethics of modern medicine. On an average working day about three quarters of a million of us go t...
Childhood
09 Dec 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss childhood. The 20th Century was proclaimed the Century of the Child. It has been much else but in the western world th...
Tragedy
02 Dec 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the ancient genre of tragedy and examines whether we have a psychological need for it, either as cathar...
Consciousness
25 Nov 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the problems of consciousness, one of the greatest mysteries facing science and philosophy today. The frustrations, th...
Progress
18 Nov 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss progress. As man has grown in years and knowledge, has he also progressed in terms of happiness and a true understandi...
The Novel
11 Nov 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development and the future of the novel. D.H. Lawrence was proud of his job, he said: “I am a man, and alive…f...
Education
04 Nov 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and the modern purpose of education. Nobody - would argue with the fact that education is of central impor...
Atrocity in the 20th Century
23 Oct 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the widespread and chilling atrocities of the 20th century. Just over a hundred years ago, in the ‘Genealogy of Mora...
The Individual
21 Oct 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the concept of the individual. The Renaissance gave birth to the concept of the individual. Shakespeare...
The Nation State
14 Oct 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Nation State. When we speak of our island story which island do we mean? When did England elide with Britain and ...
Utopia
07 Oct 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of Utopia. Both the idea of, and the longing for a perfect society have been in our imagination for centur...
Maths and Storytelling
30 Sep 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between maths and storytelling. Is there a hidden mathematical logic in stories? The American mathema...
Genetic Determinism
23 Sep 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theory of Genetic Determinism. In the middle of the last century two men - Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, and Ch...
Pain
22 Jul 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss pain; something of which everyone has an individual experience. What causes it, how do we cope with it, what mechanism...
Truth, Lies and Fiction
15 Jul 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss truth, lies and fiction. In 1995 a book appeared which brought its author great acclaim from serious critics, won priz...
Africa
08 Jul 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Africa. It could be seen as the great test of the West; economically, intellectually, spiritually. The "dark continent...
Intelligence
01 Jul 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a question that has stalked the twentieth century: Intelligence. Since the first IQ tests were invented in 1905, the q...
Capitalism
24 Jun 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss capitalism throughout the last two centuries. In 1848 Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto described the dynamic force...
The Great Disruption
17 Jun 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the shift that has gone on through the 20th century from our being an industrial society to what is often called ‘th...
The Monarchy
10 Jun 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British monarchy. In the last two hundred and fifty years, we’ve beheaded one king, exiled another, hired a dist...
Just War
03 Jun 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of a just war. There were theories about a justified or noble war before the birth of Christ, but it was his ...
Memory and Culture
27 May 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss memory. At the start of the twentieth century Freud put memory at the centre of our psychology, and as the century has...
The Universe's Origins
20 May 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the history of what we know about the origins of the universe. Some four hundred years ago in Rome, one Giordano Bruno was burnt...
Multiculturalism
13 May 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss multiculturalism. The divisions between people provoked and exploited because of differences in religion, culture, nat...
Mathematics
06 May 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the way perceptions of the importance of mathematics have fluctuated in the 20th century, the nature of mathematical a...
Artificial Intelligence
29 Apr 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss artificial intelligence. Can we create a machine that creates? Some argue so. And is consciousness, as we are, with h...
Fundamentalism
22 Apr 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the roots and the consequences of religious fundamentalism. It still surprises many Western liberal intellectuals that...
Evolution
15 Apr 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the future of gene therapy and advances in evolutionary biology. Are we continuing to evolve? If so, what are the signs and if n...
Writing and Political Oppression
08 Apr 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines how two writers’ work have been shaped by political oppression and explores whether writers have a political role in modern so...
Good and Evil
01 Apr 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether religion can still be seen as a way of interpreting and judging good and evil in modern western civilisation a...
Architecture in the 20th Century
25 Mar 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise in so-called spectacular architecture at the end of the 20th century. Is architecture to do with what we live...
Animal Experiments and Rights
18 Mar 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of animals in humankind's search for knowledge. Since the Greek physician Galen used pigs for anatomical stud...
History as Science
11 Mar 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of geography and ecology in determining world history since civilisation began. The 18th century histor...
Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
04 Mar 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the enduring popular and academic appeal of Shakespeare. Did he invent the human personality as we inhabit it now? Pro...
The Avant Garde's Decline and Fall in the 20th Century
25 Feb 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg examines the social and aesthetic impact of the Avant Garde and discusses whether it has failed in making painting relevant in the 20th c...
Space in Religion and Science
18 Feb 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of thought about space, and examines whether cyberspace has introduced a new concept of space in our world...
Language and the Mind
11 Feb 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of our ideas about the formation of language. The psychologist George Miller worked out that in English th...
Psychoanalysis and its Legacy
04 Feb 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relevance of psychoanalysis at the end of the 20th century. It’s 100 years since Sigmund Freud, the founder of p...
Ageing
28 Jan 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ageing. In 1900, 1% of the world’s population were over 65. In the 1990s nearly 8% are. By the year 2020, nearly 1...
Modern Culture
28 Jan 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests debate the state of Modern Culture in the 20th century. Culture used to be a word we mocked, a concept too foreign for the sto...
Genetic Engineering
14 Jan 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the implications of the developments in genetic engineering. Out of the city of Cambridge in the mid century came DNA ...
Feminism
07 Jan 1999
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important events of the 20th century - the rise of Feminism and the subsequent empowerment of women. W...
The British Empire's Legacy
31 Dec 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Britain's colonial legacy. The 18th, 19th and early part of the 20th centuries were times of colonial conquest for thi...
Neuroscience in the 20th century
24 Dec 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests marvel at our brains and discuss how at the end of a century of research we still understand so little about how they work.Dev...
The American Century
17 Dec 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how legitimate it is to call the 20th century the American century. Just how benevolent has America’s impact on the ...
Cultural Rights in the 20th Century
10 Dec 1998
Contributed by Lukas
On the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in New York, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the c...
History's relevance in the 20th century
03 Dec 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of history this century. One of the debates raging in the practice of history is between the history of fact...
Work in the 20th Century
26 Nov 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changing nature of work practices and the work ethic as it pertains at the end of the 20th century. Has our unders...
The Brain and Consciousness
19 Nov 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how our increased knowledge of the functioning of the brain and the mechanisms of memory in the 20th century has chang...
The City in the 20th Century
12 Nov 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the artistic, cultural and innovative developments of the city in the 20th century and is joined by two practitioners ...
Science in the 20th century
05 Nov 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how perceptions of science and the power of science have changed in the 20th century. Does scientific endeavour increa...
Science's Revelations
29 Oct 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether the mass of scientific understanding and knowledge we have accumulated has destroyed our sense of poetic wonde...
Politics in the 20th Century
22 Oct 1998
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg talks to Gore Vidal and Alan Clarke about the future of the nation-state; is the concept dead and buried? And what is the relationship b...
War in the 20th Century
15 Oct 1998
Contributed by Lukas
In the first programme of a new series examining ideas and events which have shaped thinking in philosophy, religion, science and the arts, Melvyn Bra...