In Our Time

Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin

05 Jan 2009

Contributed by Lukas

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009 and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, Me...

The Consolations of Philosophy

01 Jan 2009

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the consolation of Philosophy. In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius fo...

The Physics of Time

18 Dec 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the physics of time. When writing the Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton declared his hand on most of the big questio...

Heat

04 Dec 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of scientific ideas about heat. As anyone who’s ever burnt their hand will testify – heat is a pretty ...

The Great Reform Act

27 Nov 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Great Reform Act of 1832. The Act redrew the map of British politics in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and...

Neuroscience

13 Nov 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests examine the relationship between the mind and the brain as they discuss recent developments in Neuroscience. In the mid-19th c...

The Fire of London

11 Nov 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Great Fire of London which destroyed up to a third of the city in 1666. Samuel Pepys described the scene in his d...

Aristotle's Politics

06 Nov 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important works of political philosophy ever written - Aristotle’s ‘Politics’. Looking out acros...

Bolivar

30 Oct 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Simon Bolivar, hero of the revolutionary wars that liberated Spanish America from Spain. In 1804...

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...

Vitalism

16 Oct 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Vitalism, an 18th and 19th century quest for the spark of life. On a dreary night in November 1818, a young doctor cal...

Godel's Incompleteness Theorems

09 Oct 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss an iconic piece of 20th century maths - Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In 1900, in Paris, the International Cong...

The Translation Movement

02 Oct 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest intellectual projects in history - the mass translation of Greek ideas into Arabic from the 9th ce...

Miracles

25 Sep 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the five thousand and the general subject of miracles. Miracles have been p...

Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome

10 Jul 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman historian Tacitus who chronicled some of Rome’s most notorious emperors, including Nero and Caligula, 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 Arab Conquests

26 Jun 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Arab conquests - an extraordinary period in the 7th and 8th centuries when the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula con...

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...

Lysenkoism

05 Jun 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests delve into the dark world of genetics under Joseph Stalin in discussing the career of Trofim Lysenko. In 1928, as America lurc...

Probability

29 May 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the strange mathematics of probability where heads or tails is a simple question with a far from simple answer. Gambli...

The Black Death

22 May 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the Black Death influenced the structure and ideas of Medieval Europe. In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arr...

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...

The Brain

08 May 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of ideas about the human brain. Since time immemorial people have puzzled over the brain and its function...

The Enclosures of the 18th Century

01 May 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire poet John Clar...

Materialism

24 Apr 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Materialism in Philosophy – the idea that matter and the interactions between matter account for all that exists and...

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 Norman Yoke

10 Apr 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ‘the Norman Yoke’ – the idea that the Battle of Hastings sparked years of cruel oppression for the Anglo Saxons ...

The Laws of Motion

03 Apr 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Newton’s Laws of Motion. In 1687 Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in the universe, from...

The Dissolution of the Monasteries

27 Mar 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Was Henry’s decision to destroy monastic culture in this country ...

Kierkegaard

20 Mar 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.In 1840 a young Danish girl...

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...

Ada Lovelace

06 Mar 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They contro...

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...

The Multiverse

21 Feb 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests will be leaving the studio, the planet and indeed, the universe to take a tour of the Multiverse. If you look up the word ‘...

The Statue of Liberty

14 Feb 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Statue of Liberty."Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. With these word...

The Social Contract

07 Feb 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Social Contract and ask a foundational question of political philosophy – by what authority does a government go...

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 ...

Plate Tectonics

24 Jan 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the science of plate tectonics revolutionised our understanding of the planet on which we live. America is getting...

The Fisher King

17 Jan 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests will be delving into the world of medieval legend in pursuit of the powerful and enigmatic Fisher King. In the world of mediev...

The Charge of the Light Brigade

10 Jan 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Charge of the Light - an event of no military significance that has become iconic in the British historical imagin...

Camus

03 Jan 2008

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Algerian-French writer and Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a powerful...

The Nicene Creed

27 Dec 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Nicene Creed which established the Divinity of Christ. "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heave...

The Four Humours

20 Dec 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests talk about blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. These are the four humours, a theory of disease and health that is among...

The Sassanid Empire

13 Dec 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Sassanian Empire. Founded around 226 AD, in Persia, the Sassanian Empire lasted over 400 years as a grand imperial...

Genetic Mutation

06 Dec 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss mutation in genetics and evolution. When lying mortally ill with cancer, the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane penned ...

The Fibonacci Sequence

29 Nov 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Fibonacci Sequence. Named after a 13th century Italian Mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa who was known as Fibonacci,...

The Prelude

22 Nov 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest long poems in the English language – The Prelude. Begun in Northern Germany during the terrible ...

Oxygen

15 Nov 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg discusses the discovery of Oxygen by Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier. In the late 18th century Chemistry was the prince of the sci...

Avicenna

08 Nov 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Persian Islamic philosopher, Avicenna. In the city of Hamadan in Iran, right in the centre, there is a vast mausol...

Guilt

01 Nov 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss morality by taking a long hard look at the idea of guilt. The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke wa...

Taste

25 Oct 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 18th century obsession with taste. In the mid 18th century the social commentator, George Coleman, decried the gre...

The Arabian Nights

18 Oct 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg discusses the myths, tales and legends of the Arabian Nights.Once upon a time a wealthy merchant grew hot in the sun and sat down under a...

The Divine Right of Kings

11 Oct 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Divine Right of Kings. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the character Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of t...

Antimatter

04 Oct 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Antimatter, a type of particle predicted by the British physicist, Paul Dirac. Dirac once declared that “The laws of...

Socrates

27 Sep 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek philosopher Socrates, acknowledged as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Born in 469 BC into the go...

Madame Bovary

12 Jul 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary sensation caused by Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. In January 1857 a man called Ernest Pinard s...

The Pilgrim Fathers

05 Jul 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Pilgrim Fathers and their 1620 voyage to the New World on the Mayflower. Every year on the fourth Thursday in Nove...

The Permian-Triassic Boundary

28 Jun 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Permian-Triassic boundary. 250 million years ago, in the Permian period of geological time, the most ferocious pre...

Common Sense Philosophy

21 Jun 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg looks at an unexpected philosophical subject - the philosophy of common sense. In the first century BC the Roman statesman Marcus Tulliu...

Renaissance Astrology

14 Jun 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance Astrology. In Act I Scene II of King Lear, the ne’er do well Edmund steps forward and rails at the weakn...

Siegfried Sassoon

07 Jun 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "...

Ockham's Razor

31 May 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophical ideas of William Ockham including Ockham's Razor. In the small village of Ockham, near Woking in Sur...

The Siege of Orléans

24 May 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Siege of Orléans, when Joan of Arc came to the rescue of France and routed the English army with the help of God....

Gravitational Waves

17 May 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss mysterious phenomena called Gravitational Waves in contemporary physics. The rather un-poetically named star SN 2006gy...

Victorian Pessimism

10 May 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Victorian Pessimism. On 1 September 1851 the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon. Catching a ferry from Dover to ...

Spinoza

03 May 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg discusses the Dutch Jewish Philosopher Spinoza. For the radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was the first man to have lived and die...

Greek and Roman Love Poetry

26 Apr 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Greek and Roman love poetry, from the Greek poet Sappho and her erotic descriptions of romance on Lesbos, to the love-...

Symmetry

19 Apr 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss symmetry. Found in Nature - from snowflakes to butterflies - and in art in the music of Bach and the poems of Pushkin,...

The Opium Wars

12 Apr 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg discusses the Opium Wars, a series of conflicts in the 19th Century which had a profound effect on British Chinese relations for generati...

St Hilda

05 Apr 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 7th century saint, Hilda, or Hild as she would have been known then, wielded great religious and political influen...

Anaesthetics

29 Mar 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of anaesthetics, from laughing gas in the 1790s to the discovery of “blessed chloroform”. Remembering ...

Bismarck

22 Mar 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the original Iron Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. One of Europe's leading statesmen in the 19th Century he is credited ...

Epistolary Literature

15 Mar 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 18th Century fashion for epistolary literature. From its first appearance in the 17th Century with writers l...

Microbiology

08 Mar 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of microbiology. We have more microbes in our bodies than we have human cells. We fear them as the cause o...

Optics

01 Mar 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of optics. From telescopes to microscopes, from star-gazing to the intimacies of a magnified flea. As Gali...

Heart of Darkness

15 Feb 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg will be discussing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Written in 1899, Heart of Darkness is a fascinating fin de siecle critique of col...

Popper

08 Feb 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustl...

Genghis Khan

01 Feb 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Genghis Khan. Born Temujin in the 12th Century, he was cast out by his tribe when just a child and left to struggle fo...

Archimedes

25 Jan 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek mathematician Archimedes. Reputed to have shouted “Eureka!” as he leapt from his bath having discovered...

The Jesuits

18 Jan 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order of priests who became known as “the school masters of Europe”. Founded in ...

Mars

11 Jan 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet Mars. Named after the Roman god of war, Mars has been a source of continual fascination. It is one of our n...

Jorge Luis Borges

04 Jan 2007

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is one of the greatest write...

Constantinople Siege and Fall

28 Dec 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Constantinople in 1453. When Sultan Mehmet the Second rode into the city of Constantinople on a white hor...

Hell

21 Dec 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss hell and its representation in literature and the visual arts, through the ages from Ancient Egypt to modern Christian...

Indian Mathematics

14 Dec 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the contribution Indian mathematicians have made to our understanding of the subject. Mathematics from the Indian subc...

Anarchism

07 Dec 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Anarchism and why its political ideas became synonymous with chaos and disorder. Pierre Joseph Proudhon famously decla...

The Speed of Light

30 Nov 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the speed of light. Scientists and thinkers have been fascinated with the speed of light for millennia. Aristotle wron...

Altruism

23 Nov 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss altruism. The term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist Auguste Comte and is derived from the Latin “...

The Peasants’ Revolt

16 Nov 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?" these are the opening ...

Pope

09 Nov 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Alexander Pope. His enemies – who were numerous - described him as a hunchbacked toad, twisted ...

The Poincaré Conjecture

02 Nov 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Poincaré Conjecture. The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré declared: “The scientist does not study mat...

The Encyclopédie

26 Oct 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French encyclopédie, the European Enlightenment in book form. One of its editors, D’Alembert, described its mis...

The Needham Question

19 Oct 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Needham Question; why Europe and not China developed modern technology. What do these things have in common? Firew...

The Diet of Worms

12 Oct 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Diet of Worms, an event that helped trigger the European Reformation. Nestled on a bend of the River Rhine, in the...

Averroes

05 Oct 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle achieving fam...

Humboldt

28 Sep 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt. He was possibly the greatest and certainly one of the mos...

Comedy in Ancient Greek Theatre

13 Jul 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss comedy in Ancient Greek theatre including Aristophanes and Menander. In The Birds, written by Aristophanes, two Atheni...

Pastoral Literature

06 Jul 2006

Contributed by Lukas

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss pastoral literature.Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills,...