In Our Time
Episodes
Galaxies
29 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the galaxies. Spread out across the voids of space like spun sugar, but harbouring in their centres super-massive blac...
The Spanish Inquisition
22 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Spanish Inquisition, the defenders of medieval orthodoxy. The word ‘Inquisition’ has its roots in the Latin wo...
Carbon
15 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Carbon. It forms the basis of all organic life and has the amazing ability to bond with itself and a wide range of oth...
Uncle Tom's Cabin
08 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the anti slavery novel, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. When Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start...
The Heart
01 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the heart. Aristotle considered the heart to be the seat of thought, reason and emotion. The Roman physician Galen lo...
Mathematics and Music
25 May 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mathematical structures that lie within the heart of music. The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz ...
Mill
18 May 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill. He believed that, 'The true philosophy is the mar...
Fairies
11 May 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary and visual depiction of fairies, supernatural creatures that inhabit a half-way world between this one an...
Astronomy and Empire
04 May 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between astronomy and the British Empire. The 18th century explorer and astronomer James Cook wrote: ...
The Great Exhibition of 1851
27 Apr 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1851 Great Exhibition. “Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. ...
Immunisation
20 Apr 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the search for immunisation. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Emp...
The Oxford Movement
13 Apr 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Oxford Movement in the Church of England in the 19th century. Cardinal John Henry Newman is perhaps the most signi...
Goethe
06 Apr 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the great German polymath. 'I had the great advantage of being born at a time that was ripe f...
The Carolingian Renaissance
30 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance. In 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III p...
The Royal Society
23 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the formation of the Royal Society. In the 17th century the natural philosopher Francis Bacon heralded the new age of ...
Don Quixote
16 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century novel, Don Quixote. Published four hundred years ago in Madrid, the book was an im...
Negative Numbers
09 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss negative numbers, a history of mystery and suspicion. In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that neg...
Friendship
02 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of friendship. In Greek and Roman times, friendship was thought of as being an essential constituent of bo...
Catherine the Great
23 Feb 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catherine the Great. In Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery hangs perhaps the most well-known picture of Russia's most well-kno...
Human Evolution
16 Feb 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the story of human evolution, which stretches back over six million years. It is not the story of one species but of s...
Chaucer
09 Feb 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Geoffrey Chaucer, often called the father of English literature."In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on...
The Abbasid Caliphs
02 Feb 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Abbasid Caliphs, dynastic rulers of the Islamic world from the mid eighth to the tenth century. They headed a Musl...
Seventeenth Century Print Culture
26 Jan 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 17th century print culture."Away ungodly Vulgars, far away, Fly ye profane, that dare not view the day, Nor speak to m...
Relativism
19 Jan 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss relativism, a philosophy of shifting sands. "Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the ...
Prime Numbers
12 Jan 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 … This sequence of numbers goes on literally forever. Recently, a team of rese...
The Oath
05 Jan 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of the oath in ancient Greece and Rome, The importance of oaths in the Classical world cannot be overst...
The Oresteia
29 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ‘Oresteia’, the seminal trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus. The composer Richard Wagner recalled the visceral s...
Heaven
22 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of heaven and the afterlife. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote 'that in the end language can on...
The Peterloo Massacre
15 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, a defining moment of its age. In 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: 'I met Murder on the ...
Artificial Intelligence
08 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss artificial intelligence. Can machines think? It was a question posed by the mathematician and Bletchley Park code brea...
Hobbes
01 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes who argued: "During the time men live without a common powe...
The Graviton
24 Nov 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the search for the Graviton particle. Albert Einstein said "I know why there are so many people who love chopping wood...
Pragmatism
17 Nov 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism. A pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal soluti...
Greyfriars and Blackfriars
10 Nov 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, known as the Blackfriars and Greyfriars. "Just as it is be...
Asteroids
03 Nov 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the unique properties of asteroids. They used to be regarded as the 'vermin of the solar system', irritating rubble th...
Johnson
27 Oct 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Johnson, a giant of 18th century literature. “There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fi...
Cynicism
20 Oct 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cynics, the performance artists of philosophy. Eating live octopus with fresh lupins, performing intimate acts in...
Mammals
13 Oct 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise of the mammals. The Cenozoic Era of Earth's history began 65 million years ago and runs to this day. It began...
The Field of the Cloth of Gold
06 Oct 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Field of the Cloth of Gold, an extraordinary international party. In the spring of 1520 six thousand Englishmen an...
Magnetism
29 Sep 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of magnetism. Pliny the Elder, in his Historia Naturalis, tells a story of a legendary Greek shepherd call...
Marx
14 Jul 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Karl Marx. "Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains", "Religion is the opium of the peopl...
Marlowe
07 Jul 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Christopher Marlowe. In the prologue to The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say:"I count religion but a...
Merlin
30 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the legendary wizard Merlin. He was sired by an incubus and born of a virgin; he was a prophet, a shape-shifter, a kin...
The KT Boundary
23 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the KT Boundary. Across the entire planet, where it hasn't been eroded or destroyed in land movements, there is a thin...
Paganism in the Renaissance
16 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss paganism in the Renaissance. For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism...
The Scriblerus Club
09 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Scriblerus Club. The 18th century Club included some of the most extraordinary and vivid satirists ever to have wr...
Renaissance Maths
02 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance Mathematics. As with so many areas of European thought, mathematics in the Renaissance was a question of r...
The French Revolution's reign of terror
26 May 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the reign of terror during the French Revolution. On Monday September 10th 1792 The Times of London carried a story co...
Beauty
19 May 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss beauty and its qualities."Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."That...
Abelard and Heloise
05 May 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the story of Abelard and Heloise, a tale of literature and philosophy, theology and scandal, and above all love in the...
Perception and the Senses
28 Apr 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss perception: how the brain reacts to the mass of data continually crowding it. Barry Stein's laboratory at Wake Forest ...
The Aeneid
21 Apr 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Aeneid'. Out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan wars came a man heading West, his father on his back an...
Archaeology and Imperialism
14 Apr 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the link between archaeology and imperialism. In 1842 a young English adventurer called Austen Henry Layard set out to...
Alfred and the Battle of Edington
07 Apr 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss King Alfred and the defeat of the Vikings at Battle of Edington. At the end of the 9th century the Vikings controlled ...
John Ruskin
31 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of John Ruskin. He was the most brilliant art critic of his age, perhaps the most brilliant that Bri...
Angels
24 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the heavenly host of Angels. George Bernard Shaw made the observation that "in heaven an angel is nobody in particular...
Dark Energy
17 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'dark energy'. Only 5% of our universe is composed of visible matter, stars, planets and people; something called 'dar...
Modernist Utopias
11 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mad, bad world of modern utopias. "I want to gather together about twenty souls," wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, "and...
Stoicism
04 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Stoicism, the third great philosophy of the Ancient World. It was founded by Zeno in the fourth century BC and flouris...
Alchemy
24 Feb 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Alchemy, the ancient science of transformations. The most famous alchemical text is the Emerald Tablet...
The Cambrian Period
17 Feb 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cambrian period when there was an explosion of life on Earth. In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Cana...
The Mind/Body Problem
13 Jan 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mind/body problem in philosophy. At the start of René Descartes' Sixth Meditation he writes: "there is a great di...
Tsar Alexander II's assassination
06 Jan 2005
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. On 1st March 1881, the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, was travelling through the ...
The Roman Republic
30 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual downfall of the Roman Republic which survived for 500 years.Around 550 BC, Lucretia, the daughte...
Faust
23 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the myth of Faustus." Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Hel...
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
16 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics which can be very simply stated like this: "Energy spontaneously tends to flow from b...
Machiavelli and the Italian City States
09 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli's great manual of power, he wrote, "since me...
Jung
02 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the extraordinary mind of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In 1907 Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a con...
The Venerable Bede
25 Nov 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Venerable Bede. In 731 AD, in the most far-flung corner of the known universe, a book was written that represented...
Higgs Boson
18 Nov 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Higgs Boson particle. One weekend in 1964 the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs was walking in the Cairngorm Mountain...
Zoroastrianism
11 Nov 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses Zoroastrianism. "Now have I seen him with my own eyes, knowing him in truth to be the wise Lord of the good mind and...
Electrickery
04 Nov 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dawn of the age of electricity. In Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philoso...
Witchcraft
21 Oct 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss witchcraft in Reformation Europe. In 1486 a book was published in Latin, it was called Maleus Mallificarum and it very...
Rhetoric
14 Oct 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses rhetoric. Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, "Speech is a powerful lord that with t...
The Han Synthesis
14 Oct 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Han Synthesis philosophies of China. In The Analects the Chinese sage Confucius says of statecraft: "He who exerci...
Sartre
07 Oct 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jean-Paul Sartre, the French novelist, playwright, and philosopher who became the king of intellectual Paris and a foc...
Politeness
30 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of Politeness. A new idea that stalked the land at the start of the eighteenth century in Britain, Politenes...
The Origins of Life
23 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the emergence of the world’s first organic matter nearly four billion years ago. Scientists have named 1.5 million s...
Agincourt
16 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Battle of Agincourt."Owre kynge went forth to Normandy, With grace and myyt of chivalry; The God for hym wrouyt ma...
The Odyssey
09 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Odyssey by Homer, often claimed as the great founding work of Western Literature. It's an epic that has entertain...
Pi
02 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the most detailed number in nature. In the Bible's description of Solomon's temple it comes out as thr...
Washington and the American Revolution
24 Jun 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the first President of the US, George Washington, and the people and ideas that caused the American Revolution. In 177...
Renaissance Magic
17 Jun 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance obsession with Magic. In 1461 one of the powerful Medici family’s many agents carried a mysterious manus...
Empiricism
10 Jun 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Empiricism, England’s greatest contribution to philosophy. At the end of the seventeenth century the philosopher Joh...
Babylon
03 Jun 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the truth about Babylon. Six thousand years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being bui...
The Planets
27 May 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss our knowledge of the planets in both our and other solar systems. Tucked away in the outer Western Spiral arm of the M...
Toleration
20 May 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and politics behind the idea of religious toleration. In 1763 Voltaire remarked that "of all religions, the ...
Zero
13 May 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the number between 1 and -1, which has strange and uniquely beguiling qualities. Shakespeare’s King L...
Heroism
06 May 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what defines a hero and what place they had in classical society. On the fields of Troy a fallen soldier pleaded with ...
Tea
29 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss tea, the first truly global commodity. After air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet an...
Hysteria
22 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a problematic notion which can be an emotional condition, a syndrome, an extreme or over-reaction, or the physical sig...
The Later Romantics
15 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry, the tragedy and the idealism of the Later Romantics. There must have been something extraordinary about th...
The Fall
08 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of original sin and its influence in Christian Europe. Genesis tells the Bible’s story of creation, but ...
China's Warring States period
01 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the astonishing productivity of the Chinese Golden Age. 400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axial Age, when great civili...
Theories of Everything
25 Mar 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 30 year search to solve all the biggest questions in physics. At the end of the last century, brave voices were pr...
The Norse Gods
11 Mar 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Vikings’ myths. Thor’s huge hammer, the wailing Valkyrie, howling wolves and fierce elemental giants give a ro...
Dreams
04 Mar 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the interpretation of dreams. Over a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud declared confidently, “The interpretation of d...
The Mughal Empire
25 Feb 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Mughal Empire which, at its height, stretched from Bengal in the East to Gujarat in the West, and from Lahore in...
Rutherford
19 Feb 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Ernest Rutherford. He was the father of nuclear science, a great charismatic figure who mapped the landscape of the su...
The Sublime
12 Feb 2004
Contributed by Lukas
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a transcendental idea that took hold on the Age of Enlightenment. When the English essayist John Hall translated the w...