2019

January

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why, in 1870, the Vatican Council issued the decree ‘pastor aeternus’ which, among other areas, affirmed papal infallibility.
    260 Social and ecclesiastical theology
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), who lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse.
    840 French and related literatures
  • Emmy Noether 24 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and life of one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Emmy Noether.
    510 Mathematics
  • Owain Glyndwr 31 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life of the Welsh nobleman, also known as Owen Glendower, who began a revolt against Henry IV in 1400 which was at first very successful.
    940 History of Europe

February

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable achievement of Aristotle (384-322BC) in the realm of biological investigation, for which he has been called the originator of the scientific study of life.
    570 Biology
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how artists from the Middle Ages onwards have been inspired by the Bible story of the widow who killed an Assyrian general who was besieging her village, and so saved her people from his army and from his master Nebuchadnezzar.
    700 Arts
  • Pheromones 21 Feb
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how members of the same species send each other invisible chemical signals to influence the way they behave.
    590 Animals (Zoology)
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, works, context and legacy of Antarah (525-608AD), the great poet and warrior.
    890 Other literatures

March

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact on the British Isles of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, the most poweful man in the court of Elizabeth I.
    940 History of Europe
  • Authenticity 14 Mar
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what it means to be oneself, a question explored by philosophers from Aristotle to the present day, including St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre.
    100 Philosophy
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest who at times burned his poems and at others insisted they should not be published.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • The Danelaw 28 Mar
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the effective partition of England in the 880s after a century of Viking raids, invasions and settlements.
    940 History of Europe

April

May

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most destructive riots in London’s history, which reached their peak on 7th June 1780 as troops fired on the crowd outside the Bank of England.
    940 History of Europe
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on ‘Time and Free Will’ in 1889.
    110 Metaphysics
  • Frankenstein 16 May
    In a programme first broadcast in May 2019, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names.
    800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how scientists sought to understand the properties of gases and the relationship between pressure and volume, and what that search unlocked.
    530 Physics
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of Grant’s presidency on Americans in the years after the Civil War in which he, with Lincoln, had led the Union Army to victory.
    970 History of North America

June

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the range, depth and style of Browne (1605-82) , a medical doctor whose curious mind drew him to explore and confess his own religious views, challenge myths and errors in science and consider how humans respond to the transience of life.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • The Inca 13 Jun
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the people of Cusco, in modern Peru, established an empire along the Andes down to the Pacific under their supreme leader Pachacuti.
    980 History of South America
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why Athenians decided to send a fast ship to Lesbos in 427BC, rowing through the night to catch one they sent the day before.
    930 History of the Ancient World
  • Doggerland 27 Jun
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the people, plants and animals once living on land now under the North Sea, now called Doggerland after Dogger Bank, inhabited up to c7000BC or roughly 3000 years before the beginnings of Stonehenge.
    930 History of the Ancient World

July

  • Lorca 4 Jul
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), author of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, who mixed the traditions of Andalusia with the avant-garde.
    860 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures

September

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in September 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow and waited a month for the Russians to meet him, to surrender and why, to his dismay, no-one came.
    940 History of Europe
  • The Rapture 26 Sep
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas developed by the Anglican priest John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), drawn from his reading of scripture, in which Jesus would suddenly take His believers up into the air, and those left behind would suffer on Earth until He returned with His church to rule for a thousand years before Final Judgement.
    230 Christianity

October

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work and ideas of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for revealing the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin and who later determined the structure of insulin.
    540 Chemistry
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on the education of children, as set out in his novel or treatise Emile, published in 1762.
    370 Education
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas explored in HG Wells’ novella, published in 1895, in which the Time Traveller moves forward to 802,701 AD.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Robert Burns 24 Oct
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the man who, in his lifetime, was called The Caledonian Bard and whose fame and influence was to spread around the world.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Hybrids 31 Oct
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what happens when parents from different species have offspring, despite their genetic differences.
    570 Biology

November

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1691 peace treaty that ended the Williamite War in Ireland, between supporters of the deposed King James II and the forces of William III and his allies.
    940 History of Europe
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novel written by Dostoevsky and published in 1866, in which Raskolnikov, a struggling student, justifies his murder of two women, as his future is more valuable than their lives.
    890 Other literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most powerful woman in the Crusader states in the century after the First Crusade.
    900 History
  • Li Shizhen 28 Nov
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of Li Shizhen (1518-1593) whose compendium of natural medicines is celebrated in China as the most complete survey of natural remedies of its time.
    610 Medicine and health

December