2024

January

  • Condorcet 11 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94), known as the Last of the Philosophes, the intellectuals in the French Enlightenment who sought to apply their learning to solving the problems of their world.
    190 Modern Western Philosophy
  • Nefertiti 18 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who inspired one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt.
    930 History of the Ancient World
  • Panpsychism 25 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that some kind of consciousness is present not just in our human brains but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons.
    120 Epistemology

February

March

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed.
    960 History of Africa
  • The Waltz 14 Mar
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years.
    780 Music
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire.
    930 History of the Ancient World
  • The Kalevala 28 Mar
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Finnish epic poem that first appeared in print in 1835 in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire and until recently part of Sweden.
    890 Other literatures

April

May

  • Mercury 2 May
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet which is closest to our Sun.
    520 Astronomy
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ‘the greatest poet of his age’, Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Philippa Foot 16 May
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010).
    170 Ethics
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court.
    950 History of Asia
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the canonical figures from the history of political thought.
    320 Political science

June

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander.
    940 History of Europe
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss “The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling” (1749) by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), one of the most influential of the early English novels and a favourite of Dickens.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Karma 20 Jun
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the doctrine of Karma as developed initially among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists in India from the first millennium BCE.
    290 Other religions
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the great French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) in London, initially in 1870 and then from 1899.
    750 Painting

July

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that ‘eat’ bacteria.
    570 Biology

September

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the major figures in Victorian British politics.
    940 History of Europe
  • Wormholes 26 Sep
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tantalising idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies, somewhere out there in the universe.
    530 Physics

October

November

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who, according to the French philosopher Simone Weil, wrote ‘the most beautiful poem in the world’.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 2000-year-old device which transformed our understanding of astronomy in ancient Greece.
    520 Astronomy
  • Italo Calvino 21 Nov
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century.
    850 Italian, Romanian and related literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the intense political activity at the turn of the 18th Century, when many politicians in London went to great lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and others went to equal lengths to oppose them.
    940 History of Europe

December

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature.
    890 Other literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the great unanswered questions in science: how and where did life on Earth begin, what did it need to thrive and could it be found elsewhere? Charles Darwin speculated that we might look for the cradle of life here in ‘some warm little pond’; more recently the focus moved to ocean depths, while new observations in outer space and in laboratories raise fresh questions about the potential for lifeforms to develop and thrive, or ‘habitability’ as it is termed.
    570 Biology
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work ‘Parallel Lives’ which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world.
    880 Classical and modern Greek literatures