Hello

Almost every episode is introduced with a statement that begins ‘Hello.’

1998 12 episodes

War in the 20th Century 15 Oct
Hello, and welcome to a new series of programmes in which I hope we'll be looking at some of the ideas and events which have influenced the century.
Politics in the 20th Century 22 Oct
Hello. My guests today are the novelist and commentator, Gore Vidal, whose new novel, The Smithsonian Institution, is published this week.
Science’s Revelations 29 Oct
Hello. My guest today, Richard Dawkins, whose book Unweaving the Rainbow has just been published, and Ian McEwan whose novel Enduring Love, a tale of rationalism, romanticism, and religion at odds with one another, has recently been successfully launched in paperback.
Science in the 20th century 5 Nov
Hello. Science appears so triumphant now that increasingly it seems the supreme unchallenged source of truth, knowledge, and wisdom about life, its origins, its processes, even its purposes or lack of purpose.
The City in the 20th Century 12 Nov
Hello. This week, we take a 20th century perspective on the development of cities and all that they represent in our culture.
The Brain and Consciousness 19 Nov
Hello. As the century progresses, so our knowledge of the function of the brain has accelerated, promising to change our view of our own nature and our approach to the behaviour and treatment of others.
Work in the 20th Century 26 Nov
Hello. This week, we're taking a look at the changing nature of work and the work ethic as it obtains at the end of the 20th century.
History’s relevance in the 20th century 3 Dec
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Cultural Rights in the 20th Century 10 Dec
Hello. Today is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in New York, and we're going to attempt to discuss that in the context of globalisation, cultural rights, and rights and responsibilities.
The American Century 17 Dec
Hello. What does it mean to call this century the American Century?
Neuroscience in the 20th century 24 Dec
Hello. We'll be talking about the brain and the latest work on that most fascinating of subjects, which is also an incredible object.
The British Empire’s Legacy 31 Dec
Hello. Today, I'm joined by two historians to discuss Britain's colonial legacy.

1999 44 episodes

Feminism 7 Jan
Hello. Today, I'm joined by the academic and feminist writer, Germaine Greer, and the Darwinian philosopher, Helena Cronin, to discuss the rise of feminism and the subsequent empowerment of women in the 20th century.
Genetic Engineering 14 Jan
Hello. Today, I'm joined by the geneticist professor Graham Bulfield and the writer Bryan Appleyard to discuss the impact of the new genetics, one of the most important advances in scientific knowledge in the modern age.
Modern Culture 21 Jan
Hello. In the week in which Charles Sachi launches his new invention, a school of contemporary British artists he calls the young neurotics, and James Joyce's Ulysses has been voted this century's classic novel in a national poll, I'm joined by the philosopher Roger Scruton and the writer Will Self to debate the state of modern culture in the 20th century.
Ageing 28 Jan
Hello. Today, I'm joined by Britain's first professor of biological gerontology, Tom Kirkwood from Manchester University, and Alan Walker, professor of social policy at the University of Sheffield, to discuss and explore one of the great revolutions of our century, that of old age.
Psychoanalysis and its Legacy 4 Feb
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Language and the Mind 11 Feb
Hello. Jean Jacques Rousseau said that we differ from the animal kingdom in two main ways, the use of language and the prohibition of incest.
Space in Religion and Science 18 Feb
Hello. In the 20th century, our notions of physical space have been revolutionised.
The Avant Garde’s Decline and Fall in the 20th Century 25 Feb
Hello. Next month sees the opening of one of the Tate Galleries' most ambitious retrospectives, Jackson Pollack.
Shakespeare and Literary Criticism 4 Mar
Hello. He's been voted by Radio 4 listeners as the man of the millennium, and the American literary critic Harold Bloom claims, quote, Shakespeare is universal.
History as Science 11 Mar
Hello. The 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished.
Animal Experiments and Rights 18 Mar
Hello. Today, we look at one of the most impassioned debates of the late 20th century in this country, animal rights and the use of animals in furthering scientific understanding.
Architecture in the 20th Century 25 Mar
Hello. Daniel Libeskind has been heralded as one of the greatest architects of his generation and of the latter half of the 20th century.
Good and Evil 1 Apr
Hello. The nature of good and evil is a subject which has continued to tease and trouble the greatest minds in the 20th century, whether in medicine, philosophy, politics, or the arts.
Writing and Political Oppression 8 Apr
Hello. In this century in which we've seen the execution of writers such as Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria in 1995 and a fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie, we turn to two writers of the century, Nadine Gordimer and Ariel Dorfman, to discuss the writing of fiction and political oppression.
Evolution 15 Apr
Hello. Our knowledge of evolution this century has expanded in ways unimaginable in Darwin's time.
Fundamentalism 22 Apr
Hello. The latter half of the 20th century has seen the surprising and unexpected rise of religious fundamentalism in all the major faiths.
Artificial Intelligence 29 Apr
Hello. It's 31 years since Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke gave us HAL, the archetypal thinking computer of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Mathematics 6 May
Hello. Galileo wrote, this grand book, the universe, is written in the language of mathematics.
Multiculturalism 13 May
Hello. A recent estimate put the figure of people living in a country other than the one of their birth at 80 millions.
The Universe’s Origins 20 May
Hello. About 400 years ago in Rome, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his belief in other inhabited worlds.
Memory and Culture 27 May
Hello. As every second passes, humanity has a moment more to remember, and perhaps this fact alone goes some way to explaining the ever changing role of memory both in the mind of individuals and the heart and at the heart of the body politic.
Just War 3 Jun
Hello. I'm joined today by historian Niall Ferguson and political scientist John Keane to examine the question of the just war.
The Monarchy 10 Jun
Hello. I'm joined today by historian David Cannadine and social commentator Bea Campbell to look at the changing face of monarchy.
The Great Disruption 17 Jun
Hello. I'm joined today by Francis Fukuyama and the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, to look at the shift that has gone on through our century from our being an industrial society to what's often called the information society.
Capitalism 24 Jun
Hello. I'm joined today by two economic commentators, Edward Luttwak and Anatole Kaletsky, to look at capitalism through the century.
Intelligence 1 Jul
Hello. Today, we're looking at a question that, in the words of one of our contributors, has stalked the 20th century, intelligence.
Africa 8 Jul
Hello. In the spring of last year, president Bill Clinton glad handed his way across the continent of Africa.
Truth, Lies and Fiction 15 Jul
Hello. I'm joined today by Elena Lappin and Nick Groom to examine truth, lies and fiction.
Pain 22 Jul
Hello. I'm joined today by two neurologists, Patrick Wall and Semir Zeki to look at pain and subjective experience.
Genetic Determinism 23 Sep
Hello. In the middle of the last century, two men, Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk, and Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, established the central theories of modern biology and changed the way the world thinks.
Maths and Storytelling 30 Sep
Hello. I'm joined today by John Allen Paulos and Marina Warner to examine the links between mathematics and storytelling.
Utopia 7 Oct
Hello. I'm joined today by John Carey and Anthony Grayling to look at Utopia's real and fictional in the past, present, and future.
The Nation State 14 Oct
Hello. As we end the century, the identity of one of the most influential and forceful countries of the last millennium, our own, is subject to scrutiny, doubt, and criticism.
The Individual 21 Oct
Hello. One view is that the Renaissance gave birth to the concept concept of the individual, and Shakespeare most brilliantly defined this individual.
Atrocity in the 20th Century 28 Oct
Hello. For inhumanity, there's never been a century like it.
Education 4 Nov
Hello. Plato made his priorities in education plain when he inscribed over the entrance to the academy, let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.
The Novel 11 Nov
Hello. D J Lawrence was unashamedly proud of what he did.
Progress 18 Nov
Hello. The end of the century approaches at a gallop now.
Consciousness 25 Nov
Hello. One of the greatest mysteries facing science and philosophy today is the problem of consciousness.
Tragedy 2 Dec
Hello. Aristotle said it could help us.
Childhood 9 Dec
Hello. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, when I was a child, I spake as a child.
Medical Ethics 16 Dec
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Prayer 23 Dec
Hello. Why do people pray?
Time 30 Dec
Hello. At the end of the last century, h g Wells imagined and travelling through time in the Time Machine.

2000 34 episodes

Climate Change 6 Jan
Hello, and happy New Year to a new time.
Information Technology 13 Jan
Hello. There are now more than 200,000,000 people connected to the Internet worldwide.
Masculinity in Literature 20 Jan
Hello. Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Old Man and the Sea, a man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Economic Rights 27 Jan
Hello. Is democracy the truest conduit of capitalism, or do the forces that make us rich run counter in the end to the democratic institutions that safeguard our rights?
Republicanism 3 Feb
Hello. Before the French Revolution, before the American Declaration of Independence, before Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Marx, there was the English Revolution.
Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment 10 Feb
Hello. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great poet and dramatist, is famous for Faust, for the sorrows of Young Werther, for Storm and Drang, and for being a colossus in German literature.
Reading 17 Feb
Hello. Gustave Flaubert's advice was, do not read as children do to amuse yourself or like the ambitious for the purposes of instruction.
Grand Unified Theory 24 Feb
Hello. Einstein left us with his theory of general relativity, which explained how gravity works on the scale of stars and galaxies and the universe itself.
Metamorphosis 2 Mar
Hello. Ovid wrote at the beginning of The Metamorphosis in Ted Hughes' wonderful version.
The Age of Doubt 9 Mar
Hello. Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God was dead in 1882.
Lenin 16 Mar
Hello. The Russian presidential elections take place at the end of the month, and the acting president Vladimir Putin has promised that if he wins, he'll finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him.
Materialism and the Consumer 23 Mar
Hello. Are we in the thrall of consumer culture, hopelessly manipulated by materialism, or has the market developed to better the condition, liberate even the situation of man and woman?
History and Understanding the Past 30 Mar
Hello. The 21st century is only a few months old, yet already the first history has been written.
The Natural Order 6 Apr
Hello. The Argentinian author Jose Luis Borges illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification when he quoted from an ancient Chinese Encyclopaedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
New Wars 13 Apr
Hello. In the early 19th century, the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz seemed to define war for all time when he called it an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will and nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
Englishness 20 Apr
Hello. An Englishman's word is his bond, they say.
Human Origins 27 Apr
Hello. The story of human evolution is one that stretches back over about five million years.
Death 4 May
Hello. Our subject today is what the 16th century philosopher Frances Bacon called the least of all evils, death, a subject which has provoked thousands of reflections which live on.
Shakespeare’s Work 11 May
Hello. William Shakespeare Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time, according to Ben Johnson.
The Wars of the Roses 18 May
Hello. The Wars of the Roses have been the scene for many a historical skirmish over the ages.
Chemical Elements 25 May
Hello. Aristotle thought there were four earth, air, fire, and water.
The American Ideal 1 Jun
Hello. The 20th century was called the American Century, and you don't have to look very far to see the evidence of its enormous success.
The Renaissance 8 Jun
Hello. The Renaissance was first given its role as a birthplace of modern man by the 19th century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt.
Inspiration and Genius 15 Jun
Hello. When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Biography 22 Jun
Hello. Biography sells more books now than ever before.
Imagination and Consciousness 29 Jun
Hello. The question of consciousness, our sense of self, and how we're able to imagine things when they're not there are problems that have engaged the great minds of philosophy for thousands of years.
London 28 Sep
Hello. To T. S. Eliot, it was the unreal city.
Hitler in History 5 Oct
Hello. Historians have struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler.
The Romantics 12 Oct
Hello. In the space of a few years around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Romantic period gave us Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Two Shelleys, Keats, De Quincey, Carlisle, Byron, Scott, the list goes on and on.
Laws of Nature 19 Oct
Hello. Since ancient times, philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principles that control the universe.
The Tudor State 26 Oct
Hello. In 1485, Henry Tudor slew Richard the third and routed his army at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Evolutionary Psychology 2 Nov
Hello. There are those who believe that Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976 when he wrote in The Selfish Gene.
Psychoanalysis and Literature 9 Nov
Hello. Freud said, the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.
Nihilism 16 Nov
Hello. The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish.

2001 34 episodes

Gothic 4 Jan
Hello. In 1764, Horace Walpole bewitched an unprepared public with what's been claimed as the first ever Gothic novel, The Castle of Atranter.
Mathematics and Platonism 11 Jan
Hello. Galilei Galileo wrote, the universe cannot be read until we've learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it was written.
The Enlightenment in Britain 18 Jan
Hello. The Age of Enlightenment is the period around the 18th century or perhaps the long 18th century from, say, 1688 to 1715 when an until 1815.
Science and Religion 25 Jan
Hello. What space should science leave to religion?
Imperial Science 1 Feb
Hello. Francis Bacon said of the Irish in 1603, we shall reclaim them from their barbarous manners, populate, plant, and make civil all the provinces of that kingdom as we are persuaded that it's one of the chief causes for which god has brought us the Imperial Crown of these kingdoms.
Humanism 8 Feb
Hello. Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC.
The Restoration 15 Feb
Hello. On the 29/05/1660, on his 30th birthday, Charles the second rode into London and was restored to the thrones of England and Wales, of Scotland and Ireland.
Quantum Gravity 22 Feb
Hello. Early in the 20th century, physicists were alarmed at the realisation that the smallest things in the universe don't obey the laws described by Newton's theory of gravity.
Money 1 Mar
Hello. In the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament appear to agree about the power of money.
Shakespeare’s Life 15 Mar
Hello. Henry James said of Shakespeare, the facts of Stratford do not square with the plays of genius.
Fossils 22 Mar
Hello. In the middle of the 19th century, the discoverers of the fossil hunters worried John Ruskin greatly.
The Philosophy of Love 29 Mar
Hello. In Plato's symposium, Aristophanes tells a story about love.
The Roman Empire’s Collapse in the 5th century 5 Apr
Hello. Edward Gibbon wrote of the decline of the Roman Empire.
Black Holes 12 Apr
Hello. Black holes have been described as the dead collapsed ghosts of massive stars.
The Glorious Revolution 19 Apr
Hello. In 1688, with a Protestant wing behind him and no naval opposition in front, William of Orange and his Dutch fleet sailed safely into Torbay on the Southeast Coast, and thus began a period of history known, in England at least, as the Glorious Revolution.
Literary Modernism 26 Apr
Hello. In James Joyce Ulysses, he writes, greater love than this, he said, no man hath, that a man may lay down his wife for a friend.
Evil 3 May
Hello. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche constructed an argument against what he called the herd morality of Christianity.
The French Revolution’s Legacy 14 Jun
Hello. In 1789, the Bastille was stormed, King Louis the 16th was put under national guard, and the calendar was turned back to zero.
The Sonnet 21 Jun
Hello. The sonnet's the most enduring form in the poet's armoury.
Existentialism 28 Jun
Hello. Imagine being inside the Clafe Floor on the Left Bank Of Paris in the 1930s.
The Earth’s Origins 5 Jul
Hello. We used to be very clear about the origin of the earth.
Dickens 12 Jul
Hello. George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was, quote, more seditious than Das Kapital, unquote.
Byzantium 19 Jul
Hello. This is our last programme in the present run, and we're going east.
Democracy 18 Oct
Hello. In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln called it government of the people by the people for the people, but the word democracy appears nowhere in the American Constitution.
Napoleon and Wellington 25 Oct
Hello. On the morning of the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon told his loyal lieutenants, I tell you that Wellington is a bad general, that the English are bad troops, and.
Confucius 1 Nov
Hello. In the fifth century BC, a wise man called Kung Fu Tzu said, study the past if you would divine the future.
The British Empire 8 Nov
Hello. The British Empire was officially sealed on the 01/01/2577 when the Israeli had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India, and it formally dissolved into the Commonwealth in 1958.
Surrealism 15 Nov
Hello. Surrealism.
Oceanography 22 Nov
Hello. In 1870, Jules Verne described the deep ocean in 2,000 leagues under the sea.
Third Crusade 29 Nov
Hello. In October, Pope Urban the second launched the First Crusade.
Oscar Wilde 6 Dec
Hello. In February 1895, Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers.
Genetics 13 Dec
Hello. In the 1850s and 60s, in a monastery garden in Brno in Moravia, a Franciscan monk was cultivating peas.
Rome and European Civilization 20 Dec
Hello. The myths that surround the foundation of Rome are a potent brew.
Food 27 Dec
Hello. The French philosopher of food, Bria Savarin, wrote in his physiology of taste, The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day.

2002 38 episodes

Sensibility 3 Jan
Hello. In Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, the lead character, Jorick, comforts a young woman who's been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as a lover.
Nuclear Physics 10 Jan
Hello. One of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of 20th century and certainly the most controversial was the development of nuclear physics.
Catharism 17 Jan
Hello. In 1215, Pope Innocent the third called the greatest meeting of Catholic minds for 100 years.
Happiness 24 Jan
Hello. Does happiness mean living a life of pleasure or one of virtue?
Yeats and Mysticism 31 Jan
Hello. At the close of the 19th century, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats published one of his best known works called He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
The Universe’s Shape 7 Feb
Hello. In the beginning, Ran's one secular account was the Big Bang.
Anatomy 14 Feb
Hello. The first great anatomist who laid down the principles of the workings of the human body for the next 1,300 years was Galen.
The Celts 21 Feb
Hello. Around 400 BC, a great sway the Western Europe from Ireland to Southern Russia was peopled by one civilisation.
Virtue 28 Feb
Hello. When Socrates asked the question, how should man live?
Milton 7 Mar
Hello. If it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvell, it's unlikely that we would have the later works of John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
The Buddha 14 Mar
Hello. 2,500 years ago, a young man meditated on life and death and found enlightenment.
Marriage 21 Mar
Hello. To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part.
The Artist 28 Mar
Hello. The sculptors who create created the statues of ancient Greece were treated with disdain by some of their contemporaries who saw the menial task of chipping images out of stone as a low form of drudgery.
Extra Terrestrials 4 Apr
Hello. The hunt for extraterrestrial life is no longer confined to the pages of science fiction, but occupies astronomers, geologists, mathematicians, and new schools of scientists, astrobiologists, and xenobiologists.
Bohemia 11 Apr
Hello. The medieval kingdom of Bohemia was at crossroads of Europe and during the 15th century at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire.
Tolstoy 25 Apr
Hello. The Russian novel has been acclaimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of literature alongside Greek tragedy, Shakespeare's plays, and Romantic poetry.
The Physics of Reality 2 May
Hello. When quantum mechanics was developed in the early 20th century, reality changed forever.
The Examined Life 9 May
Hello. Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the fourth century BC, famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Chaos Theory 16 May
Hello. When Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687, his work was founded on the idea that nature has laws and we can find them.
Drugs 23 May
Hello. Throughout history, people have taken drugs to alter their perceptions and change their moods.
The Grand Tour 30 May
Hello. In 1776, Samuel Johnson observed that a man who's not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.
The Soul 6 Jun
Hello. In sailing to Byzantium, WBEH wrote, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.
The American West 13 Jun
Hello. In 1845, the editor of The New York Morning News wrote that it was the, quote, manifest destiny of The United States to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government entrusted to us.
Wagner 20 Jun
Hello. Richard Wagner, more than any other composer, would seem to capture the greatest triumphs and most terrifying excesses of the German spirit.
Cultural Imperialism 27 Jun
Hello. An empire is built on many things, powerful armies, good administration, sometimes strong leadership, but perhaps its secret weapon lies in its culture.
Freedom 4 Jul
Hello. Mahatma Gandhi said that freedom and slavery are mental states.
Psychoanalysis and Democracy 11 Jul
Hello. At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, we saw the birth and rise of psychoanalysis.
Heritage 18 Jul
Hello. Welcome to the last programme in our current series.
Slavery and Empire 17 Oct
Hello. This week on In Our Time, we're discussing captivity and empire, which brings in slavery and empire, two of the themes that run through this country's imperial history.
The Scientist 24 Oct
Hello. The word science first appeared in the English language in 1340, and ever since its meaning has been in a state of flux.
Architecture and Power 31 Oct
Hello. In today's In Our Time, I'll be discussing the role which architecture has played in public life.
Human Nature 7 Nov
Hello. On In Our Time this week, we'll be discussing nothing less than human nature.
Victorian Realism 14 Nov
Hello. Henry James said, if I may be allowed to edit, realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas romanticism is something we will never encounter.
Muslim Spain 21 Nov
Hello. In 07/2011, a small army of North African Berbers invaded Spain and established an Iberian Islamic culture that would last for over 700 years.
Imagination 28 Nov
Hello. Kant said, imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatever, but of which we're scarcely even conscious.
The Enlightenment in Scotland 5 Dec
Hello. In 1696, the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aitkenhead, aged 18, claimed that theology was, quote, a rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense, unquote.
Man and Disease 12 Dec
Hello. The book of Exodus makes clear that when god wants to strike man, he does so with plague and disease.
The Calendar 19 Dec
Hello. The calendar shapes the lives of millions of people.

2003 36 episodes

The Epic 6 Feb
Hello. In his essay, why the novel matters, DH Lawrence argued that the novel contained all aspects of life.
Chance and Design 13 Feb
Hello. The evolutionary biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, argued that if you reran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge.
The Lindisfarne Gospels 20 Feb
Hello. In five/1997, Pope Gregory the Great ordered that a mission of monks be sent from Rome to reconvert Britain to its own brand of Christianity and to rescue it from the pagan beliefs of the Anglo Saxon overlords.
The Aztecs 27 Feb
Hello. According to legend, the origins of the Aztec Empire lie on mythical island called Aztlan, a place of the white herons in the North Of Mexico.
Meteorology 6 Mar
Hello. The Book of Genesis resounds with a terrible act of punishment carried out by an angry god, and the mechanism with which this is carried out is a catastrophic flood which wipes out evil on earth.
Redemption 13 Mar
Hello. In St Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote, Christ has set us free.
Originality 20 Mar
Hello. Wordsworth wrote in 1800 in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
The Life of Stars 27 Mar
Hello. In his poem Bright Star, John Keats wrote, bright star, would I was steadfast as thou art.
The Spanish Civil War 3 Apr
Hello. The Spanish Civil War was a defining war of the 20th century.
Proust 17 Apr
Hello. Marcel Proust's novel, La Recherche Temps Perdu or In Search of Lost Time has been called the definitive modern novel.
Youth 24 Apr
Hello. In 1898, Joseph Conrad spoke for all of us when he wrote, I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back anymore, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men, the deceitful feeling that lures us on to perils, to love, to vain effort, to death.
Roman Britain 1 May
Hello. About 2,000 years ago, Tacitus noted that the climate is wretched.
The Jacobite Rebellion 8 May
Hello. In the summer of 1745, a young man in a small French frigate landed on the West Coast Of Scotland.
The Holy Grail 15 May
Hello. Tennyson wrote, a cracking and arriving of the roofs and rending and a blast and overhead thunder, and in the thunder was a cry.
Blood 22 May
Hello. For more than 1,500 years, popular imagination, western science, and the Christian Church colluded in a belief that blood was the link between the human and the divine.
Memory 29 May
Hello. The greatest writer about memory, in my opinion, Marcel Proust, said, quote, we are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
The Lunar Society 5 Jun
Hello. In the late 18th century, with the ascendant British Empire centred on London, a small group of friends met at a house on a crossroads outside Birmingham and applied their minds to the problems of the age.
The Art of War 12 Jun
Hello. The historian Edward Gibbon wrote, every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.
The Aristocracy 19 Jun
Hello. The Greeks gave us the word aristocracy.
The East India Company 26 Jun
Hello. At its peak, its influence stretched from Western India to Eastern China via the furthest reaches of the Indonesian Archipelago.
Vulcanology 3 Jul
Hello. In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted on the Bay Of Naples, buried Pompeian ash, and drowned nearby Herculaneum in lava.
Nature 10 Jul
Hello. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron wrote, there is a pleasure in the pathless woods.
The Apocalypse 17 Jul
Hello. George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as the curious record of the visions of a drug addict.
Maxwell 2 Oct
Hello. He took the first colour photograph, defined the nature of gases, with a few elegant mathematical equations expressed all the fundal fundamental laws of light, electricity, and magnetism.
Bohemianism 9 Oct
Hello. In 1848, the young Parisian Henri Murger wrote of his Bohemian friends, their daily existence is a work of genius.
The Schism 16 Oct
Hello. In October, Cardinal Humbert went into the Cathedral Of Constantinople.
Infinity 23 Oct
Hello. Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counterintuitive character of infinity with style.
Robin Hood 30 Oct
Hello. The first printed version of the Robin Hood story begins like this.
Sensation 6 Nov
Hello. The Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons.
Duty 13 Nov
Hello. George Bernard Shaw, that great upender, wrote in his play Caesar and Cleopatra, when a stupid man is doing something he's ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
Ageing the Earth 20 Nov
Hello. In the 17th century, it was thought that the world began in April.
St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 27 Nov
Hello. In Paris, in the high summer of 1572, a very unexpected wedding was taking place in the Cathedral Of Notre Dame.
Wittgenstein 4 Dec
Hello. There's little doubt that Ludwig Wittgenstein was a towering figure in 20th century thought.
The Devil 11 Dec
Hello. In the gospel according to John, he is a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father of lies, and Dante calls him the ill worm that pierces the world's core.
The Alphabet 18 Dec
Hello. At the start of the 20th century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai Peninsula, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an astonishing discovery.
Lamarck and Natural Selection 26 Dec
Hello. Charles Darwin defined natural selection in on the origin of Species.

2004 39 episodes

Cryptography 29 Jan
Hello. In October 1586, in the forbidding hall of Fotheringhay Castle, Mary Queen of Scots was on trial for her life.
Thermopylae 5 Feb
Hello. There are certain events in history which have often been thought of as crucial.
The Sublime 12 Feb
Hello. When the English essayist John Hall translated the work of an obscure Roman thinker into English in the middle of the 17th century, he could hardly have known the ferment it would cause.
Rutherford 19 Feb
Hello. Ernest Rutherford was the father of nuclear science, the great charismatic figure who mapped the landscape of the subatomic world.
The Mughal Empire 26 Feb
Hello. At its zenith, the Mughal Empire stretch from Gujarat in the East to Bengal in the West, from Lahore in the North, and Madras in the South.
Dreams 4 Mar
Hello. Over 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud declared confidently, quote, the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind, unquote.
The Norse Gods 11 Mar
Hello. Thor's huge hammer, the wailing Valkyrie, howling wolves, and fierce elemental giants give a violent impression of the Norse myths.
Theories of Everything 25 Mar
Hello. At the end of the last century, brave voices were predicting that all the big questions of physics were on the verge of being answered by a theory of everything.
China’s Warring States period 1 Apr
Hello. April to February is known as the Axial Age, when great civilisations in Asia and the Mediterranean forged the ideas that dominated the next 2,000 years.
The Fall 8 Apr
Hello. Genesis tells the bible's story of creation, but it also carries within it the story of the fall of mankind.
The Later Romantics 15 Apr
Hello. There must have been something extraordinary about the early 19th century when six of the greatest poets in the English language were all writing.
Hysteria 22 Apr
Hello. The term hysteria was first used in Greece in the fifth century BC by Hippocratic doctors.
Tea 29 Apr
Hello. After air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet and a British national drink.
Heroism 6 May
Hello. On the fields of Troy, a fallen soldier pleaded with Achilles, the great hero of all the Greeks, to spare his life.
Zero 13 May
Hello. Shakespeare's king Lear warned nothing will come of nothing.
Toleration 20 May
Hello. In 1763, Voltaire remarked that, quote, of all religions, the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instil the greatest toleration.
The Planets 27 May
Hello. Tucked away in the outer western and spiral arm of the Milky Way is a middle aged star with nine or possibly 10 orbiting planets of hugely varying sizes.
Babylon 3 Jun
Hello. 6,000 years ago between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built.
Empiricism 10 Jun
Hello. England's greatest contribution to philosophy is probably empiricism.
Renaissance Magic 17 Jun
Hello. In 1461, one of the powerful Medici family's many agents carried a mysterious manuscript into his master's house in Florence.
Washington and the American Revolution 24 Jun
Hello. In 1774, a wheat farmer from Virginia with refined manners and a quiet lifestyle was moved to put himself forward as a military leader of the most massive rebellion the British Empire had ever suffered.
Pi 2 Sep
Hello. In the bible's description of Solomon's temple, it comes out as three.
The Odyssey 9 Sep
Hello. The Odyssey by Homer is often claimed as one of the two great founding works of Western Literature.
Agincourt 16 Sep
Hello. Our king went forth to Normandy with grace and might of chivalry.
The Origins of Life 23 Sep
Hello. Scientists have named 1,500,000 species of living organism on the land, in the skies, and in the ocean of planet Earth, and a new one's classified every day.
Politeness 30 Sep
Hello. At the start of the 18th century, more precisely in 1711, a new idea took wing.
Sartre 7 Oct
Hello. Jean Paul Sartre, French novelist, playwright, and philosopher, was king of postwar alternative cafe society Paris, where the intellectuals regrouped.
The Han Synthesis 14 Oct
Hello. In The Analects, the Chinese sage Confucius says of statecraft, he who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the North Polar Star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn to it.
Witchcraft 21 Oct
Hello. In 1486, a book was published in Latin.
Rhetoric 28 Oct
Hello. Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most godlike works.
Electrickery 4 Nov
Hello. In Gulliver's Travels published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philosophers as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
Zoroastrianism 11 Nov
Hello. Now have I seen him with my own eyes, knowing him in truth to be the wise lord of the good mind and of good deeds and words.
Higgs Boson 18 Nov
Hello. One weekend in 1964, the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs was walking in the Cairngorm Mountains.
The Venerable Bede 25 Nov
Hello. In July, in what pope Gregory called the outermost edge of the known world, a book was written that reached a dazzling height of scholarship and erudition not to be equalled for centuries to come.
Jung 2 Dec
Hello. In 1907, Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that's reputed to have lasted for 13 hours.
Machiavelli and the Italian City States 9 Dec
Hello. In The Prince Machiavelli's manual of power and politics, he wrote, since men love as they themselves determine, but fear as their ruler determines, a wise prince must rely upon what he and not others can control.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics 16 Dec
Hello. The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be simply stated thus.
Faust 23 Dec
Hello. Was this the face that launched 1,000 ships and burnt the topless towers of William?
The Roman Republic 30 Dec
Hello. Around May, Lucretia, the daughter of an aristocrat, was raped by the son of Tarquin, the king of Rome.

2005 37 episodes

Tsar Alexander II’s assassination 6 Jan
Hello. On the 03/01/1881, the Russian Tsar Alexander the second travelling through the snow to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.
The Mind/Body Problem 13 Jan
Hello. At the start of Rene Descartes six meditation, he writes, there is a great difference between mind and body in as much as body is by nature always divisible, and mind is entirely indivisible.
The Cambrian Period 17 Feb
Hello. In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Canada, there's an outcrop of limestone shot through with a seam of fine dark shale.
Alchemy 24 Feb
Hello. At the end of the 16th century, the German alchemist, Heinrich Konrad, wrote, darkness will appear on the face of the abyss.
Stoicism 3 Mar
Hello. The philosophy of Stoicism was founded by Zeno in the fourth century BC and flourished in Greece and then in Rome.
Modernist Utopias 10 Mar
Hello. I want to gather together about 20 souls, wrote the edge Florence in 1915, and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessary as of life go and some real decency.
Dark Energy 17 Mar
Hello. Only five% of our universe is composed of visible matter, stars, planets, people.
Angels 24 Mar
Hello. George Bernard Shaw made the observation that in heaven, an angel is nobody in particular, unquote.
John Ruskin 31 Mar
Hello. John Ruskin was the most brilliant art critic of his age, perhaps the most brilliant that Britain's ever produced, but he was much more than that.
Alfred and the Battle of Edington 7 Apr
Hello. The Battle of Edington in 08/1978 is taken by many historians to be the founding battle of England.
Archaeology and Imperialism 14 Apr
Hello. In 1842, a young English adventurer called Austen Henry Layard set out to excavate what he hoped were the remains of the biblical city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia.
The Aeneid 21 Apr
Hello. Out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan Wars came a man heading west.
Perception and the Senses 28 Apr
Hello. Barry Stein's laboratory at Wake Forest University in The United States found that the shape of a right angle drawn on the hand of a chimpanzee starts the visual part of the brain working, even when the shape hasn't been seen.
Abelard and Heloise 5 May
Hello. The story of Abelard and Heloise is a tale of literature and philosophy, theology and scandal, and romantic love in the high Middle Ages.
Beauty 19 May
Hello. Beauty is truth.
The French Revolution’s reign of terror 26 May
Hello. On Monday, 9/10/1792, The Times of London carried a story covering events in revolutionary France.
Renaissance Maths 2 Jun
Hello. As with so many areas of European thought, mathematics in the Renaissance was a question of recovering, and if you are very lucky, improving upon Greek ideas.
The Scriblerus Club 9 Jun
Hello. The 18th century Scriblerus Club included some of the most extraordinary and vivid satirists ever to have written in the English language.
Paganism in the Renaissance 16 Jun
Hello. For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism of a Christian moralising text.
The KT Boundary 23 Jun
Hello. Across the entire planet where it hasn't been eroded or destroyed in land movements, there's a thin grey line of clay.
Merlin 30 Jun
Hello. It was claimed he was sired by an incubus and born of a virgin.
Marlowe 7 Jul
Hello. In the prologue to the Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe has Machiavell say, I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Marx 14 Jul
Hello. Workers of the world unite.
Magnetism 29 Sep
Hello. Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis tells a story of a legendary Greek shepherd called Magnetism, who, while guiding his flock on Mount Ida, suddenly found it hard to move his feet.
The Field of the Cloth of Gold 6 Oct
Hello. In the spring of 1520, 6,000 English men, women, and servants followed their king across the sea to France.
Mammals 13 Oct
Hello. The Cenozoic Era of Earth's history started about 65 million years ago and runs to this day.
Cynicism 20 Oct
Hello. Eating fresh lupins, performing intimate acts in public places, and shouting at passersby from inside a barrel is behaviour not normally associated with philosophy, but the Cynics were different.
Johnson 27 Oct
Hello. Quote, there's no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it.
Asteroids 3 Nov
Hello. Comets and asteroids used to be regarded as the vermin of the solar system, irritating rubble that got in the way of astronomers trying to study more interesting phenomena.
Greyfriars and Blackfriars 10 Nov
Hello. Quote, just as it's better to light up others than to shine alone, it is better to share the fruits of one's contemplation with others than to contemplate in solitude.
Pragmatism 17 Nov
Hello. William James, John Dewey, and Charles son and Charles Sanders Peirce were the founders of Pragmatism, an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last 30 years of the 19th century and the first 20 years of the 20th century.
The Graviton 24 Nov
Hello. Albert Einstein said, I know why there are so many people who love chopping wood.
Hobbes 1 Dec
Hello. Quote.
Artificial Intelligence 8 Dec
Hello. Can machines think?
The Peterloo Massacre 15 Dec
Hello. In 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, I met murder on the way.
Heaven 22 Dec
Hello. The medieval theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, wrote, quote, that in the end, language can only be related to what is experienced here.
The Oresteia 29 Dec
Hello. Richard Wagner recalled the visceral sensations of reading Aeschylus' great trilogy for the first time.

2006 43 episodes

The Oath 5 Jan
Hello. The importance of oaths in the classical world can't be overstated.
Prime Numbers 12 Jan
Hello. two three, 57,111,317, blast off.
Relativism 19 Jan
Hello, and I quote, today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture, that of relativism, which recognising nothing is definitive, leaves as the ultimate criteria only the self with its desires.
Seventeenth Century Print Culture 26 Jan
Hello. From the advent of the printing press, the number of books printed each year steadily increased, and so did literacy rates.
The Abbasid Caliphs 2 Feb
Hello. The Abbasid Caliphs were the dynastic rulers of the Islamic world between the middle of the eighth and the 10th centuries.
Chaucer 9 Feb
Hello. Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of 14th century English society in his Canterbury Tales, never out of print since Caxton.
Human Evolution 16 Feb
Hello. The story of human evolution stretches back over about six million years.
Catherine the Great 23 Feb
Hello. In Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery hangs perhaps the most well known picture of Russia's most well known ruler.
Friendship 2 Mar
Hello. In Greek and Roman times, friendship was thought of as being an essential constituent of both a good society and a good life.
Negative Numbers 9 Mar
Hello. In 1759, the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers, quote, darken the very whole doctrine of the equations and make darker the things which are in thy nature excessively obvious and simple.
Don Quixote 16 Mar
Hello. The pencil engraving of the errant knight of La Mancha tilting at windmills with his portly squire astride a donkey is one of the most enduring images in the popular imagination.
The Royal Society 23 Mar
Hello. The natural philosopher Francis Bacon heralded the new age of science, The frontispiece of his 1620 edition of the Instauratio Magna depicted a galleon travelling between the metaphorical pillars of Hercules, thought to lie in the Strait Of Gibraltar and believed to mark the end of the known world.
The Carolingian Renaissance 30 Mar
Hello. In August on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo the third proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor.
Jorge Luis Borges 6 Apr
Hello. Jorge Luis Borges, whom some consider to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, is best known for his work that plays with ideas such as identity, reality, and language.
Goethe 6 Apr
Hello. I'll start with a quotation from Goethe.
The Oxford Movement 13 Apr
Hello. Cardinal John Henry Newman is the most significant Christian theologian of the 19th century.
Immunisation 20 Apr
Hello. In 1717, Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how she'd witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation in Constantinople.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 27 Apr
Hello. Quote, its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things.
Astronomy and Empire 4 May
Hello. The 18th century explorer and astronomer, Cook, wrote, ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far, I think, as it is possible for man to go, end quote.
Fairies 11 May
Hello. They stole little Bridget for seven years long.
Mill 18 May
Hello. The 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that, quote, the true philosophy is a marriage of poetry and logic, unquote.
Mathematics and Music 25 May
Hello. The 17th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote, quote, music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting, unquote.
The Heart 1 Jun
Hello. The 17th century physician William Harvey wrote in the preface to his thesis on the motion of the heart and blood in animals, a letter addressed to King Charles the first, quote, the heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, from which all power proceeds.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 8 Jun
Hello. When Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start of the American Civil War, he's reported to have said to her, so you're the little lady whose book started this big war.
Carbon 15 Jun
Hello. Carbon forms the basis of all organic life and has the amazing ability to bond with itself and with a wide range of other elements forming nearly 10,000,000 known compounds.
The Spanish Inquisition 22 Jun
Hello. The Inquisition has its roots in the Latin word inquisitio, which which means inquiry.
Galaxies 29 Jun
Hello. Ours is about 100,000 light years across.
Pastoral Literature 6 Jul
Hello. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove that valleys, groves, hills and fields, woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Comedy in Ancient Greek Theatre 13 Jul
Hello. In The Birds written by Aristophanes, two Athenians seek a utopian refuge from the madness of city life and found a city of birds located between Earth and Olympus.
Humboldt 28 Sep
Hello. Darwin described him as the greatest scientific traveller who's ever lived.
Averroes 5 Oct
Hello. In The Divine Comedy, Dante subject ed all the sinners in Christendom to a series of grizzly punishments from being buried alive to being frozen in ice.
The Diet of Worms 12 Oct
Hello. Nestled on a bend of the River Rhine in the South-west Corner of Germany is the city of Worms or Worms.
The Needham Question 19 Oct
Hello. What do these things have in common?
The Encyclopédie 26 Oct
Hello. This week, we discuss the mammoth 18th century undertaking that was the Encyclopaedia.
The Poincaré Conjecture 2 Nov
Hello. The great French mathematician Henri Poincare declared, the scientist doesn't study mathematics because it's useful.
Pope 9 Nov
Hello. His enemies, who are numerous, described him, he was four foot six, as a hunchbacked toad, twisted in body, twisted in mind.
The Peasants’ Revolt 16 Nov
Hello. When Adam delved at eve's span, who was then the gentleman?
Altruism 23 Nov
Hello. The term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist Auguste Comte.
The Speed of Light 30 Nov
Hello. This week, we're discussing the speed of light.
Anarchism 7 Dec
Hello. Pierre Joseph Proudhon famously declared property is theft, and perhaps more surprisingly, that anarchy is order.
Indian Mathematics 14 Dec
Hello. Mathematics from the Indian Subcontinent have provided foundations for much of our modern thinking on the subject.
Hell 21 Dec
Hello. And today, we're discussing the history of hell, a fiery vault beneath the earth, a frozen tomb, or as Satya famously declared, other people.
Constantinople Siege and Fall 28 Dec
Hello. When Sultan Mehmet the second wrote into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of 1,000 years of the Byzantine Empire.

2007 41 episodes

Mars 11 Jan
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing the red planet.
The Jesuits 18 Jan
Hello. Today, the Jesuits, the Catholic religious order of priests who became known as the schoolmasters of Europe.
Archimedes 25 Jan
Hello. Today, it's Archimedes, the Greek mathematician reputed to have shouted eureka as he leapt from his bath having discovered the principles of floating bodies.
Genghis Khan 1 Feb
Hello. Today, we're talking about Genghis Khan.
Popper 8 Feb
Hello. Today, we're discussing Karl Popper, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day.
Heart of Darkness 15 Feb
Hello. Today, it's Heart of Darkness.
Wilberforce 22 Feb
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Optics 1 Mar
Hello. From telescopes to microscopes, from stargazing to the revelation of a magnified flea, today, we'll be discussing the history of optics.
Microbiology 8 Mar
Hello. Today, we'll be talking about the history of microbiology.
Epistolary Literature 15 Mar
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing epistolary fiction, that is fiction in the form of letters.
Bismarck 22 Mar
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing the Iron Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, one of Europe's leading states in the 19th century and credited with the unification of Germany.
Anaesthetics 29 Mar
Hello. Today, it's the history of anaesthetics.
St Hilda 5 Apr
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing the seventh century saint Hilda or Hild as she would have been known then.
The Opium Wars 12 Apr
Hello. Today, we're discussing the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century, a conflict that forced China to open its doors to trade with the Western world.
Symmetry 19 Apr
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing symmetry from the most perfect forms in nature like the snowflake and the butterfly to our perceptions of beauty in the human face and the deep symmetry in most of the laws that govern our physical world.
Greek and Roman Love Poetry 26 Apr
Hello. Today, we'll be discussing Greek and Roman love poetry, the source of many of the images and metaphors of love that have survived in literature through the centuries.
Spinoza 3 May
Hello. For the radical thinkers of the enlightenment, Spinoza was the first man to have lived and died as a true atheist.
Victorian Pessimism 10 May
Hello. On the 9/1/1851, the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon.
Gravitational Waves 17 May
Hello. The rather unpoetically named star, s n 2006 g y, is roughly 150 times the size of our sun.
The Siege of Orléans 24 May
Hello. In 1422, Henry the fifth, warrior hero, on his way to conquer France, died as did king Charles the sixth of France.
Ockham’s Razor 31 May
Hello. In the small village of Ockham near Woking in Surrey stands a church made of grey stone.
Siegfried Sassoon 7 Jun
Hello. In 1916, the Military Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.
Renaissance Astrology 14 Jun
Hello. In Act one, scene two of King Lear, the Machiavellian Edmund scoffs at the weakness and cynicism of his fellow men.
Common Sense Philosophy 21 Jun
Hello. In in average, in the first century BC, the Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, claimed, there's no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.
The Permian-Triassic Boundary 28 Jun
Hello. 250 million years ago in the Permian period of geological time, the most ferocious predators on earth were the Gorgonopsians.
The Pilgrim Fathers 5 Jul
Hello. Every year on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans go home to their families and sit down to a meal called Thanksgiving.
Madame Bovary 12 Jul
Hello. In January 1857, Ernest Pinard stood up in a crowded courtroom in Paris and declared, art that observes no rule is no longer art.
Socrates 27 Sep
Hello. Of all the names in ancient philosophy, Socrates is the most intriguing.
Antimatter 4 Oct
Hello. The Nobel Prize winning British physicist Paul Dirac declared that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.
The Divine Right of Kings 11 Oct
Hello. In Macbeth, Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the king, how his elicits heaven himself best knows, but strangely visited people all swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, the mere despair of surgery he cures, hanging a golden stamp about their necks.
The Arabian Nights 18 Oct
Hello. Once upon a time, a wealthy merchant grew hot in the sun and sat down under a tree.
Taste 25 Oct
Hello. In the mid 18th century, the social commentator George Coleman decried the great fashion of his time.
Guilt 1 Nov
Hello. The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was once moved to comment, guilt was never a rational thing.
Avicenna 8 Nov
Hello. In the city of Hamadan in Iran, right in the centre, there's a vast mausoleum dedicated to an Iranian national hero.
Oxygen 15 Nov
Hello. In 1772, the British chemist Joseph Priestley stood in front of the Royal Society and reported on his latest discovery.
The Prelude 22 Nov
Hello. The winter of 1798 was a terrible one across Europe, allegedly the coldest of the century.
The Fibonacci Sequence 29 Nov
Hello. 0112358132134.
Genetic Mutation 6 Dec
Hello. When he was mortally ill with cancer, the British geneticist, JBS Holdain, came up with the following gallant lines.
The Sassanid Empire 13 Dec
Hello. In modern day Iran, near the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, there's a picture carved into a rock.
The Four Humours 20 Dec
Hello. According to an 11th century Arabic book called the almanac of health, an old man went to the doctor complaining of a frigid complexion and stiffness in winter.
The Nicene Creed 27 Dec
Hello. We believe in one god, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds.

2008 41 episodes

Camus 3 Jan
Hello. Shortly after the New Year of 1960, a small family car crashed in the French town of Villebleva in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants.
The Charge of the Light Brigade 10 Jan
Hello. On 14/11/1854, w h Russell in The Times newspaper reported on a minor cavalry skirmish in the Crimean War.
The Fisher King 17 Jan
Hello. In the world of medieval romance, there are many weird and wonderful creatures, golden dragons and green knights, sinister enchantresses and tragic kings, strange magicians and spears that bleed and talk.
Plate Tectonics 24 Jan
Hello. America is getting further away from Europe.
Rudolph II 31 Jan
Hello. In 1606, the archdukes of Vienna declared of their ruler.
The Social Contract 7 Feb
Hello. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
The Statue of Liberty 14 Feb
Hello. Quote, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, unquote.
The Multiverse 21 Feb
Hello. If you look up the word universe in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll find the following definition.
Lear 28 Feb
Hello. Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well known impresario, mister William Shakespeare.
Ada Lovelace 6 Mar
Hello. Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon is a network of computers.
The Greek Myths 13 Mar
Hello. Are you a touch narcissistic?
Kierkegaard 20 Mar
Hello. In 1840, a young Danish girl called Regine Olsen got engaged to her sweetheart, a difficult and brilliant young man called Kierkegaard.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries 27 Mar
Hello. In his old age, Michael Sherbrook wrote about the momentous event of his youth, the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Laws of Motion 3 Apr
Hello. In 1687, Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in the universe from a pea rolling on a plate to the position of Pluto.
The Norman Yoke 10 Apr
Hello. 1066, William of Normandy.
Yeats and Irish Politics 17 Apr
Hello. In May 1916, 15 men were shot by the British government.
Materialism 24 Apr
Hello. This is a quotation from the 18th century.
The Enclosures of the 18th Century 1 May
Hello. In the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire so called peasant poet, John Clare, took a look at the countryside and didn't like what he saw.
The Brain 8 May
Hello. In the fifth century BC, the Greek physician Hippocrates confidently asserted, men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, tears.
The Library at Nineveh 15 May
Hello. In 1849, a young English adventurer called Henry Layard started digging into a small hill.
The Black Death 22 May
Hello. In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arrived at the Visiport Of Messina in Sicily.
Probability 29 May
Hello. Heads or tails?
Lysenkoism 5 Jun
Hello. In 1928, as America heads towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his master plan.
The Riddle of the Sands 12 Jun
Hello. In 1903, an Englishman called Charles Caruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled on a German military plot.
The Music of the Spheres 19 Jun
Hello. In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the young Lorenzo woos his sweetheart with talk of the stars.
The Arab Conquests 26 Jun
Hello. In 632, the prophet Muhammad died and left behind the nascent religion of Islam among a few tribes in the Arabian Desert.
The Metaphysical Poets 3 Jul
Hello. Mourning the death of a good friend in 1631, the poet Thomas Carew declared, the Muses garden with pedantic weeds or spread was purged by thee, the lazy seeds of servile imitation thrown away and fresh invention planted.
Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome 10 Jul
Hello. The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace.
Miracles 25 Sep
Hello. The parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the 5,000, the turning of water into wine, miracles.
The Translation Movement 2 Oct
Hello. One night in Baghdad, so it goes, in the ninth century, the Caliph Al Mamun was visited by a dream.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems 9 Oct
Hello. In 1900 in the German city of Konigsberg, the International Congress of Mathematicians gathered in what could be called a mood of hope and fear.
Vitalism 16 Oct
Hello. On a dreary night in 1818, a young doctor called Frankenstein completed an experiment and described it in his diary.
Dante’s Inferno 23 Oct
Hello. Abandon hope or ye you enter here.
Bolivar 30 Oct
Hello. In 1804, a young man from Venezuela stood on a small hill in Roman in Rome and with two friends and made a grand declaration.
Aristotle’s Politics 6 Nov
Hello. What makes a good society?
Neuroscience 13 Nov
Hello. In the mid 19th century, a doctor had a patient who had suffered a stroke.
The Baroque Movement 20 Nov
Hello. What did the music of Bach, the colonnades of Saint Peter's in Rome, the paintings of Caravaggio, and the rebuilding of Prague have in common?
The Great Reform Act 27 Nov
Hello. Here's a quotation from a 19th century novel.
Heat 4 Dec
Hello. Heat is a commonplace concept.
The Fire of London 11 Dec
Hello. On a balmy evening in September 1666, Samuel Pepys sat in a pub by the River Thames and watched London burning.
The Physics of Time 18 Dec
Hello. When writing the Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton declared his hand on most of the big questions in physics.

2009 46 episodes

The Consolations of Philosophy 1 Jan
Hello. In the sixth century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason.
Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin 5 Jan
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Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle 6 Jan
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Darwin: On the Origin of Species 7 Jan
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Darwin: Life After Origins 8 Jan
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Thoreau and the American Idyll 15 Jan
Hello. Quote, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
History of History 22 Jan
Hello. In the sixth century AD, the bishop of Tours began his history of the world with the unassailable observation that a great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.
Swift’s A Modest Proposal 29 Jan
Hello. 1729 was a very bad year for the Irish people who worked the land.
The Brothers Grimm 5 Feb
Hello. Cinderella does not have a fairy godmother.
Carthage’s Destruction 12 Feb
Hello. The North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second in the second century BC, it suffered a terrible fate.
The Observatory at Jaipur 19 Feb
Hello. If you travel to the city of Jaipur in Northern India, you'll find at its heart a palace.
The Waste Land and Modernity 26 Feb
Hello. In October 1922, the latest edition of London's literary magazine, The Criterion, hit the shelves.
The Measurement Problem in Physics 5 Mar
Hello. If the most famous fruit in physics is an apple, the most famous animal in physics is a cat.
The Library of Alexandria 12 Mar
Hello. Had the famous and fabled Library of Alexandria founded at the beginning of the third century BC not existed, it might have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls.
The Boxer Rebellion 19 Mar
Hello. In the hot summer of 1900, Peking, the capital of China, was under a heavy siege.
The School of Athens 26 Mar
Hello. Despite the not unimpressive feat of commissioning the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Pope Julius the second is better known as a warrior than a scholar.
Baconian Science 2 Apr
Hello. In you in the introduction to Thomas Spratt's history of the Royal Society, there's a poem about Francis Bacon.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 9 Apr
Hello. In Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, the character Miranda declares when confronted by a group of young men of whom on her isolated island she has never seen alike.
Suffragism 16 Apr
Hello. On the 4 June 1913, the Epsom Derby was underway.
The Building of St Petersburg 23 Apr
Hello. When he visited St Petersburg in Russia in 1739, the Venetian art connoisseur Francesco Algarotti made an unflattering observation.
The Vacuum of Space 30 Apr
Hello. When contemplating the vacuum of space in the 17th century, the physicist Blaise Pascal claimed, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
The Magna Carta 7 May
Hello. If you look at the English statute book, you'll find the following lines.
The Siege of Vienna 14 May
Hello. In June 1683, a man called Kara Mustafa Pasha made a journey to Vienna.
The Whale - A History 21 May
Hello. Of all the Whales in literature, the most famous is Moby Dick described by Herman Melvyn.
St Paul 28 May
Hello. About 2,000 years ago, Saul of Tarsus, a young tentmaker and a Jewish zealot, was travelling to Damascus when a light flashed around him, as the King James version has it, and he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecute thou me?
The Trial of Charles I 4 Jun
Hello. In defending the killing of a king, the poet and republican, John Milton, declared, if men within themselves would be governed by reason and not generally give up their understanding to a double tyranny of custom from without and blind affections from within, they would discern better what it is to favour and uphold the tyrant of a nation.
The Augustan Age 11 Jun
Hello. When Julius Caesar's will was read earlier than intended, it contained gifts.
Elizabethan Revenge 18 Jun
Hello. In Thomas Kyd's play, The Spanish Tragedy, a father seeks redress for the murder of his son.
Sunni and Shia Islam 25 Jun
Hello. In 06/18 near in Iraq, a man was killed in battle.
Logical Positivism 2 Jul
Hello. The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophically trained scientists and scientifically trained philosophers who met on Thursdays in term time in Vienna in the years after the First World War.
Ediacara Biota 9 Jul
Hello. In the 1940s, this was a prospector called Reginald Sprigg was working in Southern Australia searching for uranium for Britain's atomic bomb project when he came across impressions in the rock unlike anything he'd ever seen before.
St Thomas Aquinas 17 Sep
Hello. We will be discussing St Thomas Aquinas.
Calculus 24 Sep
Hello. Calculus is a mathematical technique created in the 17th century, which made it possible for the first time in history to measure varying rates of change.
Akhenaten 1 Oct
Hello. The pharaoh Akhenaten has been described as history's first individual, a saint, tyrant, utopian, and rebel.
The Dreyfus Affair 8 Oct
Hello. In 1894, a Jewish staff officer in the French Army was convicted of spying.
The Death of Elizabeth I 15 Oct
Hello. In February '3, queen Elizabeth the first began to complain of insomnia and loss of appetite.
The Geological Formation of Britain 22 Oct
Hello. 600 million years ago, Britain was in two parts far to the South Of The Equator.
Schopenhauer 29 Oct
Hello. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in East Germany in 1788.
The Siege of Munster 5 Nov
Hello. In the early 16th century, the Protestant Reformation revolutionised Christian belief.
Radiation 12 Nov
Hello. Since the end of the 19th century and especially since the dropping dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, the word radiation has carried a fearful resonance.
Sparta 19 Nov
Hello. Uniquely in Ancient Greece, the city state of Sparta didn't see any need to build a wall around itself.
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 26 Nov
Hello. Many novelists choose their own young life as the subject for their first book, but very few have subjected themselves to the scrutiny of the great Irish novelist, Joyce.
The Silk Road 3 Dec
Hello. In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang.
Pythagoras 10 Dec
Hello. The Ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras is probably better known than most of his illustrious successors over the last 2,500 years.
The Samurai 24 Dec
Hello. During the second World War, Japanese kamikaze pilots were photographed climbing into their cockpits armed with samurai swords.
Mary Wollstonecraft 31 Dec
Hello. By the time it was cut short in 1797, the life of the pioneering writer and thinker Mary Wollstonecraft was a gift to the obituerists.

2010 45 episodes

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1 4 Jan
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The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2 5 Jan
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The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 3 6 Jan
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The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4 7 Jan
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The Frankfurt School 14 Jan
Hello. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, so wrote the German thinker Theodor Adorno in the wake of the second World War.
The Glencoe Massacre 21 Jan
Hello. At 05:00 in the morning of the 13/02/1692, the McDonald's of Glencoe were massacred by the Scottish army.
Silas Marner 28 Jan
Hello. By the end of her lifetime, George Eliot was the most powerful female intellectual in the country.
Ibn Khaldun 4 Feb
Hello. In 1375 in North Africa, after a career beset by imprisonment, intrigue, and the murder of his mentor, an ambitious political administrator went to live among the Bedouin.
Mathematics’ Unintended Consequences 11 Feb
Hello. I'm interested in mathematics, wrote the Cambridge mathematician, g h Hardy, only as a creative art.
The Indian Mutiny 18 Feb
Hello. In 1757, Lord Clive, an army officer for the East India Company, won a battle at Plassey.
Calvinism 25 Feb
Hello. A dog barks when his master is attacked.
The Infant Brain 4 Mar
Hello. Everyone's been a baby.
Boudica 11 Mar
Hello. In 61 AD, an East Anglian queen took on the might of the Roman Empire and lost.
Munch and The Scream 18 Mar
Hello. In 1893 in Berlin, a Norwegian artist exhibited a disturbing image.
The City - a history, part 1 25 Mar
Hello. In 1625, a traveller from Rome found himself in an antique land.
The City - a history, part 2 1 Apr
Hello. In 1820s, a barely educated engineer from North-eastern England needed to find a way to transport coal from the pithead to the River Tyne.
William Hazlitt 8 Apr
Hello. On a tomb in the graveyard of Saint Anne's Church in London, there's an inscription that reads, the first unanswered metaphysician of the age, a despiser of the merely rich and great, a lover of the people, poor or oppressed, a hater of the pride and power of the few, the unconquered champion of truth, liberty, and humanity.
The Zulu Nation’s Rise and Fall 15 Apr
Hello. On the 22nd of January January 1879, as the British tried to invade their kingdom, an army of African warriors, armed mainly with iron spears, attacked an advanced column of the imperial army.
Roman Satire 22 Apr
Hello. The ancient Romans prided themselves on inventing at least one new form of literature, satire, and yet it's sometimes hard to pin down exactly what made Roman satire satirical.
The Great Wall of China 29 Apr
Hello. The Great Wall Of China is not a single wall, but made of a many smaller walls begun in the sixth century BC.
The Cool Universe 6 May
Hello. Over the last few decades, astronomers have been using infrared telescopes to make visible the matter between the stars, immense clouds of dust and gas that are not hot enough to be seen with optical equipment.
William James’s ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ 13 May
Hello. One day in the 19th century in America, a man locked himself in a room and refused food and water.
The Cavendish Family in Science 20 May
Hello. In the centuries before scientific research was publicly funded, one of the best ways to pursue a career in experimentation was to be lucky enough to be born rich or an aristocrat or both.
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists 27 May
Hello. In 1550, a little known Florentine courtier and painter published a book that would transform the way people saw Renaissance art.
Edmund Burke 3 Jun
Hello. In 1790, 18 months after the storming of the Bastille, a British MP published a pamphlet which condemned the French revolution and accused its supporters of bringing anarchy, violence, and terror to the population of France.
al-Biruni 10 Jun
Hello. If you were to point a reasonable powerful telescope at the surface of the moon at latitude 17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you'll find yourself looking at the Al Biruni Crater.
The Neanderthals 17 Jun
Hello. In 1856 in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, workers quarrying limestone stumbled across some old bones, which they assumed to be the remains of a bear.
Antarctica 24 Jun
Hello. At the southern extremity of this planet lies an icy windswept and virtually uninhabitable landmass.
Athelstan 1 Jul
Hello. In his chronicle of the English kings written in the 12th century, the historian William of Maulsbury says of one monarch, the firm opinion among the English remains that no one more just or more learned ever governed the kingdom.
Pliny’s Natural History 8 Jul
Hello. Sometime in the middle of the first century AD, a retired Roman lawyer and soldier called Gaius Pliny's Secundus, known to us today as Pliny the Elder, started work on a an ambitious work of scholarship, nothing quite like it had been attempted before.
Imaginary Numbers 23 Sep
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The Delphic Oracle 30 Sep
Hello. On the flank of Mount Parnassus in Central Greece, with rocky cliffs above and a peaceful valley below, lies a ruined city.
The Spanish Armada 7 Oct
Hello. On the 28/05/1588, a fleet of a 151 Spanish ships set out from Lisbon bound for England.
Sturm und Drang 14 Oct
Hello. Reflecting on the literature of his time, the late 18th century satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote, if another and later species comes to reconstruct the human being from the evidence of our sentimental writings, they'll conclude man to have been a heart with testicles, that is passionate and male.
Logic 21 Oct
Hello. In 1740, the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, wrote, philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes.
The Unicorn 28 Oct
Hello. In 1486, a German priest published the first ever printed and illustrated travel book entitled A Journey to the Holy Land.
Women and Enlightenment Science 4 Nov
Hello. In 1762, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, wrote, the education of women should always be relative to that of men, to please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise and console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable.
The Volga Vikings 11 Nov
Hello. In 07/1993, the Northumbrian Christian island monastery of Lindisfarne was raided and destroyed by a group of warriors who arrived in amazing boats from Scandinavia.
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 18 Nov
Hello. In the early years of the Elizabethan age, the Protestant scholar, John Foxe, published a work of religious history.
History of Metaphor 25 Nov
Hello. We'll be discussing metaphors.
Cleopatra 2 Dec
Hello. On August 12, in 30 BC, the last pharaoh of Egypt died, bringing to an end the independence of a civilisation which had lasted more than 3,000 years.
Thomas Edison 9 Dec
Hello. United States patent at number 9600And46 is for a device described by its inventor as an apparatus which records and registers in an instant and with great accuracy the votes of legislative bodies, thus avoiding loss of valuable time consumed in counting and registering the votes and names as done in the usual manner.
Daoism 16 Dec
Hello. It's said that on a cold, misty night many years ago, an old man arrived at the western border of Imperial China.
The Industrial Revolution 23 Dec
Hello. Between the middle of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, Britain experienced the most significant transformation in its history.
Consequences of the Industrial Revolution 30 Dec
Hello. In 1842, a German businessman sent his 22 year old son abroad to work in the Manchester office of the family textile firm.

2011 43 episodes

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 6 Jan
Hello. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a 21 year old aristocrat, George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, left Falmouth on a ship bound for Portugal.
Random and Pseudorandom 13 Jan
Hello. A little earlier today, I rolled a single die 10 times.
The Mexican Revolution 20 Jan
Hello. In 1908, an American journalist, James Creelman, visited Mexico to interview the country's president, whom he described as the foremost man of the American hemisphere.
Aristotle’s Poetics 27 Jan
Hello. In the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher and biologist Aristotle wrote a book about plays and how to construct them.
The Battle of Bannockburn 3 Feb
Hello. At Bannockburn, the English lay, the Scots, they were nay far away, but waited for the break a day that glinted in the East.
The Nervous System 10 Feb
Hello. Running through every part of our bodies is a network of fibres.
Maimonides 17 Feb
Hello. One of the most visited sites in the city of Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea Of Galilee is a simple marble tomb.
The Taiping Rebellion 24 Feb
Hello. In 1843, a young man called Hong Xiuquan in the southern province of Guangdong in China failed his civil service examination for the fourth time.
The Age of the Universe 3 Mar
Hello. In 1654, the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, James Usher, published a research published research which in which he said, it he proved that the universe had been created at 06:00 on the evening of the October 22.
Free Will 10 Mar
Hello. Earlier, I came to this studio in broadcasting house and sat down in this chair.
The Medieval University 17 Mar
Hello. There are a 115 universities in Britain today, but 800 years ago, that number was just two, Oxford and Cambridge.
The Iron Age 24 Mar
Hello. In 1907, during the construction of the Brooklyn's motor racing track in Surrey, workmen uncovered the remains of a prehistoric village.
The Bhagavad Gita 31 Mar
Hello. One of the defining moments in the life of Mahatma Gandhi took place in London in the late 1880s when the future leader of the Indian Independence Movement was a law student at UCL.
Octavia Hill 7 Apr
Hello. In an alleyway just off mall Marlyburn High Street in Central London, there's a handsome townhouse with a blue plaque.
The Neutrino 14 Apr
Hello. About 93,000,000 miles above our heads is a star we call the sun.
The Pelagian Controversy 21 Apr
Hello. In the late fourth century, a British monk arrived in Rome and began to write highly regarded and popular works of theology.
Cogito Ergo Sum 28 Apr
Hello. There are a few sentences in the history of philosophy that have become as famous as their authors.
Islamic Law and its Origins 5 May
Hello. In the early seventh century, a new religion emerged in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Anatomy of Melancholy 12 May
Hello. Samuel Johnson, the compiler of his mighty English dictionary, suffered terribly from depression.
Custer’s Last Stand 19 May
Hello. On the 7/10/1876, the New York Daily Tribune printed a new poem by Walt Whitman.
Xenophon 26 May
Hello. In April, an army of Greek mercenaries found themselves stranded more than 1,000 miles from home, deep in hostile territory, and with their generals dead.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge 2 Jun
Hello. Behind a car park in a picturesque village a few miles east of York is a diminutive obelisk, a monument to a bloody battle which took place 945 years ago.
The Origins of Infectious Disease 9 Jun
Hello. In his history of the wars, the historian Procopius of Caesarea records a dreadful event which befell Byzantium in the year 542.
Wyclif and the Lollards 16 Jun
Hello. One of the oldest parts of Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishop of Canterbury, was built in the 1440s and used as a prison.
Malthusianism 23 Jun
Hello. In the years after the French Revolution, an eccentric intellectual and wealthy Surrey landowner, Daniel Malthus, enjoyed friendly debates with his son, Thomas, a priest and Cambridge academic.
Tennyson’s In Memoriam 30 Jun
Hello. About 50 yards from where I'm sitting in broadcasting house is a street called Hallam Street.
The Minoan Civilisation 7 Jul
Hello. Just over 100 years ago, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate a plot of land at Knossos in Northern Crete.
The Hippocratic Oath 15 Sep
Hello. Here's a quotation purportedly from 2,500 years ago.
Shinto 22 Sep
Hello. In a tranquil forest in the Japanese city of Issei stands a group of wooden buildings, which are visited by 7,000,000 people every year.
The Etruscan Civilisation 29 Sep
Hello. In the late 1920s, d h Lawrence spent several years living in Italy.
David Hume 6 Oct
Hello. In 18th century, the city of Edinburgh became the centre for an intellectual movement which has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Ming Voyages 13 Oct
Hello. In the winter of 1405, a fleet of 317 Chinese ships manned by more than 27,000 crew members set sail from the Yangtze Estuary and headed south towards Siam.
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People 20 Oct
Hello. In 1831, the German poet, Heinrich Heine, visited visited the the Salon in Paris, the largest and most important annual art exhibition in Europe.
The Siege of Tenochtitlan 27 Oct
Hello. A 16th century adventurer to the New World wrote these awestruck words.
The Moon 3 Nov
Hello. On 11/30/2500, Galileo Galileo pointed his telescope at the moon.
The Continental-Analytic Split 10 Nov
Hello. About 100 years ago, the discipline philosophy seemed split into two main camps.
Ptolemy and Ancient Astronomy 17 Nov
Hello. Mortal as I am, I know that I'm born for a day.
Judas Maccabeus 24 Nov
Hello. So he got his people great honour and put on a breastplate as a giant and girt his warlike harness about him, and he made battles protecting the host with his sword.
Christina Rossetti 1 Dec
Hello. In 1872, Christina Rossetti wrote a poem which has since become one of our best loved Christmas carols.
Heraclitus 8 Dec
Hello. Thought to have lived about 500 year May, Heraclitus is one of the most important and certainly the most intriguing of the pre Socratic Greek philosophers.
The Concordat of Worms 15 Dec
Hello on the 23/09/1122 in a town on the West bank of the River Rhine known as Worms, an agreement was signed between Pope Calixtus the second and the German Emperor Henry the fifth.
Robinson Crusoe 22 Dec
Hello. In 1719, a man aged in 1719, a man aged nearly 60 published his first novel.
Macromolecules 29 Dec
Hello. They're in our houses, in our clothes, on our desks at work, in the car, in our food, and in the fabric of our bodies.

2012 48 episodes

Episode 1 2 Jan
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Episode 2 3 Jan
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Episode 3 4 Jan
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Literature 5 Jan
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Episode 5 6 Jan
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The Safavid Dynasty 12 Jan
Hello. One of Iran's greatest architectural masterpieces can be found in the city of Isfahan.
1848: Year of Revolution 19 Jan
Hello. On 26/02/1848, page five of the Times contained dramatic news from the continent.
The Scientific Method 26 Jan
Hello. In 1620, the lord chancellor England was the distinguished scholar lord Verrillum.
The Kama Sutra 2 Feb
Hello. The Kama Sutra is a book whose origins are uncertain, but which may have been composed as early as 2,000 years ago.
Erasmus 9 Feb
Hello. One of Hans Holbein's best known paintings is portrait of a middle aged man dressed in a luxurious fur coat.
The An Lushan Rebellion 16 Feb
Hello. In the eighth century AD, the largest and most powerful city in the world was Chang'an in Eastern China.
Conductors and Semiconductors 23 Feb
Hello. Until the end of the 19th century, the phenomenon of electricity was very poorly understood.
Benjamin Franklin 1 Mar
Hello. In the early stages of the American war of independence, an ambassador travelled from New York to negotiate an alliance with the French.
Lyrical Ballads 8 Mar
Hello. In September 1798, the Bristol firm of Biggs and Cottle printed a small volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads with a few other poems.
Vitruvius and De Architectura 15 Mar
Hello. A little over 2,000 years ago, a retired Roman soldier and engineer wrote what's probably the most influential book in the history of architecture.
Moses Mendelssohn 22 Mar
Hello. In 1763, the philosopher Immanuel Kant entered an essay competition organised by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
The Measurement of Time 29 Mar
Hello. We'll be talking about time.
George Fox and the Quakers 5 Apr
Hello. England in the 1650s was a land recovering from the turmoil of civil war.
Early Geology 12 Apr
Hello. The Geological Society of London was founded at a dinner at the Freemason's Tavern in Covent Garden in London on the October 13.
Neoplatonism 19 Apr
Hello. Of all the great thinkers of the ancient world, few have been as influential as Plato, born in the fifth century BC, the founder of the academy in Athens.
The Battle of Bosworth Field 26 Apr
Hello. 118 years of Tudor rule began in a field in Leicestershire on the 22/08/1485.
Voltaire’s Candide 3 May
Hello. The French enlightenment thinker Voltaire was one of the most prolific writers of the 18th century.
Game Theory 10 May
Hello. In 1928, a 25 year old Hungarian student gave his first public lecture.
Clausewitz and On War 17 May
Hello. The 19th century Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz, never commanded an army, a job for which his superiors thought him unsuitable.
Marco Polo 24 May
Hello. One morning in December, two merchants boarded a ship in the Port Of Venice and set sail for the East.
The Trojan War 31 May
Hello. It began when a prince was asked to judge a beauty contest and ended with the great city of Troy burned to the ground.
King Solomon 7 Jun
Hello. When George the second was crowned in 1727, George Frederick Handel composed an anthem for the occasion.
James Joyce’s Ulysses 14 Jun
Hello. In a celebrated case brought before the District Court of New York in December 1932, judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce's novel Ulysses was obscene.
Annie Besant 21 Jun
Hello. In the summer of 1873, a vicar in Lincolnshire, the reverend Frank Besant, issued an ultimatum to his wife.
Al-Kindi 28 Jun
Hello. Ninth century Baghdad was a prosperous city at the centre of an expanding empire.
Scepticism 5 Jul
Hello. In one of his earliest works, the Ponce Philosophique of 1746, the French philosopher, Denise Diderot, wrote, a thing not proved just because no one a thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it.
Hadrian’s Wall 12 Jul
Hello. In 117 AD, the Roman emperor, Trajan, died and was succeeded by his adopted son, Hadrian.
The Cell 13 Sep
Hello. All life on Earth has one thing in common, the cell.
The Druids 20 Sep
Hello. The earliest known case of religious persecution in these islands took place 2,000 years ago in the first century AD.
The Ontological Argument 27 Sep
Hello. In the late 11th century, a man called Anselm, an Italian prio at a monastery in Northern France who became archbishop of Canterbury in October, started to wrestle with a philosophical problem.
Gerald of Wales 4 Oct
Hello. Manabear Castle is a remote and beautiful Norman ruin on the Pembrokeshire Coast in South Wales.
Hannibal 11 Oct
Hello. Anybody walking the river bank near the northern Italian town of Piacenza on a freezing cold morning in December 218 BC would have seen an extraordinary spectacle.
Caxton and the Printing Press 18 Oct
Hello. More than 500 years ago, with England still locked into the Wars of the Roses, a merchant called William Caxton set up shop not far from where I am now, in the city of Westminster.
Fermat’s Last Theorem 25 Oct
Hello. On the 23/06/1993 at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, Andrew Wiles announced that after seven years of work, it solved the most celebrated problem in mathematics, Fermat's Last Theorem.
The Anarchy 1 Nov
Hello. Here's a quotation from a 12th century source.
The Upanishads 8 Nov
Hello. What are we here for?
Simone Weil 15 Nov
Hello. In Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford, Kent, lies the grave of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and social activist described by her compatriot Albert Camus as the only great spirit of our time.
The Borgias 22 Nov
Hello. The Borgias are thought to be one of the most notorious dynasties in European history.
Crystallography 29 Nov
Hello. In a letter to a colleague, the Nobel Prize winning chemist Max Perutz tried to convey the crucial importance of crystallography to our understanding of the world.
Bertrand Russell 6 Dec
Hello. On the last day of the year 1900, an ecstatic British academic wrote to a friend, I invented a new subject, which turned out to be all mathematics for the first time treated in its essence.
Shahnameh of Ferdowsi 13 Dec
Hello. Over 1,000 years ago in October, the Persian poet Ferdowsi finished Ferdowsi finished writing his epic poem, The Sharmaneh or Book of Kings.
The South Sea Bubble 20 Dec
Hello. In September 1720, England was plunged into economic crisis when the South Sea Company collapsed, one of the first examples of a financial boom and bust and one which gave rise to the term bubble to refer to such an incident of spectacular stock market failure.
The Cult of Mithras 27 Dec
Hello. In 1954, construction work was taking place in Warbrook Street in the city of London following the Second World War.

2013 41 episodes

Le Morte d’Arthur 10 Jan
Hello. It was an age of chivalry and romance, a time when knights fought dragons and saved damsels in distress, or so it went in the romances of the day.
Comets 17 Jan
Hello. One evening in April 1937, a strange new star was spotted in the skies above Northern Europe.
Romulus and Remus 24 Jan
Hello. The Capitoline Museum in Rome contains a small but magnificent room known as the Chamber Of The She Wolf.
The War of 1812 31 Jan
Hello. In 1814, a 35 year old American lawyer, Francis Scott Key, wrote a poem which he called Defence of Fort McHenry.
Epicureanism 7 Feb
Hello. In 1819, the retired American president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote to his former secretary giving a revealing account of his personal philosophy.
Ice Ages 14 Feb
Hello. 20,000 years ago, much of Northern Europe was covered in thick ice.
Decline and Fall 21 Feb
Hello. In May 1928, The Times Literary Supplement published a long review of a new book about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Pitt-Rivers 28 Feb
Hello. One of the world's extraordinary museums can be found in a grand Victorian building in Central Oxford.
Absolute Zero 7 Mar
Hello. The coldest natural temperature ever known on Earth was recorded 30 years ago at a Soviet research base in the Antarctic.
Chekhov 14 Mar
Hello. A little over a century ago, The Times Literary Supplement reviewed the first English translation of plays by Anton Chekhov.
Alfred Russel Wallace 21 Mar
Hello. In the reign of Queen Victoria, a young British naturalist travelled to remote parts of the world, collecting vast numbers of animals and plants in an attempt to understand where species came from and how they changed.
Water 28 Mar
Hello. Water is one of the commonest substances on Earth.
Japan’s Sakoku Period 4 Apr
Hello. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1797, contains a long article about Japan, which states, quote, the natives are prohibited from going out of their country, and all foreigners are excluded from an open and free trade.
The Amazons 11 Apr
Hello. In 1542, a Spanish explorer, Francesco di Oleana, travelled 800 miles down a massive and uncharted river, the largest in South America.
The Putney Debates 18 Apr
Hello. The church of Saint Mary's Putney stands on the South Bank Of The Thames about six miles upriver from Central London.
Montaigne 25 Apr
Hello. Michel de Montaigne's essays first published in 1580 begin rather unconventionally.
Gnosticism 2 May
Hello. In 1945, an Egyptian farmer walked out into the mountains near his home looking for fertiliser.
Icelandic Sagas 9 May
Hello. The late Middle Ages was a period when literature flourished across Europe as never before.
Cosmic Rays 16 May
Hello. One of the world's largest and most unusual astronomical observatories can be found on a vast empty plane in Western Argentina.
Lévi-Strauss 23 May
Hello. A celebrated travel memoir published in 1955 begins with an unusual confession from its author.
Queen Zenobia 30 May
Hello. In his history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote, modern Europe has produced several illustrious women who have sustained with glory the weight of empire, but Zenobia is perhaps the only female whose superior genius broke through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia.
Relativity 6 Jun
Hello. In 1905, a 26 year old technical assistant at the patient office in Bern in Switzerland submitted four papers to a German scientific journal.
Prophecy 13 Jun
Hello. The prophets are some of the most important and intriguing figures in the Hebrew Bible.
The Physiocrats 20 Jun
Hello. An eminent French economist of the 18th century, the Marquis de Minervaude, believed that three inventions had enabled the emergence of stable political societies.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 27 Jun
Hello. The empire long divided must unite.
The Invention of Radio 4 Jul
Hello. On the 7/2/1897, a young Italian living in Bayswater was awarded a patent for a new device.
Pascal 19 Sep
Hello. The first practical calculating machine was invented 1642 by the 19 year old son of a tax inspector who wanted to find a way to make his father's job easier.
The Mamluks 26 Sep
Hello. The Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo is widely regarded as one of the most impressive Islamic monuments in Egypt.
Exoplanets 3 Oct
Hello. The star 51 Pegasi is part of the constellation Pegasus, and at this time of year, in clear conditions, it's just about visible from the Northern hemisphere.
Galen 10 Oct
Hello. In the middle years of the second century AD, a young Greek man called Galen began to practise medicine as chief physician to the local troop of gladiators.
The Book of Common Prayer 17 Oct
Hello. Two years after the death of Henry the eighth, a new prayer book was published which affected not only what people did in church, but the way they spoke and wrote.
The Corn Laws 24 Oct
Hello. One evening in March 1815, a riot broke out in Canterbury.
The Berlin Conference 31 Oct
Hello. On 15/11/1884, the representatives of 14 world powers arrived at the Berlin Palace of the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for an international summit.
Ordinary Language Philosophy 7 Nov
Hello. In the years after the second world war, a small group of British philosophers emerged who were obsessed with language.
The Tempest 14 Nov
Hello. As I came through the front doors of Broadcasting House this morning, I walked under a famous statue by Eric Gill.
Pocahontas 21 Nov
Hello. In an unmarked grave in the town of Gravesend in Kent lie the remains of a young woman who died there in 1616.
The Microscope 28 Nov
Hello. One afternoon in January 1665, Samuel Peeps visited his favourite bookshop and an impulse bought a volume that took his fancy.
Hindu Ideas of Creation 5 Dec
Hello. The Brahmanda Purana, an important Hindu text written over 1,000 years ago, contains an account, one of many, of the beginning of the universe.
Pliny the Younger 12 Dec
Hello. After a fire which destroyed several houses and two public buildings, a local government official wrote to his superior asking for permission to set up a fire brigade.
Complexity 19 Dec
Hello. Hello. In the late 1940s, a chemist in Brussels called Ilya Prigogine embarked on research which would take him in rather surprising directions.
The Medici 26 Dec
Hello. In 1433, Cosimo dei Medici, one Florence's wealthiest citizens, was staying in his country villa just to the north of the city.

2014 40 episodes

Plato’s Symposium 2 Jan
Hello. Plato's Symposium, one of the masterpieces of Western philosophy, is a dramatic dialogue set at a dinner party in ancient Athens.
The Battle of Tours 16 Jan
Hello. In the first half of the eighth century, an army from Arab Spain invaded Gaul and reached as far north as Poitiers in Central France.
Sources of Early Chinese History 23 Jan
Hello. In 1900, a Taoist monk was exploring a cave complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Northwest China.
Catastrophism 30 Jan
Hello. 65 million years ago, a massive object from outer space slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
The Phoenicians 6 Feb
Hello. In his masterpiece, The Histories, the Greek writer Herodotus describes how the alphabet first came to Europe.
Chivalry 13 Feb
Hello. In Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, the medieval knight for whom the novel is named, praises the idea of chivalry to the book's heroine, Rebecca.
Social Darwinism 20 Feb
Hello. When Charles Darwin published his masterpiece on the origin of species by means of natural natural selection in 1859, he laid the foundations for a new era in scientific inquiry.
The Eye 27 Feb
Hello. In the collection of Cambridge University Library is a modest notebook, which belongs to Isaac Newton when he was a student.
Spartacus 6 Mar
Hello. In 1960, the American director Stanley Kubrick made a film starring Kirk Douglas, which was widely acclaimed by the critics and won numerous awards.
The Trinity 13 Mar
Hello. One of the beliefs that sets Christianity apart from all other faiths is known as the doctrine of the Trinity.
Bishop Berkeley 20 Mar
Hello. In his life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell recalls a conversation the two men had about the work of the philosopher George Berkeley and his theory that objects do not really exist except as ideas in our minds.
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic 27 Mar
Hello. In 1905, the German sociologist Max Weber published an essay suggesting a connection between religion and the spread of capitalism.
States of Matter 3 Apr
Hello. Most of the matter we encounter in everyday life appears in one of three states, solid, liquid, or gas.
Strabo’s Geographica 10 Apr
Hello. One of the earliest known examples of a foreigner complaining about the British weather can be found in a book written 2,000 years ago by the Greek scholar Strabo.
The Domesday Book 17 Apr
Hello. 20 years after the battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror sent hundreds of officials out into the English and Welsh countryside.
Tristram Shandy 24 Apr
Hello. In 1760, a London periodical called the monthly review published a review of two books by an Anglican clergyman.
The Tale of Sinuhe 1 May
Hello. In 1895, the archaeologist was excavating a burial site in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes.
The Sino-Japanese War 8 May
Hello. 10 miles south-west of the Chinese capital, Beijing, a handsome and venerable stone bridge crosses the Yongding River.
Photosynthesis 15 May
Hello. 3.5 billion years ago, this planet was a hostile and barren place.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 22 May
Hello. Quote, awake for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight, and lo, the hunter of the East has caught the sultan's turret in a noose of light.
The Talmud 29 May
Hello. The Talmud is one of the most important texts of Judaism.
The Bluestockings 5 Jun
Hello. In the middle of the 18th century, a group of aristocratic women formed an informal club which met regularly at their homes in London.
Robert Boyle 12 Jun
Hello. On the 1/7/1692, a vast congregation filled the church of Saint Martin in the field for the funeral of one of the country's most celebrated thinkers.
The Philosophy of Solitude 19 Jun
Hello. In 1845, the American writer Henry David Thoreau moved into a small log cabin built in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts.
Hildegard of Bingen 26 Jun
Hello. If you'd walked into the abbey of the monastery Trier in Germany 850 years ago, it's quite possible that this is what you would have heard.
Mrs Dalloway 3 Jul
Hello. In 1922, Virginia Woolf began work on a novel which many now see as her masterpiece.
The Sun 10 Jul
Hello. 26,000 light years from the centre of our galaxy in one of the outer reaches of the Milky Way is an unremarkable little star.
e 25 Sep
Hello. Centuries ago, when thinkers started to look at the world around them using the language of mathematics, they found that a few very important numbers seem to underpin everything.
Julius Caesar 2 Oct
Hello. In 49 BC, a Roman army marched south from the Alps and crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river which marked the northern border of the territory controlled by the city of Rome.
The Battle of Talas 9 Oct
Hello. In the steppes of Central Asia, in a remote setting near the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, is a river called the Talas.
Rudyard Kipling 16 Oct
Hello. In March 1890, The Times published an editorial praising the work of a 24 year old author.
The Haitian Revolution 23 Oct
Hello. In the late 18th century, the French colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean was among the richest countries in the world, supplying Europe and America's insatiable appetite for sugar.
Nuclear Fusion 30 Oct
Hello. We'll be talking about nuclear fusion.
Hatshepsut 6 Nov
Hello. In the early 15th century BC, a woman came to power in ancient Egypt.
Brunel 13 Nov
Hello. In 1860, the proceedings of the institution of civil engineers printed an obituary of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Aesop 20 Nov
Hello. Look before you leap.
Kafka’s The Trial 27 Nov
Hello. Quote, somebody must have been telling lies about about Joseph Kaye.
Zen 4 Dec
Hello. Quote, if you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, kill him, unquote.
Behavioural Ecology 11 Dec
Hello. What factors influence where and what an animal chooses to eat?
Truth 18 Dec
Hello. What is truth?

2015 40 episodes

Bruegel’s The Fight Between Carnival and Lent 15 Jan
Hello. I'm looking at a painting which is looking down on a busy square with crowds of people dressed in a late medieval costume.
Phenomenology 22 Jan
Hello. Quote, back to the things themselves, unquote.
Thucydides 29 Jan
Hello. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.
Ashoka the Great 5 Feb
Hello. In 1837, a young British administrator in Cal Cutta, James Princep, succeeded in deciphering a series of mysterious and ancient inscriptions.
The Photon 12 Feb
Hello. What is light?
The Wealth of Nations 19 Feb
Hello. At the height of the enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century, few places in Europe could match the flood of intellectual accomplishment that came from Scotland.
The Eunuch 26 Feb
Hello. When an elderly Chinese man called Sun Yao Ting died in 1996, a brutal tradition lasting almost 3,000 years was brought to an end.
Beowulf 5 Mar
Hello. In dark age Scandinavia, a great hero travelled across the sea in order to fight a monstrous creature which had been terrorising the people of Denmark.
Dark Matter 12 Mar
Hello. Something in our universe is missing or rather almost everything, most of the matter in existence.
Al-Ghazali 19 Mar
Hello. In the 11th century AD, the Middle East, particularly the cities of Baghdad, Damascus, and Jerusalem, was a flourishing centre of learning and cultural activity.
The Curies 26 Mar
Hello. In 1903, thanks to her work on radio activity, Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing it with her husband Pierre and with Henri Becquerel.
The California Gold Rush 2 Apr
Hello. In California, in January 1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill by the American River.
Sappho 9 Apr
Hello. In antiquity, the Greek lyric poet Sappho was known as the 10th muse or as Sappho the wise.
Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty 16 Apr
Hello. In 1582, the Jesuit Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, disembarked at the Port Of Macau with a mission to convert the people of China to Christianity.
Fanny Burney 23 Apr
Hello. Virginia Woolf called Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction.
The Earth’s Core 30 Apr
Hello. It's said that we know more about the composition of the sun 90,000,000 miles away than we do about the core of our own planet Earth.
Tagore 7 May
Hello. Claimed that Rabindranath Tagore was at one time one of the most famous poets in the world.
The Lancashire Cotton Famine 14 May
Hello. In 1863, in the middle of president Lincoln wrote, I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working men of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis.
Josephus 21 May
Hello. In 67 AD, during the first Jewish Roman War, Josephus was in charge of Jewish rebels in Galilee, facing the fall besieging might of the Roman army under Vespasian and his son, Titus.
The Science of Glass 28 May
Hello. Around 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians were using glass to make beads, melting sand at very high temperatures and cooling it rapidly in water.
Prester John 4 Jun
Hello. In the November, the second crusade was a spectacular failure for the Christians in the West who believed so firmly in their success.
Utilitarianism 11 Jun
Hello. In 1789, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published one of his most important works in which he developed his theory of utility titled an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation.
Jane Eyre 18 Jun
Hello. In 1847, Jane Eyre was published with the author's name given as Curra Bell.
Extremophiles 25 Jun
Hello. In 1977, scientists made a discovery deep under the oceans that gave clues to life we might find in deepest space.
Frederick the Great 2 Jul
Hello. In 1740 in Berlin, Frederick the second, the new king in Prussia, took an opportunity that earned him the title Frederick the Great.
Frida Kahlo 9 Jul
Hello. The painter Frida Kahlo was born near Mexico City in 1907.
Perpetual Motion 24 Sep
Hello. Perpetual Motion has intrigued some of the greatest names in science as they tried to invent machines that could power themselves endlessly.
Alexander the Great 1 Oct
Hello. Alexander the third of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, is one of the most famous figures from the ancient world.
Holbein at the Tudor Court 15 Oct
Hello. Hans Holbein the younger was born in Bavaria in 1497 and died in London in a plague academic epidemic in 1543.
Simone de Beauvoir 22 Oct
Hello. Quote, one is not born but rather becomes a woman, end of quote.
The Empire of Mali 29 Oct
Hello. The Empire of Mali flourished during the European Middle Ages.
P v NP 5 Nov
Hello. The problem of p versus NP is so difficult to solve, there's a $1,000,000 prize on offer for the from the Clay Mathematical Institute for the first person to come up with a solution.
The Battle of Lepanto 12 Nov
Hello. In 1571, the fleets of the Holy League and the Ottomans went into battle at Lepanto in the Gulf Of Patras on the Western side of Greece.
Emma 19 Nov
Hello. At the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, etcetera, etcetera.
The Salem Witch Trials 26 Nov
Hello. In 1692 in the New England colony of Massachusetts, two young girls, Abigail Williams and Betty Paris, had fits, were twitching, they wouldn't wake up.
Voyages of James Cook 3 Dec
Hello. In 1768, a converted collier endeavour set out from Plymouth bound for Tahiti in the Pacific so that astronomers on board could observe the transit of Venus across the sun.
Chinese Legalism 10 Dec
Hello. In March, the Chinese statesman Shang Yang was torn apart by four chariots pulling in opposite directions, and his entire extended family was murdered.
Circadian Rhythms 17 Dec
Hello. Circadian rhythms are biological version of a clock inside humans and all other animals, and they're in plants and quite possibly in almost every living cell, and their origin can trace back to the beginning of life itself 3.5 billion years ago.
Michael Faraday 24 Dec
Hello. Near Waterloo Bridge in London, there's a rather unusual bronze statue of a man.
Tristan and Iseult 31 Dec
Hello. The story of Tristan and Iseult was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages.

2016 41 episodes

Saturn 14 Jan
Hello. In 1610, Galileo, using a rather primitive telescope, observed Saturn, one of the brightest points in the night sky.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense 21 Jan
Hello. In January 1776 in Philadelphia, an anonymous pamphlet was published entitled Common Sense.
Eleanor of Aquitaine 28 Jan
Hello. Eleanor Of Aquitaine was the most powerful woman in 12th century Europe, possibly in the entire Middle Ages.
Chromatography 4 Feb
Hello. One of the big one of the big ideas in chemistry today is chromatography, a way of separating mixed up substances to analyse them or extract something useful.
Rumi’s Poetry 11 Feb
Hello. The Sufi writer and teacher Rumi is so important in the Islamic world that four modern countries claim him for their own.
Robert Hooke 18 Feb
Hello. For two decades in the 17th century, Robert Hooke was arguably the greatest natural philosopher in Britain at the head of the new interest in science inspired by Copernicus and Descartes.
Mary Magdalene 25 Feb
Hello. Mary Magdalene has been a figure of religious, artistic, and literary inspiration among Christians for 2,000 years.
The Dutch East India Company 3 Mar
Hello. Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was the largest global corporation in the 17th century and more than any other East India Company of the time transformed the relationship between Europe and Southeast Asia.
The Maya Civilization 10 Mar
Hello. The Maya people of Central America have an extraordinary history with roots 2,000 or 3,000 years BC.
Bedlam 17 Mar
Hello. The Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem was founded in London in December.
Aurora Leigh 24 Mar
Hello. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic poem Aurora Leigh was published at the end of 1856.
Agrippina the Younger 31 Mar
Hello. Agrippina the Younger was for a time one of the most powerful women in the Roman world.
The Sikh Empire 7 Apr
Hello. In 1799, Ranjit Singh and his Sikh army captured Lahore, once the Mughal capital of the North.
The Neutron 14 Apr
Hello. In 1932 in a Cambridge laboratory, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, one of the building blocks of the atomic nucleus.
1816, the Year Without a Summer 21 Apr
Hello. In April 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sambawai in what we now call Indonesia.
Euclid’s Elements 28 Apr
Hello. Around 300 BC in Alexandria, one of the most important works in mathematics appeared.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles 5 May
Hello. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles first appeared in 1891, serialised each week in the Graphic from July to November, and simultaneously, New York and Sydney.
Titus Oates and his ‘Popish Plot’ 12 May
Hello. In 1678, Titus Oates claimed he discovered a Catholic conspiracy to shoot, excuse me, to shoot king Charles the second.
The Muses 19 May
Hello. The Muses have been associated with creativity and inspiration for 3,000 years, even before the time of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey.
The Gettysburg Address 26 May
Hello. On the 19/11/1863, president Abraham Lincoln spoke briefly at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg on the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War.
Margery Kempe and English Mysticism 2 Jun
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Penicillin 9 Jun
Hello. In 1928, the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming noticed something odd on the petri dish he'd left out in his laboratory, Saint Mary's Hospital, Paddington.
The Bronze Age Collapse 16 Jun
Hello. In the 12th century BC, there was a dramatic change in the kingdoms and empires of the Mediterranean, a series of events known as the Bronze Age Collapse.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience 23 Jun
Hello. The artist and poet William Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, the era of the French Revolution.
Sovereignty 30 Jun
Hello. In 1576, the French political philosopher, Jean Bodin, set out his ideas about the nature of sovereignty in what became a landmark work, the Six Books of the Commonwealth.
The Invention of Photography 7 Jul
Hello. In Paris in 1839, the daguerreotype was announced to the world.
Zeno’s Paradoxes 22 Sep
Hello. The ancient Greek thinker Zeno of Iliya flourished in the fifth century BC.
Animal Farm 29 Sep
Hello. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm at the height of the Second World War.
Lakshmi 6 Oct
Hello. Lakshmi is one of the most prominent and popular Hindu goddesses.
Plasma 13 Oct
Hello. Plasma thought of as the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas.
The 12th Century Renaissance 20 Oct
Hello. The 12th century Renaissance was a term developed by scholars in the 20th century to describe a period of intense and prolonged intellectual, social, creative, and technological growth in Western Europe.
John Dalton 27 Oct
Hello. In 1766, John Dalton was born in Cumberland.
Epic of Gilgamesh 3 Nov
Hello. He who saw the deep.
The Fighting Temeraire 10 Nov
Hello. The Fighting Temeraire from 1839 is one of Turner's greatest works, the one he called his darling.
Justinian’s Legal Code 17 Nov
Hello. The emperor Justinian the Great ruled the Eastern Roman Empire for almost 40 years from Constantinople in the sixth century AD.
Baltic Crusades 24 Nov
Hello. From the 12th century, the popes approved a series of crusades on the Baltic Lands, principally Prussia and regions now covered by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Estonia.
Garibaldi and the Risorgimento 1 Dec
Hello. Giuseppe Garibaldi, according to the historian AJP Taylor, was the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.
Harriet Martineau 8 Dec
Hello. Harriet Martineau is one of the most prolific and famous writers of the 19th century.
The Gin Craze 15 Dec
Hello. The gin craze gripped Britain in the 18th century when the government feared that poor people were drinking far too much cheap gin, damaging their own health and the safety and well-being of all.
Four Quartets 22 Dec
Hello. Four Quartets is TS Eliot's last great poem, which he began in years leading up to the second world war and completed while London was still being bombed, and he was a fire warden watching at night for burning buildings.
Johannes Kepler 29 Dec
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2017 41 episodes

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality 12 Jan
Hello. What price of human animals pay to become civilised?
Mary, Queen of Scots 19 Jan
Hello. Mary Queen of Scots had potential to be one of the most powerful rulers in Europe, yet she was also one of the most vulnerable.
Parasitism 26 Jan
Hello. All humans play host to countless parasites, if not visibly on the surface, then internally and between the cells or inside the cells themselves.
Hannah Arendt 2 Feb
Hello. Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany, where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness.
John Clare 9 Feb
Hello. John Clare is seen now as one of the great poets of the 19th century, and according to one of our guests today, the greatest labouring class poet that England has ever produced.
Maths in the Early Islamic World 16 Feb
Hello. Mathematics flourished in the early Islamic world from the eighth century onwards.
Seneca the Younger 23 Feb
Hello. Seneca the Younger, orator, philosopher, and playwright, was born in the Roman province of Hispana, modern Spain, around April and was the first great Latin writer under the emperors after the fall of the republic.
The Kuiper Belt 2 Mar
Hello. About 4.5 billion years ago, a vast cloud of dust and gas collapsed and gave rise to our solar system.
North and South 9 Mar
Hello. In 1854, Charles Dickens published a serialised novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 16 Mar
Hello. About 50 million years ago, the Earth's climate changed faster than at any time in our geological record, reaching temperatures much higher than they are today.
The Battle of Salamis 23 Mar
Hello. In April, the Greek and Persian fleets fought in a bay by the island of Salamis, a short distance from Athens, in what's often called one of the most significant battles in history.
Hokusai 30 Mar
Hello. Hokusai, born in 1760, was a major power in Japanese art, creating extraordinary images at a time when Japan was largely closed off from global cultures.
Pauli’s Exclusion Principle 6 Apr
Hello. In 1925, Wolfgang Pauli made a decisive contribution to atomic theory through his discovery of a new and fundamental law of nature, the exclusion principle, or as it became known, the Pauli principle.
Rosa Luxemburg 13 Apr
Hello. Rosa Luxemburg argued for revolution in an age of revolutions.
Roger Bacon 20 Apr
Hello. Doctor Mirabilis or wonderful doctor was the nickname given to the medieval English scholar Roger Bacon.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead 27 Apr
Hello. The Book of the Dead helped ancient Egyptians through their afterlife for over 1,000 years after the building of the Great Pyramids and before Cleopatra.
The Battle of Lincoln 1217 4 May
Hello. On the 20/05/1217, two armies fought at Lincoln to keep or to win the English crown.
Emily Dickinson 11 May
Hello. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, New England, is now celebrated as one of the greatest of American poets.
Louis Pasteur 18 May
Hello. Louis Pasteur, born in France in 1822, was one of the great scientists of the 19th century, and his work still has a profound impact on our lives today.
Purgatory 25 May
Hello. In the Middle Ages, most Christians in the West hoped that when they died, their souls would go straight to purgatory, until what they believed was an imminent final judgement.
Enzymes 1 Jun
Hello. Enzymes are essential to life.
Christine de Pizan 8 Jun
Hello. Christine de Pizan, born in 1364, earned her living as a writer at the court of the French kings in Paris.
The American Populists 15 Jun
Hello. In the late 19th century in late 19th century America, farmers in the South and Midwest suffered with droughts and low prices, while the new urban and industrial centres were thriving.
Eugene Onegin 22 Jun
Hello. Alexander Pushkin, born in 1799, is seen as the Shakespeare of Russian literature and his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, as his masterpiece.
Plato’s Republic 29 Jun
Hello. Plato's Republic, written around March, explores whether it's always better to be just than unjust and is seen as a cornerstone of Western philosophy.
Bird Migration 6 Jul
Hello. For millennia, bird migration was a complete mystery to humans.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative 21 Sep
Hello. Immanuel Kant, 1724 to 1804, was one of the great thinkers of the enlightenment, an age in which reason was the dominant force in philosophy as it was in science.
Wuthering Heights 28 Sep
Hello. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 when she was 29, is widely seen as one of the great English novels.
Constantine the Great 5 Oct
Hello. Constantine the Great ruled the Roman Empire longer than anyone else other than Augustus.
Aphra Behn 12 Oct
Hello. Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright for the restoration stage, a poet, a writer of fiction, and a sometimes spy, and her life spanned one of the most turbulent times turbulent times in English history.
The Congress of Vienna 19 Oct
Hello. In 1814, the great European powers met in Vienna to try to establish a new and lasting order after over 20 years of bloody catastrophic wars.
Feathered Dinosaurs 26 Oct
Hello. Hello. Until 20 years ago, dinosaurs were widely assumed to be large, lumping lizards that became extinct millions of years ago.
Picasso’s Guernica 2 Nov
Hello. In 1937, Pablo Picasso revealed his painting Guernica at the parish in Paris International's exhibition in the Pavilion of Republican Spain.
The Picts 9 Nov
Hello. The Picts according to Bede writing in the eighth century were one of four peoples of Britain along with the Scots, the Anglo Saxons, and the Britons.
Germaine de Stael 16 Nov
Hello. Germaine de Stael was born in Paris in 1766 where her father was finance minister to Louis the 16th and her mother held dazzling salon.
Thebes 23 Nov
Hello. The myths of the ancient Greek city of Thebes were among the most famous and notorious in the Greek world, as was its history.
Carl Friedrich Gauss 30 Nov
Hello. Carl Friedrich Gauss, by those who know about these matters, is considered the greatest mathematician of his time and arguably of all time.
Moby Dick 7 Dec
Hello. Moby Dick by Herman Melville tells the story of captain Ahab whose leg was bitten off by a great white whale, and Ahab wants to hunt it down and kill it in revenge.
Thomas Becket 14 Dec
Hello. Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in December 1170 by four knights who'd come to arrest him as a traitor as they thought to please the king.
Beethoven 21 Dec
Hello. Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the greatest composers, and is often considered the greatest, a defining figure in western classical music.
Hamlet 28 Dec
Hello. William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his longest play, around 1599.

2018 41 episodes

The Siege of Malta, 1565 11 Jan
Hello. In 1565, sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman leader, sent a great fleet west to lay siege to Malta and capture it for his empire.
Anna Akhmatova 18 Jan
Hello. Anna Akhmatova, 1889 to 1966, was one of most famous Russian poets of the 20th century and one of few to survive Stalin's terrorist banned at home though published abroad.
Cicero 25 Jan
Hello. In 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero was elected as one of the two consuls in Rome, the highest political position, a remarkable rise for someone born outside the establishment.
Cephalopods 1 Feb
Hello. The octopus, the squid, the nautilus, and the cuttlefish are some of the most extraordinary creatures on this planet, intelligent and yet so unlike other life forms.
Frederick Douglass 8 Feb
Hello. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, and once he'd escaped, became one of that century's most prominent abolitionists.
Fungi 15 Feb
Hello. Our planet is home to millions of species of fungi, and the role they play is vital.
Rosalind Franklin 22 Feb
Hello. In 1952, Rosalind Franklin was at King's College London investigating the structure of DNA, creating images for analysis.
Sun Tzu and The Art of War 1 Mar
Hello. Quote, The Art of War is vital to the state, a road either to safety or to ruin, end quote.
The Highland Clearances 8 Mar
Hello. The Highland Clearances were a notorious episode in British history that followed the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and lasted for over a century.
Augustine’s Confessions 15 Mar
Hello. In April or thereabouts, when Saint Augustine was bishop of Hippo in the Roman province of Africa, he wrote one of the most influential works in Western Christianity, his Confessions.
Tocqueville: Democracy in America 22 Mar
Hello. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville sailed from France to America to learn how its democracy worked and therefore what his own country might expect when inevitably, as he saw it, democracy spread there.
Roman Slavery 5 Apr
Hello. For a civilisation that valued liberty so highly, Romans had a spectacular number of slaves.
George and Robert Stephenson 12 Apr
Hello. In October 1829, George and Robert Stephenson proved that their steam locomotive Rocket could pull the trains on the planned Liverpool to Manchester Railway more reliably and much faster than any other.
Middlemarch 19 Apr
Hello. George Eliot's Middlemarch is, according to Virginia Woolf, one of the few English novels written for grown up people.
The Proton 26 Apr
Hello. There are enough protons in the sun for it to last 1,000 billion years, and it's only about halfway through them.
The Almoravid Empire 3 May
Hello. In the 11th century, veiled Islamic warriors rode out of the Sahara Desert and across the Atlas Mountains and established an empire, firstly in Northwest Africa and then in Muslim Spain.
The Mabinogion 10 May
Hello. English soldiers killed Llywelyn, the last sovereign prince of Wales in December.
The Emancipation of the Serfs 17 May
Hello. In March 1861 in Saint Petersburg, Tsar Alexander II proclaimed that Russian Serfs were now free.
Margaret of Anjou 24 May
Hello. In 1453, the queen of England was in serious difficulties.
Henrik Ibsen 31 May
Hello. Henrik Ibsen's tragedies were among the most performed plays in the world, second only to those of Shakespeare.
Persepolis 7 Jun
Hello. In May, Darius the Great started building on the site of Persepolis, the ceremonial city of the Persians.
Montesquieu 14 Jun
Hello. By the 18th century, France was sinking under its sun king, Louis the 14th, who was too keen on war and exercising his power over everything and everybody.
Echolocation 21 Jun
Hello. If you could hear bats flying at night, they would deafen us.
The Mexican-American War 28 Jun
Hello. Hello. In 1848, Mexico lost a war with The United States Of America.
William Morris 5 Jul
Hello. William Morris, 1834 to 1896, is best known now as a designer of wallpaper and for his advice to have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
The Iliad 13 Sep
Hello. The Iliad is one of the greatest works in world literature, one of the first and most influential.
Automata 20 Sep
Hello. In the 10th century, lifelike golden lions guarded the Byzantine court moving and roaring.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 27 Sep
Hello. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906 to 1945, was a Lutheran theologian who stood up to Hitler as he threatened to destroy the core of the German church.
Edith Wharton 4 Oct
Hello. Edith Wharton, 1862 to 1937, wrote of High Society in America's Gilded Age, which for women in her novels was more of a gilded cage.
Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets 11 Oct
Hello. Henry the fifth, Richard the third, Margaret of Bonjour, that we remember them at all is substantially thanks to Shakespeare.
Is Shakespeare History? The Romans 18 Oct
Hello. It's almost impossible to imagine Antony and Cleopatra or Julius Caesar and ignore Shakespeare's versions of their histories.
The Fable of the Bees 25 Oct
Hello. Bernard Mandeville, 1670 to 1733, scandalised the British establishment with his book, Fable of the Bees, which he argued that private vices were essential to a healthy economy.
Free Radicals 1 Nov
Hello. We'll be talking about free radicals.
Marie Antoinette 8 Nov
Hello. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755 in Vienna, the 15th child of the Empress Maria Theresa and the Holy Roman Emperor, one of the most powerful rulers in Europe.
Horace 15 Nov
Hello. Horace, who flourished under the Emperor Augustus, was one of the greatest poets of his age and is one of the most quoted of any age.
Hope 22 Nov
Hello. According to the poet Hesiod, hope was all that remained in Pandora's jar once all the evils inside had escaped and spread across the world.
The Long March 29 Nov
Hello. In October 1934, around 80,000 soldiers of the Chinese Red Army broke out of a siege in the Southeast of the country hoping to find a place to regroup and rebuild.
The Thirty Years War 6 Dec
Hello. In 1618, a war began in Europe on such a scale and with such devastation that its like was not seen for another 300 years.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 13 Dec
Hello. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is regarded as the greatest chivalric poem of the medieval world.
The Poor Laws 20 Dec
Hello. From 1834, poor people across England and Wales faced new obstacles when they could no longer feed or clothe themselves or find shelter.
Venus 27 Dec
Hello. The planet Venus is both the morning star and the evening star.

2019 41 episodes

Papal Infallibility 10 Jan
Hello. In 1870, the Vatican Council issued the dogmatic words, Pastor Eternis, which among other areas affirmed papal infallibility.
Samuel Beckett 17 Jan
Hello. Samuel Beckett, 1906 to 1989, 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.
Emmy Noether 24 Jan
Hello. Emmy Noether was one of the great innovative mathematicians of the 20th century, and her ideas have underpinned much in modern physics and algebra.
Owain Glyndwr 31 Jan
Hello. On 16/09/1400, Owain Glyndwr's supporters gathered in the Valley Of The River Dee where they proclaimed him prince of Wales, So began a revolt against the English king, Henry the fourth.
Aristotle’s Biology 7 Feb
Hello. Aristotle, March to March, was not only a philosopher, but also a great biologist, studying life to help explain the goal of life.
Judith beheading Holofernes 14 Feb
Hello. Judith was once one of the most famous women in the Old Testament.
Pheromones 21 Feb
Hello. In 1959, scientists discovered pheromones, the chemical signals that make so many animals act without thinking or needing to think.
Antarah ibn Shaddad 28 Feb
Hello. Almost 15 centuries ago, Antarah ibn Shaddad was fighting on the Arabian Peninsula and composing poems he hoped would long outlast him, and they have.
William Cecil 7 Mar
Hello. William Cecil, 1520 to 1598, was at the centre of power in the Tudor world for over 50 years from the death of Henry the eighth to the advent of James the first.
Authenticity 14 Mar
Hello. To thine own self be true is advice so apparently simple and compelling that when Polonius says it in Hamlet, he needs no further examination.
Gerard Manley Hopkins 21 Mar
Hello. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 to 1889, has been called the greatest Victorian poet for his vivid imagery and his innovation with works such as The Windhover, Pied Beauty, and As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
The Danelaw 28 Mar
Hello. In the late ninth century, Alfred the Great of Wessex and Guthrum, leader of the Danish forces, after Alfred's victory at the Battle of Eddington in August, divided England between them, along a line roughly from London to Chester, and the land on Guthrum's side was to become known as the Danelaw.
The Great Irish Famine 4 Apr
Hello. In 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland struck by a blight which came from North America.
The Evolution of Teeth 11 Apr
Hello. Great white sharks can produce about a 100,000 new teeth throughout their lifetime.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 18 Apr
Hello. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays with some of his most memorable characters, including Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peter Quinn, and Bottom.
Nero 25 Apr
Hello. In 54 AD, Nero became the ruler of the Roman Empire, aged 16.
The Gordon Riots 2 May
Hello. In June 1780, thousands of British troops fired on unarmed crowds in London.
Bergson and Time 9 May
Hello. Henri Bergson, 1859 to 1941, was the most famous philosopher of his time, and crowds for his lectures caused traffic jams in Paris and New York.
Frankenstein 16 May
Hello. In 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and lord Byron had a competition to write a ghost story to pass the time on a cold, dark, wet holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Kinetic Theory 23 May
Hello. In 1662, Robert Boyle observed that when the volume of a gas goes up, the pressure goes down.
President Ulysses S Grant 30 May
Hello. When Ulysses S Grant became the Republican US president in 1869, he'd already won the American Civil War as leader of the Union Army.
Sir Thomas Browne 6 Jun
Hello. Sir Thomas Browne, 1605 to 1682, was a physician and one of the most influential authors in English, if not widely known.
The Inca 13 Jun
Hello. In 1532, Atahulpa became a ruler of the great Inca Empire that was based high in the Andes of South America and spread along the Pacific Coast for over 1,500 miles.
The Mytilenaean Debate 20 Jun
Hello. In April, the Athenians voted to kill all adult men in Mytilenae on Lesbos where they just crushed a revolt and to enslave the women and children and raze the city to the ground.
Doggerland 27 Jun
Hello. Dogger, German Bite, Humber, Thames, and Dover had no place in the Stone Age shipping forecast as they were areas of land, not sea, and ideal habitats for human hunter gatherers.
Lorca 4 Jul
Hello. Federico Garcia Lorca, 1898 to 1936, is one of the great Spanish writers of the 20th century, and his death is still a disturbing mystery.
Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow 19 Sep
Hello. In September 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow and waited a month for the Russians to meet him, to surrender.
The Rapture 26 Sep
Hello. The rapture has become a powerful idea for millions of evangelical Christians around the world, particularly in America.
Dorothy Hodgkin 3 Oct
Hello. In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin became the first British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science and so far, the only one.
Rousseau on Education 10 Oct
Hello. In 1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote Emile, All on Education, which he considered his greatest work.
The Time Machine 17 Oct
Hello. In 1895, h g Wells wrote The Time Machine, in which the wealthy time traveller goes to the year August and is shocked by the future.
Robert Burns 24 Oct
Hello. In 1786, Robert Burns had a collection of his verse published.
Hybrids 31 Oct
Hello. As a rule of thumb, one species cannot mate with another species, and that very fact is a way of telling species apart.
The Treaty of Limerick 7 Nov
Hello. In 1691, the Treaty of Limerick ended the war in Ireland between supporters of James the second, the Catholic, on one side and William and Mary, Protestants, on the other.
Crime and Punishment 14 Nov
Hello. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky was first published in 1866.
Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem 21 Nov
Hello. Melisende was queen of Jerusalem in the 12th century AD and held power there alongside three different kings, her father, her husband, and her son, and sometimes against them.
Li Shizhen 28 Nov
Hello. In China, the name of Li Shizhen, 1518 to 1593, is as famous as Isaac Newton's name is here.
Lawrence of Arabia 5 Dec
Hello. In 1919, huge audiences saw an American film report on the recent war with the Ottoman Empire on the Middle Eastern front and were thrilled by its star, a British officer in Arab clothes.
Coffee 12 Dec
Hello. In 1652, the first coffee house opened in London, not so much a house as a shed selling to passers-by.
Auden 19 Dec
Hello. W h Auden, 1907 to 1973, was a poet of Englishness in crisis and threat and fear in the 1930s, which he called a low dishonest decade.
Tutankhamun 26 Dec
Hello. In 1922, archaeologists found Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley Of The Kings, unopened for more than 3,000 years.

2020 24 episodes

Catullus 9 Jan
Hello. Catullus, '84 to 54 BC, wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic and some of the most obscene.
The Siege of Paris 1870-71 16 Jan
Hello. In September 1870, the Prussian army besieged Paris.
Solar Wind 23 Jan
Hello. The solar wind is matter blown from the sun out into the whole solar system at up to 2,000,000 miles per hour.
Alcuin 30 Jan
Hello. Alcuin of York was one of the towering figures in the intellectual world of the eighth century, and he changed education for the better and for good.
George Sand 6 Feb
Hello. George Sand, 1804 to 1876, was one of the most popular and celebrated French novelists in the 19th century, and she defied conventions.
Battle of the Teutoburg Forest 13 Feb
Hello. In September, Germanic tribes destroyed three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
The Valladolid Debate 20 Feb
Hello. In 1550, at royal command, two sides met in Valladolid in Spain to debate the future of slavery in the new Spanish colonies in The Americas.
The Evolution of Horses 27 Feb
Hello. The ancestors of horses were as diverse as antelopes are today, roaming in North America for tens of millions of years until becoming wholly extinct there.
Paul Dirac 5 Mar
Hello. Paul Dirac, 1902 to 1984, made some of the greatest discoveries in 20th century physics, second only to Einstein.
The Covenanters 12 Mar
Hello. In 1638, a gathering of Presbyterians signed a solemn covenant in Edinburgh in Greyfires' courtyard.
Pericles 17 Sep
Hello. We're back with a new series.
Cave Art 24 Sep
Hello. In 1940, a dog called Robot fell into a hole at Lascaux in the Dordogne.
Macbeth 1 Oct
Hello. Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of his greatest tragedies, fast moving, unsettling, bloody, and compelling.
Deism 8 Oct
Hello. In 17th century England, the public hangman would burn banned books.
Alan Turing 15 Oct
Hello. At the age of 24, Alan Turing founded computer science.
Maria Theresa 22 Oct
Hello. When Maria Theresa inherited the Austrian throne in 1740 at the age of 23, her neighbours circled her, seeing a chance to bite into that great empire.
Piers Plowman 29 Oct
Hello. Seven centuries ago, William Langland wrote a poem about a man called Will who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Piers Plowman.
Mary Astell 5 Nov
Hello. Mary Astell, 1666 to 1731, has been described as the first English feminist.
Albrecht Dürer 12 Nov
Hello. Albrecht Durer, 1471 to 1528, achieved international fame through the power of his mesmerising meticulous images, and those images have never lost their power.
The Zong Massacre 26 Nov
Hello. In 1781, the British slave ship, Zong, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown so that their value could be claimed back on insurance.
Fernando Pessoa 3 Dec
Hello. Fernando Pessoa, 1888 to 1935, is one of the greatest Portuguese poets and some say one of the greatest in the whole western tradition.
John Wesley and Methodism 10 Dec
Hello. As a student, Wesley, 1703 to 1791, was mocked for approaching religion too methodically, a jibe that gave a name to the movement he was to lead and inspire Methodism.
The Cultural Revolution 17 Dec
Hello. In 1966, Chairman Mao began the Cultural Revolution, an uprising when his own party setting communists against each other with mass violence on the streets and the overthrowing of his enemies.
Eclipses 31 Dec
Hello. The experience of a total solar eclipse is one of life's most extraordinary, fleeting, and intense moments.

2021 40 episodes

The Great Gatsby 14 Jan
Hello. The Great Gatsby is now seen as f Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel and one of the greatest of American novels.
The Plague of Justinian 21 Jan
Hello. In May, in the reign of Justinian, there was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world and blighting the lives of all mankind.
Saint Cuthbert 28 Jan
Hello. For 500 years, Cuthbert was the preeminent English saint, and his tombs were major sites of pilgrimage.
Emilie du Châtelet 4 Feb
Hello. Emilie du Chatelet, 1706 to 1749, was an outstanding French mathematician and natural philosopher celebrated across Europe.
The Rosetta Stone 11 Feb
Hello. The Rosetta Stone may be the most famous museum object in the world, though perhaps not the most imposing.
Medieval Pilgrimage 18 Feb
Hello. In Medieval Europe, the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage was so intense that it fired the imagination of the age.
Marcus Aurelius 25 Feb
Hello. Marcus Aurelius, 01/21 to January, is known as the last of the five good emperors of Rome and is a model of the philosopher king.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 4 Mar
Hello. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement and one of the most loved.
The Late Devonian Extinction 11 Mar
Hello. Some mass extinctions happen instantly as when an asteroid hits the earth, and some can take millions of years.
The Bacchae 18 Mar
Hello. When Athenians first saw Euripides play the Bacchae in April, they're on the point of defeat in a long war with Sparta, their fate beyond that unknown.
David Ricardo 25 Mar
Hello. David Ricardo, 1772 to 1823, made his fortune at the Battle of Waterloo and subsequently made his lasting reputation as an economist.
The Russo-Japanese War 1 Apr
Hello. In February 1904, Japanese destroyers made a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea, and the next day, the countries were at war.
Pierre-Simon Laplace 8 Apr
Hello. Pierre-Simon Laplace was a giant in the world of mathematics, either side of the French Revolution.
Arianism 15 Apr
Hello. In the fourth century AD, Roman missionaries converted the Ostrogoths to Christianity in the form known as Arianism as a way of integrating them into the Roman Empire.
The Franco-American Alliance 1778 22 Apr
Hello. In 1778, France entered into an alliance with The United States Of America who revolted against Britain two years earlier with profound consequences for all three.
Ovid 29 Apr
Hello. Ovid, the great Roman poet in the Augustan age, was by his own account destroyed by a poem and a mistake, exiled from Rome to the Romanian coast where he remained until his death.
The Second Barons’ War 6 May
Hello. In December, English Barons toppled Henry the third in a secret bloodless coup.
Longitude 13 May
Hello. In 1714, the British Government passed the Longitude Act to reward anyone who devised reliable means for ships to determine their longitude at sea.
Journey to the West 20 May
Hello. Journey to the West is one of the great novels of China's Ming era and perhaps the most loved.
The Interregnum 27 May
Hello. In 1649, England's Parliament executed Charles the first as it couldn't rule with the monarch and spent the next decade learning it couldn't rule without one.
Kant’s Copernican Revolution 3 Jun
Hello. In 1781, Immanuel Kant shared his insight into how we understand the world around us as revolutionary in his view as when Copernicus realised it's not the earth that's at the centre of the heavens, but the sun.
Booth’s Life and Labour Survey 10 Jun
Hello. In 1886, Charles Booth surveyed every household in booming London to test an unlikely claim that as many as a quarter lived in poverty.
Edward Gibbon 17 Jun
Hello. On the 15/10/1764, Edward Gibbon sat amidst the ruins of Rome while barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple Of Jupiter.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets 24 Jun
Hello. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before imprinted, it said.
The Evolution of Crocodiles 16 Sep
Hello. Before the rise of the dinosaurs, the dominant land animals were crocs, the academic catchall name for ancestors of the alligators and crocodiles that lurk by the water's edge today among the reeds.
Herodotus 23 Sep
Hello. To some, Herodotus was the father of history.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 30 Sep
Hello. When The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848, critics condemned its portrayal of male violence and alcoholic abuse, recommending that no woman should read it.
The Manhattan Project 7 Oct
Hello. On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 14 Oct
Hello. In the 16th and 17th centuries, much of Europe was struggling under religious wars and civil wars, but not the largest state in Europe, the Commonwealth of Poland Lithuania stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, where the kings were elected and with parliament ruled over peoples of many cultures and many beliefs.
Iris Murdoch 21 Oct
Hello. Iris Murdoch, 1919 to 1999, was seen in her lifetime as a novelist who was also a philosopher, but it's her philosophy that is now gilding her reputation.
Corals 28 Oct
Hello. Whenever shipwrecked sailors find sanctuary on a desert island under a coconut palm, they can thank coral.
The Song of Roland 4 Nov
Hello. The Song of Roland from the 12th century is an early masterpiece of French poetry.
William and Caroline Herschel 11 Nov
Hello. William Herschel, 1738 to 1822, is one of the most eminent astronomers in British history.
The Decadent Movement 18 Nov
Hello. In the 1890s, the Decadent Movement flickered with a bright green flame in British culture with Oscar Wilde at its heart.
Plato’s Gorgias 25 Nov
Hello. Plato's Gorgias is one of his most striking dialogues, addressing the real nature of power and freedom and the relationship between pleasure and true self interest.
The Battle of Trafalgar 2 Dec
Hello. On the October 21, Horatio Nelson led the British fleet to a famous victory over the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The May Fourth Movement 9 Dec
Hello. On May 1919 in China, violent protests broke out over the Versailles Treaty, which had concluded the First World War.
A Christmas Carol 16 Dec
Hello. In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a work which, like Dickens' reputation, has become intertwined with Christmas itself.
The Hittites 23 Dec
Hello. Around December, there was a mighty chariot battle at Kadesh in modern Syria to be followed by what's often called the first known peace treaty, the Treaty of Kadesh.
Fritz Lang 30 Dec
Hello. Fritz Lang, 1890 to 1976, was one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the last century, working first in Weimar Germany, then in Hollywood.

2022 40 episodes

Thomas Hardy’s Poetry 13 Jan
Hello. In the 1890s, Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels and returned to his first love, poetry.
The Gold Standard 20 Jan
Hello. The century between 1870 and 1970 was the age of the gold standard, where currencies around the world were in some way tied to the price of gold.
Colette 27 Jan
Hello. Colette 1873 to 1954 was one of the outstanding French writers of the 20th century, and uniquely, her novels always had women at their centre from youth to midlife to old age.
The Temperance Movement 3 Feb
Hello, everyone.
Walter Benjamin 10 Feb
Hello, everyone.
Romeo and Juliet 17 Feb
Hello. Romeo and Juliet marked a turning point in Shakespeare's career, a move from history and comedy towards tragedy, although it contains all three.
Peter Kropotkin 24 Feb
Hello. The Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, 1842 to 1921, was one of the most famous scientists of his age and the most prominent anarchists.
The Arthashastra 3 Mar
Hello. The ancient Indian Sanskrit text, the Uttashastra, has been compared with the work of Machiavelli.
Seismology 10 Mar
Hello. On the 11/01/1755, a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Lisbon and its people, making it one of the deadliest in history.
Charisma 17 Mar
Hello. Max Weber, 1864 to 1920, devised the idea of charismatic authority to explain why people accept some as the legitimate rulers and not others.
Antigone 24 Mar
Hello. Antigone by Sophocles, April to 406 BC, is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies today and perhaps the most powerfully ambiguous.
The Sistine Chapel 31 Mar
Hello. In 1506, pope Julius the second gave Michelangelo the chance to create arguably the greatest work of art in his time or since, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Polidori’s The Vampyre 7 Apr
Hello. In 1819, John Polidori's novella, The Vampyre, thrilled readers with his aristocratic Lord Ruthven, who glutted his thirst with the blood of his victims.
Homo erectus 14 Apr
Hello. When we Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 ago, we followed an ancestor who had thrived on Earth for up to 2 million years.
Olympe de Gouges 21 Apr
Hello. In 1791 in the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a repost to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Early Christian Martyrdom 28 Apr
Hello. In March, the Roman Emperors began the Great Persecution of Christians, and it was eight years before they restored their right to worship.
The Davidian Revolution 5 May
Hello. In 1124, David the first became king of Scotland and so began what's been called the Davidian Revolution.
Tang Era Poetry 12 May
Hello. Two of China's greatest poets date from the eighth century in the Tang Era, and they're Li Bai and Du Fu.
Comenius 19 May
Hello. In the 17th century, the educator, Comenius, had a great plan to address the deep antagonisms behind the wars that were devastating Europe.
Hegel’s Philosophy of History 26 May
Hello. Hegel's 1770 to 1831 is one of the most influential of modern philosophers.
The Death of Stars 9 Jun
Hello. Across the universe, stars have been dying for billions of years.
Dylan Thomas 16 Jun
Hello. Dylan Thomas, 1914 to 1953, wrote some of his best films before he was 20 in the first half of his short, remarkable life that began in Wales and ended in a New York hospital.
Angkor Wat 23 Jun
Hello. Early in the 12th century, Surrey Obamand the second commissioned Angkor Wat in modern day Cambodia.
John Bull 30 Jun
Hello. John Bull, Lewis Baboon, and Nicholas Frog first appeared in 1712 in a pamphlet that satirised the funding of the War of the Spanish Succession.
Nineteen Eighty-Four 15 Sep
Hello. Doublethink, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother Is Watching You, just some of the ideas George Orwell coined in his last novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, and which we use still today.
Plato’s Atlantis 22 Sep
Hello. According to Plato, fourth century BC, there was once a great island of Atlantis out to the West beyond the known world of the Mediterranean.
The Electron 29 Sep
Hello. It was in 1897 that JJ Thompson discovered electron and revealed that atoms, supposedly the smallest things, were made of even smaller things.
The Knights Templar 6 Oct
Hello. For 200 years, the Knights Templar were a major fighting and financial power in the Crusader States and in Western Europe.
Berthe Morisot 13 Oct
Hello. Berthe Morisot, 1841 to 1895, was an influential painter at the heart of the French Impressionist movement.
The Fish-Tetrapod Transition 20 Oct
Hello. Around 400,000,000 ago, some of our ancestors, The Fish, started to become a little more like us, and this was one of the greatest revolutions in the history of life.
Wilfred Owen 27 Oct
Hello. Wilfred Owen, the great war poet, was killed on the 11/04/1918, seven days before the armistice.
The Morant Bay Rebellion 3 Nov
Hello. On the 10/11/1865, Paul Bogle led a march from Stony Gut, Jamaica to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay, and there, simmering anger turned to bloodshed.
Bauhaus 10 Nov
Hello. Bauhaus began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany as a school for arts and crafts combined and went on to be famous around the world.
Demosthenes’ Philippics 17 Nov
Hello. In the fourth century BC in Athens, Demosthenes delivered speeches so powerful that he became famous as one of that democracy's greatest freedom fighters.
The Challenger Expedition 1872-1876 24 Nov
Hello. In 1872, HMS Challenger set out from Portsmouth on a four year mission around the world to explore the ocean depths and search for new life.
The Nibelungenlied 1 Dec
Hello. The Nibelungenlied is a 12th century German epic full of blood, violence, fantasy, and bleakness, and it's a foundational work of medieval literature.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 8 Dec
Hello. In 1798 in Ireland, the momentum behind rebellion was so great that it was a question of when it would happen, not if.
Citizen Kane 15 Dec
Hello. Citizen Kane, released in 1941, is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest film ever made.
Persuasion 22 Dec
Hello. Persuasion, Jane Austen's last complete novel, was published just before Christmas 1817, five months after her death.
The Great Stink 29 Dec
Hello. In the summer of 1858, the stench from the River Thames appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, notably those at the houses of parliament.

2023 41 episodes

John Donne 12 Jan
Hello. John Donne is best known now as one of England's finest poets of love, and in his own time, as an astonishing preacher with an exceptional mind and remarkable life.
Rawls’ Theory of Justice 19 Jan
Hello. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls has been called the most influential book in 20th century political philosophy.
Superconductivity 26 Jan
Hello. In 1911, the Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, made a remarkable discovery that nobody predicted and that none can since fully explain.
Tycho Brahe 2 Feb
Hello. Tycho Brahe, 1546 to 1601, was born into a powerful Danish aristocratic family and was destined for the conventional life of a nobleman.
Chartism 9 Feb
Hello. On 21/05/1838, an estimated a 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration.
Stevie Smith 16 Feb
Hello. In 1957, Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning, and its title poem gave us a phrase which success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary.
Paul Erdős 23 Feb
Hello. Paul Erdos, 1913 to 1996, is one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the 20th century.
Megaliths 2 Mar
Hello. In many parts of the world, it's possible to see huge stones that have been placed in the landscape.
The Ramayana 9 Mar
Hello. The ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, is one of the greatest works of world literature.
Mercantilism 16 Mar
Hello. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, Europe was dominated by an economic way of thinking called Mercantilism.
Solon the Lawgiver 23 Mar
Hello. In the first years of the sixth century BC, the Greek city state of Athens was in crisis.
A Room of One’s Own 30 Mar
Hello. In October 1928, the novelist Virginia Woolf was invited to give two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction.
Cnut 6 Apr
Hello. In 10/16, a Danish prince called Cnut became king of England.
The Battle of Crécy 13 Apr
Hello. On the 26/08/1346, two armies met in a funnel shaped valley outside the village of Crecy in Northern France.
Linnaeus 20 Apr
Hello. The philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, once wrote, tell him I know no greater man on earth.
Walt Whitman 27 Apr
Hello. In July 1855, a Brooklyn printer, journalist, and property developer called Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry.
The Dead Sea Scrolls 4 May
Hello. In 1946, a Bedouin shepherd boy called Mohammed Ed Deeb was looking for a goat he'd lost in the hills above the Dead Sea.
The Shimabara Rebellion 11 May
Hello. In the 1630s, Japan was ruled by the Tokagawa Shoguns, a military dynasty, who 30 years earlier had unified the country ending around 200 years of civil war.
Virgil’s Georgics 18 May
Hello. In the year 29 BC, the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines.
Louis XIV: The Sun King 25 May
Hello. In 1661, the 23 year old French king, Louis the 14th, had been on the throne for 18 years when his chief minister died.
Mitochondria 1 Jun
Hello. Inside each cell of every complex organism, there structures known as mitochondria.
Oedipus Rex 8 Jun
Hello. Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex begins with a warning.
Death in Venice 15 Jun
Hello. Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous novella.
Elizabeth Anscombe 22 Jun
Hello. In 1956, Oxford University awarded an honorary degree to the former US president Harry s Truman for his role in ending the Second World War.
Jupiter 29 Jun
Hello. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and it's hard to imagine a world more alien and different from Earth.
Albert Einstein 14 Sep
Hello, everyone.
The Seventh Seal 21 Sep
Hello. It's an image that once you've seen it stays with you for the rest of your life.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace 28 Sep
Hello. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes quit his job at the Paris Peace Conference where the victors of World War One were deciding the fate of the defeated.
Plankton 5 Oct
Hello, everyone.
The Federalist Papers 12 Oct
Hello. In 1787, New Yorkers began to read The Federalist Papers, a series of 85 anonymous essays in support of the new US constitution, which needed ratification.
Julian of Norwich 19 Oct
Hello. In the late 14th century, Julian of Norwich had visions of Christ's suffering, and she wrote these down in an account known since as Revelations of Divine Love.
Germinal 26 Oct
Hello. In 1884, Emile Zola began to serialise his latest work, Germinal, for the French public.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 2 Nov
Hello. What is happiness, and how do we live a good life?
The Barbary Corsairs 9 Nov
Hello, everyone.
The Theory of the Leisure Class 16 Nov
Hello. In 1899, at the height of the American Gilded Age, Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, a reminder that all that glisters is not gold.
Marguerite de Navarre 23 Nov
Hello. In the early 16th century, Marguerite, queen of Navarre, 1492 to 1549, was the author of The Heptameron, one of the literary jewels of the French Renaissance.
Edgar Allan Poe 30 Nov
Hello. Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 to 1849, is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness, and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of House of Usher and The Tell Tale Heart.
Karl Barth 7 Dec
Hello. Karl Barth, 1886 to 1968, was one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, some say for the past few hundred years, putting God and especially Christ at the centre of Christianity.
Tiberius 14 Dec
Hello, everyone.
Vincent van Gogh 21 Dec
Hello. Starry nights and sunflowers, self portraits and simple chairs.
Twelfth Night, or What You Will 28 Dec
Hello. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is one of the great comedies of world literature, toying with the space between marriage, love, and desire.

2024 41 episodes

Condorcet 11 Jan
Hello, everyone.
Nefertiti 18 Jan
Hello. The Bustum Nefertiti is one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt, multicoloured and symmetrical, and despite the missing left eye, still holding the gaze of posterity below her tall blue headdress.
Panpsychism 25 Jan
Hello, everyone.
The Hanseatic League 1 Feb
Hello. For much of the medieval period, the Hanseatic League or Hanse dominated trade around the Baltic and the North Sea with bases from London to Bruges, Bergen to Novgorod.
Hormones 8 Feb
Hello, everyone.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 15 Feb
Hello. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland first appeared in print in 1865.
The Sack of Rome 1527 22 Feb
Hello. In 1527, an army of the Holy Roman Emperor broke through the walls of the holy city of Rome, bringing death and destruction on a holy epic scale.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 29 Feb
Hello. At the age of 23, the German physics student, Werner Heisenberg, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize.
The Mokrani Revolt 7 Mar
Hello. In 1871, the Mokrani Revolt broke out in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed.
The Waltz 14 Mar
Hello. When the Waltz reached Britain in the early 19th century, it revolutionised the role of dancing and music in our society, fracturing old ways and giving rise to new.
Julian the Apostate 21 Mar
Hello. Considering he ruled as Roman emperor for less than two years, March March, Julian the Apostate made an extraordinary impression on history.
The Kalevala 28 Mar
Hello. In 1835, the Finnish epic poem, The Kalevala appeared in print in the Grand Duchy Of Finland, then in the Russian Empire, and until recently, part of Sweden.
Nikola Tesla 4 Apr
Hello. Nikola Tesla, 1856 to 1943, is inseparable from the story of the electrification of America, if not the world.
Lysistrata 11 Apr
Hello. In April, Athenians watched Aristophanes' new comedy, Lysistrata, for their first and only time.
Napoleon’s Hundred Days 18 Apr
Hello. On the 26/02/1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on Elba, arriving in France with fewer than 1,000 men.
Bertolt Brecht 25 Apr
Hello. Bertolt Brecht, 1898 to 1956, was one of the greatest European playwrights of the 20th century.
Mercury 2 May
Hello. Mercury is the planet closest to our sun.
Sir Thomas Wyatt 9 May
Hello. Thomas Wyatt, 1503 to 1542, has been called the greatest poet of his age, and he brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet.
Philippa Foot 16 May
Hello. Philippa Foot, 1920 to 2010, was one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, and her central question was, why be moral?
Empress Dowager Cixi 23 May
Hello. The Empress Dowager Cixi, 1835 to 1908, was the dominant figure in the Chinese court for almost 50 years.
Marsilius of Padua 30 May
Hello. For someone who denounced the papacy as a fraud, Marsilius of Padua lived a remarkably long time from around December to 1343.
The Orkneyinga Saga 6 Jun
Hello. Around the turn of the 13th century, an unknown Icelander created The Orkneying Saga, the story of arguably the most important strategically of all the islands in the British Viking world.
Fielding’s Tom Jones 13 Jun
Hello. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding is one of the most influential of the early English novels, a favourite of Dickens and Coleridge and a page turner, both when it came out in 1749 and today.
Karma 20 Jun
Hello. In India, in the first millennium BC, the doctrine of karma developed among Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists.
Monet in England 27 Jun
Hello. In 1899 in London, Claude Monet looked out on the Thames from his hotel balcony in the Savoy Hotel and began series of almost a 100 paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city in which fog almost obscured the bridges, boats, and parliament.
Bacteriophages 4 Jul
Hello. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their labs was making bacteria disappear.
Benjamin Disraeli 19 Sep
Hello. Benjamin Disraeli, 1804 to 1881, was a major figure in Victorian British politics, both as prime minister twice and for long periods as leader of the opposition.
Wormholes 26 Sep
Hello. In 1957, the American physicist John Wheeler coined the term wormhole, which we understand now as a potential shortcut between two points across the universe.
The Haymarket Affair 3 Oct
Hello. On the 5/4/1886, at a workers' rally in Chicago, somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, and the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shock waves across America and Europe.
Robert Graves 10 Oct
Hello. Robert Graves, 1895 to 1985, was one of the finest poets of the 20th century.
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom 17 Oct
Hello. In The Road to Serfdom published in 1944, The Economist Friedrich Hayek warned that the way Britain ran its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead to tyranny.
Little Women 24 Oct
Hello. When Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868, she only did so at the urging of her publisher and father who hoped it would make money for all three of them, and it did.
The Venetian Empire 31 Oct
Hello. In just a few hundred years, Venice grew from some boggy islands on a mosquito infested lagoon to running an empire from Mainland Italy, down the Adriatic Coast, across the Peloponnese, to Crete, Cyprus, past Constantinople, and into the Black Sea.
George Herbert 7 Nov
Hello. George Herbert, 1593 to 1633, wrote Latin poetry of extraordinary quality and in great quantity.
The Antikythera Mechanism 14 Nov
Hello. The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of marine archaeology even though when salvaged in 1901, it seemed like just a lump of corroded bronze.
Italo Calvino 21 Nov
Hello. Italo Calvino, 1923 to 1985, was an Italian author of inventive, bedazzling stories with a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone.
The Hanoverian Succession 28 Nov
Hello. At the turn of the 18th century, Westminster politicians went to extraordinary lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland.
Nizami Ganjavi 5 Dec
Hello. Nizami Ganjavi, November to 1209, is considered to be one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature.
The Habitability of Planets 12 Dec
Hello. How and where did life on earth begin, and what did it need to thrive, and could it be found elsewhere?
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 19 Dec
Hello. The Greek biographer Plutarch's Parallel Lives have influenced perceptions of the classical world in unparalleled ways.
Vase-mania 26 Dec
Hello. In the second half of the 18th century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour, and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge appetite for acquiring vases modelled on ancient archetypes.

2025 26 episodes

Slime Moulds 2 Jan
Hello. If you've ever seen a mysterious white or yellow blob on your garden compost heap or on a fallen tree in the local park, you'll have come across slime mould.
The Battle of Valmy 16 Jan
Hello. On the 20/09/1792 at Valmy, a 120 miles to the east of Paris, the French won one of the most significant battles of recent centuries, so saving their revolution.
Socrates in Prison 23 Jan
Hello. In March, Socrates' friends were pleading for him to escape from prison in Athens where he was awaiting his death by hemlock.
Pope Joan 30 Jan
Hello. In medieval Europe, a story began circulating about a highly learned woman who lived in the ninth century, dressed as a man, travelled to Rome, and became for about two years the pope.
Sir John Soane 6 Feb
Hello. The architect Sir John Soane, who lived from 1753 to 1837, was the son of a bricklayer but rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect and saw many of his designs realised to great acclaim, particularly the Bank of England, although his work there has been largely destroyed.
Catherine of Aragon 13 Feb
Hello. Catherine of Aragon, 1485 to 1536, was born to greatness with her parents ruling most of Spain and her siblings marrying into the great royal families of Europe.
Oliver Goldsmith 20 Feb
Hello. The Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, 1728 to 1774, has a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner celebrating his life as a poet, natural philosopher, and historian.
Kali 27 Feb
Hello. The Hindu goddess Kali is often shown as dark blue, fierce, defiant, revelling in her power, and holding in her forearms or more arms a curved sword and a severed head with a cup underneath to catch the blood.
Pollination 6 Mar
Hello. Since plants have to find a mate and produce offspring while rooted to the spot, they have to be pollinated by wind, water, or animals, most commonly by insects.
Cyrus the Great 13 Mar
Hello. Cyrus the second of Persia, commonly known as Cyrus the Great, was born in the sixth century BCE in Persis, which is now in Iran.
Thomas Middleton 20 Mar
Hello. The Londoner, Thomas Middleton, 1580 to 1627, was one of the most energetic, varied, and innovative playwrights of his time, working both alone and with others from Decker and Rowley to Shakespeare.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 27 Mar
Hello. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908 to 1961, was part of the movement known as phenomenology.
The Gracchi 3 Apr
Hello. In the second century BC, the brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, brought popular reforms to the Roman Republic.
The Battle of Clontarf 10 Apr
Hello. The Battle of Clontarf 1014 is one of the best known dates in Irish history, akin to October for England in significance, but not in outcome.
Typology 17 Apr
Hello. In the fifth century AD, Saint Augustine wrote that the New Testament is hidden in the old.
Molière 24 Apr
Hello. The French playwright, Moliere, 1622 to 1673, is one of the great figures in world literature.
The Korean Empire 1 May
Hello. In October 1897, the king of Korea declared himself emperor to match the status of the neighbouring Russian, Chinese, and Japanese emperors with Korea's peninsula, his empire.
Lise Meitner 8 May
Hello. Over Christmas 1938, the physicist, Meitner, a Jewish Austrian refugee from Nazi Germany, solved the question of nuclear fission.
Copyright 15 May
Hello. In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.
Paul von Hindenburg 22 May
Hello. Paul von Hindenburg, 1847 to 1934, won Germany's presidential election twice during the Weimar Republic as a candidate of national unity.
Hypnosis 29 May
Hello. Ever since Franz Anton Mesmer induced trance like states in his Parisian subjects in the late 18th century, dressed in long purple robes, hypnosis has been associated with performance, power, and the occult.
The Vienna Secession 5 Jun
Hello. In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession.
The Evolution of Lungs 12 Jun
Hello. The evolution of lungs and of the first breath can be traced back 400 million years to when life spread from rock pools and swamps onto land, as some fish found evolutionary advantage in getting their oxygen from air rather than water.
Barbour’s ‘Brus’ 19 Jun
Hello. Around 1375, John Barbour wrote The Brus, the oldest surviving poem in older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of Robert the Bruce and his victory over the English at Bannockburn 60 years before.
Dragons 26 Jun
Hello. Here be dragons, it used to say, on the edges of maps when the world seemed flat, and almost wherever you look in the world, there are dragon legends, if not actual dragons.
Civility: talking with those who disagree with you 3 Jul
Hello. Civility, in one sense, is among the most valuable virtues in society.

2026 31 episodes

On Liberty 15 Jan
Hello. On Liberty is one of the most important works in the history of liberalism.
The Mariana Trench 22 Jan
Hello. In 1875 in the Western Pacific, the crew of HMS Challenger discovered the Mariana Trench, which turned out to be deeper than Everest is high by some two kilometres.
The Roman Arena 29 Jan
Hello. For over 500 years, Roman Arena staged gladiatorial combats, drawing the biggest crowds both in the republic and under the emperors.
Henry IV Part 1 5 Feb
Hello. Shakespeare's Henry IV Part one asks who will succeed to the throne and why.
The Code of Hammurabi 12 Feb
Hello. Almost 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi, king of Babylon, had his laws carved into a black basalt pillar for all to see.
John Keats 19 Feb
Hello. In 1819, John Keats wrote some of the most loved poems in English.
The Columbian Exchange 26 Feb
Hello. When Columbus reached The Bahamas in 1492, Europe had no potatoes, no tomatoes, no sunflowers, and arguably no syphilis.
Margaret Beaufort 5 Mar
Hello. Margaret Beaufort was almost 12 when the Wars of the Roses broke out in 1455, and she was soon to marry her second husband, Edmund Tudor.
Archaea 12 Mar
Hello. There are some scientific discoveries that seem to change everything, and one of these is that of the Archaea microorganisms.
Dadaism 19 Mar
Hello. In the spring of 1916 in Zurich, young people gathered on a small stage in a bar, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems, and people are still talking about it today.
Silicon 26 Mar
Hello. The chemical element silicon is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet.
The Spanish-American War 1898 2 Apr
Hello. The Spanish American War broke out in 1898 when many Cubans were already fighting for independence from Spain, and The United States came down on those Cubans' side.
Handel’s Messiah 9 Apr
Hello. In 1742, in a secular Dublin music hall, the first audience heard Handel's Messiah, a sacred oratorio, from its first word comfort to the chorus of hallelujahs to the last word amen.
M.C. Escher 16 Apr
Hello. Never ending staircases, dizzying twists of perspectives, and illusions that seem to defy the laws of physics.
Indian Indentured Labour 23 Apr
Hello. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation owners turned to Indian indentured labour, taking more than a million people to colonies from Guyana to Mauritius to The Caribbean and beyond.
Cybernetics 30 Apr
Hello. Before cybercrime, cybersecurity, and cyberpunk, there was cybernetics.
Joseph Roth 7 May
Hello. Joseph Roth, 1894 to 1939, was one of the great writers on the dying of the old order in Central Europe after the First World War, the loss of homeland, and the horror of what was to come.
The Garamantes 14 May
Hello. The Sahara Desert might not seem like the most hospitable place to live with extreme swings of temperature and limited water on the surface.
The Levellers 21 May
Hello. For rarely I think that the poorest he that is in England had a life to live as the greatest he.
The Welsh Marches 28 May
Hello. In October, William the Conqueror knew that if he wanted to control England, he'd have to subdue the Welsh forces across the border in an area that became known as the Welsh Marches.
The Evolution of Trees 4 Jun
Hello. We might take them for granted in parks, in our streets, and in forests, yet trees play a crucial role in regulating our climate and providing the air we breathe.
Machado de Assis 11 Jun
Hello. Machado de Assis, 1839 to 1908, is considered the towering figure of modern Brazilian literature with a global reputation, although arguably not as much as he deserves.
The Delian League 18 Jun
Hello. In April, the Greco Persian Wars had seen a series of armed conflicts for over 20 years.
Vigée Le Brun 25 Jun
Hello. The portrait painter, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, 1755 to 1842, delighted her high society subjects, showing them at their very best, notably Marie Antoinette, who she painted around 30 times.
Seashells 2 Jul
Hello. Botticelli's Venus emerging from a giant scallop shell, Vishnu's sacred horn, Panchajanya, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl's talisman cut from a conch shell.
Thomas More’s Utopia 17 Sep
Hello. In 1516, a small book was published with a curious new word as its title: Utopia.
Particle Accelerators 24 Sep
Hello. It's been described as the world's biggest experiment and it sits deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.
Casablanca 1 Oct
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Megalosaurus 8 Oct
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The Battle of Antietam 15 Oct
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Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love, sex and war 22 Oct
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