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 guests today are 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
Not found
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 Grahame 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 Saatchi 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 Gallery's most ambitious retrospectives, Jackson Pollock.
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, Professor of Mathematics, Gresham Professor of Geometry at the University of Warwick, and one of the country's most prolific popularisers of mathematics, having written or co-authored over 60 books on the subject.
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 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.
Africa 8 Jul
Hello. In the spring of last year, President Bill Clinton glad-handed his way across the continent of Africa, and taking up Thabo Mbeki's theme and phrase, he told the world about an African renaissance.
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, an 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 as 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 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 H 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, it purged our emotions, it was cathartic.
Childhood 9 Dec
Hello, St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, when I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.
Medical Ethics 16 Dec
Hello in the 16th century Francis Bacon told us in his advancement of learning medicine is a science which hath been more professed than labored and yet more labored than advanced the labor having been in my judgment rather in a circle than in a progression.
Prayer 23 Dec
Hello. Why do people pray?
Time 30 Dec
Hello. At the end of the last century, HG Wells imagined him 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 million 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. Gustav 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, Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.
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 José Luis Borges illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification when he quoted from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
New Wars 13 Apr
Hello. In the early 19th century, the Prussian general Karl von Klauschwitz 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 5 million years, and during that time there are reckoned to have been between 15 and 20 species of hominid, and they've walked this planet.
Death 4 May
Hello, our subject today is what the 16th century philosopher Francis Bacon called the least of all evils.
Shakespeare’s Work 11 May
Hello. William 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 elements, 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, Carlyle, Byron, Scott, the list goes on and on, and the poems, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Ode to a Nightingale, Tintin Abbey, Ozymandias, Don Juan, they make up some of the best known and most enjoyed works of literature in the English language.
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 III 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, they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous and indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
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 33 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 Otranto.
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 intel... 1815! When an intellectual movement committed to the reason in science and opposed to the superstition in religion embraced the greatest minds of Europe and America.
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 hath 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 29th of May 1660, on his 30th birthday, Charles II 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.
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 win 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 XVI 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 Café Flore 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 program 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.
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 ce sera l'affaire d'un déjeuner.
Confucius 1 Nov
Hello. In the 5th century BC, a wise man called Kung Fu Zhu said, study the past if you would divine the future.
The British Empire 8 Nov
Hello, the British Empire was officially sealed on the 1st of January 1877 when Disraeli had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India and it formally dissolved into the Commonwealth in 1958.
Surrealism 15 Nov
Hello. Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez Surrealism.
Oceanography 22 Nov
Hello. In 1870, Jules Verne described the deep ocean in 2000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Third Crusade 29 Nov
Hello. In 1095 Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade and by the end of the 11th century an army of Franks had driven what they called the infidel Arab out of Jerusalem.
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, Brier 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 Stern's A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who's been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as her lover.
Nuclear Physics 10 Jan
Hello. One of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, and certainly the most controversial, was the development of nuclear physics.
Catharism 17 Jan
Hello. In 1215, Pope Innocent III 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
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Anatomy 14 Feb
Hello. The first great anatomist who laid down the principles of the workings of the human body for the next 1300 years was Galen.
The Celts 21 Feb
Hello. Around 400 BC, a great swathe of 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, Plato and Aristotle answered that man should live a life of virtue.
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. Two and a half thousand 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 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 the 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 4th 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, WBH 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 711, 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 Aikenhead, 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, D. H. 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 re-ran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge.
The Lindisfarne Gospels 20 Feb
Hello. In 597, 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 a mythical island called Aztlan, the 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.
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 A la Recherche du 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 a feeling that will never come back anymore.
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 deriving of the roofs and rending and a blast an overhead thunder and in the thunder was a cry and in the blast there smote along the hall a beam of light seven times more clear than day and down the long beam stole the holy grail.
Blood 22 May
Hello, for more than 1500 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 Pompeii in ash and drowned nearby Herculaneum in lava.
Nature 10 Jul
Hello. In Childhold'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, and if the Orthodox Christian Church had had its way, he would never have made it into the New Testament.
Maxwell 2 Oct
Hello. He took the first colour photograph, defined the nature of gases, and with a few elegant mathematical equations, expressed all the fundamental laws of light, electricity and magnetism.
Bohemianism 9 Oct
Hello. In 1848, the young Parisian Henri Mouget wrote of his bohemian friends, their daily existence is a work of genius.
The Schism 16 Oct
Hello. In 1054, Cardinal Humbert went into the Cathedral of Constantinople.
Infinity 23 Oct
Hello, Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with Ansucion's 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 4004 BC.
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.
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 40 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, for the work of Longinus introduced the late 17th century British to the idea of the sublime, an idea that stalked the preceding century.
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 stretched 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 a hundred 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.
The Roman Empire’s Collapse in the 5th century 18 Mar
Hello, Edward Gibbon wrote of the decline of the Roman Empire.
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. 400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axial Age, when great civilizations 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 5th 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 instill the greatest toleration, although so far the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men, unquote.
The Planets 27 May
Hello, tucked away in the outer western spiral arm of the Milky Way is a middle-aged star with nine or possibly ten orbiting planets of hugely varying sizes.
Babylon 3 Jun
Hello. Six thousand 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 the 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 1.5 million 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, a French novelist, playwright and philosopher, was king of post-war 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 731 AD, 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 equaled 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 a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
The Roman Republic 30 Dec
Hello. Around 550 BC, 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 1st of March 1881 the Russian Tsar Alexander II was traveling through the snow to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
The Mind/Body Problem 13 Jan
Hello. At the start of René Descartes' Sixth Meditation, he writes, There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch 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 the seam of fine dark shale.
Alchemy 24 Feb
Hello. At the end of the 16th century, the German alchemist Heinrich Kunrat 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 D. H. 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 necessaries of life go and some real decency.
Dark Energy 17 Mar
Hello. Only 5% of our universe is composed of visible matter, stars, planets and people.
Angels 24 Mar
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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.
Alfred and the Battle of Edington 7 Apr
Hello. The Battle of Eddington in 878 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 Austin 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, truth beauty.
The French Revolution’s reign of terror 26 May
Hello. On Monday, September the 10th, 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 were 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 Machiavelli 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 Magnes 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 passers-by from inside a barrel is behaviour not normally associated with philosophy.
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 Saunders 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, during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they're in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.
Artificial Intelligence 8 Dec
Hello. Can machines think?
The Peterloo Massacre 15 Dec
Hello, in 1819 Percy Bysshe Shalley wrote, I met murder on the way.
Heaven 22 Dec
Hello, the medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas wrote, quote, that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer.
The Oresteia 29 Dec
Hello, Richard Wagner recalled the visceral sensations of reading Aeschylus' Great Trilogy for the first time.

2006 42 episodes

The Oath 5 Jan
Hello, the importance of oaths in the classical world can't be overstated.
Prime Numbers 12 Jan
Hello. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17.
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 and under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one for it separates people from one another locking each person into his or her ego.
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 8th 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 Maceres wrote that negative numbers, quote, darken the very whole doctrine of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their 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 Carolingian Renaissance 30 Mar
Hello, in 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III proclaimed Charlemagne emperor.
Goethe 6 Apr
Hello, I'll start with a quotation from Goethe.
The Oxford Movement 13 Apr
Hello Cardinal.
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 James 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.
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 the 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 I. 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 million known compounds.
The Spanish Inquisition 22 Jun
Hello. The Inquisition has its roots in the Latin word inquisitio, 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 and we will sit upon the rocks seeing the shepherds feed their flocks by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals.
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 subjected all the sinners in Christendom to a series of grisly 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 southwest 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 Encyclopédie.
The Poincaré Conjecture 2 Nov
Hello. The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré 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.
Constantinople Siege and Fall 28 Dec
Hello. When Sultan Mehmed II rode into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire.

2007 42 episodes

Jorge Luis Borges 4 Jan
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.
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 star gazing 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 7th 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.
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 1st of September 1851, the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon.
Gravitational Waves 17 May
Hello, the rather unpoetically named star SN2006GY is roughly 150 times the size of our sun.
The Siege of Orléans 24 May
Hello. In 1422, Henry V, warrior hero on his way to conquer France, died, as did King Charles VI 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 cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.
Renaissance Astrology 14 Jun
Hello. In Act 1, Scene 2 of King Lear, the Machiavellian Edmund scoffs at the weakness and cynicism of his fellow men.
Common Sense Philosophy 21 Jun
Not found
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 Pienaar 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 he solicits 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. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, I could go on ad infinitum.
Genetic Mutation 6 Dec
Hello. When he was mortally ill with cancer, the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane came up with the following gallant lines.
The Sassanid Empire 13 Dec
Hello. In modern-day Iran, near the ancient Persian capital of Vesepolis, 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 Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants.
The Charge of the Light Brigade 10 Jan
Not found
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, His Majesty is interested only in wizards, alchemists, cabalists and the like, sparing no expense to find all kinds of treasures, learn secrets and use scandalous ways of harming his enemies.
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 theatregoers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario Mr 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 Soren Kierkegaard.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries 27 Mar
Hello. In his old age, Michael Sherbrooke 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 5th 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 and 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 Carruthers 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 Carey declared, the muse's 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.
The Translation Movement 2 Oct
Hello. One night in Baghdad, so it goes, in the 9th century, the Caliph al-Mamun was visited by a dream.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems 9 Oct
Hello. In 1900, in the German city of Königsberg, 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 November 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 who enter here.
Bolivar 30 Oct
Hello. In 1804, a young man from Venezuela stood on a small hill 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 do the music of Bach, the colonnades of St 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 6th 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.
History of History 22 Jan
Hello. In the 6th 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, Sleeping Beauty does not have an evil stepmother, Rapunzel is pregnant and frog princes do not get kissed but thrown against walls, and that's only the tip of the horror.
Carthage’s Destruction 12 Feb
Hello. The North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but 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 and at the heart of the palace there's something rather unusual, a plot filled with great sculptural shapes with curved white walls, curious niches and staircases into the sky.
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 II is better known as a warrior than a scholar.
Baconian Science 2 Apr
Hello. In the introduction to Thomas Pratt'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 the like, oh wonder how many godly creatures are there here, how beauteous mankind is, oh brave new world that has such people in it.
Suffragism 16 Apr
Hello. On the 4th of 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 Melville.
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 persecuteth 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, in Julius Caesar's will was read, earlier than intended, it contained gifts.
Elizabethan Revenge 18 Jun
Hello. In Thomas Kidd's play, The Spanish Tragedy, a father seeks redress for the murder of his son.
Sunni and Shia Islam 25 Jun
Hello. In 618, near Karbala 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 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 1603, Queen Elizabeth I 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 eastern Germany in 1788.
The Siege of Munster 5 Nov
Hello. In the early 16th century, the Protestant Reformation revolutionized Christian belief.
Radiation 12 Nov
Hello. Since the end of the 19th century, and especially since the 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 James 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 two and a half thousand 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 obituarists.

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.
The Glencoe Massacre 21 Jan
Hello. At five o'clock in the morning of the 13th of February 1692, the MacDonalds 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 the 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 St 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 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.
The Great Wall of China 4 May
Hello. The Great Wall of China is not a single wall but made up of many smaller walls begun in the 6th 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 reasonably 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 King, written in the 12th century, the historian William of Mawnsbury 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 Plinius Secundus, known to us today as Pliny the Elder, started work on 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 28th of May 1588, a fleet of 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 793 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 the 12th in 30 BC the last pharaoh of Egypt died bringing to an end the independence of a civilization which had lasted more than 3,000 years.
Thomas Edison 9 Dec
Hello. United States patent number 9,646 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 6th 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 of 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, in which he said, he proved that the universe had been created at six o'clock on the evening of the 22nd of October 4004 BC.
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 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 Brooklands 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 Marleybone High Street in central London, there's a handsome townhouse with a blue plaque.
The Neutrino 14 Apr
Hello. About 93 million 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 7th 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 10th of July 1876 the New York Daily Tribune printed a new poem by Walt Whitman.
Xenophon 26 May
Hello, in 401 BC an army of Greek mercenaries found themselves stranded more than a thousand 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 a hundred years ago, a 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 two and a half thousand years ago.
Shinto 22 Sep
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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 the 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 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 November the 30th, 1609, Galileo Galilei appointed his telescope at the moon.
The Continental-Analytic Split 10 Nov
Hello. About 100 years ago, the discipline of philosophy seemed split into two main camps.
Ptolemy and Ancient Astronomy 17 Nov
Hello. Mortal as I am, I know that I am 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 BC, 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 to 23rd of September 1122 in a town on the west bank of the River Rhine known as Worms an agreement was signed between Pope Calixtus II and the German Emperor Henry V. This treaty, the Concordat of Worms, hoped to mark the end of a long-running bitter and bloody dispute between church and state over who had the right to appoint bishops and even the pope himself.
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 February the 26th 1848, page 5 of the Times contained dramatic news from the continent.
The Scientific Method 26 Jan
Hello. In 1620, the Lord Chancellor of England was the distinguished scholar Lord Verilam.
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 2000 years ago.
Erasmus 9 Feb
Hello, one of Hans Holbein's best-known paintings is a portrait of a middle-aged man dressed in a luxurious fur coat.
The An Lushan Rebellion 16 Feb
Hello, in the 8th 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 traveled 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 organized 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 13th of October 1807.
Neoplatonism 19 Apr
Hello. Of all the great thinkers of the ancient world, few have been as influential as Plato, born in the 5th 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 22nd of August 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, Karl von Clausewitz, never commanded an army, a job for which his superiors thought him unsuitable.
Marco Polo 24 May
Hello. One morning in 1271, 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 II 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, 9th century Baghdad was a prosperous city at the centre of an expanding empire.
Scepticism 5 Jul
Hello. In one of his earliest works, the Pensée Philosophique of 1746, the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote, 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 prior at a monastery in northern France who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, started to wrestle with a philosophical problem.
Gerald of Wales 4 Oct
Hello. Manabeir Castle is a remote and beautiful Norman ruin on the Pembrokeshire coast in South Wales.
Hannibal 11 Oct
Hello. Anybody walking the riverbank 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 23rd of June 1993, at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, Andrew Wiles announced that after seven years of work, he'd 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 1010 AD, the Persian poet Ferdowsi finished writing his epic poem, the Shahnameh 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 Walbrook Street in the City of London following the Second World War.

2013 40 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 837, 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 Defense 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 most extraordinary museums can be found in a grand Victorian building in central Oxford.
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 change.
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 Encyclopædia 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, Francisco de Oleana, travelled 800 miles down a massive and uncharted river, the largest in South America.
The Putney Debates 18 Apr
Hello. The Church of St 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 plain 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 patent 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 Mirabeau, 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 2nd of July 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 in 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.
Galen 10 Oct
Hello. In the middle years of the 2nd century AD, a young Greek man called Galen began to practice 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 VIII, 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 November the 15th, 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 a 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 Pepys visited his favourite bookshop and on impulse bought a volume that took his fancy.
Hindu Ideas of Creation 5 Dec
Hello. The Bhrumandapurana, an important Hindu text written over a thousand 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. In the late 1940s, a chemist in Brussels called Elia Prigogine embarked on research which would take him in rather surprising directions.
The Medici 26 Dec
Hello. In 1433, Cosimo de' Medici, one of Florence's wealthiest citizens, was staying in his country villa just to the north of the city.

2014 38 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 8th 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 selection in 1859, he laid the foundations for a new era in scientific enquiry.
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 2000 years ago by the Greek scholar Strabo.
The Domesday Book 17 Apr
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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 Flinders Petrie was excavating a burial site in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes.
The Sino-Japanese War 8 May
Hello. Ten miles southwest of the Chinese capital Beijing, a handsome and venerable stone bridge crosses the Yongding River.
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 7th of January 1692, a vast congregation filled the church of St 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 he had 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.
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 seemed 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 Joseph Kay, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Zen 4 Dec
Hello. Quote, if you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, kill him.
Behavioural Ecology 11 Dec
Hello. What factors influence where and what an animal chooses to eat?
Truth 18 Dec
Hello. What is truth?

2015 41 episodes

The Sun 1 Jan
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.
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 Calcutta, 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 radioactivity, Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing it with her husband Pierre and with Henry 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 Tenth Muse or as Sappho the Wise.
Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty 16 Apr
Hello. In 1582, the 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 million miles away, than we do about the core of our own planet Earth.
Tagore 7 May
Hello. It's 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 the American Civil War, 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 full 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
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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 Currer 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 II, the new king in Prussia, took an opportunity that earned him the title Frederick the Great.
Frida Kahlo 9 Jul
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Perpetual Motion 24 Sep
Hello. Perpetual Motion has intrigued some of the greatest names in science as they try to invent machines that could power themselves endlessly.
Alexander the Great 1 Oct
Hello. Alexander III 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 epidemic in 1543.
Simone de Beauvoir 22 Oct
Hello. Quote.
The Empire of Mali 29 Oct
Hello. The Empire of Mali flourished during the European Middle Ages.
P v NP 5 Nov
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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, etc, etc.
The Salem Witch Trials 26 Nov
Hello. In 1692, in the New England colony of Massachusetts, two young girls, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, 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 338 BC, 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 a biological version of a clock inside humans and all other animals, and they're in plants and quite possibly in almost every living cell.
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 38 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, addressed to the inhabitants of America.
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 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 two or three thousand years BC.
Bedlam 17 Mar
Hello, the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem was founded in London in 1247.
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, Rajit 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 Sambawa 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'd discovered a Catholic conspiracy to shoot King Charles II.
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 19th of November 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 a Petri dish he'd left out in his laboratory, St 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 year of the French Revolution.
Sovereignty 30 Jun
Hello. In 1576, the French political philosopher Jean Baudin 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 digrotype was announced to the world.
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, that's a quotation, the first words of the epic of Gilgamesh said to be the first great masterpiece of literature.
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 6th 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 A.J.P. Taylor, was the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.
Harriet Martineau 8 Dec
Hello, Harriet Martineau was one of the most prolific and famous writers of the 19th century.
Four Quartets 22 Dec
Hello, Four Quartets is TS Eliot's last great poem which he began in the 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
Hello, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.

2017 34 episodes

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality 12 Jan
Hello, what price of human animals pay to become civilized?
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.
Maths in the Early Islamic World 16 Feb
Hello. Mathematics flourished in the early Islamic world from the 8th century onwards.
Seneca the Younger 23 Feb
Hello, Seneca the Younger, orator, philosopher and playwright, was born in the Roman province of Hispania, modern Spain, around 4 BC and was the first great Latin writer under the emperors after the fall of the Republic.
The Kuiper Belt 2 Mar
Hello, about four and a half 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 480 BC, 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, Dr 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 a thousand years, after the building of the Great Pyramids and before Cleopatra.
The Battle of Lincoln 1217 4 May
Hello. On the 20th of May, 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.
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.
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 380 BC, explores whether it's always better to be just than unjust and is seen as a cornerstone of Western philosophy.
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.
Constantine the Great 5 Oct
Hello, Constantine the Great ruled the Roman Empire longer than anyone else other than Augustus and by his death in 337 AD the empire was transformed.
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 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.
Picasso’s Guernica 2 Nov
Hello, in 1937 Pablo Picasso revealed his painting Guernica at the Paris International's exhibition in the Pavilion of Republic in Spain.
The Picts 9 Nov
Hello, the Picts, according to Bede, writing in the 8th 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 XVI 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.
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 as one of the greatest composers 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 37 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, 1889-1966, was one of the most famous Russian poets of the 20th century and one of few to survive Stalin's terrors, Band at Home that 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.
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 400 AD 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.
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 a thousand billion years and it's only about halfway through them, so that's a relief.
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 North West Africa and then in Muslim Spain.
The Mabinogion 10 May
Hello, English soldiers killed Llewelyn, the last sovereign prince of Wales, in 1282.
The Emancipation of the Serfs 17 May
Hello. In March 1861 in St 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 are among the most performed plays in the world, second only to those of Shakespeare, among them A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler and Ghosts.
Persepolis 7 Jun
Hello, in 520 BC Darius the Great started building on the site of Persepolis, the ceremonial city of the Persians, and for almost two centuries this was the richest place on earth.
Montesquieu 14 Jun
Hello. By the 18th century, France was sinking under its son king Louis XIV, 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 were deafenless.
The Mexican-American War 28 Jun
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.
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 V, Richard III, Margaret of Anjou, 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, in which he argued that private vices were essential to a healthy economy.
Free Radicals 1 Nov
Hello, we'll be talking about free radicals.
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 it 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 south east 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.
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 39 episodes

Papal Infallibility 10 Jan
Hello. In 1870, the Vatican Council issued the dogmatic words Pasto Aeternus, 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.
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 September the 16th, 1400, Owain Glyndwr's supporters gathered in the valley of the River Dee where they proclaimed him Prince of Wales.
Aristotle’s Biology 7 Feb
Hello. Aristotle, 384 to 322 BC, 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, Antare 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 VIII to the advent of James I. He advanced under the boy king Edward VI, survived under Mary and thrived under Elizabeth, and the Protestant cause flourished with him.
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 878, divided England between them along a line roughly from London to Chester.
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 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 Quince 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, Henry 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.
Kinetic Theory 23 May
Hello. In 1662, Robert Boyle observed that when the volume of a gas goes up, the pressure goes down, and when the volume goes down, the pressure goes up.
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 Atahualpa 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 1500 miles.
The Mytilenaean Debate 20 Jun
Hello, in 427 BC the Athenians voted to kill all adult men in Mytilene on Lesbos where they'd just crushed a revolt and to enslave the women and children and raze the city to the ground.
Doggerland 27 Jun
Hello, Dogger, German Bight, Humber, Thames and Dover had no place in the Stone Age shipping forecasts as they were areas of land, not sea, and ideal habitats for human hunter-gatherers.
Lorca 4 Jul
Hello, Federico García 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 Émile or 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 802,701 AD 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.
The Treaty of Limerick 7 Nov
Hello. In 1691, the Treaty of Limerick ended the war in Ireland between supporters of James II, a 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, Melisande was Queen of Jerusalem in the 12th century AD and held power there alongside three different kings.
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. WH Auden, 1907 to 1973, was a poet of Englishness in crisis, of threat and fear in the 1930s, which he called a low, dishonest decade.
Tutankhamun 26 Dec
Hello. In 1922, archaeologists found Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, unopened for more than 3,000 years.

2020 41 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 million miles per hour.
Alcuin 30 Jan
Hello. Alcuin of York was one of the towering figures in the intellectual world of the 8th century and he changed education for the better and for good.
George Sand 6 Feb
Hello. Georges 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 9 AD, 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 the Solemn Covenant in Edinburgh, in Greyfire's Coat Yard.
Frankenstein 19 Mar
Hello, in 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron had a competition to write a ghost to pass the time on a cold, dark, wet holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva.
George and Robert Stephenson 26 Mar
Hello, in October 1829 George and Robert Stevenson 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.
The Gin Craze 2 Apr
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.
Marie Antoinette 9 Apr
Hello. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755 in Vienna, the 15th child of the Empress Maria Teresa and the Holy Roman Emperor, one of the most powerful rulers in Europe.
Feathered Dinosaurs 16 Apr
Hello, hello. Until 20 years ago dinosaurs were widely assumed to be large lumpen lizards that became extinct millions of years ago.
Wuthering Heights 23 Apr
Hello, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 when she was 29, is widely seen as one of the great English novels, to some the very greatest.
Carl Friedrich Gauss 30 Apr
Hello. Karl Friedrich Gauss, by those who know about these matters, is considered the greatest mathematician of his time and arguably of all time.
John Clare 7 May
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.
Photosynthesis 14 May
Hello. Three and a half billion years ago, this planet was a hostile and barren place.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 21 May
Hello. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is regarded as the greatest chivalric poem of the medieval world.
Zeno’s Paradoxes 28 May
Hello, the ancient Greek thinker Zeno of Elea flourished in the 5th century BC.
Absolute Zero 4 Jun
Hello. The coldest natural temperature ever known on Earth was recorded 30 years ago at a Soviet research base in the Antarctic.
Frederick Douglass 11 Jun
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.
Bird Migration 18 Jun
Hello. For millennia, bird migration was a complete mystery to humans.
Hannah Arendt 25 Jun
Hello, Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany, where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness.
Mary, Queen of Scots 2 Jul
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.
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.
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 the 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 Dürer, 1471 to 1528, achieved international fame through the power of his mesmerising, meticulous images, and those images have never lost their power.
Authenticity 19 Nov
Hello, to thine own self be true is advice so apparently simple and compelling that when Polonia says it in Hamlet, he needs no further examination.
The Zong Massacre 26 Nov
Hello. In 1781, the British slave ship Zon 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, John Wesley, 1703 to 1791, was mocked for approaching religion too methodically.
The Cultural Revolution 17 Dec
Hello. In 1966, Chairman Mao began the Cultural Revolution, an uprising with 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 541 AD, 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 pre-eminent English saint and his tombs were major sites of pilgrimage.
Emilie du Châtelet 4 Feb
Hello, Emilie du Châtelet, 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, 121 to 180 AD, is known as the last of the five good emperors of Rome and as 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 405 BC, they were on the point of defeat in a long war with Sparta.
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.
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 4th 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 1258, English barons toppled Henry III 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 I as it couldn't rule with a 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 15th of October 1764, Edward Gibbon sat amidst the ruins of Rome while barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.
Animal Farm 23 Aug
Hello, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm at the height of the Second World War.
The Evolution of Crocodiles 16 Sep
Hello. Before the rise of the dinosaurs, the dominant land animals were crocs, the academic catch-all 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 16th of 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.
Iris Murdoch 21 Oct
Hello. Iris Murdoch, 1919 to 1999, was seen in her lifetime as a novelist who was also a philosopher.
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 21st of October, 1805, 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 the 4th in 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 1274 BC, 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.

2022 41 episodes

Thomas Hardy’s Poetry 13 Jan
Hello. In the 1890s, Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels and returned to his first love, poetry, and he stayed writing poems for 38 years, the rest of his life.
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, in 1832 in Preston, Lancashire, seven men signed the pledge to abstain from all liquors of an intoxicating quality, whether ale, porter, wine or ardent spirits, except as medicines.
Walter Benjamin 10 Feb
Hello, for one of the most celebrated thinkers of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin is hard to categorise.
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 1st of November, 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 their legitimate rulers and not others.
Antigone 24 Mar
Hello, Antigone by Sophocles, 496 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 II 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 Vampire, thrilled readers with its aristocratic Lord Riven, who glutted his thirst with the blood of his victims.
Homo erectus 14 Apr
Hello. When we homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago, we followed an ancestor who had thrived on earth for up to two 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 riposte to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Early Christian Martyrdom 28 Apr
Hello. In 303 AD, 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 I 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 8th century in the Tang Era and they're Li Bai and Lu Fu.
Comenius 19 May
Hello. In the 17th century, the Czech 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, 1770 to 1831, is one of the most influential of modern philosophers.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets 2 Jun
Hello. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's Sonnets.
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 poems 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, Suriobaman II commissioned Angkor Wat in modern-day Cambodia.
John Bull 30 Jun
Hello, John Bull, Louis 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.
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 J.J. Thompson discovered the 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 million years ago, some of our ancestors, the fish, started to become a little more like us.
Wilfred Owen 27 Oct
Hello, Wilfred Owen, the great war poet, was killed on the 4th of November 1918, seven days before the armistice.
The Morant Bay Rebellion 3 Nov
Hello, on the 11th of October, 1865, Paul Bogle led a march from Stoney Gut, Jamaica, to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay.
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 4th 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, films 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 May the 21st, 1838, an estimated 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 has entered the language.
Paul Erdős 23 Feb
Hello. Paul Erdős, 1913-1996, 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 6th 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 1016, a Danish prince called Cnut became King of England.
The Battle of Crécy 13 Apr
Hello. On the 26th of August 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 Mohamed Ed Dib 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 Tokugawa 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 XIV 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 are 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. Whenever you breathe in, half the oxygen in your lungs came from plankton, the tiny drifting life forms in the ocean.
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 U.S. 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, Émile 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, until their demise in the 19th century, the Barbary Corsairs were a source of great pride and wealth in North Africa, where they sold the people and goods they'd seized from European ships and coastal towns.
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 glistens 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, 1886-1968, 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, when Tiberius was born in 42 BC, there was little prospect of his ever becoming Emperor of Rome.
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 35 episodes

Condorcet 11 Jan
Hello, Nicolas de Condorcet is known as the last of the philosophes, the intellectuals in the French Enlightenment, who sought to apply their learning to solving the problems of their time.
Nefertiti 18 Jan
Hello, the bust of 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. According to panpsychists, some kind of consciousness is present, not just in our human brains, but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons.
The Hanseatic League 1 Feb
Hello. For much of the medieval period, the Hanseatic League, or Hansa, dominated trade around the Baltic and the North Sea, with bases from London to Bruges, Bergen to Novgorod.
Hormones 8 Feb
Hello. At any moment of the day, throughout our lives, our bodies are producing chemical signals that are sent to other parts of the body.
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 wars of the Holy City of Rome, bringing death and destruction on a wholly 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 Macranium 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, 361 to 363 AD, Julian the Apostate made an extraordinary impression on history.
The Kalevala 28 Mar
Hello. In 1835, the Finnish epic poem The Kallivulla appeared in print in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then in the Russian Empire and, until recently, part of Sweden.
Nikola Tesla 7 Apr
Hello. Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943, is inseparable from the story of the electrification of America, if not the world.
Lysistrata 14 Apr
Hello. In 411 BC, Athenians watched Aristophanes' new comedy, Lysistrata, for the first and only time.
Napoleon’s Hundred Days 21 Apr
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Bertolt Brecht 28 Apr
Hello. Bertolt Brecht, 1898 to 1956, was one of the greatest European playwrights of the 20th century.
Mercury 5 May
Hello. Mercury is the planet closest to our sun and as it's visible to the naked eye it's intrigued humanity for as long as we've been here.
Sir Thomas Wyatt 12 May
Hello, Thomas Wyatt, 1503 to 1542, who 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 19 May
Hello, Philippa Foote, 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 26 May
Hello. The Empress Dowager Cixi, 1835 to 1908, was the dominant figure in the Chinese court for almost 50 years.
Marsilius of Padua 2 Jun
Hello. For someone who denounced the BBC as a fraud, Marsilius of Padua lived a remarkably long time, from around 1275 to 1343.
The Orkneyinga Saga 9 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 16 Jun
Hello. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding, is one of the most influential of the early English novels.
Karma 23 Jun
Hello. In India, in the first millennium BC, the doctrine of karma developed among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists.
Monet in England 30 Jun
Hello. In 1899 in London, Claude Monet looked out on the Thames from his hotel balcony in the Savoy Hotel and began a series of almost a hundred paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city in which fog almost obscured the bridges, boats and parliament.
Bacteriophages 7 Jul
Hello. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their labs was making bacteria disappear.
Benjamin Disraeli 22 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 29 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 6 Oct
Hello. On the 4th of May 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 shockwaves across America and Europe.
Robert Graves 13 Oct
Hello, Robert Graves, 1895 to 1985, was one of the finest poets of the 20th century.
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom 20 Oct
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Little Women 27 Oct
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The Venetian Empire 3 Nov
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George Herbert 7 Nov
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The Antikythera Mechanism 17 Nov
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Note. This is a experimental feature using phrases auto-extracted from audio files. There may be transcription errors.