The Riddle of the Sands
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the prescient thriller ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ about the decline Anglo-German relations before the First World War. In 1903 an Englishman called Charles Caruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled upon a German military plot. The cunning plan was to invade the British Isles from the Frisian Islands using special barges. The plucky Caruthers foiled the plot and returned to his sailing holiday.This is not history but fiction, an immensely popular book called ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ by Erskine Childers. It was a prescient vision of two nations soon to fight the First World War but it went against the spirit of the previous century. Brits and Germans had fought together at Waterloo and had influenced profoundly each other’s thought and art. They even shared a royal family. Yet somehow victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of Romanticism became the mutual tragedy of the Somme.
Guests
- Richard Evans
2 episodes
Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge - Rosemary Ashton
10 episodes
Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London - Tim Blanning
9 episodes
Professor of Modern European history at The University of Cambridge
Related episodes
-
Victorian Pessimism
10 May, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures -
Clausewitz and On War
17 May, 2012 350 Public administration and military science -
The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4
7 Jan, 2010 500 Science -
The Spanish Armada
7 Oct, 2010 940 History of Europe -
Tristan and Iseult
31 Dec, 2015 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
History and Understanding the Past
30 Mar, 2000 900 History -
The Charge of the Light Brigade
10 Jan, 2008 940 History of Europe -
Doggerland
27 Jun, 2019 930 History of the Ancient World -
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
4 Mar, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures -
The Battle of Trafalgar
2 Dec, 2021 900 History -
Wilfred Owen
27 Oct, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures -
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
28 Sep, 2023 330 Economics -
Siegfried Sassoon
7 Jun, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures -
The Danelaw
28 Mar, 2019 940 History of Europe -
The Russo-Japanese War
1 Apr, 2021 950 History of Asia -
The Thirty Years War
6 Dec, 2018 940 History of Europe -
The Jacobite Rebellion
8 May, 2003 940 History of Europe -
The Dreyfus Affair
8 Oct, 2009 940 History of Europe -
Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow
19 Sep, 2019 940 History of Europe -
The Mabinogion
10 May, 2018 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
Programme ID: b00bzdg4
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bzdg4
Auto-category: 823.912 (English fiction written after 1900)