2024

January

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

February

March

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

April

May

  • Mercury 5 May
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet which is closest to our Sun.
    520 Astronomy
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ‘the greatest poet of his age’, Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Philippa Foot 19 May
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010).
    170 Ethics
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court.
    950 History of Asia

June

July

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

September

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the major figures in Victorian British politics.
    940 History of Europe
  • Wormholes 29 Sep
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tantalising idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies, somewhere out there in the universe.
    530 Physics

October

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious attack of 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago when somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, Mathias J.
    330 Economics
  • Robert Graves 13 Oct
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of ‘I, Claudius’ who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead to tyranny.
    330 Economics
  • Little Women 27 Oct
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction.
    810 American literature in English

November

December

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the intense political activity at the turn of the 18th Century, when many politicians in London went to great lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and others went to equal lengths to oppose them.
    940 History of Europe
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature.
    890 Other literatures