2020

January

  • Catullus 9 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catullus (c84-c54 BC) who wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene.
    870 Latin and Italic literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war and the social unrest that followed, as the French capital was cut off from the rest of the country and food was scarce.
    940 History of Europe
  • Solar Wind 23 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flow of particles from the outer region of the Sun which we observe in the Northern and Southern Lights, interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere, and in comet tails that stream away from the Sun regardless of their own direction.
    520 Astronomy
  • Alcuin 30 Jan
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alcuin of York, c735-804AD, who promoted education as a goal in itself, and had a fundamental role in the renaissance at Charlemagne’s court.
    270 History of Christianity

February

March

  • Paul Dirac 5 Mar
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theoretical physicist Dirac (1902-1984), whose achievements far exceed his general fame.
    530 Physics
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the bonds that Scottish Presbyterians made between themselves and their monarchs in the 16th and 17th Centuries, to maintain their form of worship.
    940 History of Europe
  • Frankenstein 19 Mar
    In a programme first broadcast in May 2019, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names.
    800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
  • In a programme first broadcast on April 12th 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the contribution of George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59) to the development of the railways in C19th.
    620 Engineering

April

May

  • John Clare 7 May
    In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn’s guests Jonathan Bate, was ‘the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced’.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss photosynthesis, the process by which green plants and many other organisms use sunlight to synthesise organic molecules.
    570 Biology
  • In a programme first broadcast in 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the jewels of medieval English poetry.
    820 English and Old English literatures
  • In a programme first broadcast in 2016, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic philosopher from c490-430 BC whose paradoxes were described by Bertrand Russell as “immeasurably subtle and profound.
    190 Modern Western Philosophy

June

  • In a programme first broadcast in 2013, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss absolute zero, the lowest conceivable temperature.
    530 Physics
  • In a programme first broadcast in 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 and, once he had escaped, became one of that century’s most prominent abolitionists.
    970 History of North America
  • In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why some birds migrate and others do not, how they select their destinations and how they navigate the great distances, often over oceans.
    590 Animals (Zoology)
  • Hannah Arendt 25 Jun
    In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.
    320 Political science

July

  • In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had potential to be one of the most powerful rulers in Europe, yet she was also one of the most vulnerable.
    940 History of Europe

September

  • Pericles 17 Sep
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pericles (495-429BC), the statesman who dominated the politics of Athens for thirty years, the so-called Age of Pericles, when the city’s cultural life flowered, its democracy strengthened as its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the Parthenon.
    930 History of the Ancient World
  • Cave Art 24 Sep
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas about the Stone Age people who created the extraordinary images found in caves around the world, from hand outlines to abstract symbols to the multicoloured paintings of prey animals at Chauvet and, as shown above, at Lascaux.
    930 History of the Ancient World

October

November

December

  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages.
    800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Wesley (1703 - 1791) and the movement he was to lead and inspire.
    270 History of Christianity
  • Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals.
    950 History of Asia
  • Eclipses 31 Dec
    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss solar eclipses, some of life’s most extraordinary moments, when day becomes night and the stars come out before day returns either all too soon or not soon enough, depending on what you understand to be happening.
    520 Astronomy