In Our Time, Radio 4, Interesting topics all around

I am going to excavate them all in details, to kill the boredom..

IN OUR TIME 2002-2007 (BBC Radio 4) with Melvyn Bragg -
229 episodes for maintaining the belief in civilisation

Presentations of all episodes included, with names and titles of all contributors

----------------------------------------------------------
14 February 2002: Anatomy - 2000 years of anatomical study
----------------------------------------------------------
The Greeks thought we were built like pigs, and when Renaissance man first cut his sacred flesh it was an act of heresey. We trace the noble ambitions of medical science to the murky underworld of Victorian grave robbing, we trace 2000 years of anatomical study.

From the great showman Vesalius, enthralling the Renaissance Artists in the operating theatres of Italy to the sad and gruesome pursuits of Burke and Hare, Anatomy is mankind's often frustrated attempt to understand the body of man. Joining Melvyn Bragg around the slab will be Ruth Richardson, Andrew Cunningham and Harold Ellis to explore the role of science, religion and art in the quest to understand the male and the female body.

Melvyn Bragg with
Harold Ellis, Clinical Anatomist, School of Biomedical Sciences, King's College, London.
Ruth Richardson, Historian, and author of Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Phoenix Press.
Andrew Cunningham, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the History of Medicine, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
21 February 2002: The Celts - what were the Celts in Britain really like?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around 400 BC a great swathe of Western Europe from Ireland to Southern Russia was dominated by one civilisation. Perched on the North Western fringe of this vast Iron Age culture were the British who shared many of the religious, artistic and social customs of their European neighbours. These customs were Celtic and this civilisation was the Celts.

The Greek historians who studied and recorded the Celts' way of life deemed them to be one of the four great Barbarian peoples of the world. The Romans wrote vivid accounts of Celtic rituals including the practice of human sacrifice - presided over by Druids - and the tradition of decapitating their enemies and turning their heads into drinking vessels.

But what were the Celts in Britain really like? Was their apparent lust for violence tempered by a love of poetry and beautiful art? How far should we trust the classical historians in their writings on the Celts? And what can we learn from the archaeological remains that have been discovered in this country?

Melvyn Bragg with
Barry Cunliffe, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University
Alistair Moffat, Writer and Historian
Miranda Aldhouse Green, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wales


-----------------------------------------------------
28 February 2002: Virtue - is it derived from reason?
-----------------------------------------------------
When Socrates asked the question 慔ow should man live??Plato and Aristotle answered that man should live a life of virtue. Plato claimed there were four great virtues - Temperance, Justice, Prudence and Courage and the Christian Church added three more - Faith, Hope and Love. But where does the motivation for virtue come from? Do we need rules to tell us how to behave or can we rely on our feelings of compassion and empathy towards other human beings?

Shakespeare抯 Iago says "Virtue! A fig! 憈is in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners."

So is virtue a character trait possessed by some but not others? Is it derived from reason? Or does it flow from the innate sympathies of the human heart? For the last two thousand years philosophers have grappled with these ideas, but now in the twenty first century a modern reappraisal of virtue is taking the argument back to basics with Aristotle.

Melvyn Bragg with
Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading
Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Roger Crisp, Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford.


------------------------------------------------
07 March 2002: John Milton - poet or politician?
------------------------------------------------
If it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvell we wouldn't have the later works of John Milton; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.

Milton spent the English Civil Wars as a prominent politician and right hand man to Oliver Cromwell. When the Monarchy was restored in 1660 it was only Marvell's intervention that saved Milton from execution. By then, Marvell argued, Milton was old and blind and posed no threat to Charles II.

But as a young man Milton had been an activist and pamphleteer extraordinaire. Allegedly inspired by a meeting with Galileo he wrote in passionate defence of Liberty. He detested the Church's insistence on empty ritual. And most dramatically for his time he demanded that the state serve its people rather than the people serve the state.

How then should we remember Milton - as poet or politician? As an idealist or an apologist for a revolutionary yet intolerant regime? And was he a man at one with the people or an elitist who preached to the masses but lived his own life only in the most rarefied of circles?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London
Blair Worden, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sussex


--------------------------------------------------------------------
14 March 2002: Budhhism - why has it captured the spirit of our age?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Two and a half thousand years ago a young man meditated on life and death and found enlightenment. In that moment he saw his past lives spread out before him and he realised that all life, indeed the very fabric of existence, was made of suffering.

That man was Siddhartha Gautama but we know him as The Buddha. He taught us that we have not one but many lives and are constantly reborn in different forms according to the laws of Karma: an immortality that binds us to a cosmic treadmill of death, decay, rebirth and suffering from which the only escape is Nirvana.

Buddhism was quickly established as a major religion in South East Asia but now two millenia later it is one of the fastest growing religions of the Western world. Why has it captured the spirit of our times? Is it because there is no compulsion to believe in God? And what is it that Western converts hope to get from Buddhism - truth and enlightenment or simply a spiritual satisfaction that Western religion cannot provide?

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Harvey, Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Sunderland
Kate Crosby, Lecturer in Buddhist Studies, SOAS
Mahinda Deagallee, Lecturer in the Study of Religions, Bath Spa University College and a Buddhist Monk


---------------------------------------------------------------------
21 March 2002: Marriage - its various forms and the role of the State
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

These marriage vows have been recited at church weddings since 1552, whenever two individuals have willingly pledged to enter into a relationship for life. But before the wedding service was written into the Book of Common Prayer, marriages were much more informal: couples could simply promise themselves to one another at any time or place and the spoken word was as good as the written contract.

The ancients permitted polygamy and the taking of concubines so how did monogamy come to be the favoured mode in the West? Were procreation, financial stability, companionship, or love the the reasons to get married? And what role has the state and the church played in legislating on personal affairs?

Melvyn Bragg with
Janet Soskice, Reader in Modern Theology and Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University
Frederik Pedersen, Lecturer in History, Aberdeen University
Christina Hardyment, Social historian and journalist


----------------------------------------------------------
28 March 2002: The Artist - a special kind of human being?
----------------------------------------------------------
The sculptors who created the statues of ancient Greece were treated with disdain by their contemporaries, who saw the menial task of chipping images out of stone as a low form drudgery. Writing in the 1st century AD the Roman writer Seneca looked at their work and said: "One venerates the divine images, one may pray and sacrifice to them, yet one despises the sculptors who made them".

Since antiquity artists have attempted to throw off the slur of manual labour and present themselves as gifted intellectuals on a higher level than mere artisans or craftsmen. By the Romantic period Wordsworth claimed that poets were 'endowed with a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common in mankind'.

How did the artist become a special kind of human being? What role did aristocratic patronage of the arts play in changing the status of the artist? And how have we constructed the image of the artist?

Melvyn Bragg with
Emma Barker, Lecturer in Art History at The Open University.
Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck University of London.
Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.


----------------------------------------------------
04 April 2002: ET - new life within our solar system
----------------------------------------------------
New planets have been observed far beyond our solar system and telescopes are being built that will enable us to look for water and oxygen on these distant planets. If water and oxygen are present, there is every reason to suppose that some form of life might also exist there. It has even been suggested that we might find life within our own solar system.

One of Jupiter抯 moons, Europa, appears to be covered in an ice-crusted ocean and there is evidence that water once flowed on Mars. On our own planet, there are forms of life that don抰 need the sun, living instead on energy from volcanic vents on the ocean floor. This discovery has changed our concept of what life needs in order to survive.

Could life only exist on another planet like ours and what are our chances of ever discovering such a planet? If we find life, will it be intelligent, or little more than green slime? And if intelligent aliens exist, why aren抰 they here?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Goodwin, Researcher in Astronomy, Cardiff University.
Heather Couper, Space expert.
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics, Warwick University.


---------------------------------------------------------
11 April 2002: Bohemia - what did it mean to be Bohemian?
---------------------------------------------------------
The medieval kingdom of Bohemia was at the crossroads of Europe and, during the 15th century, at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. Under Charles IV, its cosmopolitan capital Prague became a cultural and intellectual centre, attracting scholars and artists from all over Europe.

But Prague was awash with religious and political dissent. At its core stood the anarchist philosopher Jan Hus, whose ideas anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was burnt at the stake, but his followers, the Hussites, embarked on a series of wars that continue to mark the Czech and German characters even today.

Why was Bohemia such a crucible of dissent and how were its ideas exported to the rest of Europe? What did it mean to be Bohemian then and how was the ancient kingdom of Bohemia, with its ferment of religious, national and ethnic ideologies, divided up to form the states of modern Central Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Norman Davies, Professor Emeritus, University of London
Karin Friedrich, Lecturer in History, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London
Robert Pynsent, Professor of Czech and Slovak Literature, University College London


-----------------------------------------------------------
25 April 2002: Tolstoy - the influence of the Russian Novel
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Russian novel has been acclaimed as one of the outstanding genres of literature alongside Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare抯 Plays and Romantic Poetry.

Its heyday was the mid-19th century, and its practitioners gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day - and arguably of the modern era.

These men of genius included Dostoevsky, Gogol and Turgenev, but perhaps the greatest of them all was Tolstoy, author of the awesome novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy took massive subjects and presented them in loving and intricate detail. As Matthew Arnold said, "a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a piece of life".

Possessed by an urgent desire to represent real life in his work, and to reject artifice, Tolstoy declared that "The one thing necessary in life as in art is to tell the truth."

What did Tolstoy mean by telling the truth? How did he convey these truths to the reader? And why did he, ultimately, give up on literature and concentrate instead on religious and political philosophy?

Melvyn Bragg with
AN Wilson, Novelist, journalist and biographer of Tolstoy.
Catriona Kelly, Reader in Russian, Oxford University.
Sarah Hudspith, Lecturer in Russian, University of Leeds.


--------------------------------------------------
02 May 2002: Schrodinger's Cat - Quantum Mechanics
--------------------------------------------------
When Quantum Mechanics was developed in the early 20th century reality changed forever. In the quantum world particles could be in two places at once, they disappeared for no reason and reappeared in unpredictable locations, they even acted differently according to whether we were watching them. It was so shocking that Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of Quantum Theory, said "I don抰 like it and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it." He even developed an experiment with a cat to show how absurd it was.

Quantum Theory was absurd, it disagreed with the classical physics of Newton and Einstein and it clashed with our experience of the everyday world. Footballs do not disappear without reason, cats do not split into two and shoes do not act differently when we are not looking at them. Or do they? Eighty years later we are still debating whether the absurd might actually be true.

But why are features of quantum physics not seen in our experience of everyday reality? Can the classical and quantum worlds be reconciled, and why should reality make sense to us?

Melvyn Bragg with
Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University.
Fay Dowker, Lecturer in Theoretical Physics, Queen Mary, University of London.
Tony Sudbery, Professor of Mathematics, University of York.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
09 May 2002: The Examined Life - is an unexamined life worth living?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, famously declared that "The unexamined life is not worth living." His drive towards rigorous self-enquiry and his uncompromising questioning of assumptions laid firm foundations for the history of Western Philosophy.

But these qualities did not make him popular in ancient Athens: Socrates was deemed to be a dangerous subversive for his crime, as he described it, of "asking questions and searching into myself and other men". In 399 BC Socrates was sentenced to death on the charge of being "an evil-doer and a curious person".

Two thousand years later, the novelist George Eliot was moved to reply to Socrates that "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all". For Eliot too much self-scrutiny could lead to paralysis rather than clarity.

What did Socrates mean by his injunction? How have our preoccupations about how to live altered since the birth of ancient Greek philosophy? And where does philosophy rank in our quest for self-knowledge alongside science, the arts and religion?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
Janet Radcliffe Richards, Philosopher of Science and Reader in Bioethics, University College, London
Julian Baggini, Editor, The Philosopher抯 Magazine


---------------------------------------------------------------
16 May 2002: Chaos Theory - is the universe chaotic or orderly?
---------------------------------------------------------------
When Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687 his work was founded on one simple message: Nature has laws and we can find them.

His explanation of the movements of the planets, and of gravity, was rooted in the principle that the universe functions like a machine and its patterns are predictable.

Newton抯 equations not only explained why night follows day but, importantly, predicted that night would continue to follow day for evermore. Three hundred years later Newton抯 principles were thrown into question by a dread word that represented the antithesis of his vision of order: that word was Chaos.

According to Chaos Theory, the world is far more complicated than was previously thought. Instead of the future of the universe being irredeemably fixed, we are, in fact, subject to the whims of random unpredictability.

Tiny actions can change the world by setting off an infinite chain of reactions: famously, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil - it could cause a tornado in Berlin.

So what抯 the answer? Is the universe chaotic or orderly? If it抯 all so complicated, why does night still follow day?

And what is going on in that most complex machine of all - the brain - to filter and construct our perception of the world?

Melvyn Bragg with
Susan Greenfield, Senior Research Fellow, Lincoln College, Oxford University.
David Papineau, Professor of the Philosophy of Science, Kings College, London.
Neil Johnson, University Lecturer in Physics at Oxford University.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
23 May 2002: History of drugs - their role in medicine and the arts
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Throughout history people have taken drugs to alter their perceptions and change their moods. The attractions lie in the promise of instant pleasure and the possibility of heightened perceptions. Nietzche said that no art could exist without intoxication and believed that a dream-like state was an essential precondition to superior vision and understanding.

But artists and writers from De Quincey to Coleridge to Huxley have found drugs to be both a creative and a destructive force in their lives and work. Coleridge said in his poem about opium:

Fantastic Passions! Maddening Brawl!
And shame and terror over all!

The world of drugs is a topsy-turvy world of ambivalence and paradox: a world of clarity and confusion; stimulation and stupefaction; medicine and poison; vitality and death.

Can drugs really stimulate creativity? What is the impact of drugs on the body? And what role have narcotics and stimulants played in the history of medicine?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Davenport-Hines, Historian and author.
Sadie Plant, Author.
Mike Jay, Historian and author.


----------------------------------------------------------------
30 May 2002: The Grand Tour - what drove this desire for travel?
----------------------------------------------------------------
Samuel Johnson observed in 1776 that "A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see."

Johnson was referring, perhaps ironically, to the vogue for The Grand Tour, which reached its peak in the 18th century. The idea was for wealthy young travellers to finish their education with an extensive trip to Europe to experience its natural beauties, its cultural treasures and, if they were lucky, its sexual permissiveness.

The standard route took in Paris and The Alps and some tourists, including Byron, made it as far as Greece. But the destination, par excellence, was Italy, with its Renaissance glories and classical splendours.

What drove this desire for travel? Was it genuine cultural curiosity or simply the fashion? What impact did the Grand Tour have on British attitudes to art and culture? And were diplomatic relations between Britain and Europe helped or hindered by these travels?

Melvyn Bragg with
Chloe Chard, Literary historian.
Jeremy Black, Professor of History, University of Exeter.
Edward Chaney, Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts, Southampton Institute.


----------------------------------------------------------------
06 June 2002: The Soul - the key to our individuality as humans?
----------------------------------------------------------------
In his poem 慡ailing to Byzantium?WB Yeats 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.

This week on In Our Time we will be discussing the Soul. For Plato it was the immortal seat of reason, for Aristotle it could be found in plants and animals and was the essence of every being - but it died when the body died.

For some it is the fount of creativity, for others the spark of God in man. What is the soul made of and where does it live? Is it the key to our individuality as humans? And when we die will our souls find paradise or purgatory, rebirth, resurrection or simply annihilation?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Sorabji, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College
Ruth Padel, poet
Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
13 June 2002: The American West - was it an "experiment of liberty"?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1845 the editor of The New York Morning News wrote that it was the "manifest destiny" of the United States "to overspread and to posses 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."

With such phrases ringing in their ears the pioneering wagon trains rolled west into the uncharted wilderness of the American continent. Thus began the wagon trails that cut a path beyond the frontier to California and Oregon, a path soon to be followed by gold prospectors, entrepreneurs, cowboys and finally the US army itself.

But what propelled them all to go? Was it an "experiment of liberty", or the promise of a better life? Does the story of the frontier help us to understand the American psyche and do our ideas about the American West owe more to the mythology of John Wayne movies than to the history of the real trailblazers?

Melvyn Bragg with
Frank Mclynn, Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature, University of Strathclyde
Jenni Calder, Author
Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art


-----------------------------------------------------------------
20 June 2002: Richard Wagner - his influence on the German spirit
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Wagner, perhaps more than any other composer, would seem to capture the greatest triumphs and most terrifying excesses of the German spirit.

He lived as modern Germany was being born and his republicanism led to exile and nearly execution. He was a mentor of Nietzsche and a disciple of Schopenhauer and changed the face of opera perhaps more than any other single person.

Wagner conducted several orchestras and numerous affairs, suffered poverty and rejection but was finally showered with wealth by King Ludwig II. When the Nazis played his music in the death camps was it a fitting tribute to a gross anti-Semite or a travesty for a man who believed in redemption through love and social equality?

We ask to what extent can Wagner be typified as demonstrating the German spirit and what were his views on the function of art?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Deathridge, King Edward the Seventh Professor of Music, Kings College London.
Lucy Beckett, Author of Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
Michael Tanner, Philosopher.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
27 June 2002: Cultural Imperialism - should we try to prevent it?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
An empire rests on many things: powerful armies, good administration and strong leadership, but perhaps its greatest weapon lies in the domain of culture.

Culture governs every aspect of our lives: our dress sense and manners, our art and architecture, our education, law and philosophy. To govern culture, it seems, is to govern the world.

But what is cultural imperialism? Can it be distinguished from cultural influence? Does it really change the way we think and should we try to prevent it even if it does?

Melvyn Bragg with
Linda Colley, School Professor of History, London School of Economics.
Phillip Dodd, Director, Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Mary Beard, Reader in Classics, Cambridge University.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
04 July 2002: Freedom - a principle worth fighting and dying for?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Freedom has been a subject of enquiry for philosophers, theologians and politicians who have attempted to define the conditions required for humans to be free, not just in their minds but in the wider world. Some have argued that man is naturally free and no laws should confine his liberty. Others have countered that laws are the only way to preserve freedom, they protect us from the slavery of the abyss.

The very idea of freedom is riddled with constraints, limitations and qualifications, yet it is seen by many as the most basic of human rights and for some as a principle worth fighting and dying for.

John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Westminster
Bernard Williams, Professor of Philosophy, University of California
Annabel Brett, Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge


------------------------------------------------------------
11 July 2002: Psychoanalysis - do people crave dictatorship?
------------------------------------------------------------
The 20th century saw the birth and rise of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud led people to think about how the mind functioned and how our behaviour might be understood through the process of working with a psychoanalyst, either one-to-one or in a group.

Freud thought a lot about this process and in 1922 he published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he pronounced that the group "wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters." He was writing at a time when ideas about rules and oppression were much discussed because the 20th century was also a century of fascism, totalitarianism and dictatorship.

Freud died in 1939, just as a wave of despotism was sweeping across Europe. To what extent does psychoanalysis function by the rules of a dictatorship and to what extent does it function like a democracy? Is there a part of us that craves dictatorship and, if so, why? Is there a war going on in our own minds between ideas that we allow in to our consciousness and other ideas that we repress?

Melvyn Bragg with
Adam Phillips, Author.
Sally Alexander, Professor of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
18 July 2002: History of Heritage
-----------------------------------------------------------------
What role have history and heritage played in the formation of the British national identity? Historians have often maintained a guarded relationship with the so-called "heritage industry", believing that it presents a distorted version of national life: a Merrie England that is politically acceptable and economically rewarding.

History, in contrast, is held to reveal the truth about the past - objectively and scientifically. Our understanding of history changed since the 19th century and, as historians interpret our time and our society so will our ideas of heritage and history.

Melvyn Bragg with
David Cannadine, Director of the University of London's Institute of Historical Research, and an English Heritage Commissioner.
Miri Rubin, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London
Peter Mandler, Fellow in History, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge


-----------------------------------------------------------------
17 October 2002: Slavery and empire - were Britons also captives?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Slavery and empire are two themes that run right through this country抯 history. Britain抯 imperial project dominated at least the last three centuries of our national life. Its advocates claim it was a civilising mission by which Britain spread enlightenment and improvement across the globe. Opponents have long seen it as a brutal business, with Britons cast as cruel oppressors out to exploit a conquered world.

Is our imperial history so clear cut? What if Britons were themselves captives, either as prisoners of an imperial enterprise that sucked them in, generation after generation or, in some startling cases, as slaves to foreign peoples? Is slavery an inevitable part of empire: does it come with the territory? And how did Britain finally shake it off?

Melvyn Bragg with
Linda Colley, School Professor of History, LSE
Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History, University College London
Felipe Fernandez Armesto, Professorial Research Fellow, Queen Mary College London


------------------------------------------------------------------
24 October 2002: The scientist in history - missionary or monster?
------------------------------------------------------------------
The word "science" first appeared in the English language in 1340 and ever since its meaning has been in a state of flux. The notion of "the scientist" has had a similarly evolving history. For some, "the scientist" does not truly appear until after the Renaissance, others put its emergence much later than that.

When did the words and concepts we recognise today take on their contemporary meaning? How has the role of the scientist, and our understanding of it, changed? Has science always been a rival to religion, or was it once an ally? And how has the scientist been perceived by the wider world as a modern saint, the "priest of reason", or as a terrifying and amoral menace - the "mad scientist" of film and literature?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy, University of Sussex.
Patricia Fara, Lecturer on the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.
Hugh Pennington, Head of the Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Aberdeen.


----------------------------------------------------------------
31 October 2002: Architecture and power - imagery of imperialism
----------------------------------------------------------------
The role which architecture has played in our public life throughout history, whether in homage to an individual or as a monument to an institution or ideology, has always been a potent symbol of wealth, status and power. From castles to cathedrals, from the pyramids to Canary Wharf, architecture has always served to glorify in some way the animating ideal of the time.

Why is architecture such a powerful form of expression? Have architects concerned themselves mainly with the masses, or restricted their designs to the demands and aspirations of the elite? What can a country抯 buildings tell us about its ideas of its own past and present identity?

Melvyn Bragg with
Adrian Tinniswood, Architectural historian
Gavin Stamp, Senior Lecturer, Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art
Gillian Darley, Architectural historian


----------------------------------------------------
07 November 2002: Human Nature - innate or nurtured?
----------------------------------------------------
Human nature is a vexing issue: some argue that we are born as blank slates and our natures are defined by upbringing, experience, culture and the ideas of our time. Others believe that human nature is innate and pre-destined, regardless of time and place.

Is there really such a thing as human nature? And, if there is, can it be changed? Does the truth about human nature mean we should stop striving for progress, or should it give us cause for optimism? How important is the human race in the wider scheme of things?

Melvyn Bragg with
Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT
Janet Radcliffe Richards, Philosopher, Reader in Bioethics, University College London
John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics


-----------------------------------------------
14 November 2002: Victorian Realism - how real?
-----------------------------------------------
A reaction against Romanticism, the realist novel presented life as it was in urbanized, industrial Britain.

Attacked as ordinary, mundane, overly democratic and lacking the imaginative demands of poetry, its defendants argued that the ordinariness of life contained a complexity and depth previously unseen and unconsidered.

At its best the realist novel was like life itself - complex in appearance, rich in character, diverse in outlook, teeming with ideas and operating on several levels. It was a forum for the confusions of the Victorian age over Christianity and Darwinism, economics, morality and psychology, yet it was also a domestic novel concerned with the individuality of human relationships.

From the provincialism of George Eliot抯 Middlemarch to Hardy抯 bleak and brutal Wessex, Victorian Realism touched all the great Victorian authors, but can it truly be the touchstone of an age which produced the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland, the escapism of Tthe Waterbabies and the abundant grotesquerie of Dickensian London?

Melvyn Bragg with
Philip Davis is Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool
AN Wilson is a novelist
Dinah Birch is Fellow and tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
21 November 2002: Cordoba and Muslim Spain - a culture of tolerance?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In 711 a small army of North African Berbers invaded Spain and established an Iberian Islamic culture that would last for over 700 years.

Despite periods of infighting and persecution, Muslim Spain was a land where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed in relative peace and harmony.

Its capital, Cordoba, although not unique amongst Spanish cities, became the centre and focus for generations of revered and respected philosophers, physicians and scholars. By the 10th century Cordoba was one of the largest cities in the world.

But what some historians refer to as Cordoba抯 Golden Age came to an end in the 11th century, when the society was destabilised by new threats from Africa to the South and Christendom to the North.

However, it was not until 1492, when Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, that Islamic Spain was well and truly over.

In that same year the Jews were expelled from its shores and Christopher Columbus set sail to lead Spanish Christian expansionism into the new world.

But how did Muslims, Jews and Christians interact in practice?

Was this period of apparent tolerance underpinned by a respect for each other抯 sacred texts? What led to the eventual collapse of Cordoba and Islamic Spain? And are we guilty of over-romanticising this so-called golden age of co-existence?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tim Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University.
Martin Palmer, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian.
Mehri Niknam, Executive Director of the Maimonides Foundation.


------------------------------------------------
28 November 2002: Imagination - just what is it?
------------------------------------------------
Immanuel Kant said, "Imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no knowledge whatever but of which we are scarcely even conscious".

Imagination has been the companion of artists, scientists, leaders and visionaries but what exactly is it?

When did human beings first develop an imagination and why? How does it relate to creativity and what evolutionary function does creativity have? And is it possible to know whether our brains?capacity for imagination is still evolving?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Susan Stuart, Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Glasgow.
Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading.
Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of London


---------------------------------------------------------------
05 December 2002: The Scottish Enlightenment - how enlightened?
---------------------------------------------------------------
In 1696 the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aitkenhead, claimed theology was "a rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense". He was hanged for his trouble - just one victim of a repressive religious society called the Scottish Kirk.

Yet within 60 years Scotland was transformed by the ideas sweeping the continent in what we call the Enlightenment. This Scottish Enlightenment emerged on a broad front.

From philosophy to farming it championed empiricism, questioned religion and debated reason. It was crowned by the philosophical brilliance of David Hume and by Adam Smith - the father of modern economics.

But what led to this 慡cottish Miracle? was it an indigenous phenomenon or did it depend on influence from abroad? It profoundly influenced the American revolutionaries and the British Empire, but what legacy does it have for Scotland today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Professor Tom Devine, Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
Karen O払rien, Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Warwick.
Alexander Broadie, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow.


----------------------------------------------------------
19 December 2002: The Calendar - a history of the Calendar
----------------------------------------------------------
The calendar literally shapes the lives of millions of people.

It is an invention that gives meaning to the passing of time and orders our daily existence. It links us to the arcane movements of the heavens and the natural rhythms of the earth.

It is both deeply practical and profoundly sacred.

But where does this strange and complex creation come from? Why does the week last seven days but the year twelve months? Who named these concepts and through them shaped our lives so absolutely?

The answers involve Babylonian Astronomers and Hebrew Theologians, Roman Emperors and Catholic Popes.

If the calendar is a house built on the shifting sands of time it has had many architects.

Melvyn Bragg with
Robert Poole, Reader in History at St Martin抯 College, Lancaster.
Kristen Lippincott, Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Peter Watson, Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University.


------------------------------------------------
06 February 2003: The Epic - from Homer to Joyce
------------------------------------------------
In his essay "Why the novel matters", DH Lawrence argued that the novel contained all aspects of life. Perhaps better placed to make that claim is the epic. From tackling questions of identity, history, warfare, mortality and the ways of the Gods to narrating tales of magic and supernatural creatures, it was the Greek and Roman poems of Homer and Virgil that underpinned and explained the position of men in the world. And it was these narratives of heroic actions and grand deeds that were to form a template from which many future epics would be constructed - from Chaucer抯 Troilus and Cressayde to Milton抯 Paradise Lost.

But who are the heroes of these epics? To what extent was the classical epic a political project, a means of creating a founding myth for empire? How did the Renaissance revive the form and how successful were writers such as Milton in rendering the Christian story an epic? And what does the novel owe to the epic?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.
Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at Exeter University.
Oliver Taplin, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
13 February 2003: Chance and Design in Evolution - Design in Nature
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that if you re-ran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge. Man would not exist because the multitude of random changes that resulted in us would never be repeated exactly the same way. Others disagree, arguing that there is a pattern that points to some kind of direction even, perhaps, a design, a sense that some things are pre-ordained.

Who were the original proponents of the idea of a grand design? Were they deliberately setting out to find a scientific theory that could sit alongside religious faith? On the other hand, can the concept of contingency or the randomness of evolution - be compatible with a belief in God?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University.
Sandy Knapp, botanist at the Natural History Museum.
John Brooke, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 February 2003: The Lindisfarne Gospels - unifying Christianity in Britain
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 597 Pope Gregory the Great ordered that a mission of monks be sent from Rome to convert Britain to its own brand of Christianity - lest it be submerged by the pagan beliefs of the Anglo-Saxon overlords. Just over 100 years later, the Lindisfarne Gospels were produced - lavish and ornate manuscripts, central to the story of how Britain came to be unified by the flag of the Roman Church - and they came to embody a set of beliefs and ideas that dominated Britain for a thousand years.

Was the Rome mission in the 6th century the only strand of Christianity to sweep through Britain? Why did Northumbria become a key battleground for ideological dispute? How successful were the Lindisfarne Gospels in unifying the different strands of Christianity? To what extent did they serve as a founding statement of Christian identity in Britain?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Michelle Brown, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library
Dr Richard Gameson, Reader in Medieval History at Kent University
Professor Clare Lees, Professor of Medieval Literature at King's College London


-------------------------------------------------------
27 February 2003: The Aztecs - looking behind the myths
-------------------------------------------------------
According to legend, the origins of the Aztec empire lie on a mythical island called Aztlan - "place of the white herons" - in the north of Mexico. From there this nomadic group of Mesoamericans are said to have undertaken a pilgrimage south to the fertile valleys of Central America. In the space of just 200 years, they formed what has been called the largest, and arguably the most ruthless, pre-Hispanic empire in North America which, at its zenith, was to rule over approximately 500 small states, comprising by the 16th century some 6 million people.

Was it military might and intimidation alone that helped the Aztecs extend their power? What part did their complex belief system play in their imperial reach? Their use of human sacrifice has been well documented, but how widespread actually was it? How easily were the Spanish conquistadors able to Christianise this empire? And what legacy did the Aztecs leave behind that lives on in our world today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Alan Knight, Professor of the History of Latin America at Oxford University
Adrian Locke, co-curator of the Aztecs exhibition currently at the Royal Academy of Arts
Elizabeth Graham, Senior Lecturer in Mesoamerican Archaeology at University College London


------------------------------------------------------------
06 March 2003: Meteorology - why does it still fascinate us?
------------------------------------------------------------
The Book of Genesis resounds with a terrible act of vengeance, carried out by an angry God seeking to punish his people. And the mechanism with which this is carried out - a catastrophic flood which wipes out evil on earth. In fact, many ancient civilisations believed extreme meteorological phenomena like thunder and lightning, hailstones and even meteors were acts of divine intervention. Running parallel with this belief, however, was also a desire to understand and explain the natural world through rational enquiry and observation. This complex relationship between the natural world and divinity has fascinated philosophers, artists and scientists alike from antiquity to our own time.

Aristotle, for example, coined the phrase meteorology but to what extent did he link meteorological events to the cosmos and the Gods? How did the development of instrumentation during the Renaissance aid the prediction of weather events? Why did 18th century writers such as Keats feel that these scientific advances stripped the skies of its mystique and romance? And why does meteorology continue to fascinate and mystify to this day?

Melvyn Bragg with
Vladimir Jankovic, Wellcome Research Lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Manchester University.
Richard Hamblyn, writer and author.
Liba Taub, Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge University.


----------------------------------------------------
13 March 2003: Redemption - the concept of salvation
----------------------------------------------------
In St Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote: "Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery". This conception of Redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought. In Christianity, the liberation is from original sin, a transformation from fallenness to salvation - not just for mankind but for individual human beings. The content of that journey is moral, gaining redemption by becoming better.

So why is the idea of transformation so appealing to human beings? To what extent were Christian views of Redemption borrowed from Judaism? How did philosophers such as Marx reinterpret the concept of Redemption and can redemption retain its value in a world without God? Does its continuing power signify a deep psychological need in humankind?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford
Janet Soskice, Reader in Modern Theology and Philosophical Theology at Cambridge University
Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oxford University


----------------------------------------------------------
20 March 2003: Originality - is it just a romantic notion?
----------------------------------------------------------
In 1800, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote "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". But did the notion of originality begin with the Romantics in the 18th century, or has society always valued originality? Should we consider Shakespeare an innovator or a plagiarist? To what extent is originality about perception rather than conception and is originality a concept without meaning today?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Deathridge, King Edward Professor of Music at King抯 College London.
Jonathan R閑, philosopher and author of Philosophical Tales.
Professor Catherine Belsey, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University.


---------------------------------------------------
27 March 2003: Supernovas - the life cycle of stars
---------------------------------------------------
In his poem Bright Star John Keats wrote, "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art". For Keats the stars were symbols of eternity - they were beautiful and ordered and unchanging - but modern astronomy tells a very different story. Stars, like everything else in the universe, are subject to change. They are born among vast swirls of gas and dust and they die in the stunning explosions we call supernovae. They create black holes and neutron stars and, in the very beginning of the universe, they forged the elements from which all life is made. But how do stars keep burning for millions of years, why do they self-destruct with such ferocity and what will happen to the universe when they all go out?

Melvyn Bragg with
Paul Murdin, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Janna Levin, Advanced Fellow in Theoretical Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Phil Charles, Professor of Astronomy at Southampton University.


--------------------------------------------------------
03 April 2003: The Spanish Civil War - causes and legacy
--------------------------------------------------------
The Spanish Civil War was a defining war of the twentieth century. It was a brutal conflict that polarised Spain, pitting the Left against the Right, the anti-clericals against the Church, the unions against the landed classes and the Republicans against the Monarchists. It was a bloody war which saw, in the space of just three years, the murder and execution of 350,000 people. It was also a conflict which soon became internationalised, becoming a battleground for the forces of Fascism and Communism as Europe itself geared up for war.

But what were the roots of the Spanish Civil War? To what extent did Franco prosecute the war as a religious crusade? How did Franco institutionalise his victory after the war? And has Spain fully come to terms with its past?

Melvyn Bragg with
Paul Preston, Principe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish History at the London School of Economics
Helen Graham, Professor of Spanish History at Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Mary Vincent, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Sheffield University


------------------------------------
17 April: Proust - his life and work
------------------------------------
Marcel Proust抯 novel A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, has been called the definitive modern novel. His stylistic innovation, sensory exploration and fascination with memory were to influence a whole body of thinkers, from the German intellectuals of the 1930s to the Bloomsbury set, chief among them Virginia Woolf, and innumerable critics and novelists since.

But how did he succeed in creating a 3000 page novel with such an artistic coherence? To what extent did John Ruskin influence Proust? Is his fascination with memory and recall simply a nostalgia for the past? And what impact did he have on the 20th century novel?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London.
Malcolm Bowie, Master of Christ抯 College, Cambridge.
Dr Robert Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in the Literature Department at the Open University.


------------------------------------------------
24 April 2003: Youth - from Adonis to James Dean
------------------------------------------------
In 1898 Joseph Conrad wrote, "I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death..."

From antiquity to our own time, the concept of youth, with its promise of possibility and adventure, has been greeted with fascination as well as fear. The ancient Greeks saw the period of youth as dangerous and unpredictable, but how did they seek to control it? How did the Renaissance celebrate the ideals and intellect of youth? Why was 19th century British society so preoccupied with the moral well-being of young people? And does a distinct youth culture still exist?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tim Whitmarsh, Lecturer in Hellenistic Literature at Exeter University.
Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, London.
Deborah Thom, Lecturer in History at Robinson College, Cambridge.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
01 May 2003: Roman Britain - the effects of 400 years of occupation
-------------------------------------------------------------------
About 2000 years ago, Tacitus noted that "the climate is wretched", Herodian said, "the atmosphere in the country is always gloomy", Dio said "they live in tents unclothed and unshod, and share their women" and the historian Strabo said on no account should the Romans make it part of the Empire because it will never pay its way. But invade they did, and Britain became part of the Roman Empire for almost four hundred years.

But what brought Romans to Britain and what made them stay? Did they prove the commentators wrong and make Britain amount to something in the Empire? Did the Romans come and go without much trace, or do those four centuries still colour our national life and character today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University
Mary Beard, Reader in Classics at Cambridge University
Catharine Edwards, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, London University


--------------------------------------------------------------
08 May 2003: The Jacobite Rebellion - could it have succeeded?
--------------------------------------------------------------
In the summer of 1745, a young man in a small French frigate landed on the West Coast of Scotland. He had seven followers amongst his shipmates and took to the Highlands to raise an army from the Scottish clans:

"The Highland clans with sword in hand
Frae John o Groats tae Airlie
Hae tae a man declared to stand
Or fa wi Royal Charlie".

Or so the old Jacobite song goes. But why was the latest scion of the Stuart dynasty such a favourite with the Scottish Highlanders? And did Bonnie Prince Charlie ever have a real chance of gaining the throne of England?

Melvyn Bragg with
Murray Pittock, Professor of English Literature at the University of Strathclyde
Stana Nenadic, Senior Lecturer in Social History at Edinburgh University
Allan Macinnes, Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History at Aberdeen University


---------------------------------------------------
15 May 2003: The Holy Grail - just a medieval myth?
---------------------------------------------------
Tennyson wrote:

"A cracking and a riving of the roofs,
And rending, and a blast, and 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".

The sacred allure of the Grail has fascinated writers and ensnared knights for a thousand years. From Malory to Monty Python, it has the richest associations of any artefact in British myth. But where does the story spring from? What does it symbolise and why are its stories so resolutely set in these Isles and so often written by the French?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John抯 College, Oxford
Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University
Dr Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales in Cardiff


------------------------------------------------------------------
22 May 2002: Blood - its religious, medical and moral significance
------------------------------------------------------------------
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. The Greek physician, Galen, declared that it was blood that contained the force of life and linked the body to the soul, the Christian Church established The Eucharist - the taking of the body and blood of Christ. In our blood was our individuality, it was thought, our essence and our blood lines were special. Transfusion threatened all that and now itself is being questioned.

Why is it that blood was used to define both man and messiah? And how has the tradition of blood in religious thought been affected by the progress of medicine?

Melvyn Bragg with
Miri Rubin, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Anne Hardy, Reader in the History of Medicine at University College London
Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde


-----------------------------------
29 May 2003: Memory - and the brain
-----------------------------------
The great writer of remembrance, Marcel Proust, declared "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 memory is vital to life and without it we could not be the people we are, but can it really contain the sum of all our experience? Is it a repository constantly mounting events waiting to be plucked to consciousness, or if not, then under what criteria are memories turfed out?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at Durham University.
Mike Kopelman, Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King's College London and St Thomas?Hospital.
Kim Graham, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council抯 Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.


------------------------------------------------------------------
05 June 2003: The Lunar Society - scientific ferment 200 years ago
------------------------------------------------------------------
In the late 18th century, with the ascendant British Empire centred on London, a small group of friends met at a house on the crossroads outside Birmingham and applied their minds to the problems of the age. Between them they managed to launch the Industrial Revolution, discover oxygen, harness the power of steam and pioneer the theory of evolution. They were the Lunar Society, a gathering of free and fertile minds centred on the remarkable quartet of Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly and Erasmus Darwin. The potter Josiah Wedgwood, another member, summed up the ethos of this group when he said that they were 憀iving in an age of miracles in which anything could be achieved?

But how did the Lunar Society operate? What was the blend of religious dissent, entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual adventure that proved so fertile and how did their discoveries permanently change the shape and character of this country?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Jenny Uglow, Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick.
Peter Jones, Professor of French History at the University of Birmingham.


---------------------------------------------------------
12 June 2003: The Art of War - maintaining the objective?
---------------------------------------------------------
The British historian Edward Gibbon wrote: "Every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown." War, it seems, is one of mankind抯 most constant companions, one that has blighted the lives and troubled the minds of men and women from antiquity onwards. Plato envisaged a society without war, but found it had no arts, no culture and no political system. In our own time the United Nations struggles but often fails to prevent the outbreak of conflict.

But how has war been understood throughout the ages? Who has it served and how has it been justified? Is war inherent to human beings or could society be organised to the exclusion of all conflict?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter


-------------------------------------------------------------
19 June 2003: The Aristocracy - how the ruling class survives
-------------------------------------------------------------
The Greeks gave us the word aristocracy; it takes its root from 慳risto? meaning best and 慿ratos? meaning rule or power. And for more than five hundred years Britain was ruled by a class that was defined, at the time, as the best. They founded their ascendancy on the twin pillars of land and heredity and in terms of privilege, preferment, power, style and wealth, they dominated British society. As the Earl of Chesterfield confidently informed the House of Lords in the mid-18th century, "We, my lords, may thank heaven that we have something better than our brains to depend upon."

What made the British Aristocracy the most successful power elite in the world? And what brought about its decline?

Melvyn Bragg with
David Cannadine, Director of the University of London抯 Institute of Historical Research
Rosemary Sweet, Lecturer in History at the University of Leicester
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Professorial Research Fellow At Queen Mary, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------
26 June 2003: The East India Co - a corporate route to Empire
-------------------------------------------------------------
At its peak, its influence stretched from western India to eastern China via the farthest reaches of the Indonesian archipelago. It had a fleet of 130 twelve hundred tonne ships and commanded an army of 200,000 troops that came to dominate the Indian subcontinent. It funded governments, toppled princes and generated spectacular amounts of money from trading textiles and spices. But this wasn抰 an empire, it wasn抰 even a state, it was a company. The East India Company, founded in 1600, lasted for 258 years before the British state gained full control of its activities. In that time it had redrawn the map of India, built an empire and reinvented the fashions and the foodstuffs of Britain.

But how did the East India Company become so powerful? How did it change both India and Britain and how was the idea of a company running a country ever accepted by the British Crown?

Melvyn Bragg with
Huw Bowen, Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester
Linda Colley, School Professor of History at the London School of Economics
Maria Misra, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Keble College, Oxford


-----------------------------------------------------
03 July 2003: Vulcanology - significance of volcanoes
-----------------------------------------------------
In 79AD Mount Vesuvius erupted on the Bay of Naples, buried Pompeii in ash and drowned nearby Herculaneum in lava. The great letter writer Pliny the Younger was staying with his uncle in Misenum and was a witness to the cataclysm. He described it to the historian Tacitus, "It seemed as though the sea was being sucked backwards, as if it were being pushed back by the shaking of the land. Certainly the shoreline moved outwards, and many sea creatures were left on dry sand. Behind us were frightening dark clouds, rent by lightning twisted and hurled, opening to reveal huge figures of flame. These were like lightning but bigger." This eruption, which claimed the life of Pliny抯 uncle, is one of about 500 volcanoes to have erupted in the last two thousand years, some of which are now categorised by vulcanologists as 慞linian? after Pliny抯 famous description.

What causes volcanoes? What role do they play in the formation and maintenance of our planet? And is it ever possible to predict when and where they are about to erupt?

Melvyn Bragg with
Hilary Downes, Professor of Geochemistry at Birkbeck, University of London.
Steve Self, Professor of Vulcanology at the Open University.
Bill McGuire, Benfield Professor of Geophysical Hazards at University College London.


-------------------------------------------
10 July 2003: Nature - from Homer to Darwin
-------------------------------------------
In Childe Harold抯 Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote:
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more."

In the Bible抯 book of Genesis, 憂ature?was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of perpetual war, where the life of man was "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short".

The defining of Nature, whether "red in tooth and claw" or as the fount of all innocence, is an attempt to define man抯 origins and purpose and humanity抯 part in the natural world.

Melvyn Bragg with
Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.
Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham.
Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter.


---------------------------------------------------
17 July 2003: The Apocalypse - was it a revelation?
---------------------------------------------------
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, it would never have made it into the New Testament. But the Book of Revelation was included and its images of apocalypse, from the Four Horsemen to the Whore of Babylon, were fixed into the Christian imagination and its theology. As well as providing abundant imagery for artists from Durer to Blake, ideas of the end of the world have influenced the response to political, social and natural upheavals throughout history. Our understanding of history itself owes much to the apocalyptic way of thinking.

But how did this powerful narrative of judgement and retribution evolve, and how does it still shape our thinking on the deepest questions of morality and history?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture
Marina Benjamin, journalist and author
Justin Champion, Reader in the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------------
02 October 2003: James Clerk Maxwell - great 19th century physicist
-------------------------------------------------------------------
He took the first colour photograph, defined the nature of gases and with a few mathematical equations expressed all the fundamental laws of light, electricity and magnetism - and in doing so he provided the tools to create the technological age, from radar to radio and televisions to mobile phones. He is credited with fundamentally changing our view of reality, so much so that Albert Einstein said, "One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell".

But who was James Clerk Maxwell? What were his ideas, and does this nineteenth century 憂atural philosopher?deserve a place alongside Newton and Einstein in the pantheon of science?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Peter Harman, Professor of the History of Science at Lancaster University.
Joanna Haigh, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London.


---------------------------------------------------------------
09 October 2003: Bohemianism - a life of art, freedom & poverty
---------------------------------------------------------------
In 1848 the young Parisian Henri Murger wrote of his bohemian friends: "Their daily existence is a work of genius... they know how to practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried...they go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from morn till night that wild beast called a five franc piece."

Bohemianism meant a life lived for art, it meant sexual liberation and freedom from social constraint, but it also meant dodging the landlord and burning your poems to stay warm. How did the garret-philosophy of the Parisian Latin Quarter take over the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, and why did a French 憌ar with necessity?emerge as a British 憀ife-style as art??

Melvyn Bragg with
Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford.
Virginia Nicholson, author of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939.
Graham Robb, writer and biographer of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
16 October 2003: The Schism - between East and West in Christianity
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1054, Cardinal Humbert stormed into the Cathedral of Constantinople and charged down the aisle. In his hand was a Papal Bull - a deed of excommunication - and he slammed it down onto the altar. As he swept out of the startled church, the Papal Legate and his entourage stopped at the door and symbolically shook the sullied dust of Eastern Christianity from their Catholic boots. The Pope of Rome had decreed that the Patriarch of Constantinople was denied his place in heaven, and soon afterwards the Patriarch excommunicated the Pope in return.

It was the culmination of an argument over a single word in the Nicene Creed - but after a thousand years of being one Church, so began a permanent rift.

But what were the real underlying reasons behind the split, what were its effects and why did it take until December 1965 for the excommunications to be finally revoked?

Melvyn Bragg with
Henrietta Leyser, medieval historian and Fellow of St Peter抯 College, Oxford
Norman Housley, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Leicester
Jonathan Shepard, editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire


-------------------------------------------
23 October 2003: Infinity - a brief history
-------------------------------------------
Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with insouciant style:
"So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas on him that prey
And these hath smaller fleas to bite 慹m
And so proceed ad infinitum."

Alas, the developing utility mathematicians put to the idea of infinity did not find the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes quite so relaxed. When confronted with a diagram depicting an infinite solid whose volume was finite, he wrote, "To understand this for sense, it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or logician, but that he should be mad". Yet philosophers and mathematicians have continued to grapple with the unending, and it is a core concept in modern maths.

So, what is mathematical infinity? Are some infinities bigger than others? And does infinity exist in nature?

Melvyn Bragg with
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of The Math Circle at Harvard University.
Sarah Rees, Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of Newcastle.


-----------------------------------------------------------
30 October 2003: Robin Hood - the greatest of English myths
-----------------------------------------------------------
The first printed version of the Robin Hood story begins like this:
"Lithe and Lysten, gentylmen/That be of frebore blode
I shall tell of a good yeman/His name was Robyn Hode/
Robyn was a proude outlawe/Whyles he walked on grounde
So curteyse an outlawe as he was one/Was never none yfound".

Robin Hood is described as a 憏eoman?- a freeman, and though he is courteous there is not even a hint of the aristocrat he later became. In fact, in the early ballads there is no Maid Marian, no Friar Tuck, Robin does not live in the time of bad Prince John, or the crusades, does not lead a large and merry gang, and certainly never robs the rich to give to the poor. Though he always remains a trickster, and a man with a bow in a wood.

Why does this most malleable of myths go through so many changes and so many centuries? And was there ever a real outlaw Robin Hood on whom the ballads, plays, novels and movies are based?

Melvyn Bragg with
Stephen Knight, Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University
Thomas Hahn, Professor of English Literature at the University of Rochester, New York
Dr Juliette Wood, Secretary of the Folklore Society


------------------------------------------------------------------
06 November 2003: Sensation - the best sellers of the 19th century
------------------------------------------------------------------
The Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons, they spread panic through the pages of The Times and in a famous review the Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Henry Mansel, called them "unspeakably disgusting" with a "ravenous appetite for carrion": in the 1860s the novels of Sensation took the Victorian world by storm.

Bigamy. Secrecy. Murder and Madness. Detectives and surprise plot twists - all in a genteel domestic setting. It was a compelling concoction that propelled sales of the genre into millions, and for the first time ever got those above stairs reading the same stories as their servants.

How did Sensation achieve such an incredible popularity so fast? What did the ensuing moral panic reveal about the society in which the novels were set? And in terms of its literary reputation, does this racy genre deserve to languish so far behind Victorian Realism, its rather steadier cousin?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London
Lyn Pykett, Professor of English and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Dinah Birch, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool


-----------------------------------------------
13 November 2003: Duty - concepts of obligation
-----------------------------------------------
George Bernard Shaw wrote in his play Caesar and Cleopatra, "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty". But for Horatio Nelson and so many others, duty has provided a purpose for life, and a reason to die - "Thank God I have done my duty" were his final words.

The idea that others have a claim over our actions has been at the heart of the history of civilised society, but duty is an unfashionable or difficult notion now - perhaps because it seems to impose an outside authority over self interest. But has duty always meant doing what抯 best for others rather than oneself? And how did it become such a powerful idea that people readily gave their lives for it?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Annabel Brett, Fellow of Gonville and Caius and Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge
Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London


-----------------------------------------------------------------
20 November 2003: Ageing the Earth - a journey in geological time
-----------------------------------------------------------------
It was once thought that the world began in 4004 BC. Lord Kelvin calculated the cooling temperature of a rock the size of our planet and came up with a figure of 20 million years for the age of the Earth. Now, the history of our planet is divided into four great Eons: the Hadean, the Archaen, the Proterozoic and the Phanerozoic. Together, they are taken to encompass an incredible four and a half billion years.

How can we begin to make sense of such a huge swathe of time? And can we be sure that we have got the Earth抯 age right? Geologists use Eras, Periods and Epochs to further punctuate what抯 known as 慏eep Time? but can we be sure that the classifications we use don抰 obscure more than they reveal?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Corfield, Research Associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University.
Hazel Rymer, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University.
Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
27 November 2003: St Bartholomew's Day Massacre - slaughter in Paris
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In Paris, in the high summer of 1572, a very unusual wedding was happening in the cathedral of Notre Dame. Henri, the young Huguenot King of Navarre, was marrying the King of France抯 beloved sister, Margot, a Catholic. Theirs was a union designed to bring together the rival factions of France and finally end the French Wars of Religion. Paris was bustling with Huguenots and Catholics and, though the atmosphere was tense, the wedding went off without a hitch. And as they danced together at the Louvre, it seemed that the flower of French nobility had finally come together to bury its differences.

That wasn抰 to be: on St Bartholomew抯 Day, four days after the ill-starred nuptials, so many Protestants were killed in the streets of Paris that the River Seine ran red with their blood.

Was the wedding a trap? Who was to blame for the carnage and what impact did it have on the Reformation in Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University
Mark Greengrass, Professor of History at the University of Sheffield
Penny Roberts, Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick


------------------------------------------------------------
04 December 2003: Wittgenstein - a philosophy of linguistics
------------------------------------------------------------
There is little doubt that Ludwig Wittgenstein was a towering figure of the twentieth century, but on his return to Cambridge in 1929 Maynard Keynes wrote, "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train".

Wittgenstein is credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one but two philosophies for his descendents to argue over: The early Wittgenstein said, "the limits of my mind mean the limits of my world"; the later Wittgenstein replied, "If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of". Language was at the heart of both. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was to finally free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all. As he put it, "To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle".

How did he think language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would?

Melvyn Bragg with
Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton
Barry Smith, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Marie McGinn, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York


-----------------------------------------------
11 December 2003: The Devil - a brief biography
-----------------------------------------------
In the Gospel according to John he is 慳 murderer from the beginning? 慳 liar and the father of lies? and Dante calls him 憈he ill Worm that pierces the world抯 core? But Milton抯 description of him as a powerful rebel was so attractive that William Blake declared that Milton was 憃f the Devil抯 party, without knowing it? To ordinary folk the Devil has often been regarded as a trickster, a tempter, sometimes even a figure of fun rather than of fear.

How did this contradictory character come into being? Why did it take so long for him to become an established figure in Christianity? And if the Devil did not exist, would we have had to invent him?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture
Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex
David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------
18 December 2003: The Alphabet - its creation and development
-------------------------------------------------------------
At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world?

Melvyn Bragg with
Eleanor Robson, historian of Ancient Iraq and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Alan Millard, Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool
Rosalind Thomas, Professor of Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
26 December 2003: Lamarck and Natural Selection - the Lamarckian Heresy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection in On the Origin of Species, "Variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species" will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring". It was a simple idea that had instant recognition, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" said T H Huxley. However, Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution and not everyone saw his ideas as original. The great geologist Charles Lyell repeatedly referred to "Lamarck抯 theory as modified by Darwin", Darwin complained to him, "I believe this way of putting the case is very injurious to its acceptance". He desperately wanted to escape the shadow of this genuine scientific precursor and what has become known as the 慙amarckian Heresy?has maintained a ghostly presence on the fringes of biology to this day.

Who was Lamarck? How did Natural Selection escape from his shadow and gain acceptance from the scientific establishment? And has any evidence emerged that might challenge the elegant simplicity of Darwin抯 big idea?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sandy Knapp, Senior Botanist at the Natural History Museum.
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in the Galton Laboratory at University College London.
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge University.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
29 January 2004: Cryptography - secret history of ciphers and codes
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In October 1586, in the forbidding hall of Fotheringhay Castle, Mary Queen of Scots was on trial for her life. Accused of treason and denied legal representation, she sat alone in the shadow of a vast and empty throne belonging to her absent cousin and arch rival Elizabeth I of England. Walsingham, Elizabeth抯 Principal Secretary, had already arrested and executed Mary抯 fellow conspirators, her only hope lay in the code she had used in all her letters concerning the plot. If her cipher remained unbroken she might yet be saved. Not for the first time the life of an individual and the course of history depended on the arcane art of Cryptography.

What are the origins of this secretive science? And what links the 慍aesar Cipher?with the complex algorithms which underpin so much of our modern age?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Singh, science writer.
Professor Fred Piper, Director of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
05 February 2004: The Battle of Thermopylae - battle that defined East & West
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the historian Herodotus, the Battle of Thermopylae was the defining clash between East and West: "The Persians fell in their scores, for the officers stood behind lashing them forward, forward all the time. Many fell into the sea and were drowned, many more were trampled to death by their comrades ... The Greeks knew they were doomed now the Persians had discovered a way round the hill, and put forth their last ounce of strength, utterly desperate, utterly unsparing of their lives. (King) Leonidas fell in this battle. He had proved himself a great and brave man".

A force of three hundred free Spartans and their King had stood and fallen before an invading army of three million, led by a brutal tyrant. Or so the story goes - such was their courage and its association with freedom that, nearly two and a half thousand years later, William Golding wrote, "A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to setting us free".

How important are the Greek/Persian wars to the story of democracy? Was the West and its values really so far removed from life in the Persian Empire?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tom Holland, historian
Simon Goldhill, Professor in Greek Literature and Culture at King抯 College, Cambridge
Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham


---------------------------------------------------------
12 February 2004: The Sublime - defining the state of awe
---------------------------------------------------------
When the English essayist John Hall translated the work of an obscure Roman thinker into English, he could hardly have known the ferment it would cause; for the work of Longinus introduced late 17th century Britain to the idea of the sublime - an idea that stalked the proceeding century. Longinus wrote, "As if instinctively, our soul is lifted up by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it had heard".

He was talking about the power of language, but in the 18th century the idea was set for a broader stage as British artists, poets, philosophers and scientists grappled with the sublime and adapted it to great swathes of the intellectual and physical landscape. What drove the great minds of the age to invest so much in the defining of the state of awe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Janet Todd, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow
Annie Janowitz, Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary, University of London
Peter de Bolla, Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge


-------------------------------------------------------------
19 February 2004: Rutherford - the father of nuclear physics
-------------------------------------------------------------
Ernest Rutherford was the father of nuclear science, the great charismatic figure who mapped the landscape of the sub-atomic world. He identified the atom抯 constituent parts, discovered that elemental decay was the cause of radiation and became the first true alchemist in the history of science when he forced platinum to change into gold.

He was born at the edge of the Empire in 1871, the son of Scottish immigrant farmers and was working the fields when a telegram came from the great British physicist J J Thomson asking him to come to Cambridge. Rutherford immediately laid down his spade saying "that抯 the last potato I ever dig". It was. He went on to found a science, win a Nobel Prize and pioneer the 慴ig science?of the twentieth century.

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Jim Al-Khalili, Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Surrey.
Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.


--------------------------------------------------------
26 February 2004: The Mughal Empire - the glory of India
--------------------------------------------------------
At its height, the Mughal Empire stretched from Bengal in the East to Gujarat in the West, and from Lahore in the North to Madras in the South. It covered the whole of present day northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and became famous for the Taj Mahal, the Koh-i-Noor and the Peacock Throne.

In 1631 a Dutch naturalist Johannes de Laet published his account of the vast Empire, "the nobles live in indescribable luxury and extravagance, caring only to indulge themselves whilst they can, in every kind of pleasure. Their greatest magnificence is in their women抯 quarters, for they marry three or four wives or sometimes more".

But were they really the opulent despots of European imagination? If so, how did they maintain such a vast territory? And to what extent was the success of the British Raj a legacy of their rule?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor of Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford
Susan Stronge, Curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Chandrika Kaul, Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of St Andrews


-----------------------------------------------------
04 March 2004: Dreams - is there a science of dreams?
-----------------------------------------------------
Over a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud declared confidently, "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind". He was writing in his famous volume, The Interpretation of Dreams and his ideas made a huge impact on the century that was to follow. However, despite the cultural influence of his work, there is still no agreement in neuroscience as to the function or mechanism of dreaming; this is partly because for much of the century the prevailing wisdom was that there was no meaning to dreams at all.

What is the mental circuitry that creates our dreams? If they have no meaning, why do we dream them? And why is the tide turning with neuroscientists starting to find reasons to take dreams seriously again?

Melvyn Bragg with
Professor V S Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.
Mark Solms, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town.
Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at the University of Durham.


---------------------------------------------------------------
11 March 2004: The Norse Gods - the great myths of pagan Europe
---------------------------------------------------------------
Thor抯 huge hammer, the wailing Valkyrie, howling wolves and fierce elemental giants give a rowdy impression of the Norse myths. But at the centre of their cosmos stands a gnarled old Ash tree, from which all distances are measured and under which Valhalla lies. In the first poem of The Poetic Edda, where the stories of the Norse Gods are laid down in verse, the Seeress describes it in her prophesy:
"I know that an ash-tree stands called Yggdrasil,
a high tree soaked with shining loam
from there come the dews which fall in the valley,
ever green, it stands over the well of fate."
It is from this tree that the father of the Gods, Odin, will ultimately hang himself: an image of divine sacrifice so problematic for thirteenth century Christians that they left it out when they wrote the myths down.

What was the theology that inspired the Vikings and what role did their myths and religion play in their daily lives?

Melvyn Bragg with
Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John抯 College, Oxford
Heather O扗onoghue, Vigfusson Rausing Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature in the Department of English at Oxford University
John Hines, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University


-------------------------------------------------------
18 March 2004: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
-------------------------------------------------------
Edward Gibbon wrote of the decline of the Roman Empire, "While that great body was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol."

But how far is the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome? How critical were the bawdy incursions of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire? Should we even be talking in terms of blame and decline at all?

St Augustine wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, Edward Gibbon famously tackled it in the eighteenth and it is a question that preoccupies us today.

Melvyn Bragg with
Charlotte Rouech? historian of late antiquity at Kings College London
David Womersley, Fellow and Tutor at Jesus College, Oxford
Richard Alston, Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London


------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 March 2004: Theories of Everything - still the holy grail of physics?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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. The disparity between the physics of the very small would finally be reconciled with the very large, and the four forces of nature would finally be united with a single set of equations. It was suggested that with such a theory we might solve the riddle of black holes, unlock the secrets of the Big Bang, probe other universes and even uncover the mystery of travelling through time.

Now it is 2004 and the clock is still ticking. Stephen Hawking, who once said that with a Theory of Everything "we would know the mind of God", has changed his mind and now says that it may not be possible after all.

So what are the prospects for a Theory of Everything? Why do we need one? How do we get one? And what would it mean if we did?

Melvyn Bragg with
Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University.
John Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Val Gibson, particle physicist from the Cavendish Laboratory and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
01 April 2004: China: The Warring States Period - the fiery beginnings of Chinese civilisation
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axial Age, when great civilisations in Asia and the Mediterranean forged the ideas that dominated the next two thousand years. In China the equivalent to the Golden Age in Greece was the Warring States Period. It was a time of political turmoil, economic change and intellectual ferment that laid the foundations for the first Chinese Empire. Astronomy was systematised, the principles of Yin and Yang were invented, Confucianism grew and Taoism emerged, as a hundred schools of thought are reputed to have vied for the patronage of rival kings.

Why was a period of war such a fertile age for culture and thought, what kinds of ideas were developed and how do they still inform the thinking of nearly a fifth of the world抯 population?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University
Dr Vivienne Lo, Lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
Carol Michaelson, Assistant Keeper of Chinese Art in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum


--------------------------------------------------------
08 April 2004: The Fall - how Adam and Eve affect us all
--------------------------------------------------------
Genesis tells the Bible抯 story of creation, but it also carries within it a tale of the 慺all of mankind? After their primal transgression, Adam and Eve are banished from Eden and cursed by God:

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life."

What effect has this passage had on western culture, and how did the concept of an 憃riginal sin?influence gender and morality in Christian Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, theologian
Griselda Pollock, Professor of Art History at the University of Leeds
John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 April 2004: The Later Romantics - the world of Byron, Keats and Shelley
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
There must have been something extraordinary about the early 19th century, when six of the greatest poets in the English language were all writing. William Blake was there and Wordsworth and Coleridge had established themselves as the main players in British poetry, when the youthful trio of Byron, Shelley and Keats erupted - if not straight onto the public stage, then at least onto the literary scene. The great chronicler of the age was William Hazlitt, whose romantic maxim was:

"Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar and into whom the spirit of the world has not yet entered... the world has no hand on them."

How fitting an epitaph is that for the three great poets who all died tragically young? What were the ideals that drove them and how did their unconventional lifestyles infect the poetry they left behind?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick
Robert Woof, Director of the Wordsworth Trust
Jennifer Wallace, Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge


-----------------------------------------------------------
22 April 2004: Hysteria - the normal state of human beings?
-----------------------------------------------------------
The term 慼ysteria?was first used in Greece in the 5th century BC by Hippocratic doctors. They were trying to explain an illness whose symptoms were breathing difficulties and a sense of suffocation, and whose sufferers were seen chiefly to be recently bereaved widows. The explanation was thought to be a wandering womb putting pressure on other organs. The use that Sigmund Freud put to the term was rather different, but although there is no wandering womb in his notion of hysteria, there is still a mysterious leap from the emotional to the physical, from the mind to the body.

What is hysteria? How can emotional experiences cause physical illnesses? And has hysteria抯 association with old stereotypes of femininity put it off the modern medical map?

Melvyn Bragg with
Juliet Mitchell, Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English at the University of York.
Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London.


------------------------------------------
29 April 2004: Tea - an empire in a teacup
------------------------------------------
After air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet and the British national drink. In this country it helped define class and gender, it funded wars and propped up the economy of the Empire. The trade started in the 1660s with an official import of just 2 ounces, by 1801 24 million pounds of tea were coming in every year and people of all classes were drinking an average two cups a day. It was the first mass commodity, and the merchant philanthropist Jonas Hanway decried its hold on the nation, "your servants' servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China".

What drove the extraordinary take up of tea in this country? What role did it play in the global economy of the Empire and at what point did it stop becoming an exotic foreign luxury and start to define the essence of Englishness?

Melvyn Bragg with
Huw Bowen, Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester
James Walvin, Professor of History at the University of York
Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London


---------------------------------------------------
06 May 2004: Heroism - do we live in an heroic age?
---------------------------------------------------
On the fields of Troy a fallen soldier pleaded with Achilles, the great hero of the Greeks, to spare his life. According to Homer, Achilles replied,
"Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid.
And born of a great father and the mother who bore me immortal?
Yet even I have also my death and strong destiny,
And there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime,
When some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
Either with a spear cast or an arrow flown from the bow string".

With that, he killed him. Heroes have special attributes, but not necessarily humility or compassion. How did the Greeks define their heroes? What place did the hero have in classical society and what do modern ideas of heroism owe to the heroes of the golden age?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge


--------------------------------------------
13 May 2004: Zero - everything about nothing
--------------------------------------------
Shakespeare抯 King Lear warned, "Nothing will come of nothing". The poet and priest John Donne said from the pulpit, "The less anything is, the less we know it: how invisible, unintelligible a thing is nothing", and the English monk and historian William of Malmesbury called them "dangerous Saracen magic". They were all talking about zero, the number or symbol that had been part of the mathematics in the East for centuries but was finally taking hold in Europe.

What was it about zero that so repulsed their intellects? How was zero invented? And what role does zero play in mathematics today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Maths Circle at Harvard University.
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 May 2004: Toleration - from medieval intolerance to religious freedom
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1763 Voltaire remarked that "of all religions, the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instil the greatest toleration, although so far the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men". Christian intolerance was brutally enforced across Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, with inquisitions, executions, church courts and brandings with hot irons. But during the English Civil War a variety of Christian sects sprang up which challenged the imposition of state religion and opened the floodgates to religious diversity.

What were the politics and philosophy behind the idea of toleration in England? Did the rise of toleration go hand in hand with the rise of the secular, or were tolerationists - in fact - deeply religious? And how does toleration differ from tolerance?

Melvyn Bragg with
Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London
David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London
Sarah Barber, Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University


--------------------------------------------------------
27 May 2004: Planets - the astronomy of the 21st century
--------------------------------------------------------
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. Roughly ninety-two million miles and third in line from that central star is our own planet Earth, in thrall to our Sun, just one of the several thousand million stars that make up the Galaxy.

Ever since Galileo and Copernicus gave us a scientific model of our own solar system, we have assumed that somewhere amongst the myriad stars there must be other orbiting planets, but it took until 1995 to find one. ?1 Pegasus A?was discovered in the Pegasus constellation and was far bigger and far closer to its sun than any of our existing theories could have predicted. Since then 121 new planets have been found. And now it is thought there may be more planets in the skies than there are stars.

What causes a planet to form? How do you track one down? And how likely is there to be another one out there with properties like the Earth抯?

Melvyn Bragg with
Paul Murdin, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
Hugh Jones, planet hunter and Reader in Astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University.
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.


--------------------------------------------------------
03 June 2004: Babylon - the great forgotten civilisation
--------------------------------------------------------
Six thousand years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the first cities were being built. The great empire to spring from the region was Babylon, which held sway for over a thousand years and in that time managed to garner an extraordinarily bad press: it抯 associated with the Tower of Babel, with Nineveh where Jonah is sent to preach repentance and, perhaps most famously, with "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth" - the whore of Babylon, who in Revelation is taken to personify the city itself. It抯 not just the Bible; Herodotus described the Babylonians as effeminate, lascivious and decadent as well.

But what is the true story? Classics in this country has meant a study of Greece and Rome, but there is an increasingly vocal contingent that claims that Babylonian culture has been hugely undervalued, and that there is a great wealth of extraordinary literature waiting to be translated.

Melvyn Bragg with
Eleanor Robson, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University
Irving Finkel, Curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum
Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies


--------------------------------------------------
10 June 2004: Empiricism - the English philosophy?
--------------------------------------------------
England抯 greatest contribution to philosophy is Empiricism. At the end of the seventeenth century the philosopher John Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
"All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE."

It was a body of ideas that for Voltaire, and for Kant after him, defined the English attitude to thought; a straight talking pragmatic philosophy that was hand in glove with a practical people.

How was the philosophy of empiricism developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? And what effect did this emphasis on experience have on culture and literature in Britain?

Melvyn Bragg with
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London
Murray Pittock, Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester

Jonathan R閑, philosopher and author


--------------------------------------------------------------
17 June 2004: Renaissance Magic - the great passion of the age
--------------------------------------------------------------
In 1461 one of the powerful Medici family抯 many agents carried a mysterious manuscript into his master抯 house in Florence. It purported to be the work of an ancient Egyptian priest-king and magician called Hermes Trismegistus. When Cosimo de Medici saw the new discovery, he ordered his translations of Plato to be stopped so that work could begin on the new discovery at once. Hermes promised secret knowledge to his initiates and claimed to have spoken with the spirits and turned base metal into gold. His ideas propelled natural magic into the mainstream of Renaissance intellectual thought, as scholars and magi vied to understand the ancient secrets that would bring statues to life and call the angels down from heaven.

But why did magic appeal so strongly to the Renaissance mind? And how did the scholarly Magus, who became a feature of the period, manage to escape prosecution and relate his work to science and the Church?

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London
Valery Rees, Renaissance historian and a translator of Ficino抯 letters
Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
24 June 2004: George Washington and the American Revolution - the most significant event in history
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1774 a tobacco farmer from Virginia with nice 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. George Washington had been a stout upholder of the status quo, regularly lending money to his ne抮-do-well neighbour simply to keep him in the plantation to which he had become accustomed. He even wrote a book on how to behave properly in polite society.

What drove him to revolution? Washington may have been a moral man, but by anyone抯 account he was no scholar; the American constitution is one of the great Enlightenment documents, who provided its intellectual inspiration?

Melvyn Bragg with
Carol Berkin, Professor of History at The City University of New York
Simon Middleton, Lecturer in American History at the University of East Anglia
Colin Bonwick, Professor Emeritus in American History at Keele University


------------------------------------------------------
02 September 2004: Pi - the number that doesn't add up
------------------------------------------------------
In the Bible's description of Solomon's temple it comes out as three, Archimedes calculated it to the equivalent of 14 decimal places and today's super computers have defined it with an extraordinary degree of accuracy to its first 1.4 trillion digits. It is the longest number in nature and we only need its first 32 figures to calculate the size of the known universe within the accuracy of one proton.

We are talking about Pi, 3.14159 etc, the number which describes the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. How has something so commonplace in nature been such a challenge for maths? And what does the oddly ubiquitous nature of Pi tell us about the hidden complexities of our world?

Melvyn Bragg with
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Maths Circle at Harvard University.
Eleanor Robson, Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University.
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
09 September 2004: The Odyssey - Homer's epic tale of Odysseus' return home
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Odyssey by Homer is often claimed as the great founding work of Western Literature. It's an epic that has entertained its audience for nearly three thousand years: it's got shipwrecks, it's got monsters, it's got brave heroes and seductive sex goddesses. It's got revenge and it's also got love. The story follows on from Homer's The Iliad, and essentially it is a tale of the Greek hero Odysseus and his long attempt to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan Wars.

What has given it such a fundamental position in the history of western ideas? What are the meanings behind the trials and tribulations that befall Odysseus on his way? And who really wrote The Odyssey?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at King's College, Cambridge
Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University
Oliver Taplin, Classics Scholar and Translator at Oxford University


---------------------------------------------------------------
16 September 2004: Agincourt - the real facts behind the battle
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Owre kynge went forth to Normandy,
With grace and myyt of chivalry;
The God for hym wrouyt marvelously,
Wherefore Englonde may calle, and cry
Deo gratias:
Deo gratias redde pro victoria."

The great victory was Agincourt as described in the Agincourt Carol , when the 'happy few' of Henry V's English army vanquished the French forces on St Crispin's Day 1415.

It is a battle that has resounded through the centuries and has been used by so many to mean so much. But how important was the battle in the strategic struggles of the time? What were the pressures at home that drove Henry's march through France? And what is the cultural legacy of Agincourt?

Melvyn Bragg with
Anne Curry, Professor of Medieval History at Southampton University
Michael Jones, medieval historian and writer
John Watts, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Corpus Christie College, Oxford


---------------------------------------------------------
23 September 2004: The Origins of Life - how it all began
---------------------------------------------------------
Scientists have named 1.5 million species of living organism on the land, in the skies and in the oceans of planet Earth and a new one is classified every day. Estimates of how many species remain to be discovered vary wildly, but science accepts one categorical point - all living matter on our planet, from the nematode to the elephant, from the bacterium to the blue whale, is derived from a single common ancestor.

What was that ancestor? Did it really emerge from a 憄rimordial soup? And what, in the explanation of evolutionary science, provided the catalyst to start turning the cycle of life?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Richard Corfield, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University.
Linda Partridge, Biology and Biotechnology Research Council Professor at University College London.


-------------------------------------------------------------
30 September 2004: Politeness - the great 18th century craze
-------------------------------------------------------------
At the start of the eighteenth century in Britain a new idea stalked the land. Soon it was complete with a philosophy, a literature and even a society devoted to its thrall. The idea was Politeness. It may seem to represent the very opposite now, but at that time, when Queen Anne was on the throne and The Spectator was in the coffee houses, politeness was part of a social revolution.

How did the idea of politeness challenge the accepted norms of behaviour? How did a notion of how to behave affect the great wealth of eighteenth century culture?

Melvyn Bragg with
Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London
David Wootton, Professor of History at the University of York
John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London


--------------------------------------------------------------
07 October 2004: Jean-Paul Sartre - a man condemned to be free
--------------------------------------------------------------
Jean-Paul Sartre, French novelist, playwright and philosopher, was king of post-war Paris where the intellectuals re-grouped. He was a mid-century focus of intellectual influence.

Sartre's own life was coloured by jazz, affairs, Simone de Beauvoir, an extraordinary output of plays, novels, biographies, philosophical treatises and the camaraderie of intellectual discussions in the caf閟 of the Left Bank of the Seine. He was also politically active in many major controversies. He produced some wonderful statements: "my heart is on the left, like everyone else's", he wrote, or "a human person is what he is not, not what he is", or "we are condemned to be free".

How do his novels and plays carry Sartre's ideas? And what light does Sartre's life bring to bear on his influential philosophy and how did he put his ideas into practice?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jonathan R閑, philosopher and historian
Benedict O'Donohoe, Principal Lecturer in French at the University of the West of England
Christina Howells, Professor of French at the University of Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------
14 October 2004: The Han Synthesis - creating the Chinese cosmos
----------------------------------------------------------------
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".

Confucianism had been all but outlawed under the Chin Emperor, but in 206 BC the Han dynasty came to power and held sway for over 400 years. They brought Confucian thought to the heart of government, his favourite books became set texts for the world's first civil service exam and in a grand intellectual project 'The Great Tao' was combined with 'The Five Phases' and with the Yin and the Yang.

Who were the Han? How did they bring these strands of thought together into the great founding moment of Chinese culture? And what drove them to their extraordinary intellectual task?

Melvyn Bragg with
Christopher Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute
Carol Michaelson, Assistant Keeper of Chinese Art in the Department of Asia at the British Museum
Roel Sterckx, Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge


-------------------------------------------------------------------
21 October 2004: Witchcraft - Reformation Europe turned upon itself
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1486 a book was published in Latin, it was called Maleus Mallificarum and it very soon outsold every publication in Europe bar the Bible. It was written by Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican Priest and a witchfinder.
"Magicians, who are commonly called witches" he wrote, "are thus termed on account of the magnitude of their evil deeds. These are they who by the permission of God disturb the elements, who drive to distraction the minds of men, such as have lost their trust in God, and by the terrible power of their evil spells, without any actual draught or poison, kill human beings."

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" says Exodus, and in the period of the Reformation and after, over a hundred thousand men and women in Europe met their deaths after being convicted of witchcraft.

Why did practices that had been tolerated for centuries suddenly become such a threat? What brought the prosecutions of witchcraft to an end, and was there anything ever in Europe that could be truly termed as a witch?

Melvyn Bragg with
Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex
Lyndal Roper, Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford
Malcolm Gaskill, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28 October 2004: Rhetoric - from the original sophists to latter-day demagogues
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, "Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instil pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain". But for Plato it was a vice, and those like Gorgias who taught rhetoric were teaching the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger. He warned "this device - be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack - must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society".

But strike root it did, and there is a rich tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it.

How did the art of rhetoric develop? What part has it played in philosophy and literature? And does it still deserve the health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
Ceri Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor


-----------------------------------------------------------
04 November 2004: Electrickery - the origins of electricity
-----------------------------------------------------------
In Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philosophers as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Perhaps he would have been surprised, or even horrified, by the sheer force of what these seemingly obscure experimentalists were about to unleash on society. Electricity soon reached into all areas of 18th century life, as Royal Society Fellows vied with showmen and charlatans to reveal its wonders to the world. It was, claimed one commentator, 'an entertainment for Angels rather than for Men'. Electricity also posed deep questions about the nature of life. For some it was the divine spark that animated all things, for others it represented a dangerous materialism that reduced humans to mere machines.

But how did electricity develop in the 18th and 19th centuries? Why was it so politically contentious and how was it understood during the age in which it changed the world forever?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Patricia Fara, historian of science and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
Iwan Morus, Lecturer in the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11 November 2004: Zoroastrianism - was the religion of the Persian Empire the first monotheism?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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." Thus spake the real Zarathustra, the prophet and founder of the ancient and modern religion of Zoroastrianism. It has claims to be the world's first monotheistic creed and perhaps as long ago as 1200 BC Zarathustra also said, "I point out the way, it is the truth, it is for all living". Truth is a central tenet of the religion which holds that people must above all do good things, hear good things and see good things.

How was the religion established in Ancient Persia, what is its body of beliefs and how have they been developed and disseminated?

Melvyn Bragg with
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Curator of Ancient Iranian Coins in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum
Farrokh Vajifdar, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society
Alan Williams, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester


----------------------------------------------------------------
18 November 2004: Higgs Boson - the search for the God particle
----------------------------------------------------------------
One weekend in 1964 the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs was walking in the Cairngorm Mountains. On his return to his laboratory in Edinburgh the following Monday, he declared to his colleagues that he had just experienced his 'one big idea' and now had an answer to the mystery of how matter in the universe got its mass. That big idea took many years of refining, but it has now generated so much international interest and has such an important place in physics that well over one billion pounds is being spent in the hope that he was right. It's the biggest science project on Earth; the quest to find the 'Higgs Boson', a fundamental constituent of nature that - if it does exist - has such a central role in defining the universe that it's also known as the God Particle.

What is the Higgs Boson? Why is it so important to scientists and how are they planning to find it?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jim Al-Khalili, Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Surrey.
David Wark, Professor of Experimental Physics at Imperial College London.
Professor Roger Cashmore, former Research Director at CERN.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
25 November 2004: The Venerable Bede - the father of English history
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In 731 AD, in the most far-flung corner of the known universe, a book was written that represented a height of scholarship and erudition that was not to be equalled for centuries to come. It was called the Ecclesiastical History of the Angle Peoples and its author was Bede. A long way from Rome, in a monastery at Jarrow in the North East of England, his works cast a light across the whole of Western Civilisation and Bede became a bestseller, an internationally renowned scholar and eventually a saint. His Ecclesiastical History has been in copy or in print ever since it was written in the eighth century and his edition of the Bible remains the Catholic Church's most authoritative Latin version to this day.

How did Bede achieve such ascendancy from such an obscure part of Christendom? And what was so remarkable about his work?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Gameson, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury
Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Sheffield
Michelle Brown, a manuscript specialist from the British Library


---------------------------------------------------------
02 December 2004: Carl Gustav Jung - Discovering the Self
---------------------------------------------------------
In 1907 Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that is reputed to have lasted for 13 hours. That man was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Freud is celebrated as the great pioneer of the 20th century mind, but the idea that personality types can be 'introverted' or 'extroverted', that certain archetypal images and stories repeat themselves constantly across the collective history of mankind, and that personal individuation is the goal of life, all belong to Jung: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens", he declared. And he also said "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you".

Who was Jung? What is the essence and influence of his thought? And how did he become such a controversial and, for many, such a beguiling figure?

Melvyn Bragg with
Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London.
Ronald Hayman, writer and biographer of Jung.
Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
09 December 2004: Machiavelli and the Italian City States - high politics and low cunning in the Italian Renaissance
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In The Prince, Machiavelli's great manual of power, 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".
He also advised, "One must be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage".

What times was Machiavelli living through to take such a brutal perspective on power? How did he gain the experience to provide this advice to rulers? And was he really the amoral, or even evil figure that so many have liked to paint him?

Melvyn Bragg with
Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London
Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 December 2004: The Second Law of Thermodynamics - the most important thing you will ever know
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be very simply stated like this: "Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out". It was first formulated to explain how a steam engine worked, it can explain why a cup of tea goes cold if you don't drink it and how a pan of water can be heated to boil an egg.

But its application has been found to be rather grander than this. The Second Law is now used to explain the big bang, the expansion of the cosmos and even suggests our inexorable passage through time towards the 'heat death' of the universe. It's been called the most fundamental law in all of science, and CP Snow in his Two Cultures wrote: "Not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics is like never having read a work of Shakespeare".

What is the Second Law? What are its implications for time and energy in the universe, and does it tend to be refuted by the existence of life and the theory of evolution?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.
Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University.
Monica Grady, Head of Petrology and Meteoritics at the Natural History Museum.


-----------------------------------------------------------
23 December 2004: Faust - the original pact with the Devil
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!"

So spoke Dr Faustus with unnerving prescience shortly before being dragged off to hell in Christopher Marlowe's historical tragedy. His Faustian pact with the devil Mephistopheles had granted him 24 years of limitless knowledge and power, but at the cost of his soul. His terrible story was told as a dire warning to anyone who would seek to reach beyond the limits of their human lot.

But who was the real Faust? Why has his story maintained a 400 year grip on the German and British imaginations, and how has his image changed as each generation embraced the myth?

Melvyn Bragg with
Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales in Cardiff and Secretary of the Folklore Society
Osman Durrani, Professor of German at the University of Kent at Canterbury
Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
30 December 2004: The Roman Republic - what were Rome's republican ideals?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around 550BC, Lucretia, the daughter of an aristocrat, was raped by the son of Tarquin, the king of Rome. Lucretia told her family what had happened to her and then, in front of them, killed herself from shame. The Roman historian Livy describes what was believed to have happened next:

"Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief; drew out the knife from Lucretia's wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, "By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!". The King was duly expelled from the city and the Roman Republic was founded and lasted for 500 years.

But in what form did this republic evolve, what were its values and ideals and what ultimately caused the end of the world抯 first true experiment in constitutional government?

Melvyn Bragg with
Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University.
Catherine Steel, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow.
Tom Holland, historian and author.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
06 January 2005: The Assassination of Tsar Alexander II - did his killing cause the Russian Revolution?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 1st March 1881, the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, was travelling through the snow to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. An armed Cossack sat with the coach driver, another six Cossacks followed on horseback and behind them came a group of police officers in sledges. It was the day that the Tsar, known for his liberal reforms, had signed a document granting the first ever constitution to the Russian people.

But his journey was being watched by a group of radicals called 'Narodnaya Volya' or 'The People's Will'. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal, they hurled the first of their bombs to halt the Tsar's iron-clad coach. When Alexander ignored advice and ventured out onto the snow to comfort his dying Cossacks, he was killed by another bomber who took his own life in the blast.

Why did they kill the reforming Tsar? What was the political climate that inspired such extreme acts? And could this have been the moment that the Russian state started an inexorable march towards revolution?

Melvyn Bragg with
Orlando Figes, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London
Dominic Lieven, Professor of Russian Government at the London School of Economics
Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at Oxford University


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13 January 2005: The Mind/Body Problem - does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the start of Ren?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. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish many parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete. Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or an arm or any other part of the body is cut off nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind".

This thinking is the basis of what's known as 'Cartesian dualism', Descartes' attempt to address one of the central questions in philosophy, the mind/body problem: is the mind part of the body, or the body part of the mind? If they are distinct, then how do they interact? And which of the two is in charge?

Melvyn Bragg with
Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine
Sue James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
17 February 2005: The Cambrian Explosion - the big bang of evolutionary history
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Canada, there is an outcrop of limestone shot through with a seam of fine dark shale. A sudden mudslide into shallow water some 550 million years ago means that a startling array of wonderful organisms has been preserved within it. Wide eyed creatures with tentacles below and spines on their backs, things like flattened rolls of carpet with a set of teeth at one end, squids with big lobster-like arms. There are thousands of them and they seem to testify to a time when evolution took a leap and life on this planet suddenly went from being small, simple and fairly rare to being large, complex, numerous and dizzyingly diverse. It happened in the Cambrian Period and it's known as the Cambrian Explosion.

But if this is the great crucible of life on Earth, what could have caused it? How do the strange creatures relate to life as we see it now? And what does the Cambrian Explosion tell us about the nature of evolution?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University.
Richard Corfield, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University.
Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds.


----------------------------------------------------------------
24 February 2005: Alchemy - seeking the perfection of all things
----------------------------------------------------------------
At the end of the 16th century, the German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath wrote: "Darkness will appear on the face of the Abyss; Night, Saturn and the Antimony of the Sages will appear; blackness, and the raven's head of the alchemists, and all the colours of the world, will appear at the hour of conjunction; the rainbow also, and the peacock's tail. Finally, after the matter has passed from ashen-coloured to white and yellow, you will see the Philosopher's Stone".

The language, which sounds fantastical, is cryptic, encoded, symbolic and secretive. It is worth bearing in mind that Isaac Newton wrote more manuscripts on alchemy than on anything else and Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, described himself as an alchemist.

What was the essence of alchemy, its history and legacy? And how much more was it than a rapacious desire to turn base metals into gold?

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Lauren Kassell, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster.


---------------------------------------------------
03 March 2005: Stoicism - the search for inner calm
---------------------------------------------------
The philosophy of Stoicism was founded by Zeno in the fourth century BC and flourished in Greece and then in Rome. Its ideals of inner solitude, forbearance in adversity and the acceptance of fate won many brilliant adherents and made it the dominant philosophy across the whole of the Ancient World. The ex-slave Epictetus said "Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them". Seneca, the politician, declared that "Life without the courage for death is slavery". The stoic thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, provided a rallying point for empire builders into the modern age.

But what was stoicism? How did its ideas of inner retreat come to influence the most powerful and public men of the classical era? And does it still have a legacy for us today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Jonathan R閑, philosopher and historian
David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge


------------------------------------------------------------
10 March 2005: Modernist Utopias - the original 21st century
------------------------------------------------------------
"I want to gather together about twenty souls," wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, "and sail away from this world of war and squalor and find a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go, and some real decency". Utopias were in the air in the first decades of the twentieth century and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate.

What was it about that era that brought forward so many imagined futures? How did utopias become the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984, and why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University
Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
Laura Marcus, Professor of English at the University of Sussex


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
17 March 2005: Dark Energy - the unknown force breaking the universe apart
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Only 5% of our universe is composed of visible matter, stars, planets and people; something called 'dark matter' makes up about 25% and an enormous 70% of the universe is pervaded with the mysteriously named 'dark energy'. It is a recent discovery and may be only a conjecture, but it has been invoked to explain an abiding riddle of the cosmos: if the expansion of the universe is powered by the energy of the Big Bang, then why isn't the expansion slowing down over time as the initial energy runs down and the attractive force of gravity asserts itself? Scientists had predicted a Big Crunch as the logical opposite of the Big Bang, but far from retracting, the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating...it's running away with itself.

How do we know that the universe is behaving like this and what's causing it? If dark energy is the culprit, then what is this elusive, though omnipresent entity?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Cambridge University.
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge.
Sir Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Maths at Oxford University.


------------------------------------------------
24 March 2005: Angels - how they got their wings
------------------------------------------------
George Bernard Shaw made the observation that "in heaven an angel is nobody in particular", but there is nothing commonplace about this description of angels from the Bible's book of Ezekiel:
"they had the likeness of a man.
And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.
And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass.... As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle." With angels like that, it is easy to see why they have caused so much controversy over the centuries.

What part have angels played in western religion? How did they get their halos and their wings? And what are they really? Gods or men?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, theologian
Valery Rees, Renaissance Scholar from the School of Economic Science
John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews


----------------------------------------------------------
31 March 2005: John Ruskin - a different kind of Victorian
----------------------------------------------------------
John Ruskin was the most brilliant art critic of his age, perhaps the most brilliant that Britain has ever produced, but he was much more than that. A champion of Turner and an enemy of Whistler, he placed the study of art and architecture at the heart of a moral assault on Victorian life. In the stone work of a Gothic cathedral, Ruskin saw all that was right about medieval society and all that was wrong about his own capitalist age.

But why was Ruskin so critical of his own time? What deep currents of thought infused his ideas? And how much does our thinking, about society, the environment, art and work owe to this unusual man?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University
Keith Hanley, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University
Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
07 April 2005: Alfred and the Battle of Edington - without Alfred, no England?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Battle of Edington in 878 is taken by many to be the great founding Battle of England. It is the conflict in which Alfred, King of Wessex, came back from an impossible position to defeat the Vikings and launch a grand project to establish a new entity of Englishness, what he called the 'Anglecynn' in the South of the island of Britain.

How did Alfred manage to defeat the Vikings when he had been so thoroughly routed? What motivated his project to fashion Englishness? And without Edington, would there be no England?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Gameson, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury
Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Sheffield
John Hines, Professor in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University


-----------------------------------------------------------------
14 April 2005: Archaeology and Imperialism - conquest of the past
-----------------------------------------------------------------
In 1842 a young English adventurer called Austen Henry Layard set out to excavate what he hoped were the remains of the biblical city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia. On arrival he discovered that the local French consul, Paul Emile Botta, was already hard at work. Across the Middle East and in Egypt, archaeologists, antiquarians and adventurers were exploring cities older than the Bible and shipping spectacular monuments down the Nile and the Tigris to burgeoning European museums.

What was it about the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia that so gripped the 19th century imagination? How did nationalism and imperialism affect the search for the ancient past and how did archaeology evolve from its adventuresome, even reckless, origins into the science of artefacts we know today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tim Champion, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton
Richard Parkinson, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum
Eleanor Robson, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University


----------------------------------------------------------
21 April 2005: The Aeneid - the Roman history of the world
----------------------------------------------------------
Out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan wars came a man heading West, his father on his back and his small son holding his hand. This isn't Odysseus, it's Aeneas and in that vision Virgil gives an image of the very first Romans of the Empire.

Virgil's Aeneid was the great epic poem that formed a founding narrative of Rome. It made such an impact on its audience that it soon became a standard text in all schools and wiped away the myths that preceded it. It was written in Augustus' reign at the start of the Imperial era and has been called an apologia for Roman domination; it has also been called the greatest work of literature ever written.

How much was Virgil's poem influenced by the extraordinary times in which it was written? How does it transcend the political pressures of Imperial patronage and what are the qualities that make it such a universal work?

Melvyn Bragg with
Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University
Philip Hardie, Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford
Catharine Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London


---------------------------------------------------------------------
28 April 2005: Perception and the Senses - how do we see what we see?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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 has not been seen. It has also been discovered that babies learn by touch before they can properly make sense of visual data, and that the senses of smell and taste chemically combine to give us flavour.

Perception is a tangled web of processes and so much of what we see, hear and touch is determined by our own expectations that it raises the question of whether we ever truly perceive what others do.

What governs our perception of the world? And are we correct to distinguish between sight, sound, smell, touch and taste when they appear to influence each other so very much?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Gregory, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Bristol University.
David Moore, Director of the Medical Research Council Institute of Hearing Research at the University of Nottingham.
Gemma Calvert, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bath.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
05 May 2005: Abelard and Heloise - love, sex and theology in 12th century Paris
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The story of Abelard and Heloise is a tale of literature and philosophy, theology and scandal, and above all love in the high Middle Ages. They were two of the greatest minds of their time and Abelard, a famous priest and teacher, wrote of how their affair began in his biography, Historia Calamitatum, "Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then with our books open before us, more words of love than of reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts".

Years later, when she was an Abbess at the head of her own convent, Heloise wrote to Abelard: "Even during the celebration of Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers".

Melvyn Bragg with
Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London
Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Historian and Fellow of St Peter抯 College, Oxford
Michael Clanchy, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research


----------------------------------------------
19 May 2005: Beauty - the philosophy of beauty
----------------------------------------------
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
That was John Keats' emphatic finale to his Ode on a Grecian Urn. It seems to express Plato's theory of aesthetics, his idea that an apprehension of beauty is an apprehension of perfection and that all things in our shadowy realm are botched representations of perfect 'forms' that exist elsewhere. Beauty is goodness and, for Plato, the ultimate of all the forms is 'The Good'.

But does beauty really have a moral quality? And is it inherent in things, or in the mind of the observer? How much influence have Plato's ideas had on the history of aesthetics and what has been said to counter or develop them?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Julian Baggini, Editor of The Philosophers' Magazine


-------------------------------------------------------------
26 May 2005: The Terror - when Madame Guillotine ruled France
-------------------------------------------------------------
On Monday September 10th 1792 The Times of London carried a story covering events in revolutionary France:

"The streets of Paris, strewed with the carcases of the mangled victims, are become so familiar to the sight, that they are passed by and trod on without any particular notice. The mob think no more of killing a fellow-creature, who is not even an object of suspicion, than wanton boys would of killing a cat or a dog".
These were the infamous September Massacres when Parisian mobs killed thousands of suspected royalists and set the scene for the events to come, when Madame La Guillotine took centre stage and The Terror ruled in France.

But how did the French Revolution descend into such extremes of violence? Who or what drove The Terror? And was it really an aberration of the revolutionary cause or the moment when it truly expressed itself?

Melvyn Bragg with
Mike Broers, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford
Rebecca Spang, Lecturer in Modern History at University College London
Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge


------------------------------------------------------------------
02 June 2005: Renaissance Maths - the birth of modern mathematics?
------------------------------------------------------------------
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 geometry of Euclid, Appollonius and Ptolemy ruled the day. Yet within two hundred years, European mathematics went from being an art that would unmask the eternal shapes of geometry to a science that could track the manifold movements and changes of the real world. The Arabic tradition of Algebra was assimilated and both Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus - the maths by which we can still put men on the moon.

But how did this profound change come about? What were the ideas that drove it and is this the period in which mathematics became truly modern?

Melvyn Bragg with
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Maths Circle at Harvard University.
Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of Science and Fellow of Linacre College at the University of Oxford.
Jackie Stedall, Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at The Queen's College, Oxford.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
09 June 2005: The Scriblerus Club - the satirists-in-chief of the 18th century
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 18th century Scriblerus Club included some of the most extraordinary and vivid satirists ever to have written in the English language. We are given giants and midgets, implausible unions with Siamese twins, diving competitions into the open sewer of Fleet-ditch, and Olympic-style pissing competitions: "Who best can send on high/The salient spout, far streaming to the sky". But these exotic images were part of an attempt by Pope, Swift and their cadres to show a world in terrible decline:
"Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! Thy dread empire, Chaos! Is restored:
Light dies before thy uncreating word".
So wrote Alexander Pope in his great mock epic verse, The Dunciad.

Who were the Scriblerans? And what in eighteenth century society had driven them to such disdain and despair?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London
Marcus Walsh, Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 June 2005: Paganism in the Renaissance - how the classical gods returned to the Christian cities
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism of a Christian moralising text. Ovid's sensual tales of metamorphosis and pagan gods were presented as veiled allegories, and the famous story of Zeus descending to Danae in a shower of gold was explained as the soul receiving divine illumination. But in 1478 Botticelli finished Primavera, the first major project on a mythological theme for a thousand years, and by 1554 Titian completed a very different version of Danae - commissioned by a Cardinal, no less - where she expectantly awaits her union with Zeus in what is a nakedly sexual pose.

What happened to bring the myths and eroticism of antiquity back into the culture of Europe? And how was it possible for a Church that was prosecuting for heresy to exalt in pagan imagery, even in the Vatican itself?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
Charles Hope, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London
Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London


------------------------------------------------------------------------
23 June 2005: The KT Boundary - did the dinosaurs burn out or fade away?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Across the entire planet, where it hasn't been eroded or destroyed in land movements, there is a thin grey line. In Italy it is 1 cm thick, in America it stretches to three centimetres, but it is all the same thin grey line laid into the rock some 65 million years ago and it bears witness to a cataclysmic event experienced only once in Earth's history. It is called the KT Boundary and geologists believe it is the clue to the death of the dinosaurs and the ultimate reason why mammals and humans inherited the Earth.

But exactly what did happen 65 million years ago? How was this extraordinary line created across the Earth and does it really hold the key to the death of the dinosaurs?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Kelley, Head of Department in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University.
Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds.
Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.


------------------------------------------------
30 June 2005: Merlin - the original Welsh wizard
------------------------------------------------
He was sired by an incubus and born of a virgin; he was a prophet, a shape-shifter, a king-maker and a mad man of the woods. In a literary career spanning 1500 years, Merlin, or originally Myrddin, put the sword in the stone, built Stonehenge, knew the truth behind the Holy Grail and discovered the Elixir of Life. "Beware Merlin for he knows all things by the devil's craft" say the poisoners in Malory's Morte D'Arthur; but he is also on the side of the good and is almost Christ-like in some of the versions of his tale, and his prophesies were pored over by the medieval Church.

Who was Merlinus Ambrosius, as he is sometimes known? Where does his legend spring from and how has it been appropriated and adapted over time?

Melvyn Bragg with
Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University
Stephen Knight, Distinguished Research Professor in English Literature at Cardiff University
Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London


----------------------------------------------------------------------
07 July 2005: Christopher Marlowe - poet, spy, atheist, murder victim?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In the prologue to The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say:
"I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Birds of the air will tell of murders past!
I am ashamed to hear such fooleries.
Many will talk of title to a crown.
What right had Caesar to the empire?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood."

By the age of 29 Marlowe was a brilliant scholar, a popular playwright, an international spy, a forger, a homosexual and was accused of atheism. His hugely ambitious characters, like Tamburlaine and Faustus, are often taken to be versions of Marlowe himself, a subversive who also counted religion as a 'childish toy'. By the age of 30 Marlowe was dead.

Was Marlowe assassinated by the Elizabethan state? How subversive was his literary work? And had he lived as long as his contemporary Shakespeare, how would he have compared?

Melvyn Bragg with
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Senior Research Fellow in the English Faculty of Oxford University
Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick
Emma Smith, Lecturer in English at Oxford University


------------------------------------------------------------
14 July 2005: Karl Marx - In Our Time's Greatest Philosopher
------------------------------------------------------------
"Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains", "Religion is the opium of the people", and "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". That should be enough for most of you to work out whom Radio 4 listeners have voted as their favourite philosopher: the winner of the In Our Time Greatest Philosopher Vote, chosen from 20 philosophers nominated by listeners and carried through on an electoral tidal wave of 28% of our 'first-past-the-post' vote is the communist theoretician, Karl Marx.

So, when you strip away the Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet era and later Marxist theory, who was Karl Marx? Where does he stand in the history of philosophy? He wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it" - which begs the question, is he really a philosopher at all?

Melvyn Bragg with
Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Francis Wheen, journalist and author of a biography of Karl Marx
Gareth Stedman Jones, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University


----------------------------------------------------
29 September 2005: Magnetism - an attractive history
----------------------------------------------------
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 nails of his sandals held fast to the rock beneath them, and the iron tip of his crook was strangely attracted to the boulders all around. Magnes had stumbled across the lodestone, or 'Magnetite', and discovered the phenomenon of magnetism. Plato was baffled by this strange force, as were Aristotle and Galen, and despite being used in navigation, supposedly suspended over the body of Mohammed and deployed in the pursuit of medical cures - apart from some 13th century scholastic studies - it was not until the late 16th century that any serious scientific attempt was made to explain the mystifying powers of the magnet.

Who pioneered the study of magnetism? What theories did they construct from its curious abilities and how was the power of the magnet brought out of the realm of magic and into the service of science?

Melvyn Bragg with
Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster.
John Heilbron, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
06 October 2005: Field of the Cloth of Gold - a Renaissance entente cordiale
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the spring of 1520 six thousand Englishmen and women packed their bags and followed their King across the sea to France. They weren't part of an invasion force but were attendants to King Henry VIII and travelling to take part in the greatest and most conspicuous display of wealth and culture that Europe had ever seen. They were met by Francis I of France and six thousand French noblemen and servants on English soil in Northern France and erected their temporary palaces, elaborate tents, jousting pavilions and golden fountains spewing forth red, white and claret wine in the Val D'Or. For just over two weeks they created a temporary town the size of Norwich, England's second city, on the 'Camp du Drap D'Or', or Field of the Cloth of Gold.

What drove the French and the English to create such an extraordinary event? What did the two sides do when they got there, and what - if anything - was achieved?

Melvyn Bragg with
Steven Gunn, Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University
John Guy, Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge
Penny Roberts, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick


-----------------------------------------------------------------
13 October 2005: The Rise of the Mammals - life in a cold climate
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Cenozoic Era of Earth's history began 65 million years ago and runs to this day. It began with the extraordinary 'KT event', a supposed asteroid impact that destroyed the dinosaurs, and incorporates the break up of Pangaea, the enormous landmass that eventually formed the continents we know today. It is known as the 'Age of the Mammals', and it is the period in which warm-blooded, lactating, often furry animals diversified rapidly and spread across the globe on land and in the sea.

According to evolutionary theory, what conditions created the opportunity for mammals to thrive? What environmental factors lead to the characteristics they share - and the features they don't? And how did they become the most intelligent class of animals on the planet?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Corfield, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University.
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London.
Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 October 2005: Cynicism - bold and populist, the history of a shocking philosophy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eating live octopus with fresh lupins, performing intimate acts in public places and shouting at passers by from inside a barrel is behaviour not normally associated with philosophy. But the Cynics were different. They were determined to expose the meaninglessness of civilised life by action as well as by word. They slept rough, ate simply and gave their lectures in the market place. Perhaps surprisingly, their ideas and attitudes were immensely popular in the ancient world.

But how coherent was cynicism as a philosophy? What was its influence on literature and politics and is there any truth to the contention that Jesus himself was influenced by the Cynics?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Miriam Griffin, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford
John Moles, Professor of Latin at the University of Newcastle


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
27 October 2005: Samuel Johnson and His Circle - life with the professional man of letters
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it." The poet Oliver Goldsmith was not alone in falling victim to the bludgeoning wit of Samuel Johnson. The greatest luminaries of eighteenth century England, including the painter Joshua Reynolds, the philosopher Edmund Burke and the politician Charles James Fox, all deferred to him ... happily or otherwise.

Samuel Johnson was credited with defining English literature with his Lives of the Poets and his edition of Shakespeare, and of defining English language with his Dictionary. Yet despite those lofty acclamations he failed to get a degree, claimed he had never finished a book, was an inveterate hack who told his friend James Boswell, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money".

How did an Oxford drop-out become England 's most famous and well connected man of letters? How did generations of readers come to see him as the father of English Literature? And why is he so little read today?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Jim McLaverty, Professor of English at Keele University
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
03 November 2005: Asteroids - celestial bodies from the beginning of time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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. It was difficult or even impossible for an observer of asteroids to book time using the world's best telescopes, because they were regarded as unspectacular objects that could tell us little about the origins of the universe.

However, that has all changed. It is now thought that asteroids are the unused building blocks of planets, 'pristine material' that has remained chemically unchanged since the creation of the solar system; a snapshot of matter at the beginning of time. At the moment the Japanese probe Hayabusa is 180 million miles away, pinned to the back of the asteroid Itokawa, attempting to gain our first samples of the chemical composition of an asteroid.

Why did asteroids fail to form planets? How do they differ from their celestial cousins, the comets? And are either of them likely to create another impact on planet Earth?

Melvyn Bragg with
Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science at the Open University.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10 November 2005: Greyfriars and Blackfriars - philosophy, evangelism and fund-raising in the 13th century Church
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Just as it is 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". Thus St Thomas Aquinas described his vocation, not only as a teacher, but also as a Dominican friar and philosopher at the University of Paris.

In the thirteenth century, the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were a great force for change in Catholic Europe. They thrived in the emerging towns and cities of the High Middle Ages, leading crusades and changing the way the Church dealt with heretics. They were the evangelists who transformed the Church's preaching of the Christian message to the people.

On top of all this, these two orders were also responsible for reconciling Classical and Christian philosophy; their studies of Aristotle paved the way for the Renaissance. They also managed to change the curriculum at the universities of Paris and Oxford. But the Blackfriars and the Greyfriars did not come from the great monasteries of the time; they started out as itinerant preachers surviving upon the charity of the faithful.

So how did these two orders come to dominate the spiritual and academic life of the thirteenth century, and how did they manage to accumulate such huge wealth while professing allegiance to lives of poverty?

Melvyn Bragg with
Henrietta Leyser, Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford
Alexander Murray, Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford
Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
17 November 2005: Pragmatism - a practical philosophy fit for 20th century America
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A pragmatist ... turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power". A quote from William James' 1907 treatise Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.

William James, along with John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, was the founder of an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century. It purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false - it either works or it doesn't. It was a philosophy which was deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he inhabited. In essence, practical application was all.

But how did Pragmatism harness the huge scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution? And how did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the Sceptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? Did Pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? And did it also pave the way for the contemporary preoccupation with post-modernism?

Melvyn Bragg with
A C Grayling, Professor of Applied Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine
Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
24 November 2005: The Graviton - the quest for the theoretical gravity particle
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Albert Einstein said "I know why there are so many people who love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees the results". Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life trying to find a theory that would unify electromagnetism with gravity, but success eluded him.

The search is still on for a unifying theory of gravitational force and hopes are pinned on the location of the graviton - a hypothetical elementary particle that transmits the force of gravity. But the graviton is proving hard to find. Indeed, the next big research project which involves the largest earth-based laboratory in the world - a circular ring which goes underground for about twenty-seven miles and spans Switzerland, France and Germany - still won't allow us to detect gravitons per se, but might be able to prove their existence in other ways.

The idea of the graviton particle first emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, when the notion that particles as mediators of force was taken seriously. Physicists believed that it could be applicable to gravity and by the late 20th century the hunt was truly on for the ultimate theory, a theory of quantum gravity.

So why is the search for the graviton the major goal of theoretical physics? How will the measurement of gravitation waves help prove its existence? And how might the graviton unite the seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics?

Melvyn Bragg with
Roger Cashmore, Former Research Director at CERN and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.
Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey.
Sheila Rowan, Reader in Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
01 December 2005: Thomas Hobbes and the political philosophy of 'Leviathan'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man". Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth century philosopher, was principally interested in political philosophy.

For Hobbes, the difference between order and disorder was stark. In the state of nature, ungoverned man lived life in "continual fear, and danger of violent death". The only way out of this "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" existence, he said, was to relinquish all your freedom and submit yourself to one all powerful absolute sovereign. Hobbes's proposal, contained in his controversial, and now classic text, Leviathan, was written just as England was readjusting to life after the Civil War and the rule of Oliver Cromwell.

But how did the son of a poor clergyman end up as the most radical thinker of his day? Why did so many of Hobbes' ideas run counter to the prevailing fondness for constitutionalism with a limited monarchy? And why is he regarded by so many political philosophers as an important theorist when so few find his ideas convincing?

Melvyn Bragg with
Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
David Wootton, Professor of History at the University of York
Annabel Brett, Senior Lecturer in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge University


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08 December 2005: Artificial Intelligence - the quest for a machine that can think
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can machines think?" It was the question posed by the mathematician and Bletchley Park code breaker Alan Turing and it is a question still being asked today. What is the difference between men and machines and what does it mean to be human? And if we can answer that question, is it possible to build a computer that can imitate the human mind?

There are those who have always had robust answers to the questions that those who seek to create artificial intelligence have posed. In 1949 the eminent neurosurgeon, Professor Geoffrey Jefferson argued that the mechanical mind could never rival a human intelligence because it could never be conscious of what it did:
"Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt", he declared "and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain - that is, not only write it but know that it had written it." Yet the quest rolled on for machines that were bigger and better at processing symbols and calculating infinite permutations.

Who were the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and what drove them to imitate the operations of the human mind? Is intelligence the defining characteristic of humanity? And how has the quest for artificial intelligence been driven by warfare and conflict in the twentieth century?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jon Agar, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Alison Adam, Professor of Information Systems at Salford University.
Igor Aleksander, Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College, University of London.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 December 2005: The Peterloo Massacre - democratic protest and brutal repression
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote:
'I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.'

As Foreign Secretary, Robert Stewart Castlereagh had successfully co-ordinated European opposition to Napoleon, but at home he had repressed the Reform movement, and popular opinion held him responsible for the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful demonstrators in 1819. Shelley's epic poem, The Mask of Anarchy, reflected the widespread public outrage and condemnation of the government's role in the massacre.

Why did a peaceful and orderly meeting of men, women and children in St Peter's Field, Manchester turn into a blood bath? How were the stirrings of radicalism in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars dealt with by the British establishment? And what role did the Peterloo Massacre play in bringing about the Great Reform Act of 1832?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter
Sarah Richardson, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick
Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University


----------------------------------------------------------
22 December 2005: Heaven - a journey through the afterlife
----------------------------------------------------------
The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote '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'. Aquinas encapsulated a great human conundrum that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since ancient times: what might heaven be like. And although human language is constrained by experience, this has not stopped an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven.

In the early Middle Ages men ascended up a ladder to heaven. In his Divine Comedy, Dante divided heaven into ten layers encompassing the planets and the stars. And the 17th century writer John Bunyan saw the journey of the soul to heaven as a spiritual struggle in his autobiography, The Pilgrim's Progress.

But what exactly is heaven and where is it? How does the Protestant conception of the afterlife differ from the Catholic conception? How does one achieve salvation and what do the saved do when they get there? And, if heaven is so interesting, why has western culture been so spellbound by hell?

Melvyn Bragg with
Valery Rees, senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science
Martin Palmer, Theologian
John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University


-------------------------------------------------------------
29 December 2005: Aeschylus' Oresteia - the birth of tragedy
-------------------------------------------------------------
The composer Richard Wagner recalled the visceral sensations of reading Aeschylus' great trilogy for the first time. "I could see the Oresteia with my mind's eye ... Nothing could equal the sublime emotion with which the Agamemnon inspired me; and to the last word of the Eumenides, I remained in an atmosphere so far removed from the present day that I have never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature."

Aeschylus' audience were all familiar with the tale of one man's return home from the Trojan War. Homer's Odyssey recounted Odysseus' perilous journey home, the forceful ejection of the suitors from his household and his reunion with wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Aeschylus had a very different tale of homecoming to tell in his Oresteia. Agamemnon arrives home from Troy to a murderous welcome from a vengeful wife and a cycle of atrocities unfolds in his household.

Why did Aeschylus make the family the subject of his bloody revenge tragedy? How did his trilogy make a contribution to the development of Athenian legal institutions? And why has the Oresteia had such a powerful hold over the modern imagination?

Melvyn Bragg with
Edith Hall, Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University
Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge
Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
05 January 2006: The Oath - guaranteeing law, government and the army in the Classical world
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The importance of oaths in the Classical world cannot be overstated. Kings, citizens, soldiers, litigants all swore oaths, inviting divine retribution if they proved false to their word. Oaths cemented peace treaties, they obliged the Athenian citizenry to protect their democracy, they guaranteed the loyalty of the Roman army to its Emperor and they underpinned the legal systems of Athens and Rome. And in Homer's epic poem The Iliad , it is a broken oath to settle the dispute between Menelaus and Paris that leads the Greeks to storm Troy in pursuit of Helen.

But how did the Classical world come to understand the oath? Why did oaths come to occupy such a central place in the political, social and legal life of the Athenian State? And what role did oath-making play in the expanding Roman Empire?

Melvyn Bragg with
Alan Sommerstein, Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham
Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge
Mary Beard, Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge


-------------------------------------------------------------------
12 January 2006: Prime Numbers - the building blocks of mathematics
-------------------------------------------------------------------
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17... I could continue but we may be here for some time. The sequence of numbers which we will be speaking about today quite literally goes on forever. Last month a team of researchers in Missouri successfully calculated the highest prime number - it has 9.1 million digits.

For nearly two and a half thousand years, since Euclid first described the prime numbers in his book Elements , mathematicians have struggled to write a rule to predict what comes next in the sequence. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler feared that it is "a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate." But others have been more hopeful ...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered a connection between prime numbers and a complex mathematical function called the 'zeta function'. Ever since, mathematicians have laboured to prove the existence of this connection and reveal the rules behind the elusive sequence.

What exactly are prime numbers and what secrets might they unlock about our understanding of atoms? What are the rules that may govern the prime sequence? And is it possible that the person who proves Riemann's Hypothesis may bring about the collapse of the world financial system?

Melvyn Bragg with
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Robin Wilson, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University and Gresham Professor of Geometry.
Jackie Stedall, Junior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at Queen's College, Oxford.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
19 January 2006: Relativism - the battle against transcendent knowledge
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion 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 own "ego"." Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given last June, showed that the issue of relativism is as contentious today as it was in Ancient Greece, when Plato took on the relativist stance of Protagoras.

Relativism is a school of philosophical thought which holds to the idea that there are no absolute truths. Instead, truth is situated within different frameworks of understanding that are governed by our history, culture and critical perspective.

Why has relativism so radically divided scholars and moral custodians over the centuries? How have its supporters answered to criticisms that it is inherently unethical? And if there are universal standards such as human rights, how do relativists defend culturally specific practices such as honour killings or female infanticide?

Melvyn Bragg with
Barry Smith, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Jonathan R閑, freelance philosopher
Kathleen Lennon, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26 January 2006: Seventeenth Century Print Culture - piety, populism and political protest
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Away ungodly Vulgars, far away,
Fly ye profane, that dare not view the day,
Nor speak to men but shadows, nor would hear
Of any news, but what seditious were,
Hateful and harmful and ever to the best,
Whispering their scandals ... "

In 1614 the poet and playwright George Chapman poured scorn on the popular appetite for printed news. However, his initial scorn did not stop him from turning his pen to satisfy the public's new found appetite for scandal.

From the advent of the printing press the number of books printed each year steadily increased, and so did literacy rates. With a growing and socially diverse readership appearing over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, printed texts reflected controversy in every area of politics, society and religion. In the advent of the Civil War, print was used as the ideological battleground by the competing forces of Crown and Parliament.

What sorts of printed texts were being produced? How widespread was literacy and who were the new consumers of print? Did print affect social change? And what role did print play in the momentous English Civil War?

Melvyn Bragg with
Kevin Sharpe, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London
Ann Hughes, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Keele
Joad Raymond, Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
02 February 2006: The Abbasid Caliphs - when Baghdad ruled the Muslim world
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Abbasid Caliphs were the dynastic rulers of the Islamic world between the middle of the eighth and the tenth centuries. They headed a Muslim empire that extended from Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Persia to Uzbekistan and the frontiers of India. But unlike previous conquerors, the Abbasid Caliphs presided over a multicultural empire where conversion was a relatively peaceful business.

As Vikings raided the shores of Britain, the Abbasids were developing sophisticated systems of government, administration and court etiquette. Their era saw the flowering of Arabic philosophy, mathematics and Persian literature. The Abbasids were responsible for patronising the translation of Classical Greek texts and transmitting them back to a Europe emerging from the Dark Ages.

So who were the Abbasid Caliphs and how did they come to power? What was their cultural significance? What factors can account for their decline and fall? And why do they represent a Golden Age of Islamic civilisation?

Melvyn Bragg with
Hugh Kennedy, Professor of History at the University of St Andrews
Robert Irwin, Senior Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge


-----------------------------------------------------------------
09 February 2006: Geoffrey Chaucer - the first Great English Poet
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Canterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sundry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Canterbury wolden ryde."

Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of fourteenth century English society in his Canterbury Tales . As each pilgrim takes his, or her, turn to tell their tale on the road to Canterbury, Chaucer brings to life the voices of a knight, a miller, a Wife of Bath and many more besides.

Chaucer was born the son of a London vintner, yet rose to high office in the court of Richard II. He travelled throughout France and Italy where he came into contact with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Machaut and Froissart. He translated Boethius, wrote dream poetry, a defence of women and composed the tragic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde.

So what do we know of the man who is called the Father of English Literature? How did he introduce the themes of continental writing to an English speaking audience? And why does his poetry still seem to speak so directly to us today?

Melvyn Bragg with
Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John's College, Oxford
Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge
Ardis Butterfield, Reader in English at University College London


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
16 February 2006: Human Evolution - from early hominids to Homo sapiens
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The story of human evolution stretches back over six million years. It is not the story of one species but of several diverse species, some of whom walked the Earth at the same time. From the earliest hominids to the early Homo sapiens, there was nothing inevitable about the course of human evolution.

But what conditions created the opportunity for diverse human species to thrive? What environmental factors led to the survival of one human species, but contributed to the extinction of so many others? What can the fossil record and the science of genetics tell us about our ancestors? How does the brain make modern man so unique in the natural world?

Melvyn Bragg with
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in the Galton Laboratory at University College London.
Fred Spoor, Professor of Evolutionary Anatomy at University College London.
Margaret Clegg, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Biological Anthropology at University College London .


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
23 February 2006: Catherine the Great - the Enlightened Despot of Eighteenth Century Russia
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery hangs perhaps the most well-known picture of Russia's most well-known ruler. Dimitri Levitsky's 1780 'Portrait of Catherine the Great in the Justice Temple' depicts Catherine in the temple burning poppies at an altar, symbolising her sacrifice of self-interest for Russia. Law books and the scales of justice are at her feet, highlighting her respectful promotion of the rule of law. But menacingly, in the background an eagle crouches, suggesting the means to use brutal power where necessary. This was one of many images that Catherine commissioned that demonstrated her skill at manipulation and reinvention.

For an obscure, small town, German princess her ambition was large - the transformation of a semi-barbaric country into a model of the ideals of the French 18th century Enlightenment. How far was Catherine able to lead her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe? Was she able to liberate the serfs? And should she be remembered as Russia's most civilised ruler or a megalomaniacal despot?

Melvyn Bragg with
Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics
Simon Dixon, Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds
Tony Lentin, Professor of History at the Open University


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
02 March 2006: Friendship - thinking philosophically about our close companions
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Greek and Roman times, friendship was thought of as being an essential constituent of both a good society and a good life; a good society because it lay at the heart of participative civic democracy; a good life because it nurtured wisdom and happiness. It is this period which gives us the texts on friendship which, to this day, are arguably the most important of their kind. Amongst their authors is Aristotle, who engaged in one of the great philosophical discussions on the subject. For Aristotle, friendship could fall into three categories: it could be based on utility, pleasure or goodness. In its latter state, Aristotle described it as being 'a single soul dwelling in two bodies'.

So how did the Ancients establish the parameters of the true nature of friendship in the literature and philosophy that followed? How have different forms of friendship helped or hindered creativity and intellectual pursuit? What has been the apparent relationship between friendship and power? And what of the darker aspects of friendship - jealousy, envy and exploitation?

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Mark Vernon, Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Syracuse University and London Metropolitan University
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London


----------------------------------------------------------------------
09 March 2006: Negative numbers - how they spread across civilizations
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers "darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple". Because of their dark and mysterious nature, Maseres concluded that negative numbers did not exist, as did his contemporary, William Friend. However, other mathematicians were braver. They took a leap into the unknown and decided that negative numbers could be used during calculations, as long as they had disappeared upon reaching the solution.

The history of negative numbers is one of stops and starts. The trailblazers were the Chinese who by 100 BC were able to solve simultaneous equations involving negative numbers. The Ancient Greeks rejected negative numbers as absurd, by 600 AD, the Indians had written the rules for the multiplication of negative numbers and 400 years later, Arabic mathematicians realised the importance of negative debt. But it wasn't until the Renaissance that European mathematicians finally began to accept and use these perplexing numbers.

Why were negative numbers considered with such suspicion? Why were they such an abstract concept? And how did they finally get accepted?

Melvyn Bragg with
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.
Colva Roney-Dougal, Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews.
Raymond Flood, Lecturer in Computing Studies and Mathematics at Kellogg College, Oxford.


----------------------------------------------------------------
16 March 2006: Don Quixote - Spanish romance and the first novel
----------------------------------------------------------------
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. However, the image belies the fantastically complex, beguiling and sophisticated story on which it is based. Four hundred years ago Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote was published in Madrid. It was an immediate success and recognised as one of the classic texts of Western Literature, revered by writers such as Sterne, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Melville.

Don Quixote tells the story of an unlikely hero. An impoverished country gentleman goes mad from reading too much and decides to put the world to rights by becoming a knight errant. The novel is based on his delusional chivalric ideals which bump against the humdrum of reality and the views of his more earth-bound companion, Sancho Panza.

So how has the book endured over the centuries? What was the relationship between Cervantes' work and the world of 17th century Spain in which he lived? In what ways was Don Quixote an interpretation of the age which hitherto had not been articulated? And can it live up to the claim that it was the first European novel?

Melvyn Bragg with
Barry Ife, Cervantes Professor Emeritus at King's College London
Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford
Jane Whetnall, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary, University of London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
23 March 2006: The Royal Society - the first club for experimental science
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
he natural philosopher Francis Bacon heralded the new age of science. The frontispiece to his 1620 edition of the Instauratio Magna depicted a galleon travelling between the metaphorical pillars of Hercules thought to lie at the Strait of Gibraltar and believed to mark the end of the known world. The image encapsulated Bacon's desire to sail beyond the limits set by Aristotle and the curriculum of the Ancient universities towards the new continent of science.

Bacon imagined practical scientists engaged in a collaborative effort to expand knowledge of the natural world. But it was not until the turbulence of the Civil War and Commonwealth years had passed that such a group of scientists would gather together in London for this purpose and form the Royal Society. Amongst its members were Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton, who explicitly rejected dogma and insisted on practical experimentation and observation.

How was the Royal Society formed against a backdrop of religious and political strife? What was it about the way this group of men worked that allowed each individual to flourish in his own field? And how successful was the Royal Society in disseminating the benefits of experimental science?

Melvyn Bragg with
Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster.
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.
Michael Hunter, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London .


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
30 March 2006: The Carolingian Renaissance - the revival of early medieval Western Europe
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor. According to the Frankish historian Einhard, Charlemagne would never have set foot in St Peter's that day if he had known that the Pope intended to crown him. But Charlemagne accepted his coronation with magnanimity. Regarded as the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, Charlemagne became a touchstone for legitimacy until the institution was brought to an end by Napoleon in 1806.

A Frankish King who held more territory in Western Europe than any man since the Roman Empire, Charlemagne's lands extended from the Atlantic to Vienna and from Northern Germany to Rome. His reign marked a period of enormous cultural and literary achievement. But at its foundation lay conquest, conversion at the point of a sword and a form of Christianity that was obsessed with sin, discipline and correction.

How did Charlemagne become the most powerful man in Western Europe and how did he finance his conquest? Why was he able to draw Europe's most impressive scholars to his court? How successful was he in his quest to reform his church and educate the clergy? And can the Carolingian period really be called a Renaissance?

Melvyn Bragg with
Matthew Innes, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London
Julia Smith, Edwards Professor of Medieval History at Glasgow University
Mary Garrison, Lecturer in History at the University of York


-----------------------------------------------------------
06 April 2006: Goethe - formation of a German cultural icon
-----------------------------------------------------------
'I had the great advantage of being born at a time that was ripe for earth-shaking events which continued throughout my long life, so that I witnessed the Seven Years War...the French Revolution, and the whole Napoleonic era down to the defeat of the hero and what followed after him. As a result I have attained completely different insights and conclusions than will ever be possible for people who are born now...'
Goethe's friend Johann Peter Eckermann recorded these remarks made by the great writer at the end of his life in a series of published recollections.

Goethe's life was indeed remarkable. At the age of twenty-five he was author of the first German international best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther. A year later, he was invited by the Grand Duke to join him at the Imperial Court as Privy Councillor where he oversaw commissions on war, roads and tax. He rode to war with the Prussian Army against the French and embarked on a remarkable creative friendship with Schiller which saw the establishment of a new form of German theatre.

What made Goethe the dominant cultural icon of his time and after? What links were there between his interest in politics and the arts? Why did he support Napoleon despite the French invasion of Weimar? How did his relationships with women define his work? And how was he able to transform the status of the German language?

Melvyn Bragg with
Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge
Sarah Colvin, Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh
W Daniel Wilson, Professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13 April 2006: The Oxford Movement - Anglicans and Catholics in the 19th century
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cardinal John Henry Newman is perhaps the most significant Christian theologian of the nineteenth century. He began as an evangelical, becoming a High Anglican before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845. His is the story of the diversity of Victorian religious life. But his path also marks the waning of the ideas of Protestant nationhood at the close of the eighteenth century and the reaffirmation of the Catholic tradition at the turn of the twentieth century.

For over a decade, between 1833 and 1845, Newman and his fellow travellers, the Oxford Movement, argued that the Church of England was a holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. They sought to assert the Catholic nature of their Church just as secularism, liberalism, non-conformism, and even Roman Catholicism, seemed to threaten her. They published tracts, preached and brought their social mission to some of the poorest urban parishes.

Why between 1833 and 1845 was the voice of reaction such a loud one? What was the Oxford Movement and what motivated them? How did they present their ideas to the Anglican clergy at large and what did the clergy make of them? And why did they leave such a powerful legacy for the Church of England, its character and its churches?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sheridan Gilley, Emeritus Reader in Theology at the University of Durham
Frances Knight, Senior Lecturer in Church History at the University of Wales, Lampeter
Simon Skinner, Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 April 2006: The Search for Immunisation - and the battle against smallpox
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how she had witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation in Constantinople. This involved the transfer of material from a smallpox postule into multiple cuts made in a vein. Lady Montagu had lost her brother to smallpox and was amazed that the Middle Eastern practice of inoculation rendered the fatal disease harmless. In Britain, the practice was unknown.

Inoculation was an early attempt at creating immunity to disease, but was later dismissed when Edward Jenner pioneered immunisation through vaccination in 1796. Vaccination was hailed a huge success. Napoleon described it as the greatest gift to mankind, but it met unexpected opposition after it was made compulsory in Britain in 1853.

How did a Gloucestershire country surgeon become known as the father of vaccination? Why did the British government introduce compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1853? What were the consequences of those who opposed it? And how was the disease finally eradicated?

Melvyn Bragg with
Nadja Durbach, Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah.
Chris Dye, Co-ordinator of the World Health Organisation's work on tuberculosis epidemiology.
Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Lecturer in the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
27 April 2006: The Great Exhibition - a wonder of the Victorian world
---------------------------------------------------------------------
'Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.' So wrote Charlotte Bronte in 1851 after visiting the Great Exhibition set in the vast Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park.

By the time the exhibition closed, one quarter of the entire British population had visited Crystal Palace, the first pre-fabricated building of its kind, to marvel at an extraordinary array of exhibits amongst which were: the biggest diamond in the world, a carriage drawn by kites, furniture made of coal, and a set of artificial teeth fitted with a swivel devise which allowed the user to yawn without displacing them.

Its impact was huge in terms of the development of British manufacturing, the burgeoning of a global consumer market, the development of museums and the international standing of Britain culturally and technologically.

How did the Exhibition crystallise a particular moment in early Victorian Britain? In what way did it capitalise on the dawn of mass travel and greater levels of international co-operation? How did fears of revolutionary Europe define the policing and organisation of the event? And how far, if at all, did the Great Exhibition go in blurring class distinctions?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter
Hermione Hobhouse, Architectural Historian and Writer
Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
04 May 2006: Astronomy and Empire - the link between colonial expansion and scientific discovery
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 as I think it possible for man to go'. Cook's ambition took him to the far reaches of the Pacific and led to astronomical observations which measured the distance of Venus to the Sun with unprecedented accuracy.

Cook's ambition was not just personal and astronomical. It represented the colonial ambition of the British Empire which was linked inextricably with science and trade. The Transit of Venus discoveries on Cook's voyage to Tahiti marked the beginning of a period of expansion by the British which relied on maritime navigation based on astronomical knowledge.

How had ancient trade routes set a precedent for colonial expansion? What was the link between astronomy and surveying? What tools did the 18th and 19th century astronomers have at their disposal? And how did the British justify their colonial ambition and scientific superiority?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Kristen Lippincott, former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
Allan Chapman, Historian of Science at the History Faculty at Oxford University.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11 May 2006: Faeries - supernatural creatures that are neither gods nor humans
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'They stole little Bridget for seven years long;
When she came down again her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back, between the night and morrow;
They thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves, watching till she wake.'

When the 19th century Anglo-Irish poet Richard Allingham wrote his poem The Fairies, he was replicating a belief about supernatural figures who steal children that stretched back to ancient Persian myths that date from 3000 BC. So universal is the terror of losing a child that the images of a lonely lost child and a mother who loses her child to fairies exist in civilisations everywhere.

Demon Figures and Fairies have undergone a series of transformations according to their historical context, but what remains constant is their supernatural power and their association with the very human concerns of marriage, death and loss.

In what way have fairies changed in guise and purpose throughout history? How did ancient fairy lore sit with the Christianity of the Middle Ages? How were fairies appropriated for the purpose of the 16th century witchcraft trials? And why did fairies obsess so many Victorian artists and writers?

Melvyn Bragg with
Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University and Secretary of the Folklore Society
Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor of English at Keble College, Oxford
Nicola Bown, Lecturer in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
18 May 2006: John Stuart Mill - one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th Century
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 19th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that, 'The true philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic'. He was one of the first thinkers to argue that a social theory must engage with ideas of culture and the internal life. He used Wordsworth to inform his social theory, he was a proto feminist and his treatise On Liberty is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

J S Mill believed that action was the natural articulation of thought. He battled throughout his life for social reform and individual freedom and was hugely influential in the extension of the vote. Few modern discussions on race, birth control, the state and human rights have not been influenced by Mill's theories.

How did Mill's utilitarian background shape his political ideas? Why did he think Romantic literature was significant to the rational structure of society? On what grounds did he argue for women's equality? And how did his notions of the individual become central to modern social theory?

Melvyn Bragg with
A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics at University College London
Alan Ryan, Professor of Politics at Oxford University


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 May 2006: Mathematics and Music - the science behind sound and composition
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote: 'Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting'. Mathematical structures have always provided the bare bones around which musicians compose music and have been vital to the very practical considerations of performance such as fingering and tempo.

But there is a more complex area in the relationship between maths and music which is to do with the physics of sound: how pitch is determined by force or weight; how the complex arrangement of notes in relation to each other produces a scale; and how frequency determines the harmonics of sound.

How were mathematical formulations used to create early music? Why do we in the West hear twelve notes in the octave when the Chinese hear fifty-three? What is the mathematical sequence that produces the so-called 'golden section'? And why was there a resurgence of the use of mathematics in composition in the twentieth century?

Melvyn Bragg with
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Robin Wilson, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University.
Ruth Tatlow, Lecturer in Music Theory at the University of Stockholm.


-------------------------------------------------------------
01 June 2006: The Heart - its anatomical and cultural history
-------------------------------------------------------------
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. 'The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them...from which all power proceeds. The King, in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic, the foundation whence all power, all grace doth flow'.

Harvey was probably wise to address the King in this manner, for what he laid out in his groundbreaking text challenged scientific wisdom that had gone unquestioned for centuries about the true function of the heart. Organs had been seen in a hierarchical structure with the heart as the pinnacle. But Harvey transformed the metaphor into something quite different: the heart as a mechanistic pumping device.

How had the Ancient Greeks and Islamic physicians understood the heart? What role did the bodily humours play in this understanding? Why has the heart always been seen as the seat of emotion and passion? And why was it that despite Harvey's discoveries about the heart and its function, this had limited implications for medical therapy and advancement?

Melvyn Bragg with
David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York.
Fay Bound Alberti, Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester.
Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08 June 2006: Uncle Tom's Cabin - the novel that started the American Civil War
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start of the American Civil War, he reportedly said to her: 'So you're the little lady whose book started this big war'. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, is credited as fuelling the cause to abolish slavery in the northern half of the United States in direct response to its continuation in the South.

The book deals with the harsh reality of slavery and the enduring power of Christian faith. It proved to be the bestselling novel of the 19th century, outselling the Bible in its first year of publication. Its fame spread internationally, Lord Palmerston praised it highly and Tolstoy reportedly said it was his favourite novel.

What impact did Uncle Tom's Cabin have on the abolitionist cause in America? How did the book create stereotypes about African Americans, many of which endure to this day? And what was its literary legacy?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier, Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Nottingham
Dr Sarah Meer, Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
Dr Clive Webb, Reader in American History at the University of Sussex


----------------------------------------
15 June 2006: Carbon - the basis of life
----------------------------------------
Carbon forms the basis of all organic life and has the amazing ability to bond with itself and a wide range of other elements, forming nearly 10 million known compounds. It is in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the shampoo we use and the petrol that fuels our cars. Because carbon has the largest range of subtle bonding capabilities, 95% of everything that exists in the universe is made up of carbon atoms that are stuck together.

It is an extraordinary element for many reasons: the carbon-nitrogen cycle provides some of the energy produced by the sun and the stars; it has the highest melting point of all the elements; and its different forms include one of the softest and one of the hardest substances known.

What gives carbon its great ability to bond with other atoms? What is the significance of the recent discovery of a new carbon molecule - the C60? What role does carbon play in the modern chemistry of nanotechnology? And how should we address the problem of our diminishing carbon energy sources?

Melvyn Bragg with
Harry Kroto, Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University.
Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.
Ken Teo, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Cambridge University.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
22 June 2006: The Spanish Inquisition - one of the most barbaric episodes in European history
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Inquisition has its roots in the Latin word 'inquisito' which means inquiry. The Romans used the inquisitorial process as a form of legal procedure employed in the search for evidence. Once Rome's religion changed to Christianity under Constantine, it retained the inquisitorial trial method but also developed brutal means of dealing with heretics who went against the doctrines of the new religion. Efforts to suppress religious freedom were initially ad hoc until the establishment of an Office of Inquisition in the Middle Ages, founded in response to the growing Catharist heresy in South West France.

The Spanish Inquisition set up in 1478 surpassed all Inquisitorial activity that had preceded it in terms of its reach and length. For 350 years under Papal Decree, Jews, then Muslims and Protestants were put through the Inquisitional Court and condemned to torture, imprisonment, exile and death.

How did the early origins of the Inquisition in Medieval Europe spread to Spain? What were the motivations behind the systematic persecution of Jews, Muslims and Protestants? And what finally brought about an end to the Spanish Inquisition 350 years after it had first been decreed?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Edwards, Research Fellow in Spanish at the University of Oxford
Alexander Murray, Emeritus Fellow in History at University College, Oxford
Michael Alpert, Emeritus Professor in Modern and Contemporary History of Spain at the University of Westminster


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
29 June 2006: Galaxies - extra-galactic nebulae, black holes, stars and dark matter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ours is about 100,000 light years across, is shaped like a fried egg and we travel inside it at approximately 220 kilometres per second. The nearest one to us is much smaller and is nicknamed the Sagittarius Dwarf. But the one down the road, called Andromeda, is just as large as ours and, in 10 billion years, we'll probably crash into it.

Galaxies - the vast islands in space of staggering beauty and even more staggering dimension. But galaxies are not simply there to adorn the universe, they house much of its visible matter and maintain the stars in a constant cycle of creation and destruction.

But why do galaxies exist, how have they evolved and what lies at the centre of a galaxy to make the stars dance round it at such colossal speeds?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.
Robert Kennicutt, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
06 July 2006: Pastoral Literature - the romantic idealisation of the countryside
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

An entreaty from Christopher Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd to His Love - thought by many to be the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. The traditions of pastoral poetry, literature and drama can be traced back to the third century BC and have principally offered a conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical, and although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they have often been penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets and playwrights.

But to what extent does pastoral literature represent a continuous yearning for a non-existent Golden Age of Innocence? How far did it evolve to reflect the social and political preoccupations of its times and what were the real meanings of its much used metaphors of town and country?

Melvyn Bragg with
Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge
Laurence Lerner, former Professor of English at the University of Sussex
Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham


-------------------------------------------------------
13 July 2006: Greek Comedy - sing as you revel and rout
-------------------------------------------------------
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. Unfortunately, the idealism of their perfect new City - christened (in 414BC) 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' - is corrupted. When The Birds was performed it featured a Chorus which represented twenty-four different species of birds; one of Aristophanes' other politically anthropomorphic plays, The Wasps, which was devised as an attack on the failures of Athenian democracy, featured a chorus of actors dressed in black and yellow stripes who swarmed the stage stinging each other. From the fifth century BC onwards, Greek Comedy fizzed and flourished, crossing boundaries of time and space, often informed by a savage political spleen.

But how did Greek comedy evolve? Why did its subsequent development differ so radically from that of Greek tragedy? To what extent did it reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of a nascent democracy? And can it be said to have left any lasting legacy?

Melvyn Bragg with
Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge
Edith Hall, Professor of Drama and Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London
Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28 September 2006: Alexander von Humboldt - the remarkable career of the Prussian naturalist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darwin described him as 'the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived'. Goethe declared that one learned more from an hour in his company than eight days of studying books and even Napoleon was reputed to be envious of his celebrity. We're talking about the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt. If you haven't heard of him you're not alone and yet, at the time of his death in 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in Europe. Add to this shipwrecks, homosexuality and Spanish American revolutionary politics and you have the ingredients for one of the more extraordinary lives lived in Europe (and elsewhere) in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But what is Humboldt's true position in the history of science? How did he lose the fame and celebrity he once enjoyed and why is he now, perhaps, more important than he has ever been?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jason Wilson, Professor of Latin American Literature at University College London.
Patricia Fara, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Jim Secord, Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.


---------------------------------------------------------------
05 October 2006: Averroes - the battle between faith and reason
---------------------------------------------------------------
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 deeper you go the more brutal and bizarre the punishments get, but the uppermost level of Hell is populated not with the mildest of Christian sinners, but with non-Christian writers and philosophers. It was the highest compliment Dante could pay to pagan thinkers in a Christian cosmos and in Canto Four he names them all. Aristotle is there with Socrates and Plato, Galen, Zeno and Seneca, but Dante ends the list with neither a Greek nor a Roman but 'with him who made that commentary vast, Averroes'. Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar who devoted his life to defending philosophy against the precepts of faith and in writing a commentary on Aristotle so influential that St Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as 'The Commentator'.

But why did an Islamic philosopher achieve such esteem in the mind of a Christian Saint, how did Averroes seek to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology and can he really be said to have sown the seeds of the Renaissance in Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge
Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London
Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------------
12 October 2006: The Diet of Worms - Luther's stand against the Church
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nestled on a bend of the River Rhine, in the South West corner of Germany, is the City of Worms. It抯 one of the oldest cities in central Europe; it still has its early city walls, its 11th century Romanesque cathedral and a 500-year-old printing industry, but in its centre is a statue of the monk, heretic and founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. In 1521 Luther came to Worms to explain his attacks on the Catholic Church to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and the gathered dignitaries of the German lands. What happened at that meeting, called the Diet of Worms, tore countries apart, set nation against nation, felled kings and plunged dynasties into suicidal bouts of infighting.

But why did Martin Luther risk execution to go to the Diet, what was at stake for the big players of medieval Europe and how did events at the Diet of Worms irrevocably change the history of Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University
David Bagchi, Lecturer in the History of Christian Thought at the University of Hull
Reverend Dr Charlotte Methuen, Lecturer in Reformation History at the University of Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
19 October 2006: The Needham Question - did China lay the foundations of modern science?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What do these things have in common? Fireworks, wood-block printing, canal lock-gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass. The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that, right through the Middle Ages, maintained a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up and even reverse as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution back across the globe.

Why did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.

But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China抯 early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with barely a ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge
Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at SOAS
Frances Wood, Head of Chinese Collections at the British Library


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
26 October 2006: The Encyclopedie - the great project of the Enlightenment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This week we explore the mammoth undertaking that was the Encyclop閐ie - one of its editors, D扐lembert, described its mission as giving an overview of knowledge, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human knowledge, observing where they separate or unite and even catching sight of the secret routes between them. It was a project that attracted some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment - Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot - striving to bring together all that was known of the world in one comprehensive encyclopedia. No subject was too great or too small, so while Voltaire wrote of "fantasie" and "elegance", Diderot rolled up his sleeves and got to grips with trades and crafts, even jam-making.

The resulting Encyclop閐ie was a bestseller - running to 28 volumes over more than 20 years, amidst censorship, bans, betrayals and reprieves. It even got them excited on this side of the Channel, with subscribers including Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson and Charles Burney.

So what drove these men to such lengths that they were prepared to risk ridicule, prison, even exile? How did the Encyclop閐ie embody the values of the Enlightenment? And what was its legacy - did it really fuel the French Revolution?

Melvyn Bragg with
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London
Caroline Warman, Fellow and Tutor in French at Jesus College, Oxford
David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
02 November 2006: The Poincare Conjecture - how a 19th century mathematician changed how we think about the shape of the universe
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The great French mathematician Henri Poincar?declared: "The scientist does not study mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living. And it is because simplicity, because grandeur, is beautiful that we preferably seek simple facts, sublime facts, and that we delight now to follow the majestic course of the stars."
Poincar閽s ground-breaking work in the 19th and early 20th century has indeed led us to the stars and the consideration of the shape of the universe itself. He is known as the father of topology - the study of the properties of shapes and how they can be deformed. His famous Conjecture in this field has been causing mathematicians sleepless nights ever since. He is also credited as the Father of Chaos Theory.

So how did this great polymath change the way we understand the world and indeed the universe? Why did his conjecture remain unproved for almost a century? And has it finally been cracked?

Melvyn Bragg with
June Barrow-Green, Lecturer in the History of Mathematics at the Open University
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
09 November 2006: Alexander Pope - "short is my date, but deathless my renown"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
His enemies - who were numerous - described him as a hunchbacked toad, twisted in body, twisted in mind, but Alexander Pope is without doubt one of the greatest poets of the English language. His acerbic wit and biting satire were the scourge of politicians, fellow writers and most especially the critics. He was the first Englishman to make a living from his pen, free from the shackles of patronage and flattery. Indeed, his sharp tongue meant he couldn抰 go out walking without his Great Dane and a pair of loaded pistols. He was a ferocious businessman too, striking tough deals with his publishers, ensuring he kept control of his work and was well-rewarded for it.

So how did Pope manage to transform himself from a crippled outsider into a major cultural and moral authority? How did he shape our ideas about what a "modern author" is? Does his work still have resonances today or is it too firmly embedded in the politics, cultural life and rivalries of the period?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Jim McLaverty, Professor of English at Keele University
Valerie Rumbold, Reader in English Literature at Birmingham University


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 November 2006: The Peasants' Revolt - a lasting legacy for popular uprising?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?" - the opening words of a rousing sermon, said to be by John Ball, which fires a broadside at the deeply hierarchical nature of fourteenth century England. Ball, along with Wat Tyler, was one of the principal leaders of the Peasants?Revolt - his sermon ends: "I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty". The subsequent events of June 1381 represent a pivotal and thrilling moment in England抯 history, characterised by murder and mayhem, beheadings and betrayal, a boy-King and his absent uncle, and a general riot of destruction and death. By most interpretations, the course of this sensational story threatened to undermine the very fabric of government as an awareness of deep injustice was awakened in the general populace.

But who were the rebels and how close did they really come to upending the status quo? And just how exaggerated are claims that the Peasants?Revolt laid the foundations of the long-standing English tradition of radical egalitarianism?

Melvyn Bragg with
Miri Rubin, Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London
Caroline Barron, Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London
Alastair Dunn, author


---------------------------------------------------------------------
23 November 2006: Altruism - how can evolutionary biology explain it?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist Auguste Comte and is derived from the Latin "alteri" or "the others". It describes an unselfish attention to the needs of others. Comte declared that man had a moral duty to "serve humanity, whose we are entirely." The idea of altruism is central to the main religions: Jesus declared "you shall love your neighbour as yourself" and Mohammed said "none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself". Buddhism too advocates "seeking for others the happiness one desires for oneself."

Philosophers throughout time have debated whether such benevolence towards others is rooted in our natural inclinations or is a virtue we must impose on our nature through duty, religious or otherwise. Then in 1859 Darwin抯 ideas about competition and natural selection exploded onto the scene. His theories outlined in the Origin of Species painted a world "red in tooth and claw" as every organism struggles for ascendancy.

So how does this square with altruism? If both mankind and the natural world are selfishly seeking to promote their own survival and advancement, how can we explain being kind to others, sometimes at our own expense? How have philosophical ideas about altruism responded to evolutionary theory? And paradoxically, is it possible that altruism can, in fact, be selfish?

Melvyn Bragg with
Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University
John Dupr? Professor of Philosophy of Science at Exeter University


------------------------------------------------------------
30 November 2006: The Speed of Light - a cosmic speed limit?
------------------------------------------------------------
This week we are discussing the speed of light. The medium most of you are listening by, radio waves, travel at the speed of light. And those of you closer to the radio transmitter will hear In Our Time fractionally before someone further away.
Here's another curious fact to ponder: For anybody listening who is aged 50, the light that reaches us from some of the stars in the galaxy left those stars before you were born.

Scientists and thinkers have been fascinated with the speed of light for millennia. Aristotle wrongly contended that the speed of light was infinite, but it was the 17th Century before serious attempts were made to measure its actual velocity - we now know that it抯 186,000 miles per second.

Then in 1905 Einstein抯 Special Theory of Relativity predicted that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This then has dramatic effects on the nature of space and time. It抯 been thought the speed of light is a constant in Nature, a kind of cosmic speed limit, now the scientists aren抰 so sure.

Melvyn Bragg with
John Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University
Iwan Morus, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University


------------------------------------------------------
07 December 2006: Anarchism - a question of authority?
------------------------------------------------------
Pierre Joseph Proudhon famously declared "property is theft". And perhaps more surprisingly that "Anarchy is order". Speaking in 1840, he was the first self-proclaimed anarchist. Anarchy comes from the Greek word "anarchos", meaning "without rulers", and the movement draws on the ideas of philosophers like William Godwin and John Locke. It is also prominent in Taoism, Buddhism and other religions. In Christianity, for example, St Paul said there is no authority except God.

The anarchist rejection of a ruling class inspired communist thinkers too. Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince and leading anarcho-communist, led this rousing cry in 1897: "Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life... Or the destruction of States and new life starting again.. on the principles of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement. The choice lies with you!" In the Spanish Civil War, anarchists embarked on the largest experiment to date in organising society along anarchist principles. Although it ultimately failed, it was not without successes along the way.

So why has anarchism become synonymous with chaos and disorder? What factors came together to make the 19th century and early 20th century the high point for its ideas? How has its philosophy influenced other movements from The Diggers and Ranters to communism, feminism and eco-warriors?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Keane, Professor of Politics at Westminster University
Ruth Kinna, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Loughborough University
Peter Marshall, philosopher and historian


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
14 December 2006: Indian Maths - laying the foundations for modern numerals and zero as a number
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mathematics from the Indian subcontinent has provided foundations for much of our modern thinking on the subject. They were thought to be the first to use zero as a number. Our modern numerals have their roots there too. And mathematicians in the area that is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were grappling with concepts such as infinity centuries before Europe got to grips with it. There抯 even a suggestion that Indian mathematicians discovered Pythagoras?theorem before Pythagoras.

Some of these advances have their basis in early religious texts which describe the geometry necessary for building falcon-shaped altars of precise dimensions. Astronomical calculations used to decide the dates of religious festivals also encouraged these mathematical developments.

So how were these advances passed on to the rest of the world? And why was the contribution of mathematicians from this area ignored by Europe for centuries?

Melvyn Bragg with
George Gheverghese Joseph, Honorary Reader in Mathematics Education at Manchester University
Colva Roney-Dougal, Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews
Dennis Almeida, Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Exeter University and the Open University


------------------------------------------------------------
21 December 2006: Hell - its representation through the ages
------------------------------------------------------------
A fiery vault beneath the earth or as Sartre put it, other people - it seems our ideas of hell are inevitably shaped by religious and cultural forces. For Homer and Virgil it抯 a place you can visit and return from, often a wiser person for it. With Christianity it抯 a one way journey and a just punishment for a sinful, unrepentant life.

Writers and painters like Dante and Hieronymus Bosch gave free rein to their imaginations, depicting a complex hierarchical world filled with the writhing bodies of tormented sinners. In the 20th century hell can be found on earth in portrayals of war and the Holocaust but also in the mind, particularly in the works of TS Eliot and Primo Levi.

So what is the purpose of hell and why is it found mainly in religions concerned with salvation? Why has hell proved so inspirational for artists through the ages, perhaps more so than heaven? And why do some ideas of hell require a Satan figure while others don't?

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture
Margaret Kean, Tutor and Fellow in English at St Hilda抯 College, Oxford
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28 December 2006: The Siege of Constantinople -the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Sultan Mehmet the Second rode into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire. After holding out for 53 days, the city had fallen. And as one contemporary witness described it: "The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm". It was the end of the classical world and the crowning of an Ottoman Empire that would last until 1922.

Constantinople was a city worth fighting for - its position as a bridge between Europe and Asia and its triangular shape with a deep water port made it ideal both for trade and defence. It was also rumoured to harbour great wealth. Whoever conquered it would reap rewards both material and political.

Earlier attempts to capture the city had largely failed - so why did the Ottomans succeed this time? What difference did the advances in weaponry such as cannons make in the outcome of the battle? And what effect did the fall of Constantinople have on the rest of the Christian world?

Melvyn Bragg with
Roger Crowley, author and historian
Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London
Colin Imber, formerly Reader in Turkish at Manchester University


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
01 January 2007: Borges - the life and work of Argentina's best loved short story writer
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, best known for his intriguing short stories that play with philosophical ideas, such as identity, reality and language. His work, which includes poetry, essays, and reviews of imaginary books, has had great influence on magical realism and literary theory. He viewed the realist novel as over-rated and deluded, revelling instead in fable and imaginary worlds. He declared "people think life is the thing but I prefer reading".

Translation formed an important part of his work, writing a Spanish language version of an Oscar Wilde story when aged around 9. He went on to introduce other key writers such as Faulkner and Kafka to Latin America, liberally making changes to the original work which went far beyond what was, strictly speaking, translation.

He lived most of his life in obscurity, finding recognition only in his sixties when he was awarded the International Publishers' Prize which he shared with Samuel Beckett. By this point he was blind but continued to write, composing poetry in his head and reciting from memory.

So how has Borges' work informed ideas about our experience of the world through language? How much was his writing shaped by his travel abroad and an unrequited love? And how has his legacy inspired the next generation of great Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa?

Melvyn Bragg with
Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford University
Efra韓 Kristal, Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Los Angeles
Evelyn Fishburn, Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University


-------------------------------------------------------------
11 January 2007: Mars - the search for life on the Red Planet
-------------------------------------------------------------
Named after the Roman god of war, Mars has been a source of continual fascination. It is one of our nearest neighbours in space, though it takes about a year to get there. It is very inhospitable with high winds racing across extremely cold deserts. But it is spectacular, with the highest volcano in the solar system and a giant chasm that dwarfs the Grand Canyon.

For centuries there has been fierce debate about whether there is life on Mars and from the 19th century it was even thought there might be a system of canals on the planet. This insatiable curiosity has been fuelled by writers like HG Wells and CS Lewis and countless sci-fi films about little green men.

So what do we know about Mars - its conditions, now and in the past? What is the evidence that there might be water and thus life on Mars? And when might we expect man to walk on its surface?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science at the Open University
Colin Pillinger, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Open University
Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University


-----------------------------------------------------------
18 January 2007: The Jesuits - the school masters of Europe
-----------------------------------------------------------
Today we抮e discussing the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order of priests who became known as "the school masters of Europe". Founded in the 16th century by the soldier Ignatius Loyola, they became a major force throughout the world, from China to South America. "Give us a boy and we will return you a man, a citizen of his country and a child of God", they declared. By the 17th century there were more than 500 schools established across Europe. Their ideas about a standardised curriculum and teaching became the basis for many education systems today.

They were also among the greatest patrons of art in early modern Europe, using murals and theatre to get their message across. However, their alleged influence over monarchs, their wealth and their adaptability to local customs abroad provoked suspicion, prompting their eventual suppression in the late 18th century. They were re-established in 1814 and now have more than twenty thousand members.

So why was education so important to the Jesuit movement? How much influence did they really have in the courts of Europe and in the colonies? And were they really at the heart of conspiracies to murder kings?

Melvyn Bragg with
Nigel Aston, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester
Simon Ditchfield, Reader in History at the University of York
Dame Olwen Hufton, Emeritus Fellow of Merton College, Oxford


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 January 2007: Archimedes - the Greek mathematician and his Eureka moments
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archimedes - the Greek mathematician reputed to have shouted "Eureka!" as he leapt from his bath having discovered the principles of floating bodies. Whatever the truth of the myths surrounding the man, he was certainly one of the world抯 great mathematicians. The practical application of his work in pulleys and levers created formidable weapons such as catapults and ship tilting systems, allowing his home city in Sicily to defend itself against the Romans. "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth", he declared.

But despite these triumphs, his true love remained maths for maths sake. Plutarch writes: "He placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life." His most important breakthroughs came in the field of geometry with his work on the areas and volumes of curved objects.

So how did this Greek mathematician in the third century BC arrive at a calculation of Pi? Did he really create a Death Ray to fight off invading ships? And what does a recently discovered manuscript reveal about his methods?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jackie Stedall, Junior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at Queen's College, Oxford
Serafina Cuomo, Reader in the History of Science at Imperial College London
George Phillips, Honorary Reader in Mathematics at St Andrews University


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
01 February 2007: Genghis Khan - founder of one of the world's largest ever land-based empires
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Genghis Khan - born Temujin in the 12th Century, he was cast out by his tribe when he was just a child and left to struggle for survival on the harsh Steppes of what is now Mongolia. From these humble beginnings he went on to become Genghis Khan, leader of the greatest continuous land-based empire the world has ever seen. His conquered territories stretched from the Caspian Sea to the borders of Manchuria, from the Siberian forest to what is now Afghanistan.

He was a charismatic commander and a shrewd military tactician. He was swift to promote those who served him well, ignoring race or creed, but vengeful to those who crossed him, killing every inhabitant of a resistant town, even the cats and dogs. Generally regarded as barbarians by their enemies, the Mongol armies were in fact disciplined and effective.

So how did Genghis create such an impressive fighting force? How did he draw together such diverse peoples to create a wealthy and successful Empire? And what was his legacy for the territories he conquered?

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Jackson, Professor of Medieval History at Keele University
Naomi Standen, Lecturer in Chinese History at Newcastle University
George Lane, Lecturer in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08 February 2007: Karl Popper - his ideas challenged our approach to the philosophy of science
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true.

Popper wrote: "The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance". He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.

He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called "pseudo sciences" which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the "murderer of Freud and Marx".

He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America.

So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are "true"?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Worrall, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics
Anthony O'Hear, Weston Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University
Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy at the LSE


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 February 2007: Heart of Darkness - one of the most influential novels of the 20th century
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written in 1899 by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness is a fascinating fin de siecle critique of colonialism and man's greed. Conrad draws on his own adventures for the plot. The story's main narrator is Marlow, a merchant seaman who pilots a steamship upriver in what is largely assumed to be the Belgian Congo. He finds the scramble for Africa well underway, with Europeans desperately competing to make their fortunes from ivory. Marlow's journey takes him into the interior of this mysterious silent continent. After a dangerous passage he finally arrives at the company's most remote trading station. It is reigned over by Kurtz, a white man who seems to have become a kind of God figure to the local people. Marlow is fascinated by him, preferring his messianic ravings to the petty treachery and mercenarism of the other white traders. On the journey back, Kurtz dies, whispering "the horror, the horror".

The interpretation of these words has perplexed readers ever since and the book has prompted a diverse range of readings from the psychoanalytical, that sees the novella as a metaphor for the journey into the subconscious, to feminist readings that examine how Conrad excludes female characters and focuses on the male consciousness.

Conrad wrote; "My task is, above all, to make you see". So did he intend this novella to provoke a discussion of the immorality and rapacity at the centre of colonialism? Was he questioning the hero's welcome given to those famous explorers who came back from "civilising" Africa, as they saw it? Or was he, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe put it, "guilty of preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"

Melvyn Bragg with
Susan Jones, Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford
Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Glasgow University


--------------------------------------------------------------
22 February 2007: William Wilberforce - the man and his legacy
--------------------------------------------------------------
Unusually this week In Our Time leaves the studio to mark the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Abolition Act. Melvyn Bragg will be exploring the life and legacy of William Wilberforce, visiting his memorial statue in Westminster Abbey and his birthplace in Hull and being shown the original copy of the Slave Trade Abolition Act in the House of Lords.

Amongst others, he will be talking to Wilberforce's biographer, the Rt Hon William Hague MP, historian Zoe Laidlaw from Royal Holloway, University of London, historian Anne Stott of Birkbeck College, London, Vanessa Salter, Keeper of Social History at the Wilberforce House Museum, Madge Dresser from the University of the West of England, Alison Lewis, guide on the William Wilberforce tour and the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
01 March 2007: The History of Optics - from telescopes to microscopes, a new way of seeing the world
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From telescopes to microscopes, from star-gazing to the intimacies of a magnified flea... today it's the history of optics. As Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens in the early 1600s, Kepler began to formulate a theory of optics. The new and improving instruments went hand in hand with radical new ideas about how we see as well as what we see. Spectacles allowed scholars to study long into the evening (and into old age), while giant telescopes, up to 100 feet long, led to the discovery of planets and attempts to map the universe.

The craze for optical trickery swept Europe with enthusiastic amateurs often providing valuable discoveries. But this new view of the world through a lens raised questions too - how much can you rely on the senses, on what you see? The further into space you can spy, the larger and more unmanageable the universe becomes. At the same time, the microscope was utterly transforming the world close at hand.

So how did these developments inform ideas of knowledge? If new methods of scientific observation support an empirical approach, what does this mean for divine, innate reason?

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science
Emily Winterburn, Curator of Astronomy at the National Maritime Museum


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08 March 2007: Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today it's the history of microbiology. We have more microbes in our bodies than we have human cells. We fear them as the cause of disease, yet are reliant on them for processes as diverse as water purification, pharmaceuticals, breadmaking and brewing. In the future, we may look to them to save the planet from environmental hazards as scientists exploit their ability to clean up pollution. For microbes are the great recyclers on the earth, processing everything - plants, animals and us. Without microbes life would grind to a halt.

How did we first discover these invisible masters of the universe? The development of microscopes in the 17th Century played a key part, but for a while science seemed stuck in this purely observational role. It is only when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch began to manipulate microbes in the lab two hundred years later that stunning advances were made. These breakthroughs led to an understanding of how microbes transform matter, spread disease and also prevent it with the development of antibiotics and vaccines.

So what do we know about how microbes operate? How can they contribute to environmental stability? How do advances in genetics in microbiology help our treatment of diseases like cancer?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Dupr? Professor of Philosophy of Science at Exeter University
Anne Glover, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at Aberdeen University
Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London


------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 March 2007: Epistolary Literature - great novels of fictional letters
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From its first appearance in the 17th Century with writers like Aphra Behn, epistolary fiction, fiction in the form of letters, reached its heyday in the 18th Century with works like Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. At over a million words, it's a contender for the longest English novel. It inspired impassioned followers such as Denis Diderot who described reading Richardson's novels like this: "In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways: I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience."

This sense of the reader gaining a privileged peek into the psychology of the protagonists was a key device of the epistolary form and essential to the development of the novel. Its emphasis on moral instruction also propelled the genre into literary respectability. These novels were a publishing sensation. Philosophers like Rousseau and Montesquieu took up the style, using it to convey their ideas on morality and society.

So why was letter writing so important to 18th Century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel? And why did epistolary literature fall out of favour?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Karen O払rien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick
Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham


---------------------------------------------
22 March 2007: Bismarck - the Iron Chancellor
---------------------------------------------
The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck -one of Europe's leading statesmen in the 19th Century and credited with the unification of Germany. He had a voracious ambition for his home state Prussia and made it indomitable among other states in the German Confederation. There was also the conflict that marked the beginning of his expansionist aims, a conflict that has gone down in history as a by-word for incomprehensible wars. The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, said: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it."

Whatever the causes of this conflict, it was just the beginning of Bismarck benefiting from regional power struggles. After vanquishing Austria and France, he led the new industrialising Germany, managing to remain in power for a further two decades. He founded one of Europe's first welfare states. But he was also known for his ruthless tactics, ignoring democratic institutions if they blocked his will and never afraid to dabble in dirty politics, leaking opportunely to the press and bribing journalists. Bismarck said: "The art of statesmanship is to steer a course on the stream of time".

So was the unification of Germany a carefully planned campaign or a series of unpredictable events that Bismarck made the most of? How did his encouragement of nationalism bear fruit in Nazi Germany? And what is his legacy today in contemporary Germany?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge
Christopher Clark, Reader in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge
Katharine Lerman, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at London Metropolitan University


---------------------------------------------------------------------
29 March 2007: Anaesthetics - from ether frolics to pain-free surgery
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Today it's the history of anaesthetics. Charles Darwin described the horrors of surgery before anaesthetics like this: "I attended the operating theatre and saw two very bad operations... but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year."
The suffering Darwin witnessed is almost unimaginable. In the 19th Century, a simple fracture often led to amputation carried out on a conscious patient, whose senses would be dulled only by brandy or perhaps some morphine. Many patients died of shock.

The properties of gases like nitrous oxide or "laughing gas" held out hope. The chemist Humphrey Davy in the 1790s described it as "highly pleasurable, thrilling". He also noticed his toothache disappeared. But he failed to apply his observations and it wasn't until the 1840s that there was a major breakthrough in anaesthetics, when an enterprising dentist in Boston managed to anaesthetize a patient with ether. It became known as the "Yankee Dodge". Ether had its drawbacks and the search for a suitable alternative continued until chloroform was tried in 1847, winning many admirers including Queen Victoria, the first English royal to use it.

So why did it take so long for inhaled gases to advance from providing merely recreational highs to providing an essential tool of humane surgery? What role did the development of the atomic bomb play in the development of anaesthetics? And how have society's changing attitudes to pain informed the debate?

Melvyn Bragg with
David Wilkinson, Consultant Anaesthetist at St Bartholomew抯 Hospital in London
Stephanie Snow, Research Associate at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine at the University of Manchester
Anne Hardy, Professor in the History of Modern Medicine at University College London


--------------------------------------------------------------------
05 April 2007: St Hilda - the life and times of the Abbess of Whitby
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The 7th century saint, Hilda, or Hild as she would have been known then, wielded great religious and political influence in a volatile era. The monasteries she led in the north of England were known for their literacy and learning and produced great future leaders, including 5 bishops. The remains of a later abbey still stand in Whitby on the site of the powerful monastery she headed there.

We gain most of our knowledge of Hilda's life from The Venerable Bede who wrote that she was 66 years in the world, living 33 years in the secular life and 33 dedicated to God. She was baptised alongside the king of Northumbria and with her royal connections, she was a formidable character. Bede writes: "Her prudence was so great that not only indifferent persons but even kings and princes asked and received her advice". Hild and her Abbey at Whitby hosted the Synod which decided when Easter would be celebrated, following a dispute between different traditions. Her achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that Christianity was still in its infancy in Northumbria.

So what contribution did she make to establishing Christianity in the north of England? How unusual was it for a woman to be such an important figure in the Church at the time? How did her double monastery of both men and women operate on a day-to-day basis? And how did she manage to convert a farmhand into England's first vernacular poet?

Melvyn Bragg with
John Blair, Fellow in History at The Queen's College, Oxford
Rosemary Cramp, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at Durham University
Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at Sheffield University


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12 April 2007: Opium Wars - a conflict that was to affect British-Chinese relations for generations
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century forced China to open its doors to trade with the western world. Thomas De Quincey describes the pleasures of opium like this: "Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle and mighty opium". The Chinese had banned opium in its various forms several times, citing concern for public morals, but the prohibition was ignored. The East India Company held a monopoly on the production of opium in British India. Private British traders continued to smuggle large quantities of opium into China. In this way, the opium trade became a way of balancing a trade deficit brought about by Britain's own addiction...to tea.

The Chinese protested against the flouting of the ban, even writing to Queen Victoria. But the British continued to trade, leading to a crackdown by Lin Tse-Hsu, a man appointed to be China's Opium Drugs Czar. He confiscated opium from the British traders and destroyed it. The British military response was severe, leading to the Nanking Treaty which opened up several of China's ports to foreign trade and gave Britain Hong Kong. The peace didn't last long and a Second Opium War followed. The Chinese fared little better in this conflict, which ended with another humiliating treaty.

So what were the main causes of the Opium Wars? What were the consequences for the Qing dynasty? And how did the punitive treaties affect future relations with Britain?

Melvyn Bragg with
Yangwen Zheng, Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Manchester
Lars Laamann, Research Fellow in Chinese History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Xun Zhou, Research Fellow in History at SOAS, University of London


------------------------------------------------------------------------
19 April 2007: Symmetry - the pattern at the heart of our physical world
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today we will be discussing symmetry, from the most perfect forms in nature, like the snowflake and the butterfly, to our perceptions of beauty in the human face. There's symmetry too in most of the laws that govern our physical world.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described symmetry as one of the greatest forms of beauty to be found in the mathematical sciences, while the French poet Paul Valery went further, declaring; "The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect".

The story of symmetry tracks an extraordinary shift from its role as an aesthetic model - found in the tiles in the Alhambra and Bach's compositions - to becoming a key tool to understanding how the physical world works. It provides a major breakthrough in mathematics with the development of group theory in the 19th century. And it is the unexpected breakdown of symmetry at sub-atomic level that is so tantalising for contemporary quantum physicists.

So why is symmetry so prevalent and appealing in both art and nature? How does symmetry enable us to grapple with monstrous numbers? And how might symmetry contribute to the elusive Theory of Everything?

Melvyn Bragg with
Fay Dowker, Reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26 April 2007: Greek and Roman Love Poetry - the pursuit of the Beloved from Sappho to Catullus
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greek and Roman love poetry - the source of many of the images and metaphors of love that have survived in literature through the centuries. We begin with the words of Sappho, known as the Tenth Muse and one of the great love poets of Ancient Greece:
"Love, bittersweet and inescapable,
creeps up on me and grabs me once again"

Such heartfelt imploring by Sappho and other (mainly male) writers led poetry away from the great epics of Homer and towards a very personal expression of emotion. These outpourings would have been sung at intimate gatherings, accompanied by the lyre and plenty of wine. The style fell out of fashion only to be revived first in Alexandria in the third Century BC and again by the Roman poets starting in the 50s BC. Catullus and his peers developed the form, employing powerful metaphors of war and slavery to express their devotion to their Beloved - as well as the ill treatment they invariably received at her hands!

So why did Greek poetry move away from heroic narratives and turn to love in the 6th Century BC? How did the Romans transform the genre? And what effect did the sexual politics of the day have on the form?

Melvyn Bragg with
Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London
Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London
Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
03 May 2007: Spinoza - believed that God and Nature were the same thing
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For the radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was the first man to have lived and died as a true atheist. For others, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he provides perhaps the most profound conception of God to be found in Western philosophy. He was bold enough to defy the thinking of his time, yet too modest to accept the fame of public office, despite numerous offers, and he died, along with Socrates and Seneca, one of the three great deaths in philosophy. His name is Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish philosopher from the 17th century, who can claim influence on both the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century and great minds of the 19th, notably Hegel, and his ideas were so radical that they could only be fully published after his death.

But what were the ideas that caused such controversy in Spinoza抯 lifetime, how did they influence the generations after, and can Spinoza really be seen as the first philosopher of the rational Enlightenment?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jonathan R閑, historian and philosopher and Visiting Professor at Roehampton University
Sarah Hutton, Professor of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
John Cottingham, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
10 May 2007: Victorian Pessimism - fear and loathing in the late 19th century
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 1 September 1851 the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon. Catching a ferry from Dover to Calais, he sat down and worked on a poem that would become emblematic of the fears and anxieties of a generation of Victorians. It is called Dover Beach and it finishes like this:

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night".

But was Arnold抯 pessimism shared by his fellow Victorians? What events and ideas were driving it on and were any of their concerns about race and religion, class and culture borne out as the 19th century drew to a close?

Melvyn Bragg with
Dinah Birch, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool
Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London
Peter Mandler, Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge


---------------------------------------------------------------
17 May 2007: Gravitational Waves - a new window on the universe
---------------------------------------------------------------
The rather un-poetically named star SN 2006gy is roughly 150 times the size of our sun. Last week it went supernova, creating the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded. But among the vast swathes of dust, gas and visible matter ejected into space, perhaps the most significant consequences were invisible - emanating out from the star like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. They are called Gravitational Waves, they run through the fabric of space-time itself and having been predicted by Einstein nearly 100 years ago we may be on the verge of proving they exist.

But what are gravitational waves, why are scientists trying to measure them and, if they succeed, what would a gravitational picture of the universe look like?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey
Carolin Crawford, Royal Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
Sheila Rowan, Professor in Experimental Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
24 May 2007: The Siege of Orleans - did Joan of Arc really rescue France?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles VI, a madman and the King of France, was dead and his kingdom hung in the balance. The French aristocracy were at war with each other, English soldiers occupied Paris and Charles?crown was up for grabs, contested by his own son, the Dauphin, and the seven-year-old King of England, Henry VI. But as the English army pressed down through France, the only thing that seemed to stand between the English King and the French Crown was the city of Orleans.

Looking back on the events that followed, the Duke of Bedford wrote to King Henry VI and declared "all things prospered for you till the time of the siege of Orleans, taken in hand God knoweth by what advice".

But what happened at the siege of Orleans, did Joan of Arc really rescue the city and how significant was the battle in changing the course of the 100 Years' War and the subsequent histories of England and France?

Melvyn Bragg with
Anne Curry, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton
Malcolm Vale, Fellow and Tutor in History at St John抯 College, Oxford
Matthew Bennett, Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst


----------------------------------------------------------------------
31 May 2007: Ockham's Razor - cutting medieval philosophy down to size
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In the small village of Ockham, near Woking in Surrey, stands a church. Made of grey stone, it has a pitched roof and an unassuming church tower but parts of it date back to the 13th century. This means they would have been standing when the village witnessed the birth of one of the greatest philosophers in Medieval Europe. His name was William and he became known as William of Ockham.

In the following 63 years William of Ockham managed to offend the Chancellor of Oxford University, disagree with his own ecclesiastical order and get excommunicated by the Pope; he also declared that the authority of rulers derives from the people they govern and was so brutally reductive with the theories of his colleagues that 慜ckham抯 Razor?remains a philosophical principle today.

But why is William of Ockham significant in the history of philosophy, how did his turbulent life fit within the political dramas of his time and to what extent do we see his ideas in the work of later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and even Martin Luther?

Melvyn Bragg with
Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford
Marilyn Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University
Richard Cross, Professor of Medieval Theology at Oriel College, Oxford


-------------------------------------------------------
07 June 2007: Siegfried Sassoon - the poet who survived
-------------------------------------------------------
In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches". The citation noted that he had braved "rifle and bomb fire" and that "owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in". The hero in question was the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. And yet a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he had fought so well.

A man of contradictions, Sassoon had a long and eventful life after surviving the trenches. It included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. And he continued to write poetry until his death, from cancer, in 1967.

But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon, what version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, homosexual cricket lover invent for himself and how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane ferocity?

Melvyn Bragg with
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London
Fran Brearton, Reader in English at the University of Belfast
Max Egremont, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
14 June 2007: Renaissance Astrology - "we are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Act I Scene II of King Lear, the ne抏r do well Edmund steps forward and rails at the weakness and cynicism of his fellow men:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, - often the surfeit
of our own behaviour, - we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity.

The focus of his attack is astrology and the credulity those who fall for its charms. But the idea that earthly life was ordained in the heavens ran deep in the Renaissance mind, offering succour to the lowliest farmhands and exercising the highest faculties of theologians and philosophers. When Elizabeth I wanted to establish a propitious date for her coronation, she asked her own astrologer, Dr John Dee.

But why did astrological ideas flourish in the period, how did astrologers interpret and influence the course of events and what new ideas eventually brought the astrological edifice tumbling down?

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London
Lauren Kassell, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
21 June 2007: Common Sense Philosophy - "There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the first century BC the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero claimed "There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it". Indeed, in the history of Western thought, philosophers have rarely been credited with having much common sense. In the 17th century Francis Bacon made the point rather poetically and wrote "Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high". Samuel Johnson picked up the theme with characteristic pugnacity in 1751 declaring that "the public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade." Philosophers, it seems, are as distinct from the common man as philosophy is from common sense.

But as Samuel Johnson scribbled his pithy knockdown in the Rambler magazine, the greatest philosophers in Britain were locked in a dispute about the very thing he denied them: Common Sense. It was a dispute about the nature of knowledge and the individuality of man, from which we derive the idea of common sense today.

But what is Common Sense Philosophy, who were its proponents and how did it emerge from the tides of scepticism, empiricism and rational enquiry running through 18th century Europe?

Melvyn Bragg with
AC Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University
Alexander Broadie, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
28 June 2007: The Permian-Triassic Boundary - when 95% of life was killed off
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
250 million years ago, in the Permian period of geological time, the most ferocious predators on earth were the Gorgonopsians. Up to ten feet in length, they had dog-like heads and huge sabre-like teeth. Mammals in appearance, their eyes were set in the side of their heads like reptiles. In fact, they looked like a cross between a lion and giant monitor lizard and were so ugly that they are named after the gorgons from Greek mythology - creatures that turned everything that saw them to stone.

Fortunately, you抣l never meet a gorgonopsian or any of their descendants because they went extinct at the end of the Permian period. And they weren抰 alone. Up to 95% of all life died with them. It抯 the greatest mass extinction the world has ever known and it marks what is called the Permian-Triassic boundary.

But what caused this catastrophic juncture in life, what evidence do we have for what happened and what do events like this tell us about the pattern and process of evolution itself?

Melvyn Bragg with
Richard Corfield, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University
Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol
Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds


---------------------------------------------------------------
05 July 2007: The Pilgrim Fathers - the original American dream
---------------------------------------------------------------
Every year on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans go home to their families and sit down to a meal. It抯 called Thanksgiving and it echoes a meal that took place nearly 400 years ago, when a group of English religious exiles sat down, after a brutal winter, to celebrate their first harvest in the New World. They celebrated it in company with the American Indians who had helped them to survive.

These settlers are called the Pilgrim Fathers and although they were not the first and certainly not the largest of the early settlements, they have retained a hold on the American imagination far out of proportion to their historical significance.

Melvyn Bragg with
Kathleen Burk, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London
Harry Bennett, Reader in History and Head of Humanities at the University of Plymouth
Tim Lockley, Associate Professor of History at the University of Warwick


----------------------------------------------------------------------
12 July 2007: The Trial of Madame Bovary - "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In January 1857 a man called Ernest Pinard stood up in a crowded courtroom and declared, "Art that observes no rule is no longer art; it is like a woman who disrobes completely. To impose the one rule of public decency on art is not to subjugate it but to honour it". Pinard was no grumbling hack, he was the imperial prosecutor of France, and facing him across the courtroom was the writer Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert抯 work had been declared "an affront to decent comportment and religious morality". It was a novel called Madame Bovary.

The trial became an argument about art and morality, about sex and marriage, it caused a sensation in Paris and forged Madame Bovary抯 reputation as one of the greatest novels in the French language.

Melvyn Bragg with
Andy Martin, Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge
Mary Orr, Professor of French at the University of Southampton
Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford


--------------------------------------------------
27 September 2007: Socrates - the man and the myth
--------------------------------------------------
Of all the names in ancient philosophy, Socrates is one to conjure with. Born in 469 BC into the golden age of the city of Athens, his impact is so profound that all the thinkers who went before are simply known as pre-Socratic.

In person Socrates was deliberately irritating, he was funny and he was rude; he didn抰 like democracy very much and spent quite a lot of time in shoe shops. He claimed he was on a mission from God to educate his fellow Athenians but has left us nothing in his own hand because he refused to write anything down.

Melvyn Bragg with
Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University
David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University
Paul Millett, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge


----------------------------------------------------
04 October 2007: Antimatter - where has it all gone?
----------------------------------------------------
The British physicist, Paul Dirac, once declared that "The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations". True to his word, he is responsible for one of the most beautiful. Formulated in 1928, it describes the behaviour of electrons and is called the Dirac equation.

But the Dirac equation is strange. For every question it gives two answers - one positive and one negative. From this its author concluded that for every electron there is an equal and opposite twin. He called this twin the anti-electron and so the concept of antimatter was born.

Since then physicists have created antimatter in the laboratory and we even use it in our hospitals, but antimatter remains fundamentally mysterious - there should be much more of it around but there isn抰 and to understand why may bring us closer to understanding events at the origin of the universe.

Melvyn Bragg with
Val Gibson, Reader in High Energy Physics at the University of Cambridge
Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Exeter College, University of Oxford
Ruth Gregory, Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Durham


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11 October 2007: Divine Right of Kings - "there's such divinity doth hedge a king"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Shakespeare抯 Macbeth, the character Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the king:

"How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures;
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers..."

The idea that a monarch could heal with his touch flowed from the idea that a king was sacred, appointed by God and above the judgement of earthly powers. It was called the Divine Right of Kings and it entered so powerfully into British culture during the 17th century that it shaped the pomp and circumstance of the Stuart monarchs, imbued the writing of Shakespeare and provoked the political thinking of Milton and Locke.

Melvyn Bragg with
Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London
Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
Clare Jackson, Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge


--------------------------------------------------------------
18 October 2007: The Arabian Nights - the art of story-telling
--------------------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time a wealthy merchant grew hot in the sun and sat down under a tree. Having eaten a date, he threw aside the stone, and immediately there appeared before him a Genie of enormous height, who, holding a drawn sword in his hand, approached him, and said, rise, that I may kill thee.

This is from The Arabian Nights, a collection of miraculous tales including Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor. Forged in the medieval Arab world, it became so popular in Europe that the 18th century Gothic writer Horace Walpole declared "Read Sinbad the Sailor抯 Voyages and you will grow sick of Aeneas".

Melvyn Bragg with
Robert Irwin, Senior Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex
Gerard van Gelder, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 October 2007: Taste - the good, the bad and the ugly in 18th century Britain
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the mid 18th century the social commentator, George Coleman, decried the great fashion of his time:

"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world... The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with Taste; the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with Taste; the painters paint with Taste; critics read with Taste; and in short, fiddlers, players, singers, dancers, and mechanics themselves, are all the sons and daughters of Taste. Yet in this amazing super-abundancy of Taste, few can say what it really is, or what the word itself signifies."

Melvyn Bragg with
Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter


----------------------------------------------
01 November 2007: Guilt - what is it good for?
----------------------------------------------
The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was once moved to comment:

"Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion."

Burke was touching upon a question that has animated theologians and philosophers for centuries. Is the feeling of guilt a vital part of our moral lives or can it do more harm than good? And how does guilt relate to reason and the workings of the mind? The answers seem to cut deeply into our understanding of what it is to be human.

Melvyn Bragg with
Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford
Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Oliver Davies, Professor of Christian Doctrine at King抯 College London


-------------------------------------------------------
08 November 2007: Avicenna - wine, women and philosophy
-------------------------------------------------------
In the city of Hamadan in Iran, right in the centre, there is a vast mausoleum dedicated to an Iranian national hero. Built in 1952, exactly 915 years after his death, it抯 a great conical tower with twelve supporting columns. It抯 dedicated not to a warrior or a king but to a philosopher and physician. His name is Ali Al Husayn Ibn-Sina, but he is also known as Avicenna and he is arguably the most important philosopher in the history of Islam.

Melvyn Bragg with
Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London
Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge
Nader El-Bizri, Affiliated Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 November 2007: The Discovery of Oxygen - feuds and revolutions at the birth of modern chemistry
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1772, the British chemist, Joseph Priestley, stood in front of the Royal Society and reported on his latest discovery:

"this air is of exalted nature... A candle burned in this air with an amazing strength of flame; and a bit of red hot wood crackled and burned with a prodigious rapidity. But to complete the proof of the superior quality of this air, I introduced a mouse into it; and in a quantity in which, had it been common air, it would have died in about a quarter of an hour; it lived at two different times, a whole hour, and was taken out quite vigorous."

Priestley had discovered Oxygen, or had he? Soon a brilliant French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, would claim the gas for himself. And so began a rancorous dispute between the British and French chemical establishments, undertaken as chemistry itself was in the process of being rediscovered, even revolutionised.

Melvyn Bragg with
Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
Jenny Uglow, Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick
Hasok Chang, Reader in Philosophy of Science at University College London


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
22 November 2007: The Prelude - the greatest poem in the English language?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The winter of 1798 was a terrible one across Europe, the coldest of the century. In the little town of Goslar, in Northern Germany, a young English poet watched the snow fall with a heavy heart. Feeling dreadfully homesick, he sat down to write a few consolatory verses about his childhood.

That poet was William Wordsworth and the poem he started writing was to be his masterpiece. It was The Prelude, an epic retelling of Wordsworth抯 own life and a foundation stone of English Romanticism.

Melvyn Bragg with
Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London
Stephen Gill, University Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford
Emma Mason, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick


----------------------------------------------------------------
29 November 2007: The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature
----------------------------------------------------------------
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 ... this is the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence, an infinite string of numbers named after, but not invented by, the 13th century Italian mathematician Fibonacci. It may seem like a piece of mathematical arcania, but the Fibonacci sequence is found to appear, time and time again, among the structures of the natural world and even in the products of human culture. From the Parthenon to pine cones, from the petals on a sunflower to the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, the Fibonacci sequence seems to be written into the world around us.

Melvyn Bragg with
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
Jackie Stedall, Junior Research Fellow in History of Mathematics at Queen抯 College, Oxford
Ron Knott, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Surrey


---------------------------------------------------------------------
06 December 2007: Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
---------------------------------------------------------------------
When lying mortally ill with cancer, the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane penned the following lines:

Cancer's a Funny Thing:
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked...

Haldane knew better than most that many cancers and many other diseases are caused by genetic mutation. Indeed, to understand mutation fully may explain the ravages of illness and even unlock the secrets of ageing. But mutation, so often a destroyer of life, is also its creator. Without it, the variety of living things on Earth simply wouldn抰 exist. It is, in the Darwinian view of life, the raw material of evolution.

Melvyn Bragg with
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in the Galton Laboratory, University College London
Adrian Woolfson, lectures in Medicine at Cambridge University
Linda Partridge, Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London


------------------------------------------------------------------------
13 December 2007: The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In modern day Iran, just down the road from the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, there is a picture carved into a rock. It depicts a king, triumphant on horseback, facing two defeated enemies. This is no pair of petty princes, they are Roman Emperors - Philip and Valerian - and the king towering above them is Shapur I of the Sassanian Empire. So complete was his victory that Shapur is reputed to have used Valerian as a footstool when mounting his horse.

Founded in 226 AD, the Sassanian Empire lasted over 400 years. It traded goods from Constantinople to Beijing, handed regular defeats to the Roman army and only fell to the Islamic conquests of the 7th century. It still influences Persian identity to this day.

Melvyn Bragg with
Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Curator of Iranian and Islamic Coins in the British Museum
James Howard-Johnston, University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 December 2007: The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 doctor, after examining his condition, prescribed a rooster. Being a hot and dry bird it was the perfect tonic for a cold and rheumatic old man.

This is medicine by the 4 humours - Black bile, Yellow bile, Blood and Phlegm. The idea that the body is a concoction of these four essential juices is one of the oldest on record. From the Ancient Greeks to the 19th century it explained disease, psychology, habit and personality. When we describe people as being choleric, sanguine or melancholic we are still using the language of the humours today. It also explains why, in the long and convoluted history of medical practice, pigeon livers were an aphrodisiac, blood letting was a form of heroism and why you really could be frightened to death.

Melvyn Bragg with
David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York
Vivian Nutton, Professor of the History of Medicine at University College London
Noga Arikha, Visiting Fellow at the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris


-----------------------------------------------------------
27 December 2007: The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God
-----------------------------------------------------------
"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."

Thus begins the Nicene Creed, a statement of essential faith spoken for over 1600 years in Christian Churches - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.

But what has become a universal statement was written for a very particular purpose - to defeat a 4th century theological heresy called Arianism and to establish that Jesus Christ was, indeed, God. The story of the Creed is in many ways the story of early Christianity - of delicate theology and robust politics. It changed the Church and it changed the Roman Empire, but that it has lasted for nearly 2000 years would seem extraordinary to those who created it.

Melvyn Bragg with
Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture
Caroline Humfress, Reader in History at Birkbeck College, University of London
Andrew Louth, Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at the University of Durham

// End of list

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help spread high culture - use http://thepiratebay.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

This document was created by Matheron on July 28th, 2008.
This document was last updated by Matheron on August 8th, 2008.