In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated British poet of World War One. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) had published only a handful of poems when he was killed a week before the end of the war, but in later decades he became seen as the essential British war poet. His works such as Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est went on to be inseparable from the memory of the war and its futility. However, while Owen is best known for his poetry of the trenches, his letters offer a more nuanced insight into him such as his pride in being an officer in charge of others and in being a soldier who fought alongside his comrades.WithJane Potter Reader in The School of Arts at Oxford Brookes UniversityFran Brearton Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University BelfastAndGuy Cuthbertson Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest changes in the history of life on Earth. Around 400 million years ago some of our ancestors, the fish, started to become a little more like humans. At the swampy margins between land and water, some fish were turning their fins into limbs, their swim bladders into lungs and developed necks and eventually they became tetrapods, the group to which we and all animals with backbones and limbs belong. After millions of years of this transition, these tetrapod descendants of fish were now ready to leave the water for a new life of walking on land, and with that came an explosion in the diversity of life on Earth.The image above is a representation of Tiktaalik Roseae, a fish with some features of a tetrapod but not one yet, based on a fossil collected in the Canadian Arctic.WithEmily Rayfield Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of BristolMichael Coates Chair and Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of ChicagoAnd Steve Brusatte Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of EdinburghProducer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet. With Tamar Garb Professor of History of Art at University College LondonLois Oliver Curator at the Royal Academy and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Notre Dame London.AndClaire Moran Reader in French at Queen's University BelfastProducer: Simon Tillotson