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A world-class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, philosophy, religion, science, literature, art and culture. On Thursdays, hear brand-new episodes hosted by Misha Glenny and leading academics. On Mondays, discover Misha's Archive Picks: classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, originally presented by Melvyn Bragg. Recent episodes have featured topics as wide-ranging as the Roman Arena, Handel's Messiah, John Keats, On Liberty and the Mariana Trench, bringing expert insight to pivotal events, influential thinkers and remarkable discoveries. Throughout the archive, you can hear discussions on historical figures such as Marie Antoinette, Nefertiti, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein; explore great works of literature such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the poetry of John Donne; uncover the stories behind cultural masterpieces including Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel; or journey from Jupiter and the death of stars, to the theories of Plato and Aristotle. In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas.
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Folge vom 09.06.2005The Scriblerus ClubMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Scriblerus Club. The 18th century 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?With John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English, University College London; Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English, Royal Holloway, University of London; Marcus Walsh, Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool.
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Folge vom 02.06.2005Renaissance MathsMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance 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 also assimilated. In its course it changed the way people understood numbers, movement, time, even nature itself and culminated in the calculus of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. 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?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, University of Oxford; Jackie Stedall, Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics, The Queen's College, Oxford.
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Folge vom 26.05.2005The French Revolution's reign of terrorMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss the reign of terror during the French Revolution. 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? With Mike Broers, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall; Rebecca Spang, Lecturer in Modern History at University College London; Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.
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Folge vom 19.05.2005BeautyMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss beauty and its qualities."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?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.