Alexander Pope (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Alexander Pope. His enemies – who were numerous - described him as a hunchbacked toad, twisted in ...
BBC Podcasts
CLASSIC POETRY in OUR TIME: "Milkshake"
The first in a series of videos highlighting the lyrical mastery of rap and pop songs in recent years. Starring Spencer Katz as Dr. Sophistication.
DrJones1935
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first ...
BBC Podcasts
The Later Romantics (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry, the tragedy and the idealism of the Later Romantics. There must have been something extraordinary about the ...
BBC Podcasts
Epic of Gilgamesh (In Our Time)
"He who saw the Deep" are the first words of the standard version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the subject of this discussion between Melvyn Bragg and his guests.
BBC Podcasts
The Mabinogion (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the eleven stories of Celtic mythology and Arthurian romance known as The Mabinogion, most of which were told and retold ...
BBC Podcasts
Yeats and Mysticism (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg explores the strange and mystical world of the poet W B Yeats. Celtic folklore, the Theosophical society, the Golden Dawn group, seances and a ...
BBC Podcasts
Milton (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the poet John Milton. If it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvell we wouldn't have his later works; ...
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Merlin (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the legendary wizard Merlin. He was sired by an incubus and born of a virgin; he was a prophet, a shape-shifter, a king-maker ...
BBC Podcasts
Dante's Inferno (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante's 'Inferno' - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. This famous ...
BBC Podcasts
William Morris (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of William Morris, known in his lifetime for his poetry and then his contribution to the Arts and Crafts movement, and ...
BBC Podcasts
Cast Away: Poems For Our Time | A Reading by Naomi Shihab Nye
Young People's Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye reads from her new collection of poems, Cast Away. In Cast Away: Poems For Our Time, Naomi Shihab Nye ...
HarperCollins Studio
Christopher Marlowe (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Christopher Marlowe. In the prologue to The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say:"I count religion but a ...
BBC Podcasts
Plato's Republic (In Our Time)
Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, discussed here by Melvyn Bragg and guests. Writing in c380BC, Plato ...
BBC Podcasts
Rudyard Kipling (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, ...
BBC Podcasts
The Philosophy of Love (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of love. In Plato's Symposium a character called Aristophanes tells a story about Love. He says that once, near ...
BBC Podcasts
Jorge Luis Borges (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is one of the greatest writers of the ...
BBC Podcasts
The Samurai (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests Gregory Irvine, Nicola Liscutin and Angus Lockyer discuss the history of the Samurai and the role of their myth in Japanese national ...
BBC Podcasts
The Odyssey (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Odyssey by Homer, often claimed as the great founding work of Western Literature. It's an epic that has entertained its ...
BBC Podcasts
The Greek Myths (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek myths from Achilles to Zeus. Are you a touch narcissistic? Do you have the body of an Adonis? Are you willing to ...
BBC Podcasts
Jane Eyre (In Our Time)
The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gateshead Hall and ...
BBC Podcasts
Wuthering Heights (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name 'Ellis Bell' just a year before her death.
BBC Podcasts
Chaucer (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Geoffrey Chaucer, often called the father of English literature."In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my ...
BBC Podcasts
The Augustan Age (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards and Duncan Kennedy discuss the political regime and cultural influence of the Roman Emperor ...
BBC Podcasts
The Medieval University (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the medieval universities.In the 11th and 12th centuries a new type of institution started to appear in the major cities of ...
BBC Podcasts
Literary Modernism (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism. In James Joyce's Ulysses he writes, “Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man may lay down ...
BBC Podcasts
Chekhov (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov. Born in 1860, Chekhov trained as a doctor and for most of his adult life divided his time ...
BBC Podcasts
The Waste Land and Modernity (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests, including Steve Connor and Lawrence Rainey, discuss TS Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land and its ambivalence to the modern ...
BBC Podcasts
Aphra Behn (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aphra Behn (1640-1689), who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction under the Restoration.
BBC Podcasts
Beowulf (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an ...
BBC Podcasts
The Aeneid (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Aeneid'. Out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan wars came a man heading West, his father on his back and his ...
BBC Podcasts
The Charge of the Light Brigade (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Charge of the Light - an event of no military significance that has become iconic in the British historical imagination.
BBC Podcasts
Constantinople Siege and Fall (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Constantinople in 1453. When Sultan Mehmet the Second rode into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in ...
BBC Podcasts
Cicero (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas developed by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) to support and reinvigorate the Roman Republic when, as it ...
BBC Podcasts
Sparta (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall and Angie Hobbs discuss Sparta, the militaristic Ancient Greek city-state, and the political ideas it spawned.
BBC Podcasts
Shakespeare's Work (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of William Shakespeare. He was nominated as the Man of the last Millennium and he steps into this one - on film, on ...
BBC Podcasts
Henrik Ibsen (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great Norwegian playwright and poet, best known for his middle class tragedies such as The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, ...
BBC Podcasts
The Phoenicians (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Phoenicians. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a people from the Levant who were accomplished sailors and ...
BBC Podcasts
The Gin Craze (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the craze for gin in Britain in the mid 18th Century and the attempts to control it. With the arrival of William of Orange, it became ...
BBC Podcasts
The Celts (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Celts. Around 400 BC a great swathe of Western Europe from Ireland to Southern Russia was dominated by one ...
BBC Podcasts
Utilitarianism (In Our Time)
A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain.
BBC Podcasts
Psychoanalysis and Literature (In Our Time)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me ...
BBC Podcasts
