Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.

With

Jenny Uglow

Rosemary Sweet

And

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (Phoenix, 2002)

Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021)

Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (British Museum Press, 1996)

Berg Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Iris Moon, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024)

Rosemary Sweet, Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (Faber and Faber, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work 'Parallel Lives' which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world. Plutarch was clear that he was writing lives, not histories, and he wrote these very focussed accounts in pairs to contrast and compare the characters of famous Greeks and Romans, side by side, along with their virtues and vices. This focus on the inner lives of great men was to fascinate Shakespeare, who drew on Plutarch considerably when writing his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. While few followed his approach of setting lives in pairs, Plutarch's work was to influence countless biographers especially from the Enlightenment onwards.

With

Judith Mossman

Andrew Erskine

And

Paul Cartledge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Mark Beck (ed.), A Companion to Plutarch (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)

Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6

Raphaëla Dubreuil, Theater and Politics in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Brill, 2023)

Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Noreen Humble (ed.), Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (Classical Press of Wales, 2010)

Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (Yale University Press, 2002)

Hugh Liebert, Plutarch's Politics: Between City and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales, 2002)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Greek Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Hellenistic Lives (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2023)

Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2011)

Plutarch (trans. Richard Talbert), On Sparta (Penguin, 2005)

Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), The Rise of Rome (Penguin, 2013)

Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), Rome in Crisis: Nine Lives (Penguin, 2010)

Plutarch (trans. Rex Warner), The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives (Penguin, 2006)

Plutarch (trans. Thomas North, ed. Judith Mossman), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Wordsworth, 1998)

Geert Roskam, Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

D. A. Russell, Plutarch (2nd ed., Bristol Classical Press, 2001)

Philip A. Stadter, Plutarch and his Roman Readers (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Frances B. Titchener and Alexei V. Zadorojnyi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. Nizami Ganjavi (c1141–1209) is was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan and his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian-speaking lands and beyond. Nizami is best known for his Khamsa, a set of five epic poems that contains a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Khosrow II (c570-628) and the Christian princess Shirin (unknown-628) and the legend of Layla and Majnun. Not only did he write romances: his poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany and the life of Alexander the Great.

With

Christine van Ruymbeke

Narguess Farzad

And

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Laurence Binyon, The Poems of Nizami (The Studio Limited, 1928)

Barbara Brend, Treasures of Herat: Two Manuscripts of the Khamsah of Nizami in the British Library (Gingko, 2020)

Barbara Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, 1995)

J-C. Burgel and C. van Ruymbeke, A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (Leiden University Press, 2011)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. P.J. Chelkowski), Mirror of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Dick Davis), Layli and Majnun (Penguin Books, 2021)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of Layla and Majnun (first published 1966: Omega Publications, 1997)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of the Seven Princesses (Bruno Cassirer Ltd, 1976)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Julie Scott Meisami, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Colin Turner), Layla and Majnun (Blake Publishing, 1997)

Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance (Brill, 2003)

Kamran Talattof, Jerome W. Clinton, and K. Allin Luther, The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (Palgrave, 2000)

C. van Ruymbeke, Science and Poetry in Medieval Persia: The Botany of Nizami's Khamsa (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

With

Guido Bonsaver

Jennifer Burns

And

Beatrice Sica

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Elio Baldi, The Author in Criticism: Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020)

Elio Baldi and Cecilia Schwartz, Circulation, Translation and Reception Across Borders: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Around the World (Routledge, 2024)

Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially the chapter ‘Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco: Postmodern Masters’

James Butler, ‘Infinite Artichoke’ (London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 12, 15 June 2023)

Italo Calvino (trans. Martin McLaughlin), The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (first published 1947; Penguin Classics, 2009)

Italo Calvino (trans. Mikki Taylor), The Baron in the Trees (first published 1957; Vintage Classics, 2021)

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo (first published 1963; Vintage Classics, 2023)

Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver and Ann Goldstein), Difficult Loves and Other Stories (first published 1970; Vintage Classics, 2018)

Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), Invisible Cities (first published 1972; Vintage Classics, 1997)

Italo Calvino (trans. Patrick Creagh), The Uses of Literature (first published 1980; Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Italo Calvino (trans. Geoffrey Brock), Six Memos for the Next Millennium (first published 1988; Penguin Classics, 2016)

Italo Calvino (trans. Tim Parks), The Road to San Giovanni (first published 1990; HMH Books, 2014)

Italo Calvino (trans. Ann Goldstein), The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays (Mariner Books Classics, 2023)

Kathryn Hume, Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos (Clarendon Press, 1992)

Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press, 1998)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who, according to the French philosopher Simone Weil, wrote ‘the most beautiful poem in the world’. Herbert gave his poems on his relationship with God to a friend, to be published after his death if they offered comfort to any 'dejected pour soul' but otherwise be burned. They became so popular across the range of Christians in the 17th Century that they were printed several times, somehow uniting those who disliked each other but found a common admiration for Herbert; Charles I read them before his execution, as did his enemies. Herbert also wrote poems prolifically and brilliantly in Latin and these he shared during his lifetime both when he worked as orator at Cambridge University and as a parish priest in Bemerton near Salisbury. He went on to influence poets from Coleridge to Heaney and, in parish churches today, congregations regularly sing his poems set to music as hymns.

With

Helen Wilcox

Victoria Moul

And

Simon Jackson

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Cornell University Press, 1977)

Thomas M. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Penguin, 2014)

George Herbert (eds. John Drury and Victoria Moul), The Complete Poetry (Penguin, 2015)

George Herbert (ed. Helen Wilcox), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Simon Jackson, George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (first published by Chatto and Windus, 1954; Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New York, 1981)

Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Harvard University Press, 1975)

James Boyd White, This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert (University of Michigan Press, 1995)

Helen Wilcox (ed.), George Herbert. 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction. When Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women, she only did so as her publisher refused to publish her father's book otherwise and as she hoped it would make money. It made Alcott's fortune. This coming of age story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, each overcoming their own moral flaws, has delighted generations of readers and was so popular from the start that Alcott wrote the second part in 1869 and further sequels and spin-offs in the coming years. Her work has inspired countless directors, composers and authors to make many reimagined versions ever since, with the sisters played by film actors such as Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson.

With

Bridget Bennett

Erin Forbes

And

Tom Wright

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Louisa May Alcott (ed. Madeline B Stern), Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (William Morrow & Co, 1997)

Kate Block, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley, March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women (Library of America, 2019)

Anne Boyd Rioux, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)

Azelina Flint, The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti (Routledge, 2021)

Robert Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007)

Bethany C. Morrow, So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix (St Martin’s Press, 2021)

Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (eds.), Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott (Grey House Publishing Inc, 2016)

Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (Picador, 2010)

Daniel Shealy (ed.), Little Women at 150 (University of Mississippi Press, 2022)

Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago, 2009)

Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson (eds.), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave, 2016), especially “The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls” by Hilary Emmett

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (first published 1950; Northeastern University Press, 1999)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills and that he bred the pedigree dogs of his prose to feed the cats of his poetry. Yet it’s for his prose that he’s most famous today, including 'I Claudius', his brilliant account of the debauchery of Imperial Rome, and 'Goodbye to All That', the unforgettable memoir of his early life including the time during the First World War when he was so badly wounded at the Somme that The Times listed him as dead.

With

Paul O’Prey

Fran Brearton

And

Bob Davis

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Robert Graves (ed. Paul O'Prey), In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914-1946 (Hutchinson, 1982)

Robert Graves (ed. Paul O'Prey), Between Moon and Moon: Selected letters of Robert Graves 1946-1972 (Hutchinson, 1984)

Robert Graves (ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward), The Complete Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2003)

Robert Graves, I, Claudius (republished by Penguin, 2006)

Robert Graves, King Jesus (republished by Penguin, 2011)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess (republished by Faber, 1999)

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (republished by Penguin, 2017)

Robert Graves (ed. Michael Longley), Selected Poems (Faber, 2013)

Robert Graves (ed. Fran Brearton, intro. Andrew Motion), Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography: The Original Edition (first published 1929; Penguin Classics, 2014)

William Graves, Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves (Pimlico, 2001)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 (Macmillan, 1986, vol. 1 of the biography)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (Viking, 1990, vol. 2 of the biography)

Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940-1985 (Orion, 1995, vol. 3 of the biography)

Miranda Seymour: Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (Henry Holt & Co, 1995)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the great French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) in London, initially in 1870 and then from 1899. He spent his first visit in poverty, escaping from war in France, while by the second he had become so commercially successful that he stayed at the Savoy Hotel. There, from his balcony, he began a series of almost a hundred paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city at that time, with fog and smoke almost obscuring the bridges, boats and Houses of Parliament. The pollution was terrible for health but the diffraction through the sooty droplets offered an ever-changing light that captivated Monet, and he was to paint the Thames more than he did his water lilies or haystacks or Rouen Cathedral. On his return to France, Monet appeared to have a new confidence to explore an art that was more abstract than impressionist.

With

Karen Serres

Frances Fowle

And

Jackie Wullschläger

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Caroline Corbeau Parsons, Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904 (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Frances Fowle, Monet and French Landscape: Vétheuil and Normandy (National Galleries of Scotland, 2007), especially the chapter ‘Making Money out of Monet: Marketing Monet in Britain 1870-1905’

Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (Harry N. Abrams, 1983)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Yale University Press, 1990)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century (Yale University Press, 1998)

Katharine A. Lochnan, Turner, Whistler, Monet (Tate Publishing, 2005)

Nicholas Reed, Monet and the Thames: Paintings and Modern Views of Monet’s London (Lilburne Press, 1998)

Grace Seiberling, Monet in London (High Museum of Art, 1988)

Karen Serres, Frances Fowle and Jennifer A. Thompson, Monet and London: Views of the Thames (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2024 – catalogue to accompany Courtauld Gallery exhibition)

Charles Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective (Random House, 1985)

Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: The Triumph of Impressionism (first published 1996; Taschen, 2022)

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" (1749) by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), one of the most influential of the early English novels and a favourite of Dickens. Coleridge wrote that it had one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned'. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays that were so painful for their targets in government that, from then until the 1960s, plays required approval before being staged; seeking other ways to make a living, Fielding turned to law and to fiction. 'Tom Jones' is one of the great comic novels, with the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest raconteur. While other authors might present Tom as a rake and a libertine, Fielding makes him the hero for his fundamental good nature, so offering a caution not to judge anyone too soon, if ever.

With

Judith Hawley

Henry Power

And

Charlotte Roberts

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge, 1989)

J. M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2012)

J.A. Downie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Henry Fielding (ed. John Bender and Simon Stern), The History of Tom Jones (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Henry Fielding (ed. Tom Keymer), The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin Classics, 1996)

Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Wiley Blackwell, 2000)

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (first published 1972; Routledge, 2021)

Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the greatest poet of his age', Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt's poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.

With

Brian Cummings

Susan Brigden

And

Laura Ashe

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Routledge, 2016)

Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (Faber, 2012)

Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy (Short Books, 2011)

Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Patricia Thomson (ed.), Thomas Wyatt: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1995)

Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Thomas Wyatt (ed. R. A. Rebholz), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1978)