Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, when Keats had been stung by some reviews labelling him an uncouth Cockney who should go back to his former work as an apothecary, work he had left for poetry only two years before with the encouragement of enthusiastic friends. Just over two years later, Keats was dead in Rome from tuberculosis, before his work found fame, though some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.

With

Fiona Stafford

Nicholas Roe

And

Meiko O’Halloran,

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (eds), John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford University Press, 1967)

John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2020)

John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Oxford 21st-Century Authors (University Press, 2017)

John Keats (ed. John Barnard), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007)

John Keats (ed. John Barnard), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2nd edition, 1977)

John Keats (ed. Jeffrey N. Cox), Keats’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)

Carol Kyros Walker, Walking North with Keats (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Richard Marggraf Turley (ed.), Keats’s Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Lucasta Miller, Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, 2021)

Michael O’Neill (ed.), John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974)

Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012)

Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

With

Emma Smith

Lucy Munro

And

Laurence Publicover

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018)

Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999)

Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997)

William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024)

William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition (Norton, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Journalist, author and historian Misha Glenny presents his first edition of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg who retired from this role last summer. Misha and his guests discuss the landmark work On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, published in 1859 and the increasing recognition for his wife Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution. The subject matter of the essay is ‘civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ and it argues that the sole end for which mankind may interfere with the liberty of action of anyone is self-protection and even then only to prevent harm to others. This essay became enormously popular and a foundational text for liberalism.

With

Helen McCabe

Mark Philp

And

Piers Norris Turner

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed.), Harriet Taylor Mill, Complete Works (Indiana University Press, 1998)

Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868 (University of Toronto Press, 1992)

Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021)

Helen McCabe, Harriet Taylor Mill (Cambridge, 2023)

Piers Norris Turner, ‘The Arguments of On Liberty: Mill’s Institutional Designs’ (Nineteenth-Century Prose 47 (1), 2020)

Piers Norris Turner et al (eds.), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, On Liberty with Related Writings (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming 2026)

Mark Philp (ed.), John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen (eds.), John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Utilitarianism and other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Palgrave MacMillan, 1998)

Ben Saunders, ‘Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle’ (Mind 125/500, 2016)

John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge, 2006)

William Stafford, John Stuart Mill (Red Globe Press, 1998)

C. L. Ten (ed.), Mill: On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds.), John Stuart Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

With

Rhiannon Purdie

Steve Boardman

And

Michael Brown

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

John Barbour (ed. A.A.M. Duncan), The Bruce (Canongate Classics, 2007)

G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1988)

Stephen Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (Tuckwell Press, 1996)

Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (eds.), Barbour's Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland (D.S. Brewer, 2015)

Michael Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280-1460 (Routledge, 2013)

Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock, Ian Brown and Susan Manning (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), (Edinburgh University Press 2006)

Robert Crawford, Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature: Vol 1, Medieval Literature, 700-1450 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), especially 'Before the Makars: Older Scots literature under the early Stewart Kings' by Rhiannon Purdie

Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306-1328 (Tuckwell Press, 2001)

Michael Penman, Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots (Yale University Press, 2014)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession.

In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied arts such as architecture and design.

The movement was characterized by Klimt’s stylised paintings, richly decorated with gold leaf, and the art nouveau buildings that began to appear in the city, most notably the Secession Building, which housed influential exhibitions of avant-garde art and was a prototype of the modern art gallery. The Secessionists themselves were pioneers in their philosophy and way of life, aiming to immerse audiences in unified artistic experiences that brought together visual arts, design, and architecture.

 With:

Mark Berry, Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway, University of London

Leslie Topp, Professor Emerita in History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London

And

Diane Silverthorne, art historian and 'Vienna 1900' scholar

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Mark Berry, Arnold Schoenberg: Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2018)

Gemma Blackshaw, Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (National Gallery Company, 2013)

Elizabeth Clegg, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1920 (Yale University Press, 2006)

Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2023)

Stephen Downes, Gustav Mahler (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford University Press, 1979)

Tag Gronberg, Vienna: City of Modernity, 1890-1914 (Peter Lang, 2007)

Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl, Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion Through the City and its History (Springer/Wien, 1998)

Jill Lloyd and Christian Witt-Dörring (eds.), Vienna 1900: Style and Identity (Hirmer Verlag, 2011)

William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (Yale University Press, 1974)

Tobias Natter and Christoph Grunenberg (eds.), Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life (Tate, 2008)

Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1979)

Elana Shapira, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture and Design in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016)

Diane V Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds and Megan Brandow-Faller, Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902-1911 (Letterform Archive, 2023)

Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture & Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (Yale University Press, 1989)

Leslie Topp, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898-1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (4th ed., Phaidon, 2015)

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed.), Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism (Walther & Franz König, 2019)

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed.), Masterpieces from the Leopold Museum (Walther & Franz König)

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (University of Nebraska Press, 1964)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the Louvre and gave him his break. It was in Paris and at Versailles that Molière wrote and performed his best known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope and Le Malade Imaginaire, and in time he was so celebrated that French became known as The Language of Molière.

With

Noel Peacock

Jan Clarke

And

Joe Harris

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Bradby and Andrew Calder (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Molière (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Jan Clarke (ed.), Molière in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Georges Forestier, Molière (Gallimard, 2018)

Michael Hawcroft, Molière: Reasoning with Fools (Oxford University Press, 2007)

John D. Lyons, Women and Irony in Molière’s Comedies of Mariage (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Robert McBride and Noel Peacock (eds.), Le Nouveau Moliériste (11 vols., University of Glasgow Presw, 1994- )

Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Noel Peacock, Molière sous les feux de la rampe (Hermann, 2012)

Julia Prest, Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) worked across the London stages both alone and with others from Dekker and Rowley to Shakespeare and more. Middleton’s range included raucous city comedies such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy, some with the main adult companies and some with child actors playing the scheming adults. Middleton seemed to be everywhere on the Jacobean stage, mixing warmth and cruelty amid laughter and horror, and even Macbeth’s witches may be substantially his work.

With

Emma Smith

Lucy Munro

And

Michelle O’Callaghan

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 1996)

Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

R.V. Holdsworth (ed.), Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Selection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1990), especially ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’ by John Stachniewski

Mark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham, Middleton and His Collaborators (Northcote House, 2007)

Gordon McMullan and Kelly Stage (eds.), The Changeling: The State of Play (The Arden Shakespeare, 2022)

Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (The Arden Shakespeare, 2020)

David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (University of Toronto Press, 2012)

Michelle O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)

Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford University Press, 2012)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

With

David O’Shaughnessy

Judith Hawley

And

Michael Griffin

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale University Press, 2019)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross), The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (first published 1766; Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Vicar of Wakefield (first published 1766; Oxford University Press, 2008)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, 1966)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden), She Stoops to Conquer (first performed 1773; Methuen Drama, 2003)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt), The Citizen of the World (first published 1762; Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood), She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies (first performed 1773; Oxford University Press, 2007)

Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), Oliver Goldsmith in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longmans, 1969)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the architect Sir John Soane (1753 -1837), the son of a bricklayer. He rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect to see many of his designs realised to great acclaim, particularly the Bank of England and the Law Courts at Westminster Hall, although his work on both of those has been largely destroyed. He is now best known for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, which he remodelled and crammed with antiquities and artworks: he wanted visitors to experience the house as a dramatic grand tour of Europe in microcosm. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and in a series of influential lectures he set out his belief in the power of buildings to enlighten people about “the poetry of architecture”. Visitors to the museum and his other works can see his trademark architectural features such as his shallow dome, which went on to inspire Britain's red telephone boxes.

With:

Frances Sands, the Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum

Frank Salmon, Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture

And

Gillian Darley, historian and author of Soane's biography.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Bruce Boucher, John Soane's Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (Yale University Press, 2024)

Oliver Bradbury, Sir John Soane’s Influence on Architecture from 1791: An Enduring Legacy (Routledge, 2015)

Gillian Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999)

Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Ashgate, 1999)

Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and London (Lund Humphries, 2006)

Helen Dorey, John Soane and J.M.W. Turner: Illuminating a Friendship (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007)

Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum (Merrell, 2015)

Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (Thames and Hudson, 2006)

Susan Palmer, At Home with the Soanes: Upstairs, Downstairs in 19th Century London (Pimpernel Press, 2015)

Frances Sands, Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces at Sir John Soane’s Museum (Batsford, 2021)

Sir John Soane’s Museum, A Complete Description (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2018)

Mary Ann Stevens and Margaret Richardson (eds.), John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light (Royal Academy Publications, 1999)

John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (9th edition, Yale University Press, 1993)

A.A. Tait, Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

John H. Taylor, Sir John Soane’s Greatest Treasure: The Sarcophagus of Seti I (Pimpernel Press, 2017)

David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

David Watkin, Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum & Soane (Prestel, 2013)

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