Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg. He risks his own life and that of his crew on the Pequod, single-mindedly seeking his revenge, his story narrated by Ishmael who was taking part in a whaling expedition for the first time. This is one of the c1000 ideas which listeners sent in this autumn for our fourth Listener Week, following Kafka's The Trial in 2014, Captain Cook in 2015 and Garibaldi and the Risorgimento in 2016.

With

Bridget Bennett

Katie McGettigan

And

Graham Thompson

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and impact of Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) who Byron praised as Europe's greatest living writer, and was at the heart of intellectual and literary life in the France of revolution and of Napoleon. As well as attracting and inspiring others in her salon, she wrote novels, plays. literary criticism, political essays, and poems and developed the ideas behind Romanticism. She achieved this while regularly exiled from the Paris in which she was born, having fallen out with Napoleon who she opposed, becoming a towering figure in the history of European ideas.

With

Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford

Alison Finch, Professor Emerita of French Literature at the University of Cambridge

and

Katherine Astbury, Associate Professor and Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso's iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that obliterated much of the Basque town of Guernica, and its people. The attack was carried out by warplanes of the German Condor Legion, joined by the Italian air force, on behalf of Franco's Nationalists. At first the Nationalists denied responsibility, blaming their opponents for creating the destruction themselves for propaganda purposes, but the accounts of journalists such as George Steer, and the prominence of Picasso's work, kept the events of that day under close scrutiny. Picasso's painting has gone on to become a symbol warning against the devastation of war.

With

Mary Vincent

Gijs van Hensbergen

and

Dacia Viejo Rose

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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. Virginia Woolf wrote of her: ' All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'. Behn may well have spent some of her early life in Surinam, the setting for her novel Oroonoko, and there are records of her working in the Netherlands as a spy for Charles II. She was loyal to the Stuart kings, and refused to write a poem on the coronation of William of Orange. She was regarded as an important writer in her lifetime and inspired others to write, but fell out of favour for two centuries after her death when her work was seen as too bawdy, the product of a disreputable age.

The image above is from the Yale Center for British Art and is titled 'Aphra Behn, by Sir Peter Lely, 1618-1680'

With

Janet Todd

Ros Ballaster

and

Claire Bowditch

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, 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. It is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling from Liverpool brought up in the Earnshaw family at the remote Wuthering Heights, high on the moors, who becomes close to the young Cathy Earnshaw but hears her say she can never marry him. He disappears and she marries his rival, Edgar Linton, of Thrushcross Grange even though she feels inextricably linked with Heathcliff, exclaiming to her maid 'I am Heathcliff!' On his return, Heathcliff steadily works through his revenge on all who he believes wronged him, and their relations. When Cathy dies, Heathcliff longs to be united with her in the grave. The raw passions and cruelty of the story unsettled Emily's sister Charlotte Bronte, whose novel Jane Eyre had been published shortly before, and who took pains to explain its roughness, jealousy and violence when introducing it to early readers. Over time, with its energy, imagination and scope, Wuthering Heights became celebrated as one of the great novels in English.

The image above is of Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy on the set of the Samuel Goldwyn Company movie 'Wuthering Heights', circa 1939.

With

Karen O'Brien

John Bowen

and

Alexandra Lewis

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Central Asian polymath al-Biruni and his eleventh-century book the India.Born in around 973 in the central Asian region of Chorasmia, al-Biruni became an itinerant scholar of immense learning, a master of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and many languages. He corresponded with the age's greatest scientist, Avicenna, and made significant contributions to many fields of knowledge.In 1017 al-Biruni became a member of the court of the ruler Mahmud of Ghazna. Over the course of the next thirteen years he wrote the India, a comprehensive account of Hindu culture which was the first book about India by a Muslim scholar. It contains detailed information about Hindu religion, science and everyday life which have caused some to call it the first work of anthropology.With:James MontgomeryProfessor of Classical Arabic at the University of CambridgeHugh KennedyProfessor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of LondonAmira BennisonSenior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of CambridgeProducer: Thomas Morris.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, the story of Eugene Onegin, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Pushkin (pictured above) began this in 1823 and worked on it over the next ten years, while moving around Russia, developing the central character of a figure all too typical of his age, the so-called superfluous man. Onegin is cynical, disillusioned and detached, his best friend Lensky is a romantic poet and Tatyana, whose love for Onegin is not returned until too late, is described as a poetic ideal of a Russian woman, and they are shown in the context of the Russian landscape and society that has shaped them. Onegin draws all three into tragic situations which, if he had been willing and able to act, he could have prevented, and so becomes the one responsible for the misery of himself and others as well as the death of his friend.

With

Andrew Kahn

Emily Finer

and

Simon Dixon

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Christine de Pizan, who wrote at the French Court in the late Middle Ages and was celebrated by Simone de Beauvoir as the first woman to 'take up her pen in defence of her sex.' She wrote across a broad range, and was particularly noted for challenging the depiction of women by famous writers such as Jean de Meun, author of the Romance of the Rose. She has been characterised as an early feminist who argued that women could play a much more important role in society than the one they were allotted, reflected in arguably her most important work, The Book of the City of Ladies, a response to the seemingly endless denigration of women in popular texts of the time.

The image above, of Christine de Pizan lecturing, is (c)The British Library Board. Harley 4431, f.259v.

With

Helen Swift

Miranda Griffin

and

Marilynn Desmond

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Emily Dickinson was arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets.

With

Fiona Green

Linda Freedman

and

Paraic Finnerty

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Reading list:

Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Penguin Books, 2009)

Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble and Gary Lee Stonum (eds.), Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2005)

Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006)

Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (University Massachusetts Press, 1998)

Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Linda Freedman, The Myth of the Fall in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2025), especially chapter 3.

Linda Freedman, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller (eds.), The Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)

Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Early Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001)

Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds.), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998)

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (first published 1958; Harvard University Press, 1986)

Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Poems of Emily Dickinson (first published 1951; Faber & Faber, 1976)

Thomas Herbert Johnson and Theodora Ward (eds.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1958)

Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990)

Mary Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

James McIntosh, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)

Cristanne Miller (ed.), Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012)

Elizabeth Phillips, Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)

Eliza Richards (ed.), Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (first published 1974; Harvard University Press, 1998)

Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1996)

Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Anchor Books, 2009)

Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press, 1984)

This episode was first broadcast in May 2017.

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 people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the Japanese artist whose views of Mt Fuji such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa (pictured) are some of the most iconic in world art. He worked as Japan was slowly moving towards greater contact with the outside world, trading with China and allowing two Dutch ships to dock each year. From these ships he picked up new synthetic colours and illustrations with Western compositions, which he incorporated in his traditional wood block prints. The quality of his images helped drive demand for prints among the highly literate Japanese public, particularly those required to travel to Edo under feudal obligations and who wanted to collect all his prints. As well as the quality of his work, Hokusai's success stems partly from his long life and career. He completed some of his most memorable works in his 70s and 80s and claimed he would not reach his best until he was 110.

With

Angus Lockyer

Rosina Buckland

And

Ellis Tinios

Producer: Simon Tillotson.