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.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South, published in 1855 after serialisation in Dickens' Household Words magazine. It is the story of Margaret Hale, who was raised in the South in the New Forest and London's Harley Street, and then moves North to a smokey mill town, Milton, in Darkshire. As well as Margaret's emotional life and her growing sense of independence, the novel explores the new ways of living thrown up by industrialisation, and the relationships between 'masters and men'. Many of Margaret Hale's experiences echo Gaskell's own life, as she was born in Chelsea and later moved to Manchester, and the novel has become valued for its insights into social conflicts and the changing world in which Gaskell lived.

With

Sally Shuttleworth

Dinah Birch

And

Jenny Uglow

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca the Younger, who was one of the first great writers to live his entire life in the world of the new Roman empire, after the fall of the Republic. He was a Stoic philosopher, he wrote blood-soaked tragedies, he was an orator, and he navigated his way through the reigns of Caligula, Claudius and Nero, sometimes exercising power at the highest level and at others spending years in exile. Agrippina the Younger was the one who called for him to tutor Nero, and it is thought Seneca helped curb some of Nero's excesses. He was later revered within the Christian church, partly for what he did and partly for what he was said to have done in forged letters to St Paul. His tragedies, with their ghosts and high body count, influenced Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. The image above is the so-called bust of Seneca, a detail from Four Philosophers by Peter Paul Rubens.

With

Mary Beard

Catharine Edwards

and

Alessandro Schiesaro

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age.

With

Sir Jonathan Bate

Mina Gorji

and

Simon Kövesi

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot's last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as meditations on the relationship between time and humanity.

With

David Moody

Fran Brearton

And

Mark Ford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Jeremy Irons will be reading TS Eliot's greatest poems, from Prufrock to The Waste Land to Four Quartets, across New Year's Day here on Radio 4.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'.

With

Susan Foister

David Blayney Brown

and

James Davey

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

"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. Gilgamesh is often said to be the oldest surviving great work of literature, with origins in the third millennium BC, and it passed through thousands of years on cuneiform tablets. Unlike epics of Greece and Rome, the intact story of Gilgamesh became lost to later generations until tablets were discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1853 near Mosul and later translated. Since then, many more tablets have been found and much of the text has been reassembled to convey the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk the sheepfold, and Enkidu who the gods created to stop Gilgamesh oppressing his people. Together they fight Humbaba, monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, and kill the Bull of Heaven, for which the gods make Enkidu mortally ill. Gilgamesh goes on a long journey as he tries unsuccessfully to learn how to live forever, learning about the Great Deluge on the way, but his remarkable building works guarantee that his fame will last long after his death.

With

Andrew George

Frances Reynolds

and

Martin Worthington

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changes in the intellectual world of Western Europe in the 12th Century, and their origins. This was a time of Crusades, the formation of states, the start of Gothic architecture, a reconnection with Roman and Greek learning and their Arabic development and the start of the European universities, and has become known as The 12th Century Renaissance.

The image above is part of Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière, Chartres Cathedral, from 1180.

With

Laura Ashe

Elisabeth van Houts

and

Giles Gasper

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Animal Farm, which Eric Blair published under his pen name George Orwell in 1945.

A biting critique of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, the essay sprung from Orwell's experiences fighting Fascists in Spain: he thought that all on the left were on the same side, until the dominant Communists violently suppressed the Anarchists and Trotskyists, and Orwell had to escape to France to avoid arrest.

Setting his satire in an English farm, Orwell drew on the Russian Revolution of 1917, on Stalin's cult of personality and the purges. The leaders on Animal Farm are pigs, the secret police are attack dogs, the supporters who drown out debate with "four legs good, two legs bad" are sheep.

At first, London publishers did not want to touch Orwell's work out of sympathy for the USSR, an ally of Britain in the Second World War, but the Cold War gave it a new audience and Animal Farm became a commercial as well as a critical success.

Featuring:

Steven Connor - Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge

Mary Vincent - Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield

Robert Colls - Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2016.