In Our Time: Culture

By BBC Radio 4History

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In Our Time: Culture episodes

February 09, 2017 John Clare
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
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford
Mina Gorji
Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge
and
Simon Kövesi
Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
49 min
December 22, 2016 Four Quartets
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
Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York
Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast
And
Mark Ford
Professor of English and American Literature at University College London
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.
49 min
November 10, 2016 The Fighting Temeraire
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
Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery
David Blayney Brown
Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain
and
James Davey
Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
46 min
November 03, 2016 Epic of Gilgamesh
"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
Professor of Babylonian at SOAS, University of London
Frances Reynolds
Shillito Fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford and Fellow of St Benet's Hall
and
Martin Worthington
Lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
47 min
October 20, 2016 The 12th Century Renaissance
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
Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of Oxford
Elisabeth van Houts
Honorary Professor of European Medieval History at the University of Cambridge
and
Giles Gasper
Reader in Medieval History at Durham University
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
50 min
September 29, 2016 Animal Farm
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.
52 min
June 23, 2016 Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first in 1789 with five hand-coloured copies and, five years later, with additional Songs of Experience poems and the explanatory phrase "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Blake drew on the street ballads and improving children's rhymes of the time, exploring the open and optimistic outlook of early childhood with the darker and more cynical outlook of adult life, in which symbols such as the Lamb belong to innocence and the Tyger to experience.
With
Sir Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford
Sarah Haggarty
Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens' College, University of Cambridge
And
Jon Mee
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
50 min
May 19, 2016 The Muses
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greeks called mousike, 'the art of the Muses' from which we derive our word 'music.' While the number of Muses, their origin and their roles varied in different accounts and at different times, they were consistently linked with the nature of artistic inspiration. This raised a question for philosophers then and since: was a creative person an empty vessel into which the Muses poured their gifts, at their will, or could that person do something to make inspiration flow?
With
Paul Cartledge
Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
And
Penelope Murray
Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Image: 'Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus)', 1631-1632. Oil on canvas. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).
46 min
May 05, 2016 Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, originally serialised in The Graphic in 1891 and, with some significant changes, published as a complete novel in 1892. The book was controversial even before serialisation, rejected by one publisher as too overtly sexual, to which a second added it did not publish 'stories where the plot involves frequent and detailed reference to immoral situations.' Hardy's description of Tess as 'A Pure Woman' in 1892 incensed some Victorian readers. He resented having to censor some of his scenes in the early versions, including references to Tess's baby following her rape by Alec d'Urberville, and even to a scene where Angel Clare lifted four milkmaids over a flooded lane (substituting transportation by wheelbarrow).
The image above, from the 1891 edition, is captioned 'It Was Not Till About Three O'clock That Tess Raised Her Eyes And Gave A Momentary Glance Round. She Felt But Little Surprise At Seeing That Alec D'urberville Had Come Back, And Was Standing Under The Hedge By The Gate'.
With
Dinah Birch
Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact at the University of Liverpool
Francis O'Gorman
Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds
And
Jane Thomas
Reader in Victorian and early Twentieth Century literature at the University of Hull
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
47 min
March 24, 2016 Aurora Leigh
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic "Aurora Leigh" which was published in 1856. It is the story of an orphan, Aurora, born in Italy to an English father and Tuscan mother, who is brought up by an aunt in rural Shropshire. She has a successful career as a poet in London and, when living in Florence, is reunited with her cousin, Romney Leigh, whose proposal she turned down a decade before. The poem was celebrated by other poets and was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most commercially successful. Over 11,000 lines, she addressed many Victorian social issues, including reform, illegitimacy, the pressure to marry and what women must overcome to be independent, successful writers, in a world dominated by men.
With
Margaret Reynolds
Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London
Daniel Karlin
Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol
And
Karen O'Brien
Professor of English Literature at King's College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
47 min