In Our Time

By BBC Radio 4History

Ranking
18th
on History
Favorites
7,064
Followers
Typical duration
42 min
per episode
If it hooks
68%
finish an episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

In Our Time episodes

March 21, 2013 Alfred Russel Wallace
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, a pioneer of evolutionary theory. Born in 1823, Wallace travelled extensively, charting the distribution of animal species throughout the world. This fieldwork in the Amazon and later the Malay Archipelago led him to formulate a theory of evolution through natural selection. In 1858 he sent the paper he wrote on the subject to Charles Darwin, who was spurred into the writing and publication of his own masterpiece On the Origin of Species. Wallace was also the founder of the science of biogeography and made important discoveries about the nature of animal coloration. But despite his visionary work, Wallace has been overshadowed by the greater fame of his contemporary Darwin.
With:
Steve Jones
Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College London
George Beccaloni
Curator of Cockroaches and Related Insects and Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project at the Natural History Museum
Ted Benton
Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min
March 14, 2013 Chekhov
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov. Born in 1860, Chekhov trained as a doctor and for most of his adult life divided his time between medicine and writing. Best known for plays including The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, he is also celebrated today as one of the greatest of short story writers. His works are often powerful character studies and chronicle the changing nature of Russian society in the late nineteenth century.
With:
Catriona Kelly
Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford
Cynthia Marsh
Emeritus Professor of Russian Drama and Literature at the University of Nottingham
Rosamund Bartlett
Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation and former Reader in Russian at the University of Durham.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min
March 14, 2013 Chekhov
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov. Born in 1860, Chekhov trained as a doctor and for most of his adult life divided his time between medicine and writing. Best known for plays including The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, he is also celebrated today as one of the greatest of short story writers. His works are often powerful character studies and chronicle the changing nature of Russian society in the late nineteenth century.
With:
Catriona Kelly
Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford
Cynthia Marsh
Emeritus Professor of Russian Drama and Literature at the University of Nottingham
Rosamund Bartlett
Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation and former Reader in Russian at the University of Durham.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min
March 07, 2013 Absolute Zero
In a programme first broadcast in 2013, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss absolute zero, the lowest conceivable temperature. In the early eighteenth century the French physicist Guillaume Amontons suggested that temperature had a lower limit. The subject of low temperature became a fertile field of research in the nineteenth century, and today we know that this limit - known as absolute zero - is approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. It is impossible to produce a temperature exactly equal to absolute zero, but today scientists have come to within a billionth of a degree. At such low temperatures physicists have discovered a number of strange new phenomena including superfluids, liquids capable of climbing a vertical surface.
With:
Simon Schaffer
Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge
Stephen Blundell
Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
Nicola Wilkin
Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham
Producer: Thomas Morris
43 min
February 28, 2013 Pitt-Rivers
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Victorian anthropologist and archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers. Over many years he amassed thousands of ethnographic and archaeological objects, some of which formed the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Inspired by the work of Charles Darwin, Pitt-Rivers believed that human technology evolved in the same way as living organisms, and devoted much of his life to exploring this theory. He was also a pioneering archaeologist whose meticulous records of major excavations provided a model for later scholars.
With:
Adam Kuper
Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University
Richard Bradley
Professor in Archaeology at the University of Reading
Dan Hicks
University Lecturer & Curator of Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
42 min
February 21, 2013 Decline and Fall
David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh's comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substandard boys' public school, the novel is a vivid, often riotous portrait of 1920s Britain. Its themes, including modernity, religion and fashionable society, came to dominate Waugh's later fiction, but its savage wit and economy of style were entirely new. Published when Waugh was 24, the book was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour.
With:
David Bradshaw
Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford
John Bowen
Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York
Ann Pasternak Slater
Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
42 min
February 14, 2013 Ice Ages
Jane Francis, Richard Corfield and Carrie Lear join Melvyn Bragg to discuss ice ages, periods when a reduction in the surface temperature of the Earth has resulted in ice sheets at the Poles. Although the term 'ice age' is commonly associated with prehistoric eras when much of northern Europe was covered in ice, we are in fact currently in an ice age which began up to 40 million years ago. Geological evidence indicates that there have been several in the Earth's history, although their precise cause is not known. Ice ages have had profound effects on the geography and biology of our planet.
With:
Jane Francis
Professor of Paleoclimatology at the University of Leeds
Richard Corfield
Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University
Carrie Lear
Senior Lecturer in Palaeoceanography at Cardiff University.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min
February 07, 2013 Epicureanism
Angie Hobbs, David Sedley and James Warren join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Epicureanism, the system of philosophy based on the teachings of Epicurus and founded in Athens in the fourth century BC. Epicurus outlined a comprehensive philosophical system based on the idea that everything in the Universe is constructed from two phenomena: atoms and void. At the centre of his philosophy is the idea that the goal of human life is pleasure, by which he meant not luxury but the avoidance of pain. His followers were suspicious of marriage and politics but placed great emphasis on friendship. Epicureanism became influential in the Roman world, particularly through Lucretius's great poem De Rerum Natura, which was rediscovered and widely admired in the Renaissance.
With:
Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
David Sedley
Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
James Warren
Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min
January 31, 2013 The War of 1812
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the War of 1812, the conflict between America and the British Empire sometimes referred to as the second American War of Independence. In June 1812, President James Madison declared war on Britain, angered by the restrictions Britain had imposed on American trade, the Royal Navy's capture of American sailors and British support for Native Americans. After three years of largely inconclusive fighting, the conflict finally came to an end with the Treaty of Ghent which, among other things, helped to hasten the abolition of the global slave trade.
Although the War of 1812 is often overlooked, historians say it had a profound effect on the USA and Canada's sense of national identity, confirming the USA as an independent country. America's national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner began life as a poem written after its author, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. The war also led to Native Americans losing hundreds of thousands of acres of land in a programme of forced removal.
With:
Kathleen Burk
Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London
Lawrence Goldman
Fellow in Modern History at St Peter's College, University of Oxford
Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh
Producer: Victoria Brignell.
43 min
January 24, 2013 Romulus and Remus
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Romulus and Remus, the central figures of the foundation myth of Rome. According to tradition, the twins were abandoned by their parents as babies, but were saved by a she-wolf who found and nursed them. Romulus killed his brother after a vicious quarrel, and went on to found a city, which was named after him.
The myth has been at the core of Roman identity since the 1st century AD, although the details vary in different versions of the story. For many Roman writers, the story embodied the ethos and institutions of their civilisation. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins remains a potent icon of the city even today.
With:
Mary Beard
Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge
Peter Wiseman
Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter
Tim Cornell
Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
43 min