Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring has probably done more than any other to raise concerns about the damage that uncontrolled use of chemicals can cause to the natural world. Carson imagined a ‘silent spring’ in a world where birds no longer sang, killed off by indiscriminate spraying of pesticides. Her plea for caution when using insecticides led to major changes in government regulation of agrochemicals both in the United States and elsewhere.

So who was Rachel Carson? How did this scientist with a passionate interest in marine biology turn first into a best-selling author and then into an environmental campaigner? And - six decades on - have the warnings of Silent Spring been heeded?

Bridget Kendall is joined by Dr. Sabine Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at University of York with a particular interest in the history of synthetic insecticides; Michelle Ferrari, an award-winning film maker who directed a documentary about Rachel Carson's life for the American public broadcaster PBS; and Professor David Kinkela, an environmental historian and chair of the Department of History at Fredonia, State University of New York whose books include 'DDT and the American Century'. The reader is Ina Marie Smith.

(Photo: Airplane dusting a field with DDT. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Why do we divide our lives into 7-day chunks? Unlike the day, month or year, there’s no natural reason for this cycle, but nevertheless the week is now deeply ingrained in us and has proven very resistant to change.

We explore the pagan, religious and early scientific roots of this man-made rhythm, the ideological battles fought over it, and the reason why the number seven came out on top. Our expert guests explain where the names of our days come from, why the weekend was born, and how the week has come to dominate our economic and social lives.

There have, however, been several radical attempts to rip up the 7-day week – we hear about these alternatives and why they ultimately failed.

Rajan Datar is joined by Eviatar Zerubavel, distinguished professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and author of ‘The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week’; Ilaria Bultrighini, honorary research fellow in ancient history at University College London; and David Henkin, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of ‘The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are’.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: A signpost with the seven days of the week on the directional arrows against a bright blue cloudy sky. Credit: Getty Images)

Forugh Farrokhzad burst into the public consciousness with a series of poems that sent shockwaves through Persian society in the mid-1950s. Her early poetry focused on the female experience and female desire, overturning – in the words of one biographer – 1,000 years of Persian literature.

Her critics sought to dismiss her skills as a writer by seeing her poetry purely as a confessional outburst of a divorced woman. That attitude has tended to overshadow her achievements, although her private life is so compelling it’s perhaps inevitable. Since her early death in a car accident, Forugh’s life and poetry have been inspirational for many Iranians, who see in her an artist who was prepared to defy authority and convention to speak out.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Sholeh Wolpé, a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She’s a poet, playwright, librettist and translator of Forugh’s work; author Jasmin Darznik, associate professor and chair of the creative writing progamme at California College of the Arts. Her novel, Song of a Captive Bird, is a re-imagining of Forugh’s life inspired by her poetry, interviews and correspondence; and Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s the author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: Forugh Farrokhzad. Credit: Courtesy of Farrokhzadpoem.com)

Today’s counter-culture and alternative movements question mainstream norms, such as putting too much value on material possessions. The Cynics, practical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, also rejected conventional desires to seek wealth, power and fame. They were not your usual kind of philosophers: rather than lecturing or writing about their ideas, they acted out their beliefs by denying themselves worldly possessions and tried to live as simply as possible. Their leader, Diogenes of Sinope, allegedly slept in a ceramic jar on the streets of Athens and ate raw meat like a dog, flouting convention to draw attention to his ideas.

So who were the Cynics? How influential was their movement? What made it last some 900 years? And why does the term 'cynicism' have a different meaning today?

Bridget Kendall is joined by three eminent scholars of Greek philosophy:

(Image: The meeting of Alexander and Diogenes, detail from a tapestry, Scotland. Credit: DEA/S. Vannini/Getty Images)

Calories are fundamental to the way many of us view food and our own bodies - you’ll find them on supermarket shelves, restaurant menus, and in cookbooks. But they didn’t start out that way.

Originally coined during the study of steam engines and industrial energy, the term ‘calorie’ was transformed into a measurement of food as ‘fuel’ for humans, influencing industrial, public health and even foreign policies for more than 100 years.

It’s also spawned a multi-billion dollar diet industry – we learn about the author whose battle with her weight introduced the world to calorie counting.

But should we be paying the calorie so much attention? There are growing concerns that it’s a misleading, perhaps even dangerous guide to how our bodies digest food and burn energy.

Bridgett Kendall is joined by Dr Giles Yeo, professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge and author of ‘Why Calories Don’t Count: How we got the science of weight loss wrong’; Adrienne Rose Bitar, a specialist in the history and culture of American food and health at Cornell University, New York, and author of ‘Diet and the Disease of Civilization’; and Nick Cullather, professor of history and international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: A smartphone showing a calorie counting app and surrounded by fresh vegetables, donuts and other snacks on a table. Credit: Getty Images)

Belarusian lands have seen dramatic upheavals throughout the twentieth century and today, like its neighbour Ukraine to the south, Belarus finds itself on the cusp, in between the countries of the European Union on one side and Putin’s Russia on the other. While Belarus often features in the news, its history is less well known. So how far back does the story of Belarus go? How was its sense of national identity forged? And how did it survive the traumas and repressions that it has been subjected to by various invaders and imperial powers?

Three historians of Eastern Europe join Bridget Kendall to answer these questions:

(Photo: Mir Castle in Belarus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Credit: tbralnina/Getty Images)

Activist Margaret Sanger is responsible for one of the most significant medical and social changes of the 20th Century – giving women the means to control the size of their families.

The former nurse, who’d witnessed the aftermath of backstreet abortions and her own mother’s premature death after 18 pregnancies, founded the birth control movement in the United States and helped to spread it internationally. She was also instrumental in developing the pill, now one of the world’s most popular contraceptives.

Her campaign was enormously controversial – she faced fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and was arrested several times for breaking strict anti-contraception laws. And her legacy is contested today – her association with the then powerful eugenics movement has thrown doubt on her motives and drawn allegations of racism by some. Even Planned Parenthood, the organisation she helped create, has distanced itself from her.

Bridget Kendall discusses her inspiration and battle against the powerful status quo with Ellen Chesler, a biographer of Margaret Sanger from New York; Elaine Tyler May, professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation; Sanjam Ahluwalia, professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947; and Dr Caroline Rusterholz, a historian of populations, medicine and sexuality at the University of Cambridge.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Photo: Margaret Sanger circa 1915. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the late 19th Century, when the motion picture camera was invented and cinema was born, a young French woman called Alice Guy ended up becoming the first ever woman film-maker; rising from being a lowly young secretary to a prolific and pioneering director, producer and entrepreneur. Yet at her death in 1968, she was barely known, most of her thousand or so films had been lost and her crucial role in the history of the film industry was forgotten. In the past few decades, Alice Guy’s reputation has been gradually revived, and today she is recognised as a creative visionary and inspiration to many women film directors.

Joining Rajan Datar to track the career of Alice Guy, or Alice Guy Blaché as she was also known by her married name, is the film scholar, Dr Anthony Slide, the editor of The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché; Dr Alison McMahan, the author of Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, and the novelised biography WonderShadows; and Caroline Rainette who performed, wrote, and directed, Alice Guy: Mademoiselle Cinema. With the contribution of Pamela Green, the director and producer of Be Natural: the untold story of Alice Guy Blaché.

The reader is Félicité du Jeu.

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Photo: Alice Guy at her Solax film studios in Fort Lee New Jersey USA, in 1914. Credit: By kind permission of Dr Anthony Slide)

Unearthed from the ruins of ancient cities in modern-day Iraq, the reconstruction of the epic from fragments of clay tablets has been a labour of love for scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. This painstaking work has brought to life a sophisticated story of adventure, heroism and friendship, as well as a reflection on the human condition.

Today, experts are uncovering additional fragments of cuneiform script and using artificial intelligence to decipher the text and fill in the gaps of this and other stories. Professor Anmar Fadhil from the University of Baghdad tells the programme about the latest discoveries.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Andrew George, Emeritus Professor of Babylonian at SOAS at the University of London and author of an acclaimed English translation of the epic; Professor Enrique Jiménez, chair of Ancient Near Eastern Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany who has published widely on Babylonian literature of the first millennium BC; and Dr Louise Pryke, Honorary Associate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney in Australia who is the author of Gilgamesh, a guide to the epic which was published in 2019.

Producer: Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet. Credit: Wisam Zeyad Mohammed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Image)

As the spotlight falls on Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we tell the story of how the world's biggest sporting spectacle began, in Uruguay in 1930.

How did a small South American nation of just two million people, thousands of miles from football's centre of power in Europe, come to launch this major global competition? We discuss the fractious international relations, the political cunning, and the sporting excellence behind the successful bid.

We learn how football helped shape a nation riven by civil war for much of its short existence, and hear about the tournament itself - the unfinished stadium, the dodgy refereeing decisions and, for some of the teams, the sheer ordeal of just getting there.

Rajan Datar is joined by Andreas Campomar, a writer and publisher from London and author of Golazo! A History of Latin American Football; Dr Philippe Vonnard, a historian specialising in the internationalisation of sport at the University of Fribourg and the University of Lausanne, both in Switzerland; and Brenda Elsey, a professor of Latin American sports and cultural history at Hofstra University, New York.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Picture: Stamp issued by the Hungarian Post to commemorate the 1930 World Cup final between Uruguay and Argentina. Credit: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)