The Forum

German chemist Fritz Haber's discovery of how to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia is seen as one of the most significant of 20th century science - it enabled the industrial manufacture of fertilisers, which now provide food for up to half the planet's people.

But he was also responsible for the development and deployment of poison gas on the battlefields of World War One and is remembered by some as the 'father of chemical warfare'. His was also a life touched by personal tragedy and a struggle against a Jewish heritage that at first threatened to hold back his career, and would later send him into exile.

Bridget Kendall examines a life that epitomises science’s capacity to create and to destroy.

Contributors:

Dan Charles, US journalist and author of ‘Master Mind: The Rise And Fall Of Fritz Haber, The Nobel Laureate Who Launched The Age Of Chemical Warfare’;

(Image: A portrait photograph of Fritz Haber, dated around 1920. Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, didn’t he? At least, that’s what the history books tell us. Nero’s image as a depraved tyrant has been handed down to us by three biased sources, written after the emperor’s suicide in 68AD. These sources have informed interpretations of Nero’s legacy ever since, so much so that his involvement in the Great Fire of Rome has become a meme.

Recent scholarship has sought to rehabilitate Nero to a certain extent, to try to understand him in the context of his time. He was indeed a man who succeeded in shocking the Roman elite, but also someone who could strike a chord with the public and was well thought of outside the centre of political intrigue.

Rajan Datar attempts to separate fact from fiction, with guests Dr Ginna Closs, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and author of While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination which was published in 2020; and Dr Evan Jewell, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden. He’s writing a book entitled Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire; and Dr Shushma Malik, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Roehampton. She’s the author of The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

(Image: Nero and the burning of Rome, July 18-27, 64 A.D. Coloured woodcut by Conti. Credit: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

For the Ancient Egyptians they were seen as receptacles for the soul, for the Aztecs they were used to tell the future and for the early Christians, they were an aid for reaching self-knowledge. And mirrors’ key role in the reflection of light led to the development of high-powered telescopes to explore the universe. No human invention has been so closely tied with our sense of self and the world around us. And yet mirrors also have a capacity to deceive us – so how much attention should we give them in our lives, and are we overly obsessed with our image in the mirror?

Joining Rajan Datar to find out more about the history of mirrors is Dr Elizabeth Baquedano, a specialist in the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica and Senior Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London. Dr Franziska Kolt, a post-doctoral research fellow in the history of science at the University of York in England, who’s written Alice Through the Wonderglass: the Surprising Histories of a children's classic. And Mark Pendergrast, the author of Mirror Mirror: a history of the human love affair with reflection. With the contribution of Professor Serpil Bagci from Hacettepe university in Ankara in Turkey.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Mirror reflecting blue sky in digital landscape. Credit: Artur Debat via Getty Images)

Kwame Nkrumah was considered by some as a visionary hero who urged would-be leaders in Africa to embrace the idea of unity for the continent, and led Ghana to independence from British colonial rule in 1957.

But in becoming Ghana’s first prime minister, and then president, he was criticised for his autocratic style of government and the way in which he pursued his Pan-African ideology seemingly at the expense of his own people. In 1966 Nkrumah was removed from power in a coup, and never returned to Ghana.

Bridget Kendall’s guests include Ghanaian journalist-turned-historian, AB Assensoh, who interviewed Nkrumah in exile. Assensoh is emeritus professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Courtesy Emeritus Professor in the History Department of University of Oregon. He’s the author of many books on Nkrumah, including a collaboration with his wife Yvette entitled Kwame Nkrumah’s Political Kingdom and Pan-Africanism Reinterpreted, 1909–1972. Joining them are Kwasi Konadu, Professor in Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University in the US. He’s published widely on African history, including The Ghana Reader: History, Culture and Politics; and Matteo Grilli, senior researcher at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He’s the author of Nkrumaism and African Nationalism: Ghana’s Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Kwame Nkrumah addresses the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, 1960. Credit: Underwood Archives via Getty Images)

President Harry Truman's address to the United States Congress, and the world, in March 1947 is seen by some historians as marking the start of the Cold War.

In it, the President committed the USA to the role of defender of global democracy, and pledged to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, led to the establishment of NATO and, later, US involvement in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

But, as Bridget Kendall discovers, the speech and the policy it set out were by no means inevitable - both were shaped as much by misunderstandings and exaggerated fears as they were conflicting ideologies and the actions of the former World War Two allies.

Producer: Simon Tulett

Contributors:

Melvyn Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, USA;

Credits:

Recording of the The RT Hon Winston Churchill extracts from a speech made at Westminster College Fulton Missouri;

(Image: Close-up of President Harry Truman as he delivers a speech to Congress. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

In in her 1843 essay The Great Lawsuit, the American journalist and early feminist Margaret Fuller forcefully argued for the rights of women to work, think and live on their own terms, not just as companions and foils for men. She was one of the first Americans to do so. Fuller was a pioneer in other respects too: a trail blazer for advocacy journalism and for unrestricted female education. In the 1840s she became the first paid US war correspondent, reporting from Rome besieged by the French army.

Fuller packed a lot into a life of just 40 years; so much so that after her tragic death in a shipwreck, the men around her - some of them rather famous - did their best to diminish her memory. They exaggerated what they saw as her personal failings and in some instances even falsified her record. As a consequence, we are still discovering the true extent of her life and work.

Bridget Kendall talks to three Fuller experts: Megan Marshall, Professor at Emerson College in Boston whose book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Professor Katie Kornacki, Chair of the English department at Caldwell University in New Jersey and the founding editor of the Margaret Fuller Society's Conversations magazine; and the cultural critic Judith Thurman, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and an award-winning biographer focusing on female authors.

The reader is Ina Marie Smith.

(Image: Margaret Fuller Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

From Mesopotamian loan records which are over 4,000 years old to the cryptocurrencies of today, money has been with us for a long time. But how did we get from exchanging bits of metal or cowrie shells to the algorithmic trading of shares? Why did paper money originate in Song-dynasty China? Why was the Gold Standard adopted in the 19th Century? And what is money anyway?

(Photo: Roman gold coins found in Corbridge, UK in 1911. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Pinocchio is a cultural icon. He is the wooden puppet who can talk and walk. A cheerful headstrong character who keeps breaking the rules, and whose dream is to become a real boy. His story has been the subject of many retellings, and his growing nose when he lies has become a way to satirise politicians the world over. But Pinocchio’s origins are largely unknown outside Italy, and couldn’t be more different from his portrayal in the 1940 Disney film.

The original novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by the 19th century Italian writer Carlo Collodi is much darker and brutal, and originally ended with Pinocchio’s execution, but it was also a way of educating the children of a newly unified Italy. The actual literary text also provided a model, which is still used today, for a more standardised form of the Italian language. So why has Collodi’s original – which is one of the most translated books in the world and one of the most adapted – been largely ignored and why should we go back to it?

Joining Bridget Kendall is Dr Katia Pizzi, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, who is the editor and co-author of Pinocchio, puppets and modernity: the mechanical body; Cristina Mazzoni, Professor of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont, and editor and translator of The Pomegranates and other Modern Italian Fairy Tales; and Dr Georgia Panteli, Lecturer in Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and University College London, and author of From Puppet to Cyborg. Pinocchio’s Posthuman Journey.

The readings from The Adventures of Pinocchio were by Marco Gambino.

Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service.

Try and imagine a world without numbers. Telling people how many siblings you have, counting your wages or organising to meet a friend at a certain time would all be much more difficult. If you’re reading this on a digital screen, even these words are produced through a series of zero and one symbols. We take them so much for granted yet some cultures don’t count and some languages don’t have the words or symbols for numbers. This programme looks at when and why humans first started start to count, where the symbols many of us use today originate from and when concepts like zero and infinity came about.

Joining Bridget Kendall to explore the history of numbers and counting are anthropological linguist Caleb Everett from the University of Miami, writer and historian of mathematics Tomoko Kitagawa, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University in the UK, Ian Stewart.

Photo: An abacus on a table.(CaoChunhai//Getty Images)

The Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh is one of the most influential painters in western art. His series of still life sunflowers are known around the world today but during his lifetime in the 1800s he lived in poverty, selling very little of his work, some say just one painting, and suffered several serious breakdowns. One of his most famous works, The Starry Night, is said to be the view from his room in a French psychiatric hospital where he’d admitted himself shortly after severing his own left ear. This programme looks at the man behind these iconic paintings, explores how and why he became a painter and picks apart the various theories around his death from a gunshot wound at the age of just 37.

(Image: Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh. Credit:Getty Images)