In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Dutch artist famous for starry nights and sunflowers, self portraits and simple chairs. These are images known the world over, and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painted them and around 900 others in the last decade of his short, brilliant life and, famously, in that lifetime he made only one recorded sale. Yet within a few decades after his death these extraordinary works, with all their colour an...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the speeches that became a byword for fierce attacks on political opponents. It was in the 4th century BC, in Athens, that Demosthenes delivered these speeches against the tyrant Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, when Philip appeared a growing threat to Athens and its allies and Demosthenes feared his fellow citizens were set on appeasement. In what became known as The Philippics, ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's greatest literary success, his thirteenth novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. The relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola’s readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree and his story is set in Northern France. It opens with Etienne trudging towards a coalmine at night seeking work, and soon he is caught up in a bleak world in which...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that Civility, in one of its meanings, is among the most valuable social virtues: the skill to discuss topics that really matter to you, with someone who disagrees and yet somehow still get along. In another of its meanings, when Civility describes the limits of behaviour that is acceptable, the idea can reflect society at its worst: when only those deemed 'civil enough' are allowed their ri...

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore dragons, literally and symbolically potent creatures that have appeared in many different guises in countries and cultures around the world.

Sometimes compared to snakes, alligators, lions and even dinosaurs, dragons have appeared on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, in the Chinese zodiac, in the guise of the devil in Christian religious texts and in the national symbolism of the countries of Engl...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of lungs and of the first breaths, which can be traced back 400 million years to when animal life spread from rock pools and swamps onto land, as some fish found an evolutionary advantage in getting their oxygen from air rather than water. Breathing with lungs may have started with fish filling their mouths with air and forcing it down into sacs in their chests, like the buccal pumping ...

In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession.

In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied arts such as architecture and design.

The movement was characterized by Klimt’s styli...

Ever since Franz Anton Mesmer induced trance-like states in his Parisian subjects in the late eighteenth century, dressed in long purple robes, hypnosis has been associated with performance, power and the occult.

 It has exerted a powerful hold over the cultural imagination, featuring in novels and films including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and George du Maurier’s Trilby - and it was even practiced by Charles Dickens himself.

But despit...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and role of one of the most significant figures in early 20th Century German history. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) had been famous since 1914 as the victorious commander at the Battle of Tannenberg against Russian invaders, soon burnishing this fame on the Western Front and Hindenburg was to claim he would have won there too, if enemies at home had not 'stabbed Germany in the back'. He w...

In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the cont...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the decisive role of one of the great 20th Century physicists in solving the question of nuclear fission. It is said that Meitner (1878-1968) made this breakthrough over Christmas 1938 while she was sitting on a log in Sweden during a snowy walk with her nephew Otto Frisch (1904-79). Both were Jewish-Austrian refugees who had only recently escaped from Nazi Germany. Others had already broken uraniu...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Korea's brief but significant period as an empire as it moved from the 500-year-old dynastic Joseon monarchy towards modernity. It was in October 1897 that King Gojong declared himself Emperor, seizing his chance when the once-dominant China lost to Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The king wanted to have the same status as the neighbouring Russian, Chinese and Japanese Emperors, to shore up a b...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the Louvre and gave him his break. It was in Paris and at Versailles that Molière wrote and performed his best known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope...

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore typology, a method of biblical interpretation that aims to meaningfully link people, places, and events in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, with the coming of Christ in the New Testament. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah, and King David were regarded by Christians as being ‘types’ or symbols of Jesus.

This way of thinking became hugely popular in medieval Europe, Rena...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known events and figures in Irish history. In 1014 Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, defeated the Hiberno-Norse forces of Sigtrygg Silkbeard and allies near their Dublin stronghold, with Brian losing his life on the day of battle. Soon chroniclers in Ireland and abroad were recording and retelling the events, raising the status of Brian Boru as one who sacrificed himself for Ireland...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus whose names are entwined with the end of Rome's Republic and the rise of the Roman Emperors. As tribunes, they brought popular reforms to the Roman Republic at the end of the 2nd century BC. Tiberius (c163-133BC) brought in land reform so every soldier could have his farm, while Gaius (c154-121BC) offered cheap grain for Romans and targeted corruption among th...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who was part of the movement known as phenomenology. While less well-known than his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his popularity has increased among philosophers in recent years. Merleau-Ponty rejected Rene Descartes’ division between body and mind, arguing that the way we perceive the world around us cannot be separa...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) worked across the London stages both alone and with others from Dekker and Rowley to Shakespeare and more. Middleton’s range included raucous city comedies such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy, some with the main adult comp...