Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
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The Garamantes
Misha Glenny and guests discuss an ancient civilisation who lived over 2000 years ago in the southwest of modern-day Libya. During prehistoric times, the Sahara Desert was greener and even had large lakes, but for the last 5000 years it has been a hyperarid environment. Extreme swings of temperature and limited surface water might make the Sahara seem like an inhospitable place to live, but an ancient people in North Africa known to us as the Garamantes thrived there. Following descriptions of the Garamantes in Roman and Greek texts, the Garamantes have often been seen as pastoral nomads, or as tribal barbarians on the periphery of the Mediterranean world. But the work of archaeologists in recent decades has revealed something different. Evidence suggests a society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, a key role in trade routes across the Sahara – and may give us a broader view of ancient history.WithDavid Mattingly Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of LeicesterFarès Moussa Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage ConsultantAndJosephine Quinn Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of CambridgeProducer: Martha OwenReading list:C.M. Daniels, The Garamantes of Southern Libya (Oleander Press, 1970)C. Duckworth, A. Cuénod and D.J. Mattingly (eds), Mobile Technologies in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 4, Cambridge University Press, 2020)M.C. Gatto, D.J. Mattingly, N. Ray and M. Sterry (eds), Burials, Migration and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 2019)R.B. Hitchner (ed.), A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), especially ‘Beyond barbarians: the Garamantes of the Libyan Sahara’ by D.J. MattinglyD.J. Mattingly, Between Sahara and Sea: Africa in the Roman Empire (Michigan University Press, 2023)D.J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 1, Synthesis (Society for Libyan Studies, 2003) D.J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 2, Site Gazetteer, Pottery and other Survey Finds (Society for Libyan Studies, 2007) D.J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 3, Excavations Carried out by C.M. Daniels (Society for Libyan Studies, 2010) D.J. Mattingly (ed.), The Archaeology of Fazzan, Volume 4, Survey and Excavations at Old Jarma (Ancient Garama) Carried out by C. M. Daniels (1962–69) and the Fazzan Project (1997–2001) (Society for Libyan Studies, 2013)D.J. Mattingly, V. Leitch, C.N. Duckworth, A. Cuénod, M. Sterry and F. Cole (eds), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Trans-Saharan Archaeology Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2017)D. Mattingly, S. McLaren, E. Savage, Y. Fasatwi and K. Gadgood (eds), The Libyan Desert: Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage (Society for Libyan Studies, 2006), especially ‘The Garamantes: The First Libyan state’ by D. Mattingly P. Mitchell and P. Lane (eds), The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially ‘Roman Africa and the Sahara’ by A. Leone and F. Moussa M. Sterry and D.J. Mattingly (eds), State Formation and Urbanisation in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2020)Some of these books are available for free from Open Access Books: British Institute for Libyan & Northern African StudiesIn Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Joseph Roth
Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then in Galicia, next in Poland and is now in Ukraine, Roth (1894 - 1939) was to spend his short life moving first to Lviv then to Vienna and finally to Paris via Berlin without ever finding a settled home. Roth explored the loss of homeland and anticipated the dangers of the new nationalism through his journalism and in his novels including Radetzky March, Job, Rebellion and Flight Without End, and his books were among the first the Nazis burned.With Helen Chambers Emeritus Professor of German at the University of St AndrewsDeborah Holmes Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of SalzburgAnd Jon Hughes Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s (MHRA, 2006) Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994)Keiron Pim, Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Deborah Holmes, ed. Helen Constantine), Vienna Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014)Joseph Roth (trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann), A Life in Letters (Granta, 2012)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Collected Shorter Fiction (Granta, 2001)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Rebellion (Granta, 2000)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Radetzky March (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Wandering Jews (Granta, 2001)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars (Granta, 2015)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Reports from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2004)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Emperor’s Tomb (Granta, 2013)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The String of Pearls (Granta, 1999)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2013)Joseph Roth (trans. David Le Vay), Weights and Measures (Pushkin Press, 2024)Joseph Roth (trans. Daved Le Vay and Beatrice Musgrave), Flight Without End (Pushkin Press, 2024)Joseph Roth (trans. Ruth Martin), The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2020)Joseph Roth (trans Will Stone), On the End of the World (Pushkin Press, 2019)Joseph Roth (trans. Dorothy Thompson), Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Granta, 2022)Wilhelm Von Sternburg, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Cybernetics
Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age.WithJacob Ward Historian of science and technology at Maastricht UniversityJon Agar Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College LondonAndOrit Halpern Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität DresdenProducer: Martha OwenReading list:Peter Galison, 'The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision' (Critical Inquiry 21, 1994)Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2004)Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke University Press, 2015)Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique (Grey Room 68, 2017) Orit Halpern, Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets (e-flux, March 2023)N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999)Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1980)Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age The Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011)David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010)Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (first published 1950; Da Capo Press, 1988)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Indian Indentured Labour
Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora.With Purba Hossain Lecturer in Modern History at the University of YorkNeha Hui Associate Professor in Economics at the University of ReadingAnd Clem Seecharan Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan UniversityProduced by Simon TillotsonReading list:Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst and Co., 2013)Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (Oxford University Press, 1995)Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2002)Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024)Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (eds.), The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire (Pluto Books, 2021)Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati, ‘Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers’ (The Economic History Review 75:2, 2022)Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The political economy of Indian indentured labor in the nineteenth century (Journal of the History of Economic Thought 47:2, 2025)Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004)Brij V. Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations’ (Indian Economic & Social History Review 22:1, 1985)Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’ (South Asian Studies 33:1, 2017)Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantation (TSAR, 1993)Kalathmika Natarajan, Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Oxford University Press, 2026)Clem Seecharan, 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29 (Macmillan, 1997)Clem Seecharan, Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture (Peepal Tree Press, 2015)S. Sen, ‘Indentured labour from India in the age of empire’ (Social Scientist, 44:1/2, 2016)Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1974)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
M.C. Escher
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geometric patterns. Born in Leeuwarden and trained as a printmaker, Escher visited the Alhambra in Granada and found inspiration in the tessellating shapes of Islamic art. Through his career he went on to create some of the most famous images of the twentieth century and has been called a one-man art movement. After his work was exhibited in a 1954 conference, Escher’s work also caught the eye of mathematicians who appreciated his intuitive geometric precision. Escher was influenced by their work, and they were influenced by his – despite Escher never thinking he was actually very good at maths himself. WithMarcus du Sautoy Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of New College, University of Oxford Sarah Hart Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of Gresham College And Judith Kadee Exhibitions project manager and public programme curator at Hague Historical Museum Producer: Martha OwenReading list:Marcus du Sautoy, Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity (Fourth Estate, 2025)Marcus du Sautoy, Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Into Symmetry (Harper Perennial, 2009)Bruno Ernst, The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher (Taschen, 2007)M.C. Escher, M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work (Taschen America Llc, 1992)Miranda Fellows, The Life and Works of Escher (Siena,1996)Frederico Giudiceandrea, Escher op reis or Escher’s Journey (Publisher Wbooks, 2018, in Dutch)Sarah Hart, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023)Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (first published 1979; Basic Books, 1999)Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry (Profile Books, 2007)Claudio Salsi, Paolo Branca and Claudio Bartocci (eds.), M.C. Escher. Tra arte e scienza. Catalogo della mostra (24 Ore Cultura, 2025, in Italian)Doris Schattschneider, “The Mathematical Side of M.C. Escher” (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 57, 6, 2010)Doris Schattschneider, M.C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2004)Wouter van Reek, Nadir & Zenith in the World of Escher (Leopold, 2019)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Handel's Messiah
Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Testament texts: prophecies about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death and the Day of Judgement and redemption for all. Handel's Messiah had its premiere in 1742 in a secular Dublin music hall to great acclaim with a packed audience and Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances, often shaping the work to the choirs or individual singers available. Messiah proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world far beyond the scale of Handel’s original.With Donald Burrows Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open UniversityRuth Smith Trustee and Council Member of the Handel InstituteAndLarry Zazzo Countertenor, and Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Donald Burrows, Messiah (full score, 2 vols, Hallische Händel Ausgabe, forthcoming)Donald Burrows, Messiah (Edition Peters, 1987)Donald Burrows, Messiah, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1991)Donald Burrows, Handel: Master Musicians series, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2012)George Frideric Handel (ed. Donald Burrows et al.), Collected Documents vol. 3 (1734-42), vol 4 (1742-50), (Cambridge University Press, 2019, 2020)G.F. Handel, facsimile ‘Messiah’: the composer’s autograph manuscript (British Library, 2009)G.F. Handel, facsimile the composer’s Conducting Score of Messiah (Scolar Press, 1974) Arthur Holroyd, Reassuring 18th-Century Protestants: The Librettist’s Intended Message for Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Quacks Books, 2018)Charles King, Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday/Bodley Head, 2024)Jens Peter Larsen, Handel’s Messiah: Origins, Composition, Sources (Adam and Charles Black, 1957)Richard Luckett, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration (Victor Gollancz, 1992)Watkins Shaw, A Textual and Historical Companion to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Novello and Co, 1965)Ruth Smith, ‘The Achievements of Charles Jennens (1700–1773)’ (Music & Letters, 70, 1989)Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Handel House Trust/The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012)Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1995)Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010)Judy Tarling, Handel’s Messiah: A Rhetorical Guide (first published 2014; Punnett Press, 2025)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
The Spanish-American War 1898
Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a significant influence over the newly independent Cuba where the war broke out. The US had been eyeing Cuba for decades, waiting for the right moment and the right kind of action, and in April 1898 intervened in the long-running fighting on the island for independence from Spain. With a much stronger navy it was a very uneven battle and the US soon triumphed over Spanish forces from Manila to Santiago de Cuba. This brief war confirmed the US as a power on the world stage and made a shocked Spain turn inwards to ask what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, people in the Philippines were about to attempt a new and bloody independence fight with the US.WithFrank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of EdinburghMary Vincent Professor of Modern European History at the University of SheffieldAndStephen Wilkinson Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of BuckinghamProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923 (Clarendon Press, 1997)Sebastian Balfour, ‘Riot, Regeneration and Reaction: Spain in the Aftermath of the 1898 Disaster’ (The Historical journal 38.2, 1995) Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021)Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Torva, 2025)Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007)Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2017)Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008)Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Mary Vincent, Spain, 1833-2002: People and State (Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Silicon
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout the universe, the silicon we have here was made billions of years ago in dying stars. In its compounds we have long used silicon for glass and, more recently, purified silicon has become the foundation of modern electronics. Perhaps less appreciated is the role silicon compounds play in the biology of life on Earth, on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the cycling of elements between land, oceans and atmosphere that sustains us.With Kate Hendry Oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and Bye-Fellow of Queen’s College, University of CambridgeAndrea Sella Professor of Chemistry at University College LondonAnd Monica Grady Professor Emerita in Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open UniversityProduced by Martha OwenReading list:Christina De La Rocha and Daniel J. Conley, Silica Stories (Springer, 2017)Bernard Quéguiner, The Biogeochemical Cycle of Silicon in the Ocean (John Wiley & Sons, 2016)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Dadaism
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.With Dawn Ades Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of EssexRuth Hemus Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAndStephen Forcer Professor of French at the University of GlasgowProduced by Martha OwenReading list:Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Archaea
Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny bacteria-sized organisms he was studying were not actually bacteria but from an entirely different branch of the tree of life. It became clear that archaea, as he named them, share aspects of the cells in all plants and animals even if they often live in places where other life struggles including salty lakes, acidic pools, under the sea bed and in the gut. While aspects of what followed from Woese are still under debate, further discoveries suggest that life on Earth has been on a journey of separation and reunion: that the first cells developed into bacteria and archaea billions of years ago and that some of those later combined to form the complex cells from which we are made. WithChrista Schleper Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of ViennaThorsten Allers Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of NottinghamAndBuzz Baum Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: John Archibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the evolution of complex life (Oxford University Press, 2014)Buzz Baum, ‘I’: A Biography of the Biological Self (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2027)Franklin M. Harold, In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005)David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018)Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford University Press, 1994)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Margaret Beaufort
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, half his age, and gave birth to their son Henry when she was thirteen and Edmund was already dead from the plague. Margaret Beaufort made it her life's work to protect Henry during the Wars of the Roses, which had begun soon before his birth and, as many more obvious successors to the crown died or were killed in the wars, she pivoted to supporting Henry when he became the strongest contender against Richard III. She was to survive Richard III declaring her a traitor and went on to see Henry become Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and herself become the King's Mother. Outliving her son by a few months, she was then to help her grandson Henry VIII succeed and the Tudor dynasty continue.WithJoanna Laynesmith Visiting Research Fellow at the University of ReadingKatherine Lewis Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of YorkAndDavid Grummitt Staff Tutor in History at the Open UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort (Amberley Publishing, 2017)Rachel Delman, 'The Vowesses, the anchoresses, and the aldermen's wives: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the Devout Society of Late Medieval Stamford' (Urban History 49, 2022) David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (revised edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (Yale University Press, 2010)Lauren Johnson, Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge University Press, 1991)Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘Margaret Beaufort's Literate Practice: Service and Self-Inscription'J.L. Laynesmith, Cecily Duchess of York (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)Susan Powell, The Household Accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1443-1509 (The British Academy, 2022)Nicola Tallis, Uncrowned Queen: The Fateful Life of Margaret Beaufort, Tudor Matriarch (Michael O'Mara, 2019) Micheline White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 (Ashgate, 2016), especially ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety’ by Brenda M. Hosington In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
The Columbian Exchange
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. That was when Columbus reached the Bahamas, a time when Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had no cattle, bananas, sugar cane or smallpox. The lists of what was then exchanged are long and as these flora, fauna and diseases moved between continents, their impact ranged from transformation to devastation. In parts of the Americas, European viruses helped kill over 90 percent of the population. In parts of Europe, Africa and Asia populations boomed on the new American foods. Sheep from Europe grazed fertile land into deserts in some parts of the Americas, while the lowered populations in others led to local reforestation which, arguably, is linked to a particularly cold period in the Little Ice Age.WithRebecca Earle Professor of History at the University of WarwickJohn Lindo Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University AndMark Maslin Professor of Earth System Science at University College LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading listSteven R. Brechin and Seungyun Lee (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Routledge, 2024), especially the chapter ‘Human Impacts on the Climate Prior to the Industrial Revolution’ by Alexander Koch, Simon Lewis, Chris Brierley and Mark MaslinJudith Carney and Richard Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009)EJ Collen, AS Johar, JC Teixeira and B. Llamas, ‘The Immunogenetic Impact of European Colonization in the Americas’ (Front Genet, August 2022)Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Press, 1972)Rebecca Earle, ‘‘‘If You Eat Their Food . . .”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America’ (American Historical Review 115:3, 2010)Raymond Grew (ed.), Food in Global History (Routledge, 1999), especially ‘The Impact of New World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India, 1600-1900’ by Sucheta Mazumda Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Pelican, 2018)Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas’ (Journal of Economic Perspectives 24:2, 2010)Jeffrey Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford University Press, 2012), especially ‘The Columbian Exchange’ by Rebecca EarleIn Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
John Keats
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, when Keats had been stung by some reviews labelling him an uncouth Cockney who should go back to his former work as an apothecary, work he had left for poetry only two years before with the encouragement of enthusiastic friends. Just over two years later, Keats was dead in Rome from tuberculosis, before his work found fame, though some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.WithFiona Stafford Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, University of OxfordNicholas Roe Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St AndrewsAndMeiko O’Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 1987)Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (eds), John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2022)Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford University Press, 1967) John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2020)John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Oxford 21st-Century Authors (University Press, 2017)John Keats (ed. John Barnard), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007)John Keats (ed. John Barnard), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2nd edition, 1977)John Keats (ed. Jeffrey N. Cox), Keats’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)Carol Kyros Walker, Walking North with Keats (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)Richard Marggraf Turley (ed.), Keats’s Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)Lucasta Miller, Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, 2021) Michael O’Neill (ed.), John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017)Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974) Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012) Helen Vendler, The Odes of Keats (Belknap Press, 2004)Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2015)Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2001)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
The Code of Hammurabi
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the laws that Hammurabi (c1810 - c1750 BC), King of Babylon, had carved into a black basalt pillar in present day Iraq and which, since its rediscovery in 1901 in present day Iran, has affirmed Hammurabi's reputation as one of the first great lawmakers. Visitors to the Louvre in Paris can see it on display with almost 300 rules in cuneiform, covering anything from ‘an eye for an eye’ to how to handle murder, divorce, witchcraft, false accusations and more. The Code of Hammurabi, as it became known, made such an impression in Mesopotamia that it was copied and shared for a millennium after his death and, since its reemergence, Hammurabi and his Code have been commemorated in the US Capitol and the International Court of Justice.WithMartin Worthington Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College DublinFrances Reynolds Shillito Fellow and Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s CollegeAnd Selena Wisnom Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of LeicesterProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Zainab Bahrani, Mesopotamia: Ancient Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2017)Dominique Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon (I.B. Tauris, 2021)Prudence O. Harper, Joan Aruz and Françoise Tallon, The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures from the Louvre (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992)J. Nicholas Postgate (ed.), Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern (British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2007), especially ‘Babylonian and Assyrian: A History of Akkadian’ by Andrew R. George Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd edition, Scholars Press, 1997)Marc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography (Wiley, 2005) Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC (4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)Selena Wisnom, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Allen Lane, 2025)Martin Worthington, Complete Babylonian: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Understanding Babylonian with Original Texts (Teach Yourself Library, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
Henry IV Part 1
Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.WithEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordLucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College LondonAndLaurence Publicover Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of BristolProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018) Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999)Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997)William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024) William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition (Norton, 2003) In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.