Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
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Dickens
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the achievements of the 19th century literary giant, Charles Dickens. George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was “more seditious than Das Kapital”. We can all think of classic Dickens; the gin palaces, grimy narrow lanes, shoe shine boys sitting in the gutters and the terrible city smog. Silas Wake with his peg leg, young Oliver asking for more. But were these figures fictional agents for the radical change that Bernard Shaw suggests? Or was Dickens a great caricaturist but really a conservative at heart? What kind of person was the man Charles Dickens? And what is his political and literary legacy to our age? With Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English at University College London; Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism; John Bowen, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele.
The Earth's Origins
Melvyn Bragg discusses the origin of the Earth. Ideas used to be very clear about its origins. Bishop Ussher, in 1654 arrived at an exact figure and specified it in his work Annalis Veteris et Novi Testamenti: He deduced that work on Planet Earth began at exactly 9am, on Monday 23rd October 4004 BC. The date was then printed in the margin of The Bible and preached from the pulpit, and right up to the nineteenth century to the left of ‘In The Beginning…’ was specified ‘Before Christ 4004’.Christian believers thought the creation story was solid as a rock…until the geologists arrived. First Hutton, then Smith, and then Lyell smashing away at orthodox belief in a way that made poor Ruskin quail, but in doing so they created a science. With Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World: the Tale of William Smith and the Birth of A Science; Cherry Lewis, geologist and author of The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth; John Cosgrove, Structural Geologist from the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College, London.
Existentialism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss existentialism. Imagine being back inside the bustling cafes on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1930s, cigarette smoke, strong coffee and the buzz of continental voices philosophising about human responsibility and freedom. This kind of talk gave utterance to Existentialism. A twentieth century philosophy of everyday life concerned with the individual, and his or her place within the world. In novels, plays and philosophy, Existentialists try to work out the nature of our existence. As Roquentin says in Sartre’s novel ‘Nausea’, “To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it”.But where did these ideas come from? What do they really mean? And how have they impacted on our lives? With Dr A. C. Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Christina Howells, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, fellow of Wadham College; Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and author of A Companion to Continental Philosophy.
The Sonnet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Sonnet, the most enduring form in the poet’s armoury. For over five hundred years its fourteen lines have exercised poetic minds from Petrarch and Shakespeare, to Milton, Wordsworth and Heaney. It has inspired the duelling verse of ‘sonneteering’, encapsulated the political perspectives of Cromwell and Kennedy and most of all it has provided a way to meditate upon love.Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it “the moment’s monument”. What is it about the Sonnet that has inspired poets to bind themselves by its strictures again and again? With Sir Frank Kermode, author of many books including Shakespeare’s Language; Phillis Levin, Poet in Residence and Professor of English at Hofstra University; Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.
The French Revolution's Legacy
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French Revolution. In 1789 the Bastille was stormed, the King Louis XVI was put under national guard and the calendar was turned back to zero. The French Revolution began its upheavals in the name of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.On this side of the English Channel there were those who thought it ‘bliss in that dawn to be alive’, but the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke was not among them. He said, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever”.What was really the end of an age? What was the impact of this revolution on the culture of Europe? And did it really change political life in Britain for ever? With Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University; Anne Janowitz, Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary College, London;the nineteenth century historian Andrew Roberts.
Evil
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of evil. When Nietzsche killed off God he had it in for evil as well: In Beyond Good and Evil, he constructed an argument against what he called the “herd morality” of Christianity, and he complained "everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbour is henceforth called evil." Nietzsche claimed that it was a dangerous idea that distorted human nature, ‘evil’ was invented by the church and was a completely alien concept to the noble philosophers of the ancient world. Was he right, did Christianity really invent the idea of evil? And has the idea meant anything more than excessively bad? With Jones Erwin, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Limerick; Stephen Mulhall, Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford University; Margaret Atkins, Lecturer in Theology at Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds.
Literary Modernism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism. In James Joyce’s Ulysses he writes, “Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man may lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius Professor of French letters to the University of Oxtail”. It is profane, it gets the Bible wrong on purpose, it nods in the direction of Nietzsche and it doesn’t quite seem to make sense - it must be modernism! The literary movement that embraced Joyce, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and many others in the early decades of the twentieth century. Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rites of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movements defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?With John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Laura Marcus, Reader in English at the University of Sussex; Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.
The Glorious Revolution
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the the Glorious Revolution. In 1688, with a fair wind behind him and no naval opposition in front, William of Orange and his Dutch fleet sailed safely into Torbay on the South coast and thus began a period of history known - in England at least - as The Glorious Revolution. The story goes that the English, fed up with their Catholic King James II and alarmed at the prospect of a Catholic succession, ‘invited’ William to come to England and save Parliament, Protestantism and the rights of ordinary citizens. William was cheered all the way to London where, with the backing of Parliament and the people, he and his wife Mary were installed as joint sovereign monarchs of England, Ireland and Scotland. Victorian historians like Macaulay claimed that this was the era that defined British democracy, but how much of the spirit of 1688 is enwrapped within our unwritten Constitution? Were the events of 1688 really either Glorious or Revolutionary?With John Spurr, Reader in History at the University of Wales, Swansea; Rosemary Sweet, Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester; Scott Mandelbrote, Fellow and Director of Studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Black Holes
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Black Holes. They are the dead collapsed ghosts of massive stars and they have an irresistible pull: their dark swirling, whirling, ever-hungry mass has fascinated thinkers as diverse as Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen Hawking and countless science fiction writers. When their ominous existence was first predicted by the Reverend John Mitchell in a paper to the Royal Society in 1783, nobody really knew what to make of the idea - they couldn’t be seen by any telescope. Although they were suggested by the eighteenth century Marquis de Laplace and their existence was proved on paper by the equations of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, it was not until 1970 that Cygnus X 1, the first black hole, was put on the astral map. What causes Black Holes? Do they play a role in the formation of galaxies and what have we learnt of their nature since we have found out where they are?With the Astronomer Royal - 2001 Sir Martin Rees, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Cambridge University; Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Professor of Physics at The Open University; Professor Martin Ward, director of the X-Ray Astronomy Group at the University of Leicester.
The Roman Empire's Collapse in the 5th century
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon wrote of its decline, "While that great body was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol."But how far is the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome? How critical were the bawdy incursions of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire? Should we even be talking in terms of blame and decline at all?St Augustine wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, Edward Gibbon famously tackled it in the eighteenth and it is a question that preoccupies us today.With Charlotte Roueché, historian of late antiquity at Kings College London; David Womersley, Fellow and Tutor at Jesus College, Oxford and editor of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Richard Alston, Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Philosophy of Love
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of love. In Plato’s Symposium a character called Aristophanes tells a story about Love. He says that once, near the beginning of time, there were three types of human, one male, one female and one that was part man and part woman. Each human type had four hands and four feet and one head with two faces, and what they lacked in beauty they made up for in power and bravery - they even dared to attack the Gods. Zeus, as usual, lost his patience and resolved to split these creatures in half to diminish their strength and increase their numbers. His plan was that there would be more people to offer sacrifices but they’d be too weak to bother the Gods. However, with the split he inadvertently created us - lonely creatures forever searching for our other halves. Aristophanes explained to Socrates, “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love”. This is one version of love that still seems to have strange echoes in the culture of today, but how has the Western understanding of the Philosophy of Love developed since Plato? Has it always been about finding our ‘other half’? With Professor Roger Scruton, author of many books including Sexual Desire; Angie Hobbes, lecturer in philosophy at Warwick University; Thomas Docherty, Professor of English at the University of Kent.
Fossils
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the significance of fossils. In the middle of the nineteenth century the discoveries of the fossil hunters used to worry poor Ruskin to death, he wrote in a letter in 1851, “my faith, which was never strong, is being beaten to gold leaf…If only those Geologists would let me alone I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”The testimony of fossils over the ages has been remarkably eloquent when we have wanted to listen; and now with mass spectrometers, electron microscopes and secondary X-ray detectors, these long dead organisms can speak to us of the past in ways they never could before.With Richard Corfield, Research Associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University; Dianne Edwards, Distinguished Research Professor in Palaeobotany at Cardiff University; Richard Fortey, Senior Research Palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum.
Shakespeare's Life
Melvyn Bragg examines what we know about the life of William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens said of the deeply enigmatic Shakespeare, “It is a great comfort…that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up”. The mystery may have been a pleasure to Dickens but for forgers, conspiracy theorists and Shakespeare scholars it is a tantalising conundrum that has exercised minds since the day the playwright died. How was the low born son of an illiterate craftsman, with a meagre education, able to write with such skill and erudition? How did a provincial man manage to become so attuned to the politics of kings? And how do we know that the plays that we have are the right plays, written by the right man and published in the form they were written?With Katherine Duncan-Jones, Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford; John Sutherland; Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College, London and textual scholar Grace Ioppolo, lecturer in English at the University of Reading.
Money
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the power of Money. In the Bible the Old Testament and the New Testament appear to agree about the power of money: Ecclesiastes says “Money answereth all things” and Timothy says “The love of money is the root of all evil”. It is a theme that seems to echo down the centuries with seemingly everyone from Karl Marx to the cast of Cabaret crying out “Money makes the world go around”. But are economic factors really the invisible hand behind all historical events? Can everything in the end be brought down to the influence of money? With Niall Ferguson, Professor of Political and Financial History at the University of Oxford; Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge; Jane Humphries, reader in Economic History at Oxford University.
Quantum Gravity
Melvyn Bragg examines Quantum Gravity. Early in the 20th century physicists were startled by the realisation that the smallest things in the universe do not obey Newton’s laws of gravity. Ripe apples fall from trees, billiard balls roll mostly on the table and the moon orbits the Earth in thrall to its gravitational pull, but there is no such force of gravity at work in the world of very small things. It seems there is one set of rules for the realm of every day objects, and a very different set of laws for the quantum world - where tiny particles actually form the building blocks of all those larger things.But how can this be? It doesn’t appear to make sense. Physicists decided that there must be another theory - a much larger theory - that unites, incorporates and finally makes sense of these divided realms. And this has been the Holy Grail of physics ever since. With Dr John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy, University of Sussex; Lee Smolin, Professor of Physics, Centre for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, Pennsylvania State University and Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London; Dr Janna Levin, Advanced Fellow, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University.