News
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual decline of the Venetian Empire. Read more
now playing
The Venetian Empire
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual decline of the Venetian Empire.
George Herbert
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the greatest devotional poem writer in English.
The Antikythera Mechanism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mysterious ancient Greek astronomical computer.
Italo Calvino
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential 20th-century Italian novelist and essayist
The Hanoverian Succession
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the politics that led to the coronation of George I.
Nizami Ganjavi
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 12th-century Persian epic romantic poet.
The Habitability of Planets
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas about where life may begin in the universe and how.
Plutarch's Parallel Lives
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential Greek biographer and his main work
Vase-mania
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the eighteenth century mania for classical vases.
Slime Moulds
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable world of slime mould.
The Battle of Valmy
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the day in 1792 when the French Revolution risked defeat.
Socrates in Prison
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the inspiring last days of the great Athenian philosopher.
Pope Joan
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the legend of Pope Joan.
Sir John Soane
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential English architect John Soane.
Catherine of Aragon
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman so important that two Tudor royals married her.
Oliver Goldsmith
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss this influential and prolific 18th-century Irish writer.
Kali
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss this Hindu goddess in her many remarkable forms
Pollination
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the interplay between plants and pollinators.
Cyrus the Great
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great.
Thomas Middleton
The prolific and versatile Jacobean playwright tasked with 'improving' some of Shakespeare
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Insights into the relationship between the body and the mind, habits, language and thought
The Gracchi
Why two brothers became linked to the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the emperors.
The Battle of Clontarf
Brian Boru's celebrated defeat of Hiberno-Norse forces and allies outside Dublin in 1014.
Typology
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss biblical typology.
Molière
The great French playwright and comic actor who flourished at the court of Louis XIV.
The Korean Empire
How Korea embraced modernisation at the end of the 19th Century in a bid for independence.
Lise Meitner
The Austrian-Jewish physicist who, in 1938, solved the question of nuclear fission.
Copyright
The evolution of copyright.
Paul von Hindenburg
How the cult of personality around this German WWI figurehead helped usher in Hitler.
