In Our Time

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. With Christa Schleper Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Vienna Thorsten Allers Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of Nottingham And Buzz Baum Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading 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 Production Spanning 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.

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. With Joanna Laynesmith Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading Katherine Lewis Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of York And David Grummitt Staff Tutor in History at the Open University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading 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 production Spanning 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.

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. With Rebecca Earle Professor of History at the University of Warwick John Lindo Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University And Mark Maslin Professor of Earth System Science at University College London Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list Steven 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 Maslin Judith 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 Earle In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning 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.

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. With Fiona Stafford Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford Nicholas Roe Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews And Meiko O’Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading 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 Production Spanning 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.

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. With Martin Worthington Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin Frances Reynolds Shillito Fellow and Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College And Selena Wisnom Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading 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 Production Spanning 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.

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. With Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford Lucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London And Laurence Publicover Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading 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 Production Spanning 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.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them. With Kathleen Coleman James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University John Pearce Reader in Archaeology at King’s College London And Matthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John’s College, Oxford Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993) Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008) Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011) A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997) A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006) Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005) Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003) Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000) Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998) F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004) Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007) T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the wonders of the natural world. In 1875 in the western Pacific, the crew of HMS Challenger discovered the Mariana Trench which turned out to be deeper than Everest is high, by two kilometres. Trenches like Mariana form when one tectonic plate slips under another and heads down and there are around fifty of them globally. While at one time some thought it was too dark and deep for life there and others wildly imagined monsters, the truth has turned out to be much more surprising. With Heather Stewart, Director of Kelpie Geoscience and Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia Jon Copley Professor of Ocean Exploration and Science Communication at the University of Southampton And Alan Jamieson Director of the Deep Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Doubleday, 2023) Jon Copley, Deep Sea: 10 Things You Should Know (Orion Books, 2023) Hali Felt, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor (Henry Holt & Co, 2012) M.E. Gerringer, ‘Pseudoliparis swirei: A newly-discovered hadal liparid (Scorpaeniformes: Liparidae) from the Mariana Trench’ (Zootaxa 4358 (1), 161-177, 2017) A.J. Jamieson, The Hadal Zone: Life in the Deepest Oceans (Cambridge University Press, 2015) A.J. Jamieson et al., ‘A global assessment of fishes at lower abyssal and upper hadal depths (5000 to 8000 m)’ (Deep-Sea Research Part 1. 178: 103642, 2021) A.J. Jamieson et al., ‘Fear and loathing of the deep ocean: Why don’t people care about the deep sea?’ (ICES Journal of Marine Science. 78: 797-809, 2020) A.J. Jamieson et al., ‘Microplastic and synthetic fibers ingested by deep-sea amphipods in six of the deepest marine environments on Earth’ (Royal Society Open Science, 6, 180667, 2019) A.J. Jamieson et al., ‘Bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean fauna’ (Nature Ecology and Evolution. 1, 0051, 2017) V.L. Vescovo et al., ‘Safety and conservation at the deepest place on Earth: A call for prohibiting the deliberate discarding of nondegradable umbilicals from deep-sea exploration vehicles’ (Marine Policy. 128, 104463, 2021) J.N.J. Weston et al., ‘New species of Eurythenes from hadal depths of the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean (Crustacea: Amphipoda)’ (Zootaxa. 4748(1): 163-181, 2020) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning 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.

Journalist, author and historian Misha Glenny presents his first edition of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg who retired from this role last summer. Misha and his guests discuss the landmark work On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, published in 1859 and the increasing recognition for his wife Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution. The subject matter of the essay is ‘civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ and it argues that the sole end for which mankind may interfere with the liberty of action of anyone is self-protection and even then only to prevent harm to others. This essay became enormously popular and a foundational text for liberalism. With Helen McCabe Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham Mark Philp Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick And Piers Norris Turner Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed.), Harriet Taylor Mill, Complete Works (Indiana University Press, 1998) Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868 (University of Toronto Press, 1992) Christopher Macleod and Dale Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill (Wiley, 2016) Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) Helen McCabe, Harriet Taylor Mill (Cambridge, 2023) Piers Norris Turner, ‘The Arguments of On Liberty: Mill’s Institutional Designs’ (Nineteenth-Century Prose 47 (1), 2020) Piers Norris Turner et al (eds.), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, On Liberty with Related Writings (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming 2026) Mark Philp (ed.), John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 2018) Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen (eds.), John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Utilitarianism and other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015) Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford University Press, 2013) Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Palgrave MacMillan, 1998) Ben Saunders, ‘Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle’ (Mind 125/500, 2016) John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge, 2006) William Stafford, John Stuart Mill (Red Globe Press, 1998) C. L. Ten (ed.), Mill: On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds.), John Stuart Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

Misha Glenny introduces himself to you ahead of his first episode on 15th January, answering some questions from producer Simon Tillotson and sharing what's coming up in the first few weeks. In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

While you wait for the new season of In Our Time with Misha Glenny, we’re introducing you to The Global Story, a new daily podcast from the BBC. In this episode, writer and voracious reader James Marriott discusses the so-called 'death of reading'. He argues that we may be entering a post literate age – shaped by addictive screen culture, fragmented attention, and an overflow of trivial or unreliable information. The conversation traces how the 18th century 'reading revolution' helped shape the modern world, and what its decline could mean for education, culture, and democracy today. If you enjoy this episode, you can find new instalments of The Global Story every day wherever you get your BBC Podcasts.

Before Misha Glenny's first edition on 15th January, BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme Today has brought Melvyn Bragg and Misha Glenny together so they can share their ideas about In Our Time's success and discuss what, if anything, will change with Misha. While Justin Webb chaired this discussion, here you will hear Melvyn introduce it and at the end he has a message for Misha and for listeners around the world. This is a longer version of the discussion broadcast on Today on Radio 4 on Christmas Eve 2025 which was produced by Jade Bogart-Preleur, when Melvyn Bragg was the guest editor. In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production.

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. The singer Joan Armatrading has selected the episode about Charles Dickens and recorded an introduction to it (this introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Dickens is best known for the strength of his plots and the richness of his characters, but he can also be regarded as a political writer. Some have seen him as a social reformer of great persuasiveness, as a man who sought through satire to expose the powerful and privileged, and whose scenes moved decision-makers to make better decisions. George Bernard Shaw said of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit that it was 'more seditious than Das Kapital'. Others argue that, although Dickens was a great caricaturist, he was really a conservative at heart. With Rosemary Ashton Professor of English at University College London Michael Slater Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism And John Bowen Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele Producers: Jonathan Levi and Charlie Taylor This programme was first broadcast in July 2001. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world. In Our Time is a BBC Studios production.

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Emily Dickinson was arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets. With Fiona Green Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College Linda Freedman Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London and Paraic Finnerty Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth Producer: Simon Tillotson. Reading list: Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Penguin Books, 2009) Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble and Gary Lee Stonum (eds.), Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2005) Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992) Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (University Massachusetts Press, 1998) Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Harvard University Press, 1998) Linda Freedman, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller (eds.), The Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Early Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001) Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds.), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998) Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2013) Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (first published 1958; Harvard University Press, 1986) Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Poems of Emily Dickinson (first published 1951; Faber & Faber, 1976) Thomas Herbert Johnson and Theodora Ward (eds.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1958) Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990) Mary Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2016) James McIntosh, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (University of Michigan Press, 2000) Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) Cristanne Miller (ed.), Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved (Harvard University Press, 2016) Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) Elizabeth Phillips, Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988) Eliza Richards (ed.), Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Richard B. Sewall, The...

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the one broadcast on Radio 4). In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published a collection of poems entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “never before imprinted”. Yet, while some of Shakespeare's other poems and many of his plays were often reprinted in his lifetime, the Sonnets were not a publishing success. They had to make their own way, outside the main canon of Shakespeare’s work: wonderful, troubling, patchy, inspiring and baffling, and they have appealed in different ways to different times. Most are addressed to a man, something often overlooked and occasionally concealed; one early and notorious edition even changed some of the pronouns. With: Hannah Crawforth Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London Don Paterson Poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews And Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford Producer: Simon Tillotson Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran has picked the episode on the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe and recorded an introduction to it. Margery Kempe (1373-1438) produced an account of her extraordinary life in a book she dictated, "The Book of Margery Kempe." She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934. This In Our Time episode was first broadcast in June 2016. The image (above), of an unknown woman, comes from a pew at Margery Kempe's parish church, St Margaret’s, Kings Lynn and dates from c1375. With Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London Katherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield And Anthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, (D. S. Brewer, 2010) Anthony Bale (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford University Press, 2015) Santha Bhattacharji, God is an Earthquake: The Spirituality of Margery Kempe (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997) Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World (Longman, 2002) Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1989) Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Faber & Faber, 2002) Brett Whalen, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2011) Barry Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition (D. S. Brewer, 2006) Barry Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Penguin Classics, 2000) Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Guy Garvey, lyricist and lead singer of the band Elbow, has selected the episode on eclipses, first broadcast in December 2020. Solar eclipses are some of life’s most extraordinary moments, when day becomes night and the stars come out before day returns either all too soon or not soon enough, depending on what you understand to be happening. In ancient China, for example, there was a story that a dragon was eating the sun and it had to be scared away by banging pots and pans if the sun were to return. Total lunar eclipses are more frequent and last longer, with a blood moon coloured red like a sunrise or sunset. Both events have created the chance for scientists to learn something remarkable, from the speed of light, to the width of the Atlantic, to the roundness of the Earth, to discovering helium and proving Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. With Carolin Crawford Public Astronomer based at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College Frank Close Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford And Lucie Green Professor of Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London Producers: Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world. In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

After 27 years, Melvyn Bragg has decided to step down from the In Our Time presenter’s chair. With over a thousand episodes to choose from, he has selected just six that capture the huge range and depth of the subjects he and his experts have tackled. In this sixth of his choices, we hear Melvyn Bragg and his guests in 2017 discussing new discoveries about dinosaurs. Their topic is the development of theories about dinosaur feathers, following discoveries of fossils which show evidence of those feathers. All dinosaurs were originally thought to be related to lizards (the word 'dinosaur' was created from the Greek for 'terrible lizard') but that now appears false. In the last century, discoveries of fossils with feathers established that at least some dinosaurs were feathered and that some of those survived the great extinctions and evolved into the birds we see today. There are still many outstanding areas for study, such as what sorts of feathers they were, where on the body they were found, what their purpose was and which dinosaurs had them. With Mike Benton Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Bristol Steve Brusatte Reader and Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Edinburgh and Maria McNamara Senior Lecturer in Geology at University College, Cork Producer: Simon Tillotson Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

After 27 years, Melvyn Bragg has decided to step down from the In Our Time presenter’s chair. With over a thousand episodes to choose from, he has selected just six that capture the huge range and depth of the subjects he and his experts have tackled. In this fifth of his choices, we hear Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss a key figure from quantum mechanics. Their topic is the life and ideas of Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), whose Exclusion Principle is one of the key ideas in quantum mechanics. A brilliant physicist, at 21 Pauli wrote a review of Einstein's theory of general relativity and that review is still a standard work of reference today. The Pauli Exclusion Principle proposes that no two electrons in an atom can be at the same time in the same state or configuration, and it helps explain a wide range of phenomena such as the electron shell structure of atoms. Pauli went on to postulate the existence of the neutrino, which was confirmed in his lifetime. Following further development of his exclusion principle, Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for his 'decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature'. He also had a long correspondence with Jung, and a reputation for accidentally breaking experimental equipment which was dubbed The Pauli Effect. With Frank Close Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College, University of Oxford Michela Massimi Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh and Graham Farmelo Bye-Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

After 27 years, Melvyn Bragg has decided to step down from the In Our Time presenter’s chair. With over a thousand episodes to choose from, he has selected just six that capture the huge range and depth of the subjects he and his experts have tackled. In this third of his choices, we hear Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Greek philosophy. Their topic is Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic philosopher from c490-430 BC whose paradoxes were described by Bertrand Russell as "immeasurably subtle and profound." The best known argue against motion, such as that of an arrow in flight which is at a series of different points but moving at none of them, or that of Achilles who, despite being the faster runner, will never catch up with a tortoise with a head start. Aristotle and Aquinas engaged with these, as did Russell, yet it is still debatable whether Zeno's Paradoxes have been resolved. With Marcus du Sautoy Professor of Mathematics and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford Barbara Sattler Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and James Warren Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world