In Our Time

Orson Welles was only 25 when his film Citizen Kane was released in 1941. It is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Welles' film, in which he plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate. It was his first acting role. He also directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac.

The production was influenced by Welles’ experience in radio and theatre, and expressed the potential of cinema as an artistic medium with its use of deep focus, long takes and other techniques.

The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.

With:

Stella Bruzzi

Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London

Ian Christie

Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London

John David Rhodes

Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Recorded at the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield, Misha Glenny and guests discuss Casablanca, one of the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Era.

The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and features the unforgettable song As Time Goes By.

Casablanca opened in November 1942 when Europe had been at war for three years and the USA for one. It was among Hollywood’s first major films to explain to US audiences why the war was worth fighting, and alongside this became a huge box office hit.

It was created by a cast and crew full of emigres and refugees from lands under Nazi control. They produced a movie that has authenticity as well as astonishing emotional power that continues to this day.

With

Ian Christie

Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London

Pamela Hutchinson

Film historian and critic

Sheldon Hall

Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University.

Producers: Simon Tillotson & Sam Peach

Reading List:

Rudy Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986)

Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013)

David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds.), Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003), especially 'The Auteur theory: Michael Curtiz and Casablanca' by Peter Wollen

Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (Hyperion, 2002)

Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood`s Most Beloved Movie (Faber & Faber, 2020)

Colin McArthur, The Casablanca File (Half Brick Images, 1992)

Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Pantheon Books, 1988)

David Thomson, Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (Yale University Press, 2017)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Dark Matter is a proposed form of matter that does not absorb, reflect or emit light. It is known to make up 27% of our universe, while the matter that makes up stars and galaxies accounts for only 5%. In this archive episode, first released in March 2015, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance existing throughout the Universe. In 1932 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noticed that the speed at which galaxies moved was at odds with the amount of material they appeared to contain. He hypothesized that much of this 'missing' matter was simply invisible to telescopes. Today astronomers and particle physicists are still fascinated by the search for dark matter and the question of what it is. One leading theory is that Dark Matter is made up of WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) that are big, heavy and move slowly, interacting with gravity but not other particles. Scientists have developed multiple theories about the make up of this substance, and they are able to test them through remarkable computer modelling that simulates the construction of the universe. With Carolin Crawford Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Astronomy Carlos Frenk Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University Anne Green Reader in Physics at the University of Nottingham Producer: Thomas Morris In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. 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 machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.

This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle.

These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.

With

Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge

Victoria Martin Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh

Joseph Martin Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.

Producer: Sam Peach

Reading list:

Jon Butterworth, A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017)

Jon Butterworth, Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment (John Murray, 2014)

Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the Race to Split the Atom (Viking, 2004)

Panagiotis Charitos, Theodore Arabatzis, Harry Cliff, Günther Dissertori, Juliette Forneris, and Jason Li-Ying (eds.), Big Science in the 21st Century: Economic and Societal Impacts (IOP Publishing, 2023)

Harry Cliff, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Picador, 2024)

Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe (Picador, 2021)

Frank Close, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (Allen Lane, 2022)

Allan Franklin, Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)

John L. Heilbron, Ernest Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms (Oxford University Press, 2003)

John L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (University of California Press, 2023)

Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Joseph D. Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (Touchstone Books, 1987)

Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Suzie Sheehy, The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)

Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1992)

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

One of the most celebrated thinkers of the Renaissance, Erasmus (c1466-1536) is best known for his works of classical and religious scholarship, and for his infamous theological dispute with Martin Luther (1483-1546) over free will and the Church. In this archive episode, first released in February 2012, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was widely seen as the greatest classical scholar of his age, having translated and edited numerous Latin and Greek texts. Above all though, he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures. He was an outspoken critic of the Church, whose biting satire on its excesses, In Praise of Folly, was famed throughout Europe. When the Reformation began in 1517, however, Erasmus chose to remain a member of the Catholic Church rather than side with Martin Luther and the reformers, and a few years later he engaged in a celebrated debate with Luther on the subject of free will. Through his writings on the Church, on education and the wide gamut of humanist scholarship, Erasmus is remembered today as one of the greatest thinkers of the northern Renaissance. With Diarmaid MacCulloch Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford Eamon Duffy Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge Jill Kraye Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London Producer: Thomas Morris In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In 1516, the publication of one small book would coin a new word and give rise to centuries of literature, theory, and thought. In his most influential work, the lawyer and Tudor politician Thomas More (1478-1535) described a seemingly perfect – but entirely fictional – island called Utopia. In 1535, less than two decades after writing the book, More was executed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as supreme head of the church of England. Misha Glenny and his guests discuss why More’s exploration of service and the ideal state has been read as a blueprint for society, a scathing satire, and as a timeless warning. This In Our Time episode examines the 16th-century origin and legacy of one of most influential works of political philosophy. The discussion explores Utopia’s roots in Renaissance Humanism, what the book has to say about tyranny and governance, and why utopias can so often seem dystopian.

With

Laura Ashe Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford

Cathy Shrank Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield

And

Joanne Paul Honorary Associate Professor in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex

Producer: Martha Owen

Reading list:

Terence Cave (ed.), Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2008)

J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 1952)

Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Thomas More (ed. Joanne Paul), Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Thomas More (ed. George M. Logan), Utopia (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Thomas More (ed. Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith), The Essential Works of Thomas More (Yale University Press, 2020)

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England (Michael Joseph, 2025)

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: Classic Thinkers (Polity, 2016)

Howard P. Segal, Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1979)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny chooses the first of his archive picks - bringing back classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, every Monday. Humans have tried to calculate, regulate, and measure time for thousands of years: from systems based on tracking sunrise and sunset, to the invention of increasingly precise mechanical alarm clocks and astrolabes. In this archive episode, first released in March 2012, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the methods used to measure time throughout human history. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, but in the ancient world there were also sophisticated timekeeping devices such as water clocks. The development of mechanical clocks in Europe emerged in the medieval period, when monks used such devices to sound an alarm to signal it was the hour to pray, although these clocks did not tell them the time. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate and it proved hard to remedy the problems, let alone settle on a standard time that a whole country should follow. It was the advent of the railways that meant time finally became standardised in Britain during the mid-19th century, and in 1884 Greenwich became the prime meridian of the world. Atomic clocks now mark the passing of the days, hours, and minutes and they are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years. With Kristen Lippincott Former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Jim Bennett Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford Jonathan Betts Senior Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Producer: Natalia Fernandez In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world. On Thursdays, hear brand-new episodes hosted by Misha Glenny and leading academics. On Mondays, discover Misha's Archive Picks: classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, originally presented by Melvyn Bragg.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His final choice is the Trinity, an episode first released in March 2014. The idea that God is a single entity, but one known in three distinct forms - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - has been a central belief for most Christians since the earliest years of the religion. The doctrine was often controversial in the early years of the Church, until clarified by the Council of Nicaea in the late 4th century. Later thinkers including St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas recognised that this religious mystery posed profound theological questions, such as whether the three persons of the Trinity always acted together, and whether they were of equal status. The Trinity's influence on Christian thought and practice is considerable, although it is interpreted in different ways by different Christian traditions.

With:

Janet Soskice Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College

Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture

The Reverend Graham Ward Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church.

Producer: Thomas Morris

Reading list:

Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapter ‘The Doctrine of God’ Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz

Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2006)

John Behre, The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology Vol 1 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001)

Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Susan Frank Parsons (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially chapter ‘Trinity and Feminism’ by Janet Soskice

George Herbert, The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics, 2004)

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)

Ben Quash and Michael Ward (eds.), Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe (SPCK, 2007), especially essay on ‘Biblical Trinitarianism’ by Janet Soskice

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (HarperPerennial, 1976)

Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1998)

Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His ninth choice is the episode on Jane Austen’s novel Emma, first released in November 2015. Austen described her leading character as "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." Emma is one of Austen’s most popular novels and arguably her masterpiece, a brilliantly sparkling comedy of manners published in December 1815 by John Murray, the last to be published in Austen's lifetime. This followed Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), with her brother Henry handling publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817).

With

Janet Todd Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge

John Mullan Professor of English at University College, London

And

Emma Clery Professor of English at the University of Southampton.

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (first published 1975; Oxford University Press, 1988)

Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Richard Jenkyns, A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

David Monaghan (ed.), Emma (New Casebook Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992)

Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

John Mullan, What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (Anthem, 2003)

Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (first published 1986; Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Janet Todd, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His eighth choice is The War of 1812, which was first released in January 2013. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed the conflict between America and the British Empire sometimes referred to as the second American War of Independence. In June 1812, President James Madison declared war on Britain, angered by the restrictions Britain had imposed on American trade, the Royal Navy's capture of American sailors and British support for Native Americans. After three years of largely inconclusive fighting, the conflict finally came to an end with the Treaty of Ghent which, among other things, helped to hasten the abolition of the global slave trade. Although the War of 1812 is often overlooked, historians say it had a profound effect on the USA and Canada's sense of national identity, confirming the USA as an independent country. America's national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner began life as a poem written after its author, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. The war also led to Native Americans losing hundreds of thousands of acres of land in a programme of forced removal. With: Kathleen Burk Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London Lawrence Goldman Fellow in Modern History at St Peter's College, University of Oxford Frank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh Producer: Victoria Brignell

Reading list:

Carl Benn, The War of 1812 (Osprey, 2002)

George Robert Gleig, A Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army: at Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans by an officer (John Murray, 1821)

Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989)

Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Various publishers, 1962)

Reginald Horsman, The Diplomacy of the New Republic, 1776-1815 (Harlan Davidson, 1985)

Lawrence Kaplan, Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent State University Press, 1987)

Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812 (Faber and Faber, 2012)

Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Bradford Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (University of Virginia Press, 2009)

J. C. A. Stagg, The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (Knopf, 2010)

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His seventh choice is the pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958), first released in February 2018. During her distinguished career, Franklin carried out ground-breaking research into coal and viruses but she is perhaps best remembered for her investigations in the field of DNA. In 1952 her research generated a famous image that became known as Photograph 51. When the Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson saw this image, it enabled them the following year to work out that DNA has a double-helix structure, one of the most important discoveries of modern science. Watson, Crick and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this achievement but Franklin did not and today many people believe that Franklin has not received enough recognition for her work.

With:

Patricia Fara President of the British Society for the History of Science

Jim Naismith Interim lead of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Director of the Research Complex at Harwell and Professor at the University of Oxford

Judith Howard Professor of Chemistry at Durham University

Producer: Victoria Brignell.

Reading list:

Jenifer Glynn, My Sister Rosalind Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, 2002)

Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (first published 1975; W. W. Norton, 2000)

James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (first published 1968; W&N, 2010)

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His sixth choice is Plato's Republic, an episode first released in June 2017. Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, written in c380BC. Plato applied this question both to the individual and the city-state, considering earlier and current forms of government in Athens and potential forms, in which the ideal city might be ruled by philosophers. The Republic is arguably Plato's best known and greatest work, a dialogue between Socrates and his companions, featuring the allegory of the cave and ideas about immortality of the soul, the value of poetry to society, and democracy's vulnerability to a clever demagogue seeking tyranny.

With

Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield

MM McCabe Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College London

and

James Warren Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Angela Hobbs, Plato's Republic (Ladybird Expert Book, to be published 2018)

Thomas More (trans. Dominic Baker-Smith), Utopia 1516 (Penguin, 2012)

Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: 18 (University of Utah Press, 1997), especially ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic’ by Myles Burnyeat

Gerald A. Press (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Plato (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)

Malcolm Schofield, Plato (Oxford University Press, 2006)

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.

In Our Time returns for a new series with host Misha Glenny.

A world class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, philosophy, religion, science, literature, art and culture. On Thursdays, hear brand-new episodes with Misha Glenny and leading academics. On Mondays, discover Misha's Archive Picks: classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, originally presented by Melvyn Bragg. Recent episodes have featured topics as wide-ranging as the Roman Arena, Handel's Messiah, John Keats, On Liberty and the Mariana Trench, bringing expert insight to pivotal events, influential thinkers and remarkable discoveries. Throughout the archive, you can hear discussions on historical figures such as Marie Antoinette, Nefertiti, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein; explore great works of literature such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the poetry of John Donne; uncover the stories behind cultural masterpieces including Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel; or journey from Jupiter and the death of stars, to the theories of Plato and Aristotle. In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas.

A BBC Studios Production.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fifth choice, first released in May 2024, is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.

With

Yangwen Zheng Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester

Rana Mitter The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School

And

Ronald Po Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University

Producer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China (first published 1956; Open Road Media, 2013)

Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (first published 1906; General Books LLC, 2009)

Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, 2013)

Princess Der Ling, Old Buddha (first published 1929; Kessinger Publishing, 2007)

Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987)

John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.), Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2002)

Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)

Keith Laidler, The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (Wiley, 2003)

Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)

Anchee Min, The Last Empress (Bloomsbury, 2011)

Ying-Chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making (Yale University Press, 2023).

Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (first published 1910; Forgotten Books, 2024)

Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Atlantic Books, 2019)

Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow), Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023)

Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Vintage, 1993)

Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (first published 1991; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)

X. L. Woo, Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine (Algora Publishing, 2003)

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fourth choice, first released in January 2008, explores how the science of plate tectonics revolutionised our understanding of the planet on which we live. America is getting further away from Europe. This is not a political statement but a geological fact. Just as the Pacific is getting smaller, the Red Sea bigger, the Himalayas are still going up and one day the Horn of Africa will be a large island. This is the theory of plate tectonics, a revolutionary idea in 20th century geology that claimed the continents of Earth were dancing to the music of deep time. A dance of incredible slowness, yet powerful enough to throw up the mountains and pour away the oceans. Plate tectonics, the idea that the earth’s surface moved on a carpet of molten magma, constituted a genuine scientific revolution in geology. It explained why mountains appeared and why earthquakes occurred; it explained the curious distribution of fossils across the globe and finally solved the age old conundrum of why continents such as Africa and South America appeared to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Plate tectonics has made geologists, and many more besides, profoundly re-think what the Earth was, how it worked and how it related to all the things in it.

With:

Richard Corfield Visiting Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University

Joe Cann Senior Fellow in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds

Lynne Frostick Director of the Hull Environment Research Institute and Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Hull

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His third choice, first released in November 2014, is the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, whose name means 'foremost of noble ladies'. She ruled Egypt from about 1479 - 1458 BC and some scholars argue that she was one of the most successful and influential pharaohs. When she came to the throne, Egypt was still recovering from a period of turbulence known as the Second Intermediate Period a few generations earlier. Hatshepsut reasserted Egyptian power by building up international trade and commissioned buildings considered masterpieces of Egyptian architecture. She also made significant changes to the ideology surrounding the pharaoh and the gods. However, following her death, her name was erased from the records and left out of ancient lists of Egyptian kings.

With:

Elizabeth Frood Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford

Kate Spence Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge

Campbell Price Curator of Egypt and Sudan at The Manchester Museum

Producer: Victoria Brignell

Reading list:

Elizabeth Blyth, Karnak: Evolution of a Temple (Routledge, 2006)

Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King (Crown, 2014)

José M. Galán, Betsy M. Bryan and Peter F. Dorman (eds.), Creativity and Innovation in the Reign of Hatshepsut (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014)

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

Catharine H. Roehrig, Renée Dreyfus and Cathleen A. Keller, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (Yale University Press, 2005)

Catharine Roehrig (ed.), Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005)

Joyce Tyldesley, Hatshepsut: The Female Pharaoh (Penguin, 1998)

Willeke Wendrich (ed.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (University of California, 2010) particularly Peter Brand’s essay, ‘Usurpation of Monuments’

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 delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His second choice, first released in December 2019, is the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethiopia, coffea arabica spread through the Ottoman Empire before reaching Western Europe where, in the 17th century, coffee houses were becoming established. There, caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer and were more animated, and this helped to spread ideas and influence culture. Coffee became a colonial product, grown by slaves or indentured labour, with coffea robusta replacing arabica where disease had struck, and was traded extensively by the Dutch and French empires; by the 19th century, Brazil had developed into a major coffee producer, meeting demand in the USA that had grown on the waggon trails.

With

Judith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Markman Ellis Professor of 18th Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London

And

Jonathan Morris Professor in Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Yale University Press, 2005)

Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (Zed Books, 2005)

Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Orion, 2004)

Ralph Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (University of Washington Press, 1985)

Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (Reaktion, 2018)

Mark Prendergast Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed our World (Basic Books, 2010)

Claudia Roden, Coffee (Faber, 1977)

William Clarence Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (first published 1935; Martino Fine Books, 2011)

Anthony Wild, Black Gold: The Dark History of Coffee (Harper Perennial, 2010)

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.

Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers across the ages.

This archive episode, first released in October 2017, was selected as part of a ten-episode series by Misha Glenny. In the episode, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Behn, who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction during the Restoration. Virginia Woolf wrote of her: 'All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'. Behn may well have spent some of her early life in Surinam, the setting for her novel Oroonoko, and there are records of her working in the Netherlands as a spy for Charles II. She was loyal to the Stuart kings and refused to write a poem on the coronation of William of Orange. She was regarded as an important writer in her lifetime and inspired others to write but fell out of favour for two centuries after her death when her work was seen as too bawdy, the product of a disreputable age.

With

Janet Todd

Former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University

Ros Ballaster

Professor of 18th Century Literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford

and

Claire Bowditch

Post-doctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University Producer: Simon Tillotson. Reading list: Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1991) Aphra Behn (ed. Joanna Lipking), Oroonoko (Norton and Co, 1997) Aphra Behn (ed. Paul Salzman), Oroonoko and Other Writings (Oxford University Press, 2009) Aphra Behn (ed. Jane Spencer), The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2008) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko (Penguin Classics, 2003) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics, 1999) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), The Complete Works of Aphra Behn:7 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 1992-6) Claire Bowditch, The Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (University of Auckland Press, 1961) Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89 (Jonathan Cape, 1977) Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Derek Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness: Oroonoko, Race and Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2000) Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (Fentum Press, 2017) Janet Todd and Derek Hughes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, 2004) S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Northcote House, 1996) 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 a familiar feature of our beaches: seashells, from their astonishing shapes and patterns that teach us about Earth’s oceans, to the ways that humans have treasured shells throughout history. Seashells appear in the mythologies of countless cultures across the world - think of Botticelli’s Venus emerging from a giant scallop shell, Vishnu's sacred horn panchajanya, or the Aztec god Quetzalcōātl’s talisman cut from a conch shell. The urge to collect shells seems to be as old as our species. We’ve used them as decoration, currency, and musical instruments. But shells aren’t just beautiful objects washed up on our beaches. Many belong to one of the most diverse groups of the animal kingdom, Mollusca, and the remarkable morphology of forms and structures they grow in offer insight into the past, present, and future of the marine world.

With

Suzanne Williams Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum

Liz Harper Professor of Evolutionary Malacology in the Department of Earth Sciences and Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge

Helen Scales Marine biologist and Author.

Producer: Martha Owen

Reading list:

S. Peter Dance, Shells (DK, 2022)

A.R. Irwin, S.T. Williams, D.I. Speiser and N.W. Roberts, ‘The marine gastropod Conomurex luhuanus (Strombidae) has high-resolution spatial vision and eyes with complex retinas’ (Journal of Experimental Biology 225:16, 2022)

Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, Animal Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Andreia Salvador, Interesting Shells (The Natural History Museum, 2022)

Helen Scales, Shell Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Molluscan Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2026)

Helen Scales, The Shell Spotter's Guide (National Trust Books, 2024)

Helen Scales, What a Shell Can Tell: Where They Live, What They Eat, How They Move, and More (Phaidon Press, 2022)

Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015)

Paul D. Taylor, Fossils: The Essential Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Suzanne Williams, ‘Molluscan shell colour’ (Biological Reviews, 2017)

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 French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. The French Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.

With

Rosalind Polly Blakesley Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge

Robert Wenley Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

And

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds), Vigée Le Brun (exhibition catalogue in English, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016)

Joseph Baillio et al., Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842 (exhibition catalogue in French, Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16)

Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023), especially chapter 8 ‘The Triumphant Refugee’

Lucy Davies, Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (National Gallery Global, 2025)

Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1997)

Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists (Apollo, 2025)

Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Getty Publications, 2025)

Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press London, 2022)

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (trans. Sian Evans), The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (Camden Press, 1989)

Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (first published 1869; Tredition Classics, 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.