Episode (200)
Halaman 5 dari 20
Socrates in Prison
Feb 20, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's Crito and Phaedo, his accounts of the last days of Socrates in prison in 399 BC as he waited to be executed by drinking hemlock. Both works show Socrates prepar...
The Battle of Valmy
Feb 13, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most consequential battles of recent centuries. On 20th September 1792 at Valmy, 120 miles to the east of Paris, the army of the French Revolution faced Prus...
Slime Moulds
Jan 30, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss slime mould, a basic organism that grows on logs, cowpats and compost heaps. Scientists have found difficult to categorise slime mould: in 1868, the biologist Thomas Hu...
Vase-mania
Jan 23, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts...
Plutarch's Parallel Lives
Jan 16, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work 'Parallel Lives' which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world. Plutarc...
The Habitability of Planets
Jan 09, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the great unanswered questions in science: how and where did life on Earth begin, what did it need to thrive and could it be found elsewhere? Charles Darwin spe...
Nizami Ganjavi
Jan 02, 2025Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. Nizami Ganjavi (c1141–1209) is was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan and his popularity soo...
The Hanoverian Succession
Dec 26, 2024Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the intense political activity at the turn of the 18th Century, when many politicians in London went to great lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Gr...
Italo Calvino
Dec 19, 2024Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvi...
The Antikythera Mechanism
Dec 12, 2024Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 2000-year-old device which transformed our understanding of astronomy in ancient Greece. In 1900 a group of sponge divers found the wreck of a ship off the coast o...