Podcast Episodes
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the life and ideas of James Clerk Maxwell whose work is not widely known, but whose genius and contribution to the age in which we live is enormous.He took the first…
Published on 22 years, 2 months ago
The Apocalypse
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Apocalypse. George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as “the curious record of the visions of a drug addict” and if the Orthodox Christian Church had had its way, it would…
Published on 22 years, 5 months ago
Nature
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the attempt to define humanity’s part in the natural world. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote:“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a raptu…
Published on 22 years, 5 months ago
Vulcanology
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the formation of volcanoes. In 79AD Mount Vesuvius erupted on the Bay of Naples, buried Pompeii in ash and drowned nearby Herculaneum in lava. The great letter writer …
Published on 22 years, 5 months ago
The East India Company
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the private trading company that helped forge the British Empire. At its peak, its influence stretched from western India to eastern China via the farthest reaches of …
Published on 22 years, 6 months ago
The Aristocracy
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British aristocracy. The Greeks gave us the word aristocracy; it takes its root from ‘aristo’, meaning best and ‘kratos’, meaning rule or power. And for more than …
Published on 22 years, 6 months ago
The Art of War
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and philosophy of warfare. The British historian Edward Gibbon wrote: “Every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of…
Published on 22 years, 6 months ago
The Lunar Society
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Lunar Society. In the late 18th century, with the ascendant British Empire centred on London, a small group of friends met at a house on the crossroads outside Bir…
Published on 22 years, 6 months ago
Memory
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the function and significance of memory. The great writer of remembrance, Marcel Proust, declared “We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispen…
Published on 22 years, 6 months ago
Blood
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss blood. For more than 1500 years popular imagination, western science and the Christian Church colluded in a belief that blood was the link between the human and the di…
Published on 22 years, 7 months ago