Li Shizhen

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 Life of Emily Dickinson (first published 1974; Harvard University Press, 1998) Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1996) Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Anchor Books, 2009) Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press, 1984) This episode was first broadcast in May 2017. 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

8 Tammi 50min

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

1 Tammi 53min

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.WithMiri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of LondonKatherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of HuddersfieldAndAnthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading 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 worldIn Our Time is a BBC Studios production

25 Joulu 202547min

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

18 Joulu 202549min

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

11 Joulu 202548min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that Civility, in one of its meanings, is among the most valuable social virtues: the skill to discuss topics that really matter to you, with someone who disagrees and yet somehow still get along. In another of its meanings, when Civility describes the limits of behaviour that is acceptable, the idea can reflect society at its worst: when only those deemed 'civil enough' are allowed their rights, their equality and even their humanity. Between these extremes, Civility is a slippery idea that has fascinated philosophers especially since the Reformation, when competing ideas on how to gain salvation seemed to make it impossible to disagree and remain civil.With Teresa Bejan Professor of Political Theory at Oriel College, University of OxfordPhil Withington Professor of History at the University of SheffieldAnd John Gallagher Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of LeedsProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017)Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1998)Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Polity Press, 1995)Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2000)Keith J. Bybee, How Civility Works (Stanford University Press, 2016)Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Haig Z. Smith and Lauren Working, Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2021)Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Polity, 1992)Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003)Austin Sarat (ed.), Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Cambridge University Press, 2014)Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2018)Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Polity, 2010)Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio ProductionSpanning 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.

31 Heinä 202551min

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore dragons, literally and symbolically potent creatures that have appeared in many different guises in countries and cultures around the world. Sometimes compared to snakes, alligators, lions and even dinosaurs, dragons have appeared on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, in the Chinese zodiac, in the guise of the devil in Christian religious texts and in the national symbolism of the countries of England and Wales. They are often portrayed as terrifying but sometimes appear as sacred and even benign creatures, and they continue to populate our cultural fantasies through blockbuster films, TV series and children’s books. With:Kelsey Granger, Post Doctoral Researcher in Chinese History at the University of EdinburghDaniel Ogden, Professor of Ancient History at the University of ExeterAnd Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the School of Welsh at the University of Wales. Producer: Eliane GlaserReading list:Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (eds.), Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend (Routledge, 2013), especially ‘Dragons in the Eddas and in Early Nordic Art’ by Paul AckerScott G. Bruce (ed.), The Penguin Book of Dragons (Penguin, 2022)James H. Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol became Christianized (Yale University Press, 2009)Juliana Dresvina, A Maid with a Dragon: The Cult of St Margaret of Antioch in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2016)Joyce Tally Lionarons, The Medieval Dragon: The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature (Hisarlik Press, 1998)Daniel Ogden, Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2013)Daniel Ogden, The Dragon in the West (Oxford University Press, 2021)Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon (D.S. Brewer, 2000)Phil Senter et al., ‘Snake to Monster: Conrad Gessner’s Schlangenbuch and the Evolution of the Dragon in the Literature of Natural History’ (Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 53, no. 1, 2016)Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons: Myth, Legend and Folklore (first published 1980; Wordsworth Editions, 2001) Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2009)Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (State University of New York Press, 2002)Roel Sterckx, Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding (Pelican Books, 2019)J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (first published 1983; HarperCollins, 2007)Christopher Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Routledge, 2003)Juliette Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore: From Medieval Times to the Present Day (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Yang Xin, Li Yihua, and Xu Naixiang, Art of the Dragon (Shambhala, 1988)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio 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.

24 Heinä 202546min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.WithRhiannon Purdie Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St AndrewsSteve Boardman Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of EdinburghAndMichael Brown Professor of Scottish History at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:John Barbour (ed. A.A.M. Duncan), The Bruce (Canongate Classics, 2007)G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1988)Stephen Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (Tuckwell Press, 1996)Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (eds.), Barbour's Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland (D.S. Brewer, 2015)Michael Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280-1460 (Routledge, 2013)Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock, Ian Brown and Susan Manning (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), (Edinburgh University Press 2006)Robert Crawford, Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature: Vol 1, Medieval Literature, 700-1450 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), especially 'Before the Makars: Older Scots literature under the early Stewart Kings' by Rhiannon PurdieColm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306-1328 (Tuckwell Press, 2001)Michael Penman, Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots (Yale University Press, 2014)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio ProductionSpanning 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.

17 Heinä 202549min