Gothic
Horace Walpole and then Anne Radcliffe appeared to have triggered an anti-enlightenment movement: the Gothic that swept in Coleridge, two Shelleys, Byron, the Brontés, Walter Scott and Dickens, innume...
4 Jan 200128min
Nihilism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Nihilism. The nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote, “There can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish: this is the great s...
16 Nov 200028min
Psychoanalysis and Literature
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovere...
9 Nov 200042min
Evolutionary Psychology
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering ro...
2 Nov 200028min
The Tudor State
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the Tudor State. In 1485 Henry Tudor slew Richard III and routed his army at The Battle of Bosworth Field. It was a decisive victory which founded a bold new dynasty...
26 Okt 200042min
Laws of Nature
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Laws of Nature. Since ancient times philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principles that control the Universe: In the 6th Century BC...
19 Okt 200028min
The Romantics
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideals, exponents and legacy of Romanticism. In the space of a few years around the start of the nineteenth century the Romantic period gave us: Wordsworth, Colerid...
12 Okt 200042min
Hitler in History
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how history has struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler: we have had theories of ‘totalitarianism’, and of ‘distorted mo...
5 Okt 200042min
