Reith Revisited: Brian Cox on Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, gave the BBC's Reith lectures in 1953. Sarah Montague and Professor Brian Cox consider the lessons to be learnt from them today.The Reith Lectures began ...
27 Sep 201728min
Reith Revisited: Anand Menon on Robert Birley
Robert Birley's 1949 Reith Lectures series, "Britain in Europe", remain urgently topical today. Sarah Montague discusses the lectures with Professor Anand Menon.The Reith Lectures began in 1948 on the...
27 Sep 201715min
Reith Revisited: Michael Sandel on Bertrand Russell
Sarah Montague and Michael Sandel look back at the inaugural Reith Lectures given in 1948 and 1949 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell.In Reith Revisited, Radio 4 assesses the contributions of great m...
27 Sep 201721min
Adaptation
Hilary Mantel on how fiction changes when adapted for stage or screen. Each medium, she says, draws a different potential from the original. She argues that fiction, if written well, doesn't betray hi...
11 Jul 201757min
Can These Bones Live?
Hilary Mantel analyses how historical fiction can make the past come to life. She says her task is to take history out of the archive and relocate it in a body. "It's the novelist's job: to put the re...
4 Jul 201749min
Silence Grips the Town
The story of how an obsessive relationship with history killed the young Polish writer Stanislawa Przybyszewska, told by best-selling author, Hilary Mantel. The brilliant Przybyszewska wrote gargantua...
27 Jun 201749min
The Iron Maiden
How do we construct our pictures of the past, including both truth and myth, asks best-selling author Hilary Mantel. Where do we get our evidence? She warns of two familiar errors: either romanticisin...
20 Jun 201749min
The Day Is for the Living
Art can bring the dead back to life, argues the late novelist Hilary Mantel, starting with the story of her own great-grandmother. 'We sense the dead have a vital force still,' she says. 'They have so...
13 Jun 201750min
