Mathematics and Music
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mathematical structures that lie within the heart of music. The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote: 'Music is the pleasure the human mind exper...
25 Maj 200642min
Mill
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill. He believed that, 'The true philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic'. He was one of the firs...
18 Maj 200642min
Fairies
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary and visual depiction of fairies, supernatural creatures that inhabit a half-way world between this one and the next.'They stole little Bridget for seven ye...
11 Maj 200628min
Astronomy and Empire
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between astronomy and the British Empire. The 18th century explorer and astronomer James Cook wrote: 'Ambition leads me not only farther than any other...
4 Maj 200642min
The Great Exhibition of 1851
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1851 Great Exhibition. “Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there. ...
27 Apr 200642min
Immunisation
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the search for immunisation. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how s...
20 Apr 200642min
The Oxford Movement
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Oxford Movement in the Church of England in the 19th century. Cardinal John Henry Newman is perhaps the most significant Christian theologian of the nineteenth cent...
13 Apr 200642min
Goethe
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the great German polymath. 'I had the great advantage of being born at a time that was ripe for earth-shaking events which continued throughout...
6 Apr 200641min
