The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Melvyn Bragg examines the science of taxonomy. The Argentinean author Jose Luis Borges illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification when he quoted from an ancient Chinese Encyclopaedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On these remote pages, in a complete absence of Phylum, Genus and Species, animals are divided into: “(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs” and “those that tremble as if they were mad” ending with “those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush”, “others”, “those that have just broken the flower vase” and “those that at a distance resemble flies.”Perhaps our own system of classifying the natural world might seem just as fantastical to a more knowing mind, and perhaps underlying the Linnaean system that homo sapiens currently finds useful there are prejudices of our own which distort the scientific truth. How does natural history classify the ‘natural order’?With Colin Tudge, writer, scientist and author of The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of all the Creatures that Have Ever Lived; Dr Sandy Knapp, Research Botanist, Department of Botany, Natural History Museum, London; Henry Gee, Senior Editor of Nature and author of Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution.

6 Apr 200028min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what can be learnt from history. Many of us were taught that an understanding of the past was essential to a knowledge of the present and, more excitingly, to a view of the future. Dig deep into the pockets of Greece and Rome, the Medievals and the Enlightened, drink deep at the well of history and from that sacred study, as from the Oracle at Delphi, would come prophecies, predictions, a sense of what is to come, based on a belief in the continuity of history. But in the 1980s reputable historians predicted the end of the American empire and the rise and rise of the Russian empire. And Lord Metroland, the old booby in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags, was forever reading history wrongly. But the way we read history is a matter of key intellectual significance. The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm’s book The New Century came out when the 21st century was but a few months old. Is it really possible for history to tell us something about an era which has hardly begun? Can we ever predict the future by understanding the past? Should we seek to understand the past because it holds important lessons for the future - or is history, as Henry Ford would have it, “more or less bunk”?With Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge; Eric Hobsbawm, eminent historian and author of The New Century.

30 Mars 200028min

Melvyn Bragg examines materialism and the consumer. Does consumerism - as a cult, a fact, a need, a religion - threaten culture as we have known it, individuality as we desire it, life as we aspire to its best condition? Is the march of Mammon an army of jack-booted businessmen, using the propaganda of advertising and the seduction of the supermarket to trample us into submission, and into the worshipping of the great god - Buy? Or is the consumer the new source of power? A truer, more democratic individual freedom? Wordsworth prophesied much current criticism of consumerism when he wrote “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours:/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”. How has ‘getting and spending’ come to enjoy the place of importance it holds in our lives, and why have we so often seen shopping as in opposition to some notion of our ‘true natures’?With Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English, University of York and author of Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping; William Gibson, science fiction writer and author of Neuromancer and All Tomorrow’s Parties.

23 Mars 200028min

For some time, in some intellectual quarters in the West, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov - also known as Lenin - was regarded as an understandable revolutionary, perhaps a necessary revolutionary given the actions of the Tsars, certainly a sympathetic revolutionary compared with his successor - Stalin. He became an icon in Russia - his body unburied, lying in Red Square in a state of permanent, imminent resurrection. The Russian Presidential Elections take place at the end of the month, and the Acting President, Vladimir Putin, promised that if he won he would finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him. But whether the country will be able to escape the extraordinary influence of the man, his ideas and his machinery of oppression is another matter. In his short period in power between 1917 and 1924 Vladimir Illyich Lenin invented the one party state, developed a model to export communism around the world and built a completely original political system that remained intact for over seventy years. What drove him and enabled him to achieve success?Robert Service, lecturer in Russian History and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford and biographer of Lenin; Vitali Vitaliev, author, columnist, broadcaster former Soviet Journalist of the Year.

16 Mars 200028min

Melvyn Bragg examines the spread of religious doubt over the last three centuries. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead in 1882, Hegel in fact beat him to it apprising his Berlin students of God’s demise as early as 1827. By the end of the 19th century echoes of the death of God can be heard everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Lenin, in the poetry of Tennyson and the psychoanalysis of Freud. The march of Science seemed to challenge the authority of the Bible at every turn and by the twentieth century almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of their belief in God.So who or what was responsible for this sudden spread of religious doubt? If God could truly be said to be dead then who fired the first shot? Have we educated ourselves out of Christ only to embrace the bleaker creed of Mamon? Is God a human construct or did God construct us? Is there an argument from design, or was the Big Bang morally pointless, without what we could call a mind at all? Did Darwin and natural selection rebut the idea of a divine purpose? With A N Wilson, novelist, biographer, journalist and author of God’s Funeral; Victoria Glendinning, author, journalist and biographer of Anthony Trollope and Jonathan Swift.

9 Mars 200028min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’s story, and beyond. Ovid wrote at the beginning of The Metamorphoses - in Ted Hughes’ wonderful version - “now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies/I summon the supernatural beings/who first contrived/The transmogrifications/In the stuff of life./You did it for your own amusement./Descend again, be pleased to reanimate/this revival of those marvels.”And descend they did: The metamorphoses is an extraordinarily wide sweep through the teeming, changing world of Roman and Greek mythology.The tales were immensely popular in their own day, they were an inspiration to Chaucer, Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet, and two thousand years after they were written the stories of shape changing still seem relevant: Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of Tales from Ovid in 1997, and a new collection called Ovid Metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tales from authors and poets from all over the world.With A S Byatt, novelist and one of the contributors to Ovid Metamorphosed; Dr Catherine Bates, critic and Research Fellow, University of Warwick.

2 Mars 200028min

Melvyn Bragg examines 20th century physics’ quest for the ultimate theory of everything. Einstein left us with his theory of General Relativity, which explained how gravity works on the scale of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself and Schroedinger left us with the equation that explained the mechanics of the tiny quantum realm. Both theories work to wonderful effect in their own worlds, but (and this is the sticking point) gravity is strangely absent from the quantum realm and planets behave nothing like particles. The enigma for scientists throughout most of the last century is that, as they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right. The history of twentieth century physics has been a struggle to find a way to unite them, to find what has become the holy grail of modern physics: The Grand Unified Theory. With Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University and Cornell University; Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Royal Society Research Professor in Astronomy and Physics at Cambridge University.

24 Feb 200028min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the politics and practice of reading. Gustave Flaubert’s sage advice to us was: “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”Advice on reading - good and bad - litters the ages, from the Catholic Church refusing to translate the Bible into modern languages, to 18th century women being warned that injudicious reading could turn them to prostitution or worse. It seems that as soon as the written word was invented it came with a health warning. But thankfully, throughout the history of reading from the invention of the printing press onwards, much of that advice has been completely ignored. From the prayer wheel of medieval England to the electronic book, how has the process of reading has changed over time? How will tomorrow’s readers compare to those of the past, and is what we read today - and how we read it - essential or peripheral to the people we become?With Kevin Sharpe, Professor of History, University of Southampton; Jacqueline Pearson, Professor of English Literature, Manchester University.

17 Feb 200028min