Popular culture, poetry, music and visual arts and the roles they play in our society.
Melvyn Bragg discusses the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Oscar Wilde, his literary legacy and the Aesthetes.
How the invention of writing influenced the spread of religion.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss surrealism, the art of the unconscious.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Greek and Roman love poetry.
Melvyn Bragg examines how a dominant power can exert a cultural influence on its empire.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Queen Zenobia, who led a rebellion against Ancient Rome.
The history of the politics, practice and process of reading.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 20th century’s vast population and cultural shifts.
Melvyn Bragg examines Dante’s ‘Inferno’, a medieval journey through Hell’s nine circles
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German polymath, Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the true meaning of genius and whether it is born or made.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novels of sensation, a Victorian literary phenomenon.
Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the creative force of originality.
Melvyn Bragg examines the controversy and scandal of 17th century print culture.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Eliot's 1861 novel Silas Marner.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Malory's epic medieval tale Le Morte d'Arthur.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the French thinker Blaise Pascal.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Melvyn Bragg discusses why revenge tragedy was so popular with Elizabethan theatre goers.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.