325 episodes

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

In Our Time BBC Podcasts

    • History
    • 4.6 • 4.7K Ratings

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher

    The Waltz

    The Waltz

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years. While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round a room to new lighter music popularised by Johann Strauss, father and son, such as The Blue Danube. Soon the Waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas and music, from the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev to Moon River and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

    With

    Susan Jones
    Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

    Derek B. Scott
    Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Leeds

    And

    Theresa Buckland
    Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of Roehampton

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski, and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Open Book Publishers, 2020)

    Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing. Part One: Waltzing Under Attack’ (Dance Research, 36/1, 2018); ‘Part Two: The Waltz Regained’ (Dance Research, 36/2, 2018)

    Theresa Jill Buckland, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

    Erica Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

    Paul Cooper, ‘The Waltz in England, c. 1790-1820’ (Paper presented at Early Dance Circle conference, 2018)

    Sherril Dodds and Susan Cook (eds.), Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Dance and Music (Ashgate, 2013), especially ‘Dancing Out of Time: The Forgotten Boston of Edwardian England’ by Theresa Jill Buckland

    Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (first published 1932; Vintage Classics, 2001)

    Hilary French, Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)

    Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013)

    Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (McFarland, 2009)

    Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (first published 1932; Virago, 2006)

    Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Indiana University Press, 2012)

    Eduard Reeser, The History of the Walz (Continental Book Co., 1949)

    Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2000), especially ‘Waltz’ by Andrew Lamb

    Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz’

    Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (Putnam, 1973)

    Cheryl A. Wilson, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

    Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (first published 1915; William Collins, 2013)

    Virginia Woolf, The Years (first published 1937; Vintage Classics, 2016)

    David Wyn Jones, The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

    Sevin H. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Pendragon Press, 2002)

    Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013)

    The Mokrani Revolt

    The Mokrani Revolt

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revolt that broke out in 1871 in Algeria against French rule, spreading over hundreds of miles and countless towns and villages before being brutally suppressed. It began with the powerful Cheikh Mokrani and his family and was taken up by hundreds of thousands, becoming the last major revolt there before Algeria’s war of independence in 1954. In the wake of its swift suppression though came further waves of French migrants to settle on newly confiscated lands, themselves displaced by French defeat in Europe and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and their arrival only increased tensions. The Mokrani Revolt became seen as a watershed between earlier Ottoman rule and full national identity, an inspiration to nationalists in the 1950s.

    With

    Natalya Benkhaled-Vince
    Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World, Fellow of University College, University of Oxford

    Hannah-Louise Clark
    Senior Lecturer in Global Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow

    And

    Jim House
    Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone History at the University of Leeds

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria: 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

    Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters, Algeria and Tunisia 1800–1904 (University of California Press, 1994)

    Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘The Islamic Origins of the French Colonial Welfare State: Hospital Finance in Algeria’ (European Review of History, vol. 28, nos 5-6, 2021)

    Hannah-Louise Clark, ‘Of jinn theories and germ theories: translating microbes, bacteriological medicine, and Islamic law in Algeria’ (Osiris, vol. 36, 2021)

    Brock Cutler, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria (University of Nebraska Press, 2023)

    Didier Guignard, 1871: L’Algérie sous Séquestre (CNRS Éditions, 2023)

    Idir Hachi, ‘Histoire social de l’insurrection de 1871 et du procès de ses chefs (PhD diss., University of Aix-Marseille, 2017)

    Abdelhak Lahlou, Idir Hachi, Isabelle Guillaume, Amélie Gregório and Peter Dunwoodie, ‘L'insurrection kabyle de 1871’ (Etudes françaises volume 57, no 1, 2021)

    James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press (2017)

    John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2005, 2nd edition)

    Jennifer E Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011)

    Samia Touati, ‘Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, 1830–1863: Spirituality, Resistance and Womanly Leadership in Colonial Algeria (Societies vol. 8, no. 4, 2018)

    Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2015)

    Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

    Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what’s known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.

    With

    Fay Dowker
    Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London

    Harry Cliff
    Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge

    And

    Frank Close
    Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of Oxford

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    The Sack of Rome 1527

    The Sack of Rome 1527

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the infamous assault of an army of the Holy Roman Emperor on the city of Rome in 1527. The troops soon broke through the walls of this holy city and, with their leader shot dead early on, they brought death and destruction to the city on an epic scale. Later writers compared it to the fall of Carthage or Jerusalem and soon the mass murder, torture, rape and looting were followed by disease which was worsened by starvation and opened graves. It has been called the end of the High Renaissance, a conflict between north and south, between Lutherans and Catholics, and a fulfilment of prophecy of divine vengeance and, perhaps more persuasively, a consequence of military leaders not feeding or paying their soldiers other than by looting.

    With

    Stephen Bowd
    Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh

    Jessica Goethals
    Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama

    And

    Catherine Fletcher
    Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University


    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Stephen Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford University Press, 2018)

    Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (Penguin Classics, 1999)

    Benvenuto Cellini (trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella), My Life (Oxford University Press, 2009)

    André Chastel (trans. Beth Archer), The Sack of Rome 1527 (Princeton University Press, 1983

    Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020)

    Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (eds), The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture (Routledge, 2005)

    Francesco Guicciardini (trans. Sidney Alexander), The History of Italy (first published 1561; Princeton University Press, 2020)

    Luigi Guicciardini (trans. James H. McGregor), The Sack of Rome (first published 1537; Italica Press, 2008)

    Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome (2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

    Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019)

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Lewis Carroll's book which first appeared in print in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. It has since become one of the best known works in English, captivating readers who follow young Alice as she chases a white rabbit, pink eyed, in a waistcoat with pocket watch, down a rabbit hole that becomes a well and into wonderland. There she meets the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and more, all the while growing smaller and larger, finally outgrowing everyone at the trial of Who Stole the Tarts from the Queen of Hearts and exclaiming 'Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!'
    With
    Franziska Kohlt
    Leverhulme Research Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Leeds and the Inaugural Carrollian Fellow of the University of Southern California
    Kiera Vaclavik
    Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of London
    And
    Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
    Professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, University of Oxford
    Producer: Simon Tillotson
    Reading list:
    Kate Bailey and Simon Sladen (eds), Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (V&A Publishing, 2021)
    Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
    Will Brooker, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Popular Culture (Continuum, 2004)
    Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (first published 1985; Faber and Faber, 2009)
    Lewis Carroll (introduced by Martin Gardner), The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)
    Gavin Delahunty and Christoph Benjamin Schulz (eds), Alice in Wonderland Through the Visual Arts (Tate Publishing, 2011)
    Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, 2015)
    Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion (Yale University Press, 2016)
    Franziska Kohlt, Alice through the Wonderglass: The Surprising Histories of a Children's Classic (Reaktion, forthcoming 2025)

    Franziska Kohlt and Justine Houyaux (eds.), Alice: Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2024)
    Charlie Lovett, Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith (University of Virginia Press, 2022)
    Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (first published 1952; Dalkey Archive Press, 2016)
    Kiera Vaclavik, 'Listening to the Alice books' (Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 26, Issue 1, January 2021)
    Diane Waggoner, Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press 2020)
    Edward Wakeling, The Man and his Circle (IB Tauris, 2014)
    Edward Wakeling, The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonné (University of Texas Press, 2015)

    • 49 min
    Hormones

    Hormones

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the chemical signals coursing through our bodies throughout our lives, produced in separate areas and spreading via the bloodstream. We call these 'hormones' and we produce more than 80 of them of which the best known are arguably oestrogen, testosterone, adrenalin, insulin and cortisol. On the whole hormones operate without us being immediately conscious of them as their goal is homeostasis, maintaining the levels of everything in the body as required without us having to think about them first. Their actions are vital for our health and wellbeing and influence many different aspects of the way our bodies work.
    With
    Sadaf Farooqi
    Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge
    Rebecca Reynolds
    Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh
    And
    Andrew Bicknell
    Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading
    Produced by Victoria Brignell
    Reading list:
    Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (first published 1962; Penguin Classics, 2000)
    Stephen Nussey and Saffron Whitehead, Endocrinology: An Integrated Approach (BIOS Scientific Publishers; 2001)
    Aylinr Y. Yilmaz, Comprehensive Introduction to Endocrinology for Novices (Independently published, 2023)

    • 50 min

Customer Reviews

4.6 out of 5
4.7K Ratings

4.7K Ratings

Lee-know ,

In our time

This is a general comment. Melvyn Bragg is by far the best host of any Podcast series.The topics are incredible and he is essential in keeping the experts on track. Experts are so immersed in their expertise that they easily wonder off at a tangent. Keep it up

glcrn ,

Disappointed with Twelfth Night discussion

I enjoy the programs, but the Twelfth Night discussion was lacking. Gender and class were at the fore, but the great language of the play was hardly touched on.

wilhelmina a. ,

Fix Tiberius link please

Instead of playing this episode, I get “Something went wrong. Try again later!” Thanks again for producing this great podcast.

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