Episode summary: In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. H...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back her public health campaigns. Her chart...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Dan Saladino looks at the future role of genome editing in food and farming. A public consultation is underway on technologies such as CRISPR. What could it mean for farmers and consumers? Unlike transgenic technologies (in which DNA is moved from one species to another), genome edi...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Josie Long presents short documentaries and adventures in sound about mothers and motherhood. We hear a story of a recurrent dream about searching for an absent mother, Heather O’Neill delves into the ways her mother and her own experience of motherhood have threaded through her lif...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Amelia Gentleman is a reporter for the Guardian. She was named Journalist of the Year at the 2019 British Journalism Awards and won the 2018 Paul Foot journalism award for her reportage on the Windrush scandal. She has also won the Orwell Prize and Feature Writer of the Year at the...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: The story of the West African diaspora in the American South is the story of the Transatlantic slave trade. But one of its staple foods, black-eyed peas, can be read as a symbol of resilience and hope.

Episode summary: Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro joins Ethan to talk about “New Approaches to Platform Data Research,” the report they just published together with the NetGain Partnership. Elizabeth and Ethan talk about a variety of issues facing journalists and researchers for studying social media compan...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: A hundred years ago one Brazilian man owned so many coffee trees he could fill every inch of a European country with them.But why does Brazil grow so much? And who is drinking these lakes of caffeine?In this third episode of A History of Coffee, Jonathan and James explore how indust...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary:

Episode summary: In the latest in our series on the fate of the Union, we talk to historians Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher about the history of Northern Ireland’s relationship to the rest of the UK. From the Anglo-Irish Union to partition to the Troubles to the Peace Process to Brexit and beyon...

There’s more ➢