In Our Time: Culture Folgen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Anne Bronte's second novel, published in 1848, which is now celebrated alongside those of her sisters but which Charlotte Bronte tried to suppress as a 'mistake'. It examines the life of Helen, who has escaped her abusive husband Arthur Huntingdon with their son to live at Wildfell Hall as a widow under the alias 'Mrs Graham', and it exposes the men in her husband's circle who gave her no choice but to flee. Early critics attacked the novel as coarse, as misrepresenting male behaviour, and as something no woman or girl should ever read; soon after Anne's death, Charlotte suggested the publisher should lose it for good. In recent decades, though, its reputation has climbed and it now sits with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as one of the great novels by the Bronte sisters.The image above shows Tara Fitzgerald as Helen Graham in a 1996 BBC adaptation.WithAlexandra Lewis Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle (Australia)Marianne Thormählen Professor Emerita in English Studies, Lund UniversityAndJohn Bowen Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of histories, dubbed by his detractors as the father of lies. Herodotus (c484 to 425 BC or later) was raised in Halicarnassus in modern Turkey when it was part of the Persian empire and, in the years after the Persian Wars, set about an inquiry into the deep background to those wars. He also aimed to preserve what he called the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks, seeking out the best evidence for past events and presenting the range of evidence for readers to assess. Plutarch was to criticise Herodotus for using this to promote the least flattering accounts of his fellow Greeks, hence the 'father of lies', but the depth and breadth of his Histories have secured his reputation from his lifetime down to the present day.WithTom Harrison Professor of Ancient History at the University of St AndrewsEsther Eidinow Professor of Ancient History at the University of BristolAndPaul Cartledge A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the one broadcast on Radio 4). In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published a collection of poems entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “never before imprinted”. Yet, while some of Shakespeare's other poems and many of his plays were often reprinted in his lifetime, the Sonnets were not a publishing success. They had to make their own way, outside the main canon of Shakespeare’s work: wonderful, troubling, patchy, inspiring and baffling, and they have appealed in different ways to different times. Most are addressed to a man, something often overlooked and occasionally concealed; one early and notorious edition even changed some of the pronouns. With:Hannah Crawforth Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College LondonDon Paterson Poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of St AndrewsAndEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (first published 1978; Yale University Press, 2000)Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (Arden, 2016)Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden, 2018)Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Sonnets (The Arden Shakespeare, 1997)Patricia Fumerton, ‘”Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’ (Representations 15, summer 1986, University of California Press)Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995), especially chapter 2, ‘Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color’John Kerrigan, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Penguin Classics, 1986)Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge University Press, 2019)Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010)Oscar Wilde (ed. John Sloan), The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World’s Classics), especially ‘The Portrait of Master W.H.’This episode was first broadcast in June 2021.Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our worldIn Our Time is a BBC Studios production