In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Melvyn Bragg examines the 18th century idea of Sensibility. In Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who has been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as her lover. Yorick describes her effect upon his ‘sweet sensibility’, “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe the tears away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own - and then in hers - and then in mine - and then I wiped hers again - and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. (I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.)”It seems a bit mawkish to us now but Sterne, Richardson and Mackenzie were all part of the ‘cult of sensibility’ in the eighteenth century which elevated the sentimental novel to the height of literary art. Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, has traditionally been taken as a parody of sensibility. But what caused the rush to emotion that so infused and enthused the Sensibility movement and was Jane Austen really so critical of the expression of feeling?With Claire Tomalin, literary biographer and author of Jane Austen: A Life and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London; Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford.

Melvyn Bragg explores the history of food in Modern Europe. The French philosopher of food Brillat-Savarin wrote in his Physiology of Taste, 'The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures; outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss' . The story of food is cultural as well as culinary, and what we eat and how we eat has always been linked to who we are or whom we might become, from the great humanist thinker Erasmus warning us to 'Always use a fork!' to the materialist philosopher Feuerbach telling us baldly, 'You are what you eat'.But what have we eaten, and why? In Europe since the Renaissance how have our intellectual appetites fed our empty stomachs? With Rebecca Spang, Lecturer in Modern History at University College London; Ivan Day, food historian; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.

Melvyn Bragg assesses the role Rome has played in European civilization. The myths that surround the foundation of Rome are a potent brew. Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars, raised by a she-wolf in the woods of Latium, the Sabine women raped by the Latins, Aeneas the Trojan General, wrecked off Carthage, loved by Dido and finally founding a new civilisation on the Tiber’s banks. According to William Shakespeare, after Brutus slayed his friend Caesar he claimed, “Not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more”. But what was the idea of Rome that demanded such devotion? And how was an identity forged that exported its values to the greatest Empire the world had ever seen? Rome has meant Republicanism, as well as Imperialism; it has stood for Pax Romana and also for the machinery of war, it is an eternally pagan city that still beats as the Catholic Heart of the Christian Church. With Mary Beard, Reader in Classics at Cambridge University, Catherine Edwards, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, London University; Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University.