In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

On the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in New York, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the current status of that original declaration. Is it possible for any sort of rights to be ‘universal’? What are the implications of the ideas enshrined in that declaration - has the emphasis changed - and if so what are such rights? New thinking in this area has focused on ‘cultural rights’ but do these work alongside human rights, or do they supplant them? Has the advent of globalisation had an impact on human rights, and if so, how? At the end of the 20th century, can we look back to any progress in this area, and, if we look forward, do we see the oncoming train, or the light at the end of the human rights tunnel? With Professor Homi Bhabha, Professor in English Literature and Art, Chicago University and Visiting Professor of the Humanities, University College, London; Profesor John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics in January 1998.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of history this century. One of the debates raging in the practice of history is between the history of facts versus the imagination - a debate raised again by so-called ‘faction’ - fiction based on documentary facts which is so much in our minds today from films and television. But in fact it is a debate which has been going on throughout the century within history. The 19th century historian Thomas Macaulay wrote that History is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and like other districts similarly situated it is ill-defined, ill-cultivated and ill-regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction and sometimes theory.Why is the study of history important? Is history relevant to us today? Are the truths likely to be yielded from history closer to those disclosed in great novels than the abstract general laws sought by social scientists? And what is the role of imagination in the writing of history? With Simon Schama, Old Dominion Professor of Humanities, Columbia University in New York and currently filming a 16-part series for BBC Television on the history of Britain; Lady Antonia Fraser historian, writer and author of biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changing nature of work practices and the work ethic as it pertains at the end of the 20th century. Has our understanding of the nature and function of work really changed so radically since the beginning of the century? How can the past inform the future in the rapidly changing work environment? Has technology usurped craftsmanship, or is this no more than a superficial reading of an increasingly complex scene?With Professor Richard Sennett, visiting professor, London School for Economics and author of The Corrosion of Character - the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism; Theodore Zeldin, historian and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford; Melanie Phillips, columnist on The Sunday Times and currently working on a book about The Sex Change State.