The Kalevala

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the epic poem that helped build the Finnish nation.

• 50 mins

Nikola Tesla

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated Serbian-American inventor.

• 52 mins

Lysistrata

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristophanes' comedy in which a sex strike brings peace.

• 55 mins

Napoleon's Hundred Days

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Napoleon Bonaparte's surprise coup in 1815 before Waterloo

• 58 mins

Bertolt Brecht

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 20th-century German playwright.

• 59 mins

Mercury

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet closest to our Sun.

• 53 mins

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the astonishing poet at the heart of Henry VIII's court

• 58 mins

Philippa Foot

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century

• 58 mins

Empress Dowager Cixi

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who dominated China's court for almost 50 years.

• 50 mins

Marsilius of Padua

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in the history of political ideas

• 56 mins

The Orkneyinga Saga

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney up to the 13th century.

• 51 mins

Fielding's Tom Jones

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great English comic novels.

• 54 mins

Karma

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the doctrine on how you answer for your own actions.

• 50 mins

Monet in England

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Claude Monet's fascination with the foggy Thames.

• 50 mins

Bacteriophages

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how viruses can help us track and cure bacterial illnesses

• 50 mins

Benjamin Disraeli

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most prominent Victorian politicians.

• 51 mins

Wormholes

Melvyn Bragg and guests test the idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies.

• 60 mins

The Haymarket Affair

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1886 bombing in Chicago amid violent labour conflict.

• 51 mins

Robert Graves

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the fine poet of love and war and author of I, Claudius.

• 54 mins

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hayek's ideas on a state-planned economy's link to tyranny

• 50 mins

Little Women

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's influential story of the March sisters

• 48 mins

The Venetian Empire

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual decline of the Venetian Empire.

• 51 mins

George Herbert

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the greatest devotional poem writer in English.

• 52 mins

The Antikythera Mechanism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mysterious ancient Greek astronomical computer.

• 50 mins

Italo Calvino

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential 20th-century Italian novelist and essayist

• 48 mins

The Hanoverian Succession

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the politics that led to the coronation of George I.

• 50 mins

Nizami Ganjavi

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 12th-century Persian epic romantic poet.

• 52 mins

The Habitability of Planets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas about where life may begin in the universe and how.

• 52 mins

Plutarch's Parallel Lives

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential Greek biographer and his main work

• 56 mins

Vase-mania

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the eighteenth century mania for classical vases.

• 56 mins