Nineteen Eighty-Four
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Orwell's (1903-1950) final novel, published in 1949, set in a dystopian London which is now found in Airstrip One, part of the totalitarian superstate…
Plague, leprosy & murder: unlocking the secrets of medieval bones
What secrets can medieval human remains unlock? With exciting new developments in the science of palaeopathology, researchers are able to glean much more from human bones than ever before. Speaking…
Chivalry: everything you wanted to know
Where does the word "chivalry" come from? How should an honourable knight treat his vanquished foes? And do chivalric ideals underlie modern-day misogyny? In our latest Everything you wanted to…
Bureaucracy from Kafka to Dickens and Gospodinov
The Palace of Dreams is a novel set in the Ottoman empire but used by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare to reflect on the totalitarian state. Lea Ypi has been…
A Ghost Story for Christmas
A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived sporadically by the BBC since…
George Orwell’s forgotten wife
George Orwell – the author of classics like 1984 – is a household name. But have you heard of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who convinced her husband to write…
The Pre-Raphaelites: everything you wanted to know
How did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood become so famous? Did Elizabeth Siddal really almost die in a bathtub when she modelled for John Everett Millais' Ophelia? And which Rosetti painting shocked…
BBC Arts & Ideas: Libraries
The Great Library of Alexandria had a mission to collect every book in the world. In attempting to do so it created the foundations for the systems and structures of…
the inconsistencies of Western standards
The BBCs diplomatic correspondent, James Landale says the West is suffering reputational damage because of it's continuous support for Israel's crimes in Gaza. Speaking to the BBC Landale, pointed that…
BBC question time October 27 2023
Netanyahu statement on support for hamas in 2019