In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  CONTENTS

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY

  The Gin Craze

  The Picts

  The Trial of Charles I

  Romulus And Remus

  1816, The Year Without a Summer

  Hatshepsut

  The Berlin Conference

  Ashoka the Great

  The Death of Elizabeth I

  The Lancashire Cotton Famine

  SCIENCE

  Bird Migration

  The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum

  Photosynthesis

  Gauss

  Ada Lovelace

  Dark Matter

  P vs NP

  Absolute Zero

  Lysenkoism

  Pauli’s Exclusion Principle

  PHILOSOPHY

  Kant’s Categorical Imperative

  Hannah Arendt

  Stoicism

  Common Sense Philosophy

  Confucius

  Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality

  Al-Biruni

  Cogito Ergo Sum

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Zeno’s Paradoxes

  CULTURE

  Frida Kahlo

  John Clare

  Epic of Gilgamesh

  The Prelude

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Tristan and Iseult

  Emma

  The Anatomy of Melancholy

  Icelandic Sagas

  The Fighting Temeraire

  RELIGION

  The Siege of Münster

  Hildegard of Bingen

  The Salem Witch Trials

  Maimonides

  The Baltic Crusades

  Rumi’s Poetry

  Titus Oates and His ‘Popish Plot’

  Zoroastrianism

  The Putney Debates

  Margery Kempe and English Mysticism

  LIST OF PROGRAMMES TO DATE

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  My thanks to Melvyn’s guests whose ideas and expertise appear in the following pages. All original thoughts and research are theirs, all errors and omissions are mine, made as I condensed the live, unscripted discussions into these chapters.

  Listeners often tell us which programmes they enjoy most and this collection represents a selection of their favourites. We could have filled this book several times over. My thanks also go to the thousands of guests who have taken part in the past twenty years and who are not represented in the book. I urge you to listen to the In Our Time archive to appreciate just how much we have missed out.

  The introductions to each chapter are the words Melvyn spoke at 9.02 a.m. in Studio 50F at BBC Broadcasting House on the relevant Thursdays. Some of his guests’ professional titles have changed since then and are printed as they are today. I have aimed to capture the shape and energy of the broadcasts, all unrehearsed, where Melvyn’s guests speak to each other informally as colleagues, rather than formally for publication. All quotations are identified, and the sentences before or after are likely to be brief paraphrases of that same speaker’s words.

  I hope this brings new listeners to In Our Time and BBC Radio 4, as well as inspiring interest in the topics under discussion. We often hear teachers and students recommending the programme and that brings us a lot of joy. You may find some chapters useful, but all offer recreational learning for its own sake, as part of what it is to be human.

  Simon Tillotson

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1998, BBC Radio 4 offered me the ‘Death Slot’ – how could I refuse?

  I had been fired from Start the Week: the powers that be thought it had been contaminated by my acceptance of an offer made by Tony Blair’s government of a seat in the House of Lords. The idea was to expand arts subsidies and it was felt that the House of Lords’ Labour benches needed beefing up. David Puttnam went in, as did Genista McIntosh and others. Despite evidence that Start the Week had never been politically biased under my watch, I had to be seen to be as pure as Caesar’s wife.

  I had enjoyed the ten years of Monday morning’s talk programme. With the producer Marina Salandy-Brown, we had changed it from predominantly show business to overwhelmingly science, history, literature and philosophy. For instance, when I went to Start the Week, 1 per cent of contributors were scientists; ten years later, the percentage was in the high thirties. And, counter-intuitively, the audiences had grown.

  The Thursday morning Death Slot – a title widely and cheerfully brandished by the BBC – had somehow become stuck in the mire: it had bruised or sunk reputations, gathered obstinately low audiences and there was a deep sense of purposelessness. It was way below the profile and audience of Start the Week. So it was a chance to do something from scratch as I had tried to do on BBC One with the book programme Read All About It and on ITV with The South Bank Show. James Boyle, the Radio 4 controller, gave me a free hand, a six-month contract and the wonderfully inappropriate title.

  I knew what I did not want. Good though Start the Week could be, I saw a chance to stop discussing books of the day, to concentrate on one subject and not four and, above all, to devote the programme to academics who, over the years, I had come to respect and enjoy as excellent broadcasters. Olivia Seligman, who had produced Start the Week, came alongside and we dived in. Neither of us expected it to last more than the six months.

  We were lucky to get a few early positive reviews. We were also lucky that the casting of subjects was eclectic. I was determined to cover the territory – all the territory. From ‘The Gin Craze’ to ‘The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum’, from ‘Zeno’s Paradoxes’ to ‘Icelandic Sagas’, from ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ to ‘Confucius’, from ‘Maimonides’ to ‘Hildegard of Bingen’, from ‘Ada Lovelace’ to ‘Dark Matter, – I loved the idea of taking the listeners by surprise with unlikely juxtapositions, which, in the long run (though I did not work this out at the time), would fall into an encyclopaedia. I loved the exhilarating feeling of infinitely varied knowledge. I have an autodidactic streak, which was now unleashed!

  As this book is published, there have been 815 editions of In Our Time. It has become the BBC’s most downloaded weekly podcast worldwide (and, on the level of individual episodes, the most downloaded of any). It is now a – free – massive archive. We get over 2 million listeners for the live broadcast on Thursday mornings and another 300,000 to 400,000 for the cut-down evening repeat. These podcasts take about 3 million copies of the programmes into forty-eight countries each month and, as importantly, to people – judging from the reactions – as widely varied as could be imagined: university graduates, workers in factories and on shop floors, men on oil rigs, people of all backgrounds catching up on their education.

  That, I think, is the key. My first attempt to get a job after university was at the WEA – the Workers’ Educational Association. I was turned down. The reason I went to university at all and did not leave school at fifteen like all my best friends was because my history teacher, Mr James, went to see my parents on three separate occasions to persuade them to let me stay at school (something I was not aware of until I was seventy-four). I like learning. I like listening to scholars. I could never have been an academic but their knowledge and turn of mind has always impressed and even seduced me. In Our Time has given me an education I could not have dreamt of at school or university.

  The strength of the programme is in the contributors. Many of them have little radio experience, some none. But because we try to concentrate on those who teach as well as research, they have no problems. Partly this is because they have listened to some of the programmes and know how it all works. The composition of the contributors has changed. It is now at least fifty/fifty male and female and has been for some time. As it happens, over the past year it
was fifty-eight female/forty-two male.

  The original programme lasted thirty minutes. Helen Boaden, when controller of Radio 4, gave us an extra fifteen minutes. I had been struggling to make it work at thirty minutes. Forty-five meant that we could have three mini acts: the proposition, the discussion, the conclusion – all in forty-three minutes ‘live’.

  Sometimes – holiday times – we record the programmes, but ‘live’, I think, gives all of us an edge. I meet the contributors at about 8.55 a.m., take them through the structure (but not the questions) and, after a two-minute news bulletin, we are on air. We have what might be called rules – for instance, we are never knowingly relevant – and therefore, for example, if we are discussing a Middle Eastern country from past centuries, we keep off the current crises. There are ways in which we structure the programme to help it flow through the three acts, and I have been accused of over-urgency when trying to reach our conclusions before 9.45 a.m. After the programme finishes, we continue to talk for about five to ten minutes – a recent addition – which is added on to the podcast. Then we have a cup of tea and leave the studio at 10 a.m. prompt. The current controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, couldn’t be more supportive. Before her, Mark Damazer as controller was always available and intellectually rich. The producer, Simon Tillotson (who has helped put together this book), is the successor in a line of fine producers. Together with Victoria Brignell, they make up the staff. I get the notes six days before the programme – they have now become my chief ‘nonfiction’ reading. They come with a structure from Simon on which I work right up to the last couple of minutes on the Thursday morning.

  Above all, I am so very pleased that students have found it and find it useful and, equally, that those who missed out on education feel that In Our Time gives them the chance to catch up. I have been in broadcasting for fifty-six years and have never had such a warm and widespread response to a programme.

  HISTORY

  Every six weeks, Simon draws up a list of possible subjects. There are about ten in each of the sections we work to. Ideas come from Simon himself, from me, from previous contributors and from enthusiasts who write in, and, over a thrifty cup of coffee and for rarely more than three-quarters of an hour, we pick the ‘team’ for the next six programmes. Usually we have two programmes in hand, so, effectively we work two months ahead. Then Simon casts the programmes at the highest level available.

  The fun is in the culture clash. As I write this, George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been followed by a programme on the proton and the week afterwards we shall be in eleventh- and twelfth-century Islamic Spain.

  At university in the late 1950s, I read modern history. This consisted of: British history from 412 to 1832; a slab of European history (say, 1492 to 1715); and a ‘special subject’ (in my case, the Italian Renaissance, which entailed learning Italian, a paper on Latin legal documents and, finally, a paper in Latin – to be translated into and out of the language and at least one other foreign tongue).

  A lot was left out. Worlds and civilisations were left untouched. As one of the secret ambitions and pleasures of this series is to fill out an education, I have taken every opportunity to depart from the university syllabus.

  In this selection, Simon has taken the reader into Roman history, with Romulus and Remus to the Picts, Ashoka the Great, Hatshepsut and the Lancashire Cotton Famine. The death of Elizabeth I was a chance to burrow deeply into a narrow but profound moment in domestic history. Similarly with the death of Charles I. The Gin Craze was a way to use social history to illuminate the more shocking and sensational aspect of that eighteenth-century debauched society.

  In each case, the task for the academics (which they made seem simple) was to condense a lifetime’s learning into a few minutes of broadcasting, which would not only hold onto their integrity but also reach out to a large audience whose appetite was keen but whose knowledge on the subject was often meagre. Time after time they did it. Perhaps this came from years of addressing students, but I think that they quickly mastered what was required of them – simply by listening – and prepared accordingly. When you listen back or read the transcripts (usually about 8,000 words), it is quite remarkable how much and how actively they covered the waterfront. The ‘extra time’ on the podcast now gives them room to finalise arguments made ‘in the heat’. But, in my view, the ‘live’ imperative can not only accelerate thought but also sharpen it.

  I am always impressed by how they combine two aspects of the subjects. The first is to give a rapid and accurate survey of the matter, citing the latest and best modern scholarship. The second is to find the space to differ courteously with each other on what are, at times, the thorniest areas of research.

  Most important of all, I think, they are unafraid to refer to events, people and past commentators, among much else, that will be known only to a small percentage of the audience but are accepted and, I believe, understood by a larger audience in the general sweep of the discussion. These colloquies can be, at their very best, mini marvels of scholarly dialogue that operate on at least two levels simultaneously.

  Of course, I am biased.

  THE GIN CRAZE

  The Gin Craze gripped Britain in the eighteenth century, when the government feared that poor people were drinking far too much cheap gin, damaging their own health and the safety and well-being of all. The roots of the craze could be traced to William of Orange, whose Dutch gin became the drink of choice for loyal Protestants. His new laws made beer expensive and let anyone distil and sell gin very cheaply at home; it was said that soon you could ‘get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence’. Hogarth later highlighted the horrors of alcohol in his Gin Lane, made as tougher and tougher laws were being imposed to end what was seen as a dangerous overconsumption by the masses.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Gin Craze were: Angela McShane, head of research at the Wellcome Collection; Judith Hawley, professor of eighteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; and Emma Major, senior lecturer in English at the University of York.

  The one fundamental fact laid down by Judith Hawley was that everybody drank alcohol in the seventeenth century, across all age ranges, both men and women, while there was a glass of small beer for the children at breakfast. Beer was thought to be good for you, while water was muddy or contaminated. Drinking was socially stratified, with ale houses run for the poor by the poor, while taverns were run for the better off and gentry and served wine, but the really strong spirits weren’t drunk regularly in Britain until William of Orange brought them over in 1688. With the support of leading Protestants, he had been invited to Britain to displace his Catholic father-in-law, James II, in what was known as the Glorious Revolution. Until then, people were drinking spirits but not in very large quantities, because they weren’t made in large quantities.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Was there an impression that this island was a sort of rocking boat of drunkenness?

  JUDITH HAWLEY: Yes, but also the British referred to the Dutch as drunks; everybody called everybody else a drunk.

  The drinking of alcohol was already embedded in society by the swearing of loyal toasts to kings and queens, but Angela McShane was clear that William changed drinking culture in Britain. Firstly, in 1690, he brought in an act to encourage the distilling of liquors in Britain, without regulation, to counteract the fact that he was banning the import of French brandy. He was at war with France and wanted to damage it economically. By the 1730s, there were 1,500 distillers in London, of whom 1,200 or so were small scale and 100 had really big stills, producing hard liquor, with medium-sized ones in between. Secondly, he brought from the Netherlands a vast number of Dutch sailors who were used to drinking gin and other spirits, which were much easier to drink on board ship than beer or wine. Gin was thought of as fortifying. Thirdly, since a lot of male sailors and soldiers were pouring into Britain, and into London in particular, women followed them and were drawn into this new drinking culture.

  A 1751
print by William Hogarth, entitled Gin Lane, depicts the evils of gin-drinking.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Can you just develop the idea of it being a Protestant drink?

  ANGELA MCSHANE: It is Protestant because, when William comes in, he is the great Protestant deliverer, going to war both against James II and the Catholics in Ireland and against the Catholics in Europe. You could be thinking about gin as a Protestant drink, in that it is feeding your armies, it is deliberately anti-French.

  Dutch gin was available, but the British were now distilling more and more of their own in place of French brandy. Gin became intertwined with the British personality, Emma Major said, and was known as ‘Madam Geneva’, from the Dutch word for the juniper in gin, jenever, which gives us the English word ‘gin’. Madam Geneva fired up the sailors and soldiers fighting for the Protestant cause, proving that God had chosen Britain as his favourite nation by providing it so generously with gin. To its proponents, there was no end to the benefits, even reviving ‘marital bliss in the home by firing up tired husbands and rendering aged, fed-up wives into young, teenage, desirous and desirable beings’. It was sold as a medicine to ward off other perceived harms.

  EMMA MAJOR: There is a sense that it must be good for you because it counters the evil effects of too much tea drinking. So, if you drink too much tea, you are made ill by your tea addiction, and you can turn to gin to make you better.

  As well as the social changes, there were real economic forces underpinning this consumption. Judith Hawley pointed to William’s desire to improve the British farming industry, where the chief grains were wheat, barley and rye. Wheat was crucial for bread, the staple of the masses, and barley was planted between the wheat sowings as part of crop rotation to maintain the health of the soil. The trouble was there was little demand for barley other than for brewing spirits.