The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Coleridge's famous poem of a sailor who shot an albatross.

• 53 mins

The Late Devonian Extinction

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the five major extinction events on Earth so far.

• 49 mins

The Bacchae

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revenge of Dionysus on Thebes in Euripides' tragedy.

• 52 mins

David Ricardo

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Ricardo's argument on free trade after the Napoleonic wars

• 49 mins

The Russo-Japanese War

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1904-5 clash of Japanese and Russian empires.

• 48 mins

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great French mathematician behind metrication.

• 48 mins

Arianism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss an orthodox form of Christianity that became a heresy.

• 50 mins

The Franco-American Alliance 1778

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French fight against Britain in America and its impact

• 50 mins

Ovid

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most influential poets of Rome's Augustan Age.

• 49 mins

The Second Barons' War

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simon de Montfort's fatal struggle with Henry III's forces

• 56 mins

Longitude

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of longitude and the race to calculate it at sea.

• 50 mins

Journey to the West

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great novel from the Ming Era, with its heroic Monkey.

• 51 mins

The Interregnum

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the upheavals of 1649-60 in the British Isles

• 52 mins

Kant's Copernican Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's insight into how we relate to the world around us.

• 53 mins

Booth's Life and Labour Survey

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Booth's landmark survey of London's poor and rich.

• 48 mins

Edward Gibbon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

• 52 mins

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the greatest and most challenging poems in English

• 52 mins

The Evolution of Crocodiles

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the land animals of the Triassic that dominated dinosaurs.

• 53 mins

Herodotus

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of history.

• 52 mins

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Anne Bronte's novel of a woman's fight for independence.

• 49 mins

The Manhattan Project

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb before anyone else in WW2

• 48 mins

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Europe's largest republic, before its partition in 1772.

• 48 mins

Iris Murdoch

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of the celebrated author of The Bell.

• 54 mins

Corals

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the simple animals which form the now-threatened reefs.

• 51 mins

The Song of Roland

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a masterpiece of French epic poetry from the 12th century.

• 51 mins

William and Caroline Herschel

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siblings at the forefront of 18th-century astronomy

• 50 mins

The Decadent Movement

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Beardsley, Wilde and art for art's sake in the 1890s.

• 51 mins

Plato's Gorgias

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's exploration of the nature of power and freedom.

• 50 mins

The Battle of Trafalgar

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nelson's famous victory and death on 21 October 1805.

• 51 mins

The May Fourth Movement

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and protests in 1919 that shaped modern China.

• 52 mins