Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and ...Show more
The Vienna Secession
In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the ...Show more
The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gateshead Hall and then at Lowood School. She leaves the school for Thornfield Hall, to become governess to the French ward of Mr Roc ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Anne Bronte's second novel, published in 1848, which is now celebrated alongside those of her sisters but which Charlotte Bronte tried to suppress as a 'mistake'. It examines the life of Helen, who has escaped her abusive husband Arthur Huntingdon ...Show more
In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name 'Ellis Bell' just a year before her death. It is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling from Liverpool brought up in the Earnshaw fa ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was ...Show more