The Petite Bourgeoisie

What happens when we tell the story of modern Britain as part of a much bigger, global history? Professor Kate Pickett OBE has recently been appointed as the UK's first-ever Professor for the Public Understanding of Social Science at the University of York. She tells Laurie about ...  Show more

As a new World Cup approaches, what does it mean that gambling now sits so close to the heart of football - and how far has the game travelled from its local roots?Laurie Taylor explores two distinct ways of understanding football’s place in contemporary society. He’s joined by D ...  Show more

A champagne-loving industrialist who enjoyed hunting, a literary critic and an upstanding Victorian gentleman: this does not sound like a description of your typical advocate of proletarian revolution or the co-author of the Communist Manifesto. Yet Friedrich Engels was all those ...  Show more

In the last years of his life, Karl Marx expanded his research in new directions-studying recent anthropological discoveries, analyzing communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, supporting the populist movement in Russia, and expressing critiques of colonial oppress ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French mathematicians and natural philosophers of the 18th Century, celebrated across Europe. Emilie du Châtelet, 1706-49, created a translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French that helped spread the light of mat ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immedi ...  Show more