Samuel Beckett

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machi ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under ...  Show more

Today's special guest is Will Tosh, Head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe, London, and the author of a new book, “Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.” Having answered the obvious question in the prologue, the book becomes a sort of emotional biograp ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the L ...  Show more

One hundred years after his birth this month’s World Book Club, will be discussing Albert Camus' seminal novel The Outsider with his acclaimed biographer Oliver Todd, and Professor of French at Sheffield University, David Walker. And appropriately the programme comes from the hea ...  Show more

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and where did he innovate? In this episode, Jacke talks to S ...  Show more