Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout the universe, the silicon we have here was made billions of y ...Show more
Dadaism
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed ...Show more
In August 1941, one of the greatest poets India has ever produced died. Known as the "Bard of Bengal", Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.Farhana Haider spoke to Professor Bashabi Fraser, Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore St ...Show more
So prodigious was the polymath Rabindranath Tagore, there’s a saying in Bengal that one lifetime is not enough to consume all of his work. Poet, playwright, thinker, activist, educator, social reformer, composer, artist… the list of his talents is long. Today his name is known al ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, celebrated for fictional works including Kim and The Jungle Book. Today his poem 'If--' remains one of the best known in the English ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1859 the poet Edward FitzGerald published a long poem based on the verses of the 11th-century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam. Not a single copy was sold in the first few months after the work's publication, but af ...Show more