14 APRIL 2016
The Neutron
21 APRIL 2016
1816, the Year Without a Summer
28 APRIL 2016
Euclid’s Elements
5 MAY 2016
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
12 MAY 2016
Titus Oates and His ‘Popish Plot’
19 MAY 2016
The Muses
26 MAY 2016
The Gettysburg Address
2 JUNE 2016
Margery Kempe and English Mysticism
9 JUNE 2016
Penicillin
16 JUNE 2016
The Bronze Age Collapse
23 JUNE 2016
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
30 JUNE 2016
Sovereignty
7 JULY 2016
The Invention of Photography
22 SEPTEMBER 2016
Zeno’s Paradoxes
29 SEPTEMBER 2016
Animal Farm
6 OCTOBER 2016
Lakshmi
13 OCTOBER 2016
Plasma
20 OCTOBER 2016
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
27 OCTOBER 2016
John Dalton
3 NOVEMBER 2016
Epic of Gilgamesh
10 NOVEMBER 2016
The Fighting Temeraire
17 NOVEMBER 2016
Justinian’s Legal Code
24 NOVEMBER 2016
The Baltic Crusades
1 DECEMBER 2016
Garibaldi and the Risorgimento
8 DECEMBER 2016
Harriet Martineau
15 DECEMBER 2016
The Gin Craze
Four Quartets
29 DECEMBER 2016
Johannes Kepler
12 JANUARY 2017
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality
19 JANUARY 2017
Mary, Queen of Scots
26 JANUARY 2017
Parasitism
2 FEBRUARY 2017
Hannah Arendt
9 FEBRUARY 2017
John Clare
16 FEBRUARY 2017
Maths in the Early Islamic World
23 FEBRUARY 2017
Seneca the Younger
2 MARCH 2017
Kuiper Belt
9 MARCH 2017
Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South
16 MARCH 2017
Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum
23 MARCH 2017
Battle of Salamis
30 MARCH 2017
Hokusai
6 APRIL 2017
Pauli’s Exclusion Principle
13 APRIL 2017
Rosa Luxemburg
20 APRIL 2017
Roger Bacon
27 APRIL 2017
Egyptian Book of the Dead
4 MAY 2017
Battle of Lincoln (1217)
11 MAY 2017
Emily Dickinson
18 MAY 2017
Louis Pasteur
25 MAY 2017
Purgatory
1 JUNE 2017
Enzymes
8 JUNE 2017
Christine de Pizan
15 JUNE 2017
American Populists and the Gilded Age
22 JUNE 2017
Eugene Onegin
Plato’s Republic
6 JULY 2017
Bird Migration
21 SEPTEMBER 2017
Kant’s Categorical Imperative
28 SEPTEMBER 2017
Wuthering Heights
5 OCTOBER 2017
Constantine the Great
12 OCTOBER 2017
Aphra Behn
19 OCTOBER 2017
Congress of Vienna
26 OCTOBER 2017
Feathered Dinosaurs
2 NOVEMBER 2017
Picasso’s Guernica
9 NOVEMBER 2017
The Picts
16 NOVEMBER 2017
Germaine de Staël
23 NOVEMBER 2017
Thebes
30 NOVEMBER 2017
Carl Friedrich Gauss
7 DECEMBER 2017
Moby Dick
15 DECEMBER 2017
Thomas Becket
22 DECEMBER 2017
Ludwig van Beethoven
28 DECEMBER 2017
Hamlet
11 JANUARY 2018
The Siege of Malta, 1565
18 JANUARY 2018
Anna Akhmatova
25 JANUARY 2018
Cicero
1 FEBRUARY 2018
Cephalopods
9 FEBRUARY 2018
Frederick Douglass
15 FEBRUARY 2018
Fungi
22 FEBRUARY 2018
Rosalind Franklin
1 MARCH 2018
Sun Tzu and The Art of War
8 MARCH 2018
Highland Clearances
Augustine’s Confessions
22 MARCH 2018
Tocqueville: Democracy in America
5 APRIL 2018
Roman Slavery
11 APRIL 2018
George and Robert Stephenson
18 APRIL 2018
Middlemarch
26 APRIL 2018
Proton
3 MAY 2018
Almoravid Empire
10 MAY 2018
The Mabinogion
17 MAY 2018
Emancipation of the Serfs
PRODUCERS TO DATE
Olivia Seligman, Ariane Koek, Sarah Peters, Natasha Maw, Elaine Lester, Alice Feinstein, Charlie Taylor, Phil Tinline, James Cook, Thomas Morris, Simon Tillotson
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2018
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © BBC, 2018
By arrangement with the BBC
The BBC Radio 4 logo is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence.
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Interior images © Getty Images
Photograph opposite © Amanda Benson/BBC
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.
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Project Editor: Melissa Bond
Desk Editor/picture research: Kaiya Shang
Design: Keith Williams, sprout.uk.com
Production: Karin Seifried
The publishers would like to thank Ruth Gardiner, John Goudie and all the many academics who have given their time to record the many episodes of the series across two decades.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7448-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-7450-6
Printed in Italy