In Our Time: Culture

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 in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.
With
Dawn Ades
Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
Ruth Hemus
Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London
And
Stephen Forcer
Professor of French at the University of Glasgow
Produced by Martha Owen
Reading list:
Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)
Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)
Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)
Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)
David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, when Keats had been stung by some reviews labelling him an uncouth Cockney who should go back to his former work as an apothecary, work he had left for poetry only two years before with the encouragement of enthusiastic friends. Just over two years later, Keats was dead in Rome from tuberculosis, before his work found fame, though some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.
With
Fiona Stafford
Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford
Nicholas Roe
Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews
And
Meiko O’Halloran,
Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (eds), John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford University Press, 1967)
John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2020)
John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Oxford 21st-Century Authors (University Press, 2017)
John Keats (ed. John Barnard), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007)
John Keats (ed. John Barnard), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2nd edition, 1977)
John Keats (ed. Jeffrey N. Cox), Keats’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)
Carol Kyros Walker, Walking North with Keats (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Richard Marggraf Turley (ed.), Keats’s Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Lucasta Miller, Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, 2021)
Michael O’Neill (ed.), John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974)
Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012)

Helen Vendler, The Odes of Keats (Belknap Press, 2004)
Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.
With
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Lucy Munro
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London
And
Laurence Publicover
Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018)
Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999)
Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997)
William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024)
William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition (Norton, 2003)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Journalist, author and historian Misha Glenny presents his first edition of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg who retired from this role last summer. Misha and his guests discuss the landmark work On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, published in 1859 and the increasing recognition for his wife Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution. The subject matter of the essay is ‘civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ and it argues that the sole end for which mankind may interfere with the liberty of action of anyone is self-protection and even then only to prevent harm to others. This essay became enormously popular and a foundational text for liberalism.
With
Helen McCabe
Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham
Mark Philp
Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick
And
Piers Norris Turner
Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed.), Harriet Taylor Mill, Complete Works (Indiana University Press, 1998)
Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868 (University of Toronto Press, 1992)

Christopher Macleod and Dale Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill (Wiley, 2016)
Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021)
Helen McCabe, Harriet Taylor Mill (Cambridge, 2023)
Piers Norris Turner, ‘The Arguments of On Liberty: Mill’s Institutional Designs’ (Nineteenth-Century Prose 47 (1), 2020)
Piers Norris Turner et al (eds.), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, On Liberty with Related Writings (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming 2026)
Mark Philp (ed.), John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen (eds.), John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Utilitarianism and other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015)
Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Palgrave MacMillan, 1998)
Ben Saunders, ‘Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle’ (Mind 125/500, 2016)
John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge, 2006)
William Stafford, John Stuart Mill (Red Globe Press, 1998)
C. L. Ten (ed.), Mill: On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds.), John Stuart Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

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 his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.
With
Rhiannon Purdie
Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews
Steve Boardman
Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh
And
Michael Brown
Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
John Barbour (ed. A.A.M. Duncan), The Bruce (Canongate Classics, 2007)
G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1988)
Stephen Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (Tuckwell Press, 1996)
Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (eds.), Barbour's Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland (D.S. Brewer, 2015)
Michael Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280-1460 (Routledge, 2013)
Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock, Ian Brown and Susan Manning (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), (Edinburgh University Press 2006)
Robert Crawford, Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature: Vol 1, Medieval Literature, 700-1450 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), especially 'Before the Makars: Older Scots literature under the early Stewart Kings' by Rhiannon Purdie
Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306-1328 (Tuckwell Press, 2001)
Michael Penman, Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots (Yale University Press, 2014)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.