newcritics

James Wolcott beat me to a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while: praise for a wonderful BBC radio program that I’ve enjoyed as a podcast on many a train ride:

I also want to direct attention to the excellent trove of replayable broadcasts of Melvyn Bragg’s superb In Our Time series on BBC 4. Each weekly installment is devoted a historical theme hosted by Bragg, with frighteningly articulate guest experts, and provides an invaluable tutorial on a vast range of topics–everything from negative numbers to Catherine the Great to the Scottish Enlightenment to the evolution of pastoral poetry to (my most recent listen) Samuel Johnson & his circle.

I can’t recommend it enough (my last listen was the Alexander Pope segment). The range of topics is brilliant, the style straightforward and occasionally humorous, the total, enlightening.