Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the man who, in his lifetime, was called The Caledonian Bard and whose fame and influence was to spread around the world. Burns (1759-1796) was born in Ayrshire and his work as a tenant farmer earned him the label The Ploughman Poet, yet i...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: ‘Cool’ - Laurie Taylor traces the trajectory of the notion of ‘cool’ with Joel Dinerstein, Professor of English and American Studies at Tulane University, and author of a study which suggests it originated in American jazz clubs as a stylish defence against racism and cross fertilis...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts. A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what’s coming. It’s pretentious, sure, but that’s the intention....

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Donald Trump says he should not be impeached as President, since there was ‘no quid pro quo’ on a phone call where he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. But does quid pro quo need to be explicitly stated to be a legal iss...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: “We have a tunnel.” The diggers are on the hunt for money and make an unlikely alliance. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Helena Merriman tells the extraordinary true story of a man who dug a tunnel into the East, right under the feet of border guards, to help friends...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Discussing Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banjeree and Michael Kremer’s economics Nobel Prize.

Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas explored in HG Wells’ novella, published in 1895, in which the Time Traveller moves forward to 802,701 AD. There he finds humanity has evolved into the Eloi and Morlocks, where the Eloi are small but leisured fruitarians and the Morlocks liv...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Serial killers: Laurie talks to Ian Cummins, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Salford, about the media and cultural responses to the child murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley two decades earlier. The Moors Murders were to provide an unfortunate templat...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: As acquisition talks with Spotify continue, Alex and Matt face their hopes and fears about what might lie ahead.

Episode summary: After two significant votes in the House of Commons pointing in two different directions - one towards a Brexit agreement and the other towards a general election - we discuss where we might be heading. Does Johnson have enough to persuade the wavering MPs he needs to get his Brexit...

There’s more ➢