Episode summary: Many people take the myth of Demeter — Ceres in Latin — and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. It is, but there may be more to it than that. Why else would it be worth scaring participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries into s...

Episode summary: The recent mass shootings and a New York gun carrying permit case calls for an examination of the current interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Episode summary: The oligarchs who made their way to London in the early 2000s and changed it presented themselves as embodiments of the new Russia; members of the global elite, and arms-length beneficiaries of Vladimir Putin’s new order, not slaves to it. Those were the terms on which Britain let t...

Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of David I of Scotland (c1084-1153) on his kingdom and on neighbouring lands. The youngest son of Malcolm III, he was raised in exile in the Anglo-Norman court and became Earl of Huntingdon and Prince of Cumbria before claiming the throne i...

Episode summary: Britain prides itself on being impregnable; a country which hasn’t been invaded for 1000 years and can’t be bought. The Lebedevs give the lie to all that. They spent a lot, but not a fortune, buying their way into British public life. And they did it in a way which perhaps nobody ha...

Episode summary: Luke Harding returns to 5x15 to discuss Ukraine, Russia, Putin and what happens next. Luke is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled hi...

Episode summary: Join 5x15 for an unmissable live event back at The Tabernacle in London’s Notting Hill with the wildly entertaining John Crace, parliamentary sketch writer and political satirist par excellence, in conversation with the one and only Viv Groskop. Throughout another year of bluster an...

Episode summary: Listening to the melodies in auctioneer school, reimagining the sound in your ears and a twilight audio-experience which takes you back in time. Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures inspired by unusual sound worlds. The Auctioneer (Excerpt) Originally produce...

Episode summary: In “Fresh Flour to the People,” the third episode in her five-part series for Gravy, producer Irina Zhorov talks to bakers who have started demanding more from a key element in their craft—flour. When we talk about ingredients, there’s a…

Episode summary: Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private collections. In recent years, with the advent of online marketplaces, researchers have begun to find a lot of artifacts for sale on the web. And it tu...