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In Our Time (radio series)
P v NP, first broadcast November 5, 2015
The most famous open problem in computer science, and the one most likely to scare a newcomer off, made graspable by talk alone. Timothy Gowers, Colva Roney-Dougal and Leslie Ann Goldberg work outward from one simple question, whether every problem whose answer a computer can check quickly can also be solved quickly, to why a $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute prize is still unclaimed and why encrypted online payments depend on the answer. It is the most abstract pick here, so save it for when you can give it your full attention.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Bronze Age Collapse, first broadcast June 16, 2016
Around 1200 BC the dominant powers of the Aegean, the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia, from Mycenaean Greece to the Hittite Empire, went through what looks like a sudden, uncontrolled collapse, and nobody is sure why. John Bennet, Linda Hulin and Simon Stoddart weigh the suspects (drought, earthquakes, rebellion, a breakdown in trade and the mysterious Sea Peoples) and are candid about how far the evidence will stretch. Ideal if you enjoy a historical whodunit, and a clear demonstration of how the program handles a debate with no settled answer.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Zeno's Paradoxes, first broadcast September 22, 2016
Achilles can never overtake a tortoise with a head start, and an arrow in flight is never actually moving: Zeno of Elea's puzzles from the 5th century BC sound like party tricks until this episode shows why Aristotle, Aquinas and Bertrand Russell all took them seriously. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy brings the math of infinity, while James Warren and Barbara Sattler supply the ancient philosophy, and the episode leaves honestly open whether the paradoxes have ever been fully resolved. The best gateway to the philosophy strand, because it needs no prior reading at all.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Gin Craze, first broadcast December 15, 2016
Social history at its most vivid: how 18th-century Britain switched from beer to cheap spirits, and how the panic that followed produced Hogarth's Gin Lane. Angela McShane, Judith Hawley and Emma Major trace the politics behind it, from William of Orange making Protestant Dutch gin the loyal drink to tariff changes that priced out everyday beer, then the crime, the moral alarm and the attempts to control it. A good first episode if you like history told through daily life, and a sharp lesson in how a moral panic takes hold.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Hamlet, first broadcast December 28, 2017
Shakespeare's best known, most quoted and longest play, with three Shakespeare scholars, Jonathan Bate, Carol Rutter and Sonia Massai, who manage to say something fresh about it. They follow the prince who reveals his inner self to the audience while hiding his thoughts from the Danish court, and explain why the title part has become the defining role for actors, men and women alike, who want to prove their mastery of Shakespeare. Start here if you know the play from school and wonder what the fuss is about.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Judith beheading Holofernes, first broadcast February 14, 2019
An art history episode built around one gruesome Bible story and the artists who kept returning to it from the Middle Ages onward. Susan Foister of the National Gallery, John Gash and Ela Nutu Hall follow Judith through versions by Donatello, Caravaggio, Liss and Artemisia Gentileschi, asking what each reveals about power, about attitudes to women and about the artists' own lives. Keep the paintings open on a screen while you listen: radio cannot show them, and this is the one pick that clearly benefits from pictures alongside.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Coffee, first broadcast December 12, 2019
World history told through one drink: from Ethiopia through the Ottoman Empire to the coffeehouses of 17th-century Western Europe, where caffeinated customers stayed awake longer and argued more, then on to colonial plantations worked by enslaved and indentured laborers. Judith Hawley, Markman Ellis and Jonathan Morris keep the pleasure and the exploitation in the same frame, ending with Brazil's rise as a major producer feeding demand in the United States. An easy, likable place to start, and one you will think about every time you order a cup.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Rosetta Stone, first broadcast February 11, 2021
The story behind one of the most famous museum objects in the world: a damaged, dark granite block from around 196 BC carrying the same text in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Penelope Wilson, Campbell Price and Richard Bruce Parkinson cover its discovery by Napoleon's soldiers at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast and the roughly 20 years before Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs, the first person to understand them since they fell out of use some 1,500 years earlier. Clear enough for a complete beginner, and it explains why the stone matters for the whole written culture of ancient Egypt it opened up.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Manhattan Project, first broadcast October 7, 2021
A tight account of how the fear that Germany, with its head start in nuclear fission, would build an atomic bomb first drove the United States into a vast engineering project led by General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer. Physicists Bruce Cameron Reed and Frank Close explain the science in plain terms, while Cynthia Kelly, founder of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, brings the history of the project itself, through the first explosion in July 1945 to the bombs used against Japan. A natural next step for anyone who came to the subject through the 2023 film Oppenheimer and wants the facts without the drama.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Thomas Hardy's Poetry, first broadcast January 13, 2022
Most readers meet Hardy through novels such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, but once his fiction had earned him enough, he gave up novels in the 1890s and spent the rest of his life on the poetry he prized far above them, hoping to be ranked one day alongside Shelley and Byron. Mark Ford, Jane Thomas and Tim Armstrong unpick the poems, above all the Poems of 1912-13 that grew out of his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma. The best way into the literature strand for anyone who assumes a discussion of poetry is not for them.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Antigone, first broadcast March 24, 2022
Sophocles' play is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies, and this episode shows why it still unsettles audiences. A girl barely in her teens defies her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, over the burial of her brother, and Edith Hall, Oliver Taplin and Lyndsay Coo draw out the clashes it sets running: state against individual, old against young, family against law, with no clean way to decide who is right. You do not need to have read the play first, and it opens the door to the many classics episodes in the archive.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Dead Sea Scrolls, first broadcast May 4, 2023
The religion strand at its best: careful, even-handed and full of detail you are unlikely to meet elsewhere. Sarah Pearce, Charlotte Hempel and George Brooke begin in 1946 with a Bedouin shepherd boy hunting for a lost goat in the hills above the Dead Sea, then explain why the scrolls are the most substantial firsthand evidence for Jewish belief and practice around the lifetime of Jesus, and how they changed what scholars know about the way the Hebrew Bible was edited and collected. Equally rewarding whether you come to it as a believer or a skeptic.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Mitochondria, first broadcast June 1, 2023
The biology episode to start with: the structures that power the cells of all complex life, which the 19th-century scientists who first saw them mistook for invading bacteria. Nick Lane, Mike Murphy and Florencia Camus explain why complex life depends on them, how they probably play a role in aging, and how their DNA, passed only down the maternal line, lets researchers trace population movements deep into human history. Some cell-biology vocabulary flies by quickly, but the big ideas land even if high school biology is a distant memory.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Federalist Papers, first broadcast October 12, 2023
The essays Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay published anonymously in New York in 1787 and 1788 as Publius, in support of the new US Constitution. Frank Cogliano, Kathleen Burk and Nicholas Guyatt explain how, once Hamilton and Madison were known as the main authors, the essays became a guide to what the Constitution's framers truly intended, and why some regard them as America's greatest contribution to political thought. A rare chance for American listeners to hear their founding arguments examined by historians based mostly in Britain.
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In Our Time (radio series)
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, first broadcast February 29, 2024
The physics episode for people who think quantum mechanics is beyond them. Fay Dowker, Harry Cliff and Frank Close tell how Werner Heisenberg, at 23 and still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics in a 1925 paper by working backward from what could be observed of atoms and the light they gave off, and how from that flowed the idea that you can accurately measure a particle's position or its momentum, but not both. What earns it a place here is how well the guests turn equations into pictures you can hold in your head.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Antikythera Mechanism, first broadcast November 14, 2024
In 1900 sponge divers found a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, and in it the corroded remains of a 2,000-year-old bronze device for showing the positions of the planets, sun and moon, with a complexity and precision not surpassed for more than a thousand years. Astrophysicist Mike Edmunds, science journalist Jo Marchant and historian of science Liba Taub explain how it changed our understanding of astronomy in ancient Greece. Pure intrigue from start to finish, and one of the easiest listens on this list.
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In Our Time (radio series)
The Columbian Exchange, first broadcast February 26, 2026
A good way to hear Misha Glenny, who took over as presenter in January 2026, on a subject that reaches every dinner plate. Rebecca Earle, John Lindo and Mark Maslin follow the crops, animals and diseases that crossed the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492: potatoes and tomatoes heading to Europe, cattle and bananas to the Americas, and European viruses that helped kill over 90 percent of the population in parts of the Americas. History, genetics and earth science meet in a single episode.
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