by BBC Radio 4
<p>Popular culture, poetry, music and visual arts and the roles they play in our society.</p>
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11/12/1998
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April 17, 2025
Melvyn Bragg interviews Emma Smith, Lucy Munro, and Michelle O’Callaghan about the diverse and influential works of playwright Thomas Middleton.
March 20, 2025
<p>Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield. </p><p>With</p><p>David O’Shaughnessy Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway</p><p>Judith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London</p><p>And </p><p>Michael Griffin Professor of English at the University of Limerick</p><p>Producer: Simon Tillotson</p><p>Reading list:</p><p>Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016)</p><p>Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale University Press, 2019)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross), The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (first published 1766; Cambridge University Press, 2024)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Vicar of Wakefield (first published 1766; Oxford University Press, 2008)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, 1966) Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Robert L. Mack), Oliver Goldsmith: Everyman’s Poetry, No. 30 (Phoenix, 1997)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden), She Stoops to Conquer (first performed 1773; Methuen Drama, 2003)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt), The Citizen of the World (first published 1762; Cambridge University Press, 2024)</p><p>Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood), She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies (first performed 1773; Oxford University Press, 2007)</p><p>Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), Oliver Goldsmith in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024)</p><p>Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018)</p><p>Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longmans, 1969)</p><p>In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production</p>
March 6, 2025
<p>Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the architect Sir John Soane (1753 -1837), the son of a bricklayer. He rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect to see many of his designs realised to great acclaim, particularly the Bank of England and the Law Courts at Westminster Hall, although his work on both of those has been largely destroyed. He is now best known for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, which he remodelled and crammed with antiquities and artworks: he wanted visitors to experience the house as a dramatic grand tour of Europe in microcosm. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and in a series of influential lectures he set out his belief in the power of buildings to enlighten people about “the poetry of architecture”. Visitors to the museum and his other works can see his trademark architectural features such as his shallow dome, which went on to inspire Britain's red telephone boxes.</p><p>With: </p><p>Frances Sands, the Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum</p><p>Frank Salmon, Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture</p><p>And </p><p>Gillian Darley, historian and author of Soane's biography.</p><p>Producer: Eliane Glaser In Our time is a BBC Studios Audio production.</p><p>Reading list:</p><p>Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 2000)</p><p>Bruce Boucher, John Soane's Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (Yale University Press, 2024)</p><p>Oliver Bradbury, Sir John Soane’s Influence on Architecture from 1791: An Enduring Legacy (Routledge, 2015)</p><p>Gillian Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999)</p><p>Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Ashgate, 1999)</p><p>Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and London (Lund Humphries, 2006)</p><p>Helen Dorey, John Soane and J.M.W. Turner: Illuminating a Friendship (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007)</p><p>Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum (Merrell, 2015)</p><p>Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (Thames and Hudson, 2006)</p><p>Susan Palmer, At Home with the Soanes: Upstairs, Downstairs in 19th Century London (Pimpernel Press, 2015)</p><p>Frances Sands, Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces at Sir John Soane’s Museum (Batsford, 2021)</p><p>Sir John Soane’s Museum, A Complete Description (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2018)</p><p>Mary Ann Stevens and Margaret Richardson (eds.), John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light (Royal Academy Publications, 1999)</p><p>John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (9th edition, Yale University Press, 1993)</p><p>A.A. Tait, Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 1993) </p><p>John H. Taylor, Sir John Soane’s Greatest Treasure: The Sarcophagus of Seti I (Pimpernel Press, 2017)</p><p>David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1996)</p><p>David Watkin, Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 2000)</p><p>John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum & Soane (Prestel, 2013)</p>
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