In Our Time

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout the universe, the silicon we have here was made billions of years ago in dying stars. In its compounds we have long used silicon for glass and, more recently, purified silicon has become the foundation of modern electronics. Perhaps less appreciated is the role silicon compounds play in the biology of life on Earth, on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the cycling of elements between land, oceans and atmosphere that sustains us.
With
Kate Hendry
Oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and Bye-Fellow of Queen’s College, University of Cambridge
Andrea Sella
Professor of Chemistry at University College London
And
Monica Grady
Professor Emerita in Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University
Produced by Martha Owen
Reading list:
Christina De La Rocha and Daniel J. Conley, Silica Stories (Springer, 2017)
Bernard Quéguiner, The Biogeochemical Cycle of Silicon in the Ocean (John Wiley & Sons, 2016)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.
With
Dawn Ades
Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
Ruth Hemus
Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London
And
Stephen Forcer
Professor of French at the University of Glasgow
Produced by Martha Owen
Reading list:
Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)
Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)
Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)
Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)
David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny bacteria-sized organisms he was studying were not actually bacteria but from an entirely different branch of the tree of life. It became clear that archaea, as he named them, share aspects of the cells in all plants and animals even if they often live in places where other life struggles including salty lakes, acidic pools, under the sea bed and in the gut. While aspects of what followed from Woese are still under debate, further discoveries suggest that life on Earth has been on a journey of separation and reunion: that the first cells developed into bacteria and archaea billions of years ago and that some of those later combined to form the complex cells from which we are made.
With
Christa Schleper
Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Vienna
Thorsten Allers
Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of Nottingham
And
Buzz Baum
Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
John Archibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the evolution of complex life (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Buzz Baum, ‘I’: A Biography of the Biological Self (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2027)
Franklin M. Harold, In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005)
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford University Press, 1994)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, half his age, and gave birth to their son Henry when she was thirteen and Edmund was already dead from the plague. Margaret Beaufort made it her life's work to protect Henry during the Wars of the Roses, which had begun soon before his birth and, as many more obvious successors to the crown died or were killed in the wars, she pivoted to supporting Henry when he became the strongest contender against Richard III. She was to survive Richard III declaring her a traitor and went on to see Henry become Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and herself become the King's Mother. Outliving her son by a few months, she was then to help her grandson Henry VIII succeed and the Tudor dynasty continue.
With
Joanna Laynesmith
Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading
Katherine Lewis
Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of York
And
David Grummitt
Staff Tutor in History at the Open University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort (Amberley Publishing, 2017)
Rachel Delman, 'The Vowesses, the anchoresses, and the aldermen's wives: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the Devout Society of Late Medieval Stamford' (Urban History 49, 2022)
David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (revised edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (Yale University Press, 2010)
Lauren Johnson, Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)
Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘Margaret Beaufort's Literate Practice: Service and Self-Inscription'
J.L. Laynesmith, Cecily Duchess of York (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
Susan Powell, The Household Accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1443-1509 (The British Academy, 2022)
Nicola Tallis, Uncrowned Queen: The Fateful Life of Margaret Beaufort, Tudor Matriarch (Michael O'Mara, 2019)
Micheline White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 (Ashgate, 2016), especially ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety’ by Brenda M. Hosington

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. That was when Columbus reached the Bahamas, a time when Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had no cattle, bananas, sugar cane or smallpox. The lists of what was then exchanged are long and as these flora, fauna and diseases moved between continents, their impact ranged from transformation to devastation. In parts of the Americas, European viruses helped kill over 90 percent of the population. In parts of Europe, Africa and Asia populations boomed on the new American foods. Sheep from Europe grazed fertile land into deserts in some parts of the Americas, while the lowered populations in others led to local reforestation which, arguably, is linked to a particularly cold period in the Little Ice Age.
With
Rebecca Earle
Professor of History at the University of Warwick
John Lindo
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University
And
Mark Maslin
Professor of Earth System Science at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list
Steven R. Brechin and Seungyun Lee (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Routledge, 2024), especially the chapter ‘Human Impacts on the Climate Prior to the Industrial Revolution’ by Alexander Koch, Simon Lewis, Chris Brierley and Mark Maslin
Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009)
EJ Collen, AS Johar, JC Teixeira and B. Llamas, ‘The Immunogenetic Impact of European Colonization in the Americas’ (Front Genet, August 2022)
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Press, 1972)
Rebecca Earle, ‘‘‘If You Eat Their Food . . .”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America’ (American Historical Review 115:3, 2010)
Raymond Grew (ed.), Food in Global History (Routledge, 1999), especially ‘The Impact of New World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India, 1600-1900’ by Sucheta Mazumda
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Pelican, 2018)
Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas’ (Journal of Economic Perspectives 24:2, 2010)
Jeffrey Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford University Press, 2012), especially ‘The Columbian Exchange’ by Rebecca Earle
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.