In Our Time

Orson Welles was only 25 when his film Citizen Kane was released in 1941. It is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Welles' film, in which he plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate. It was his first acting role. He also directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac.
The production was influenced by Welles’ experience in radio and theatre, and expressed the potential of cinema as an artistic medium with its use of deep focus, long takes and other techniques.
The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.
With:
Stella Bruzzi
Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London
Ian Christie
Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London
John David Rhodes
Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Recorded at the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield, Misha Glenny and guests discuss Casablanca, one of the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Era.
The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and features the unforgettable song As Time Goes By.
Casablanca opened in November 1942 when Europe had been at war for three years and the USA for one. It was among Hollywood’s first major films to explain to US audiences why the war was worth fighting, and alongside this became a huge box office hit.
It was created by a cast and crew full of emigres and refugees from lands under Nazi control. They produced a movie that has authenticity as well as astonishing emotional power that continues to this day.
With
Ian Christie
Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London

Pamela Hutchinson
Film historian and critic
Sheldon Hall
Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University.

Producers: Simon Tillotson & Sam Peach
Reading List:
Rudy Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986)
Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013)
David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds.), Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003), especially 'The Auteur theory: Michael Curtiz and Casablanca' by Peter Wollen
Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (Hyperion, 2002)
Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood`s Most Beloved Movie (Faber & Faber, 2020)
Colin McArthur, The Casablanca File (Half Brick Images, 1992)
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Pantheon Books, 1988)
David Thomson, Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (Yale University Press, 2017)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Dark Matter is a proposed form of matter that does not absorb, reflect or emit light. It is known to make up 27% of our universe, while the matter that makes up stars and galaxies accounts for only 5%.

In this archive episode, first released in March 2015, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance existing throughout the Universe. In 1932 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noticed that the speed at which galaxies moved was at odds with the amount of material they appeared to contain. He hypothesized that much of this 'missing' matter was simply invisible to telescopes.

Today astronomers and particle physicists are still fascinated by the search for dark matter and the question of what it is.

One leading theory is that Dark Matter is made up of WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) that are big, heavy and move slowly, interacting with gravity but not other particles.

Scientists have developed multiple theories about the make up of this substance, and they are able to test them through remarkable computer modelling that simulates the construction of the universe.

With

Carolin Crawford
Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Astronomy

Carlos Frenk
Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University

Anne Green
Reader in Physics at the University of Nottingham

Producer: Thomas Morris

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. 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 machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.
This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle.
These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.
With
Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge
Victoria Martin
Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh
Joseph Martin
Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.
Producer: Sam Peach
Reading list:
Jon Butterworth, A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017)
Jon Butterworth, Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment (John Murray, 2014)
Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the Race to Split the Atom (Viking, 2004)
Panagiotis Charitos, Theodore Arabatzis, Harry Cliff, Günther Dissertori, Juliette Forneris, and Jason Li-Ying (eds.), Big Science in the 21st Century: Economic and Societal Impacts (IOP Publishing, 2023)
Harry Cliff, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Picador, 2024)
Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe (Picador, 2021)
Frank Close, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (Allen Lane, 2022)
Allan Franklin, Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
John L. Heilbron, Ernest Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms (Oxford University Press, 2003)
John L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (University of California Press, 2023)
Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Joseph D. Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (Touchstone Books, 1987)
Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Suzie Sheehy, The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)
Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1992)
A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

One of the most celebrated thinkers of the Renaissance, Erasmus (c1466-1536) is best known for his works of classical and religious scholarship, and for his infamous theological dispute with Martin Luther (1483-1546) over free will and the Church.

In this archive episode, first released in February 2012, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was widely seen as the greatest classical scholar of his age, having translated and edited numerous Latin and Greek texts. Above all though, he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures. He was an outspoken critic of the Church, whose biting satire on its excesses, In Praise of Folly, was famed throughout Europe. When the Reformation began in 1517, however, Erasmus chose to remain a member of the Catholic Church rather than side with Martin Luther and the reformers, and a few years later he engaged in a celebrated debate with Luther on the subject of free will. Through his writings on the Church, on education and the wide gamut of humanist scholarship, Erasmus is remembered today as one of the greatest thinkers of the northern Renaissance.

With

Diarmaid MacCulloch
Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford

Eamon Duffy
Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge

Jill Kraye
Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London

Producer: Thomas Morris

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.