In Our Time is a radio discussion programme exploring a wide variety of historical, scientific, cultural, religious and philosophical topics, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom since 1998 and hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Since 2011, all episodes have been available to download as individual podcasts.[1]
Simon Schama, Old Dominion Professor of Humanities, Columbia University in New York and currently filming a 16-part series for BBC Television on the history of Britain
Lady Antonia Fraser, historian, writer and author of biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II
Alan Walker, social gerontologist, advisor to the UN's programme on Ageing and has chaired the European Commission's observatory on Ageing and Older People
John Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California and one of only two people in the world to invent an argument, the Chinese Room Argument, which destroys the plausibility of the idea of conscious machines
Stuart Hall, former Professor of Sociology, Open University and currently on a Commission set up by the Runnymede Trust looking at the future of multi-ethnic Britain
Francis Fukuyama, Hirst Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University, Washington, D.C., and author of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
Elena Lappin, novelist and author of an investigative essay published in Granta called "Truth and Lies", where she questions the veracity of the account of the Holocaust in the book Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski
Sarah Barber, lecturer in the Department of History, Lancaster University and author of Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution 1646–1659
Andrew Roberts, historian, journalist, conservative thinker and author of Salisbury: Victorian Titan
Richard Drayton, Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the 'Improvement' of the World
Michael Slater, Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism
Ruth Richardson, historian and author of Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Phoenix Press
Andrew Cunningham, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the History of Medicine, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
Philip Davis, Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and author of "The Victorians", a volume of the New Oxford English Literary History
A. N. Wilson, novelist, biographer and author of The Victorians
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University and author of The Crucible of Creation – the Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals
Richard Gameson, Reader in Medieval History at Kent University and editor of St Augustine and the Conversion of England
Clare Lees, Professor of Medieval Literature at King's College London and author of Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England
Michelle Brown, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library and author of A Guide to Western Historical Scripts
Fred Piper, Professor and Director of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and co-author of Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction
Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham and author of Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy
Juliet Mitchell, Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge and author of Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition
Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English at the University of York who has written the introduction to the latest Penguin translation of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer's Studies in Hysteria
Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London
Colin Bonwick, Professor Emeritus in American History at Keele University
2004–2005
In 2005 listeners were invited to vote in a poll for the greatest philosopher in history. The winner was the subject of the final programme before the summer break. The result of the vote was:[2]
Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London and a practising Freudian
Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Glasgow University and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Norman Solomon, Rabbi, Former Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies
Laliv Clenman, Lecturer in Rabbinic Literature at Leo Baeck College and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London
From the start of 2016 (Saturn) the podcast version of the programme started to include a few minutes of unbroadcast extra material, which would generally be prompted by the question So, what did we miss?
Broadcast date Listen again
Title
Contributors and positions held at time of broadcast
Catriona Kennedy, Senior Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York
Elizabeth Phillips, research Fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University
Vladimir Urbanek, Senior Researcher in the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Suzanna Ivanic, Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Kent
Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh and Interim Saunders Director of the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at Monticello
Tom Hopkins, Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College
Tim Crane, Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Rector at the Central European University, Director of Research, FWF Cluster of Excellence, Knowledge in Crisis
Joanna Leidenhag, Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leeds