In Our Time: Culture – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the great French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) in London, initially in 1870 and then from 1899. He spent his first visit in poverty, escaping from war in France, while by the second he had become so commercially successful that he stayed at the Savoy Hotel. There, from his balcony, he began a series of almost a hundred paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city at that time, with fog and smoke almost obscuring the bridges, boats and Houses of Parliament. The pollution was terrible for health but the diffraction through the sooty droplets offered an ever-changing light that captivated Monet, and he was to paint the Thames more than he did his water lilies or haystacks or Rouen Cathedral. On his return to France, Monet appeared to have a new confidence to explore an art that was more abstract than impressionist.

With

Karen Serres Senior Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, London Curator of the exhibition 'Monet and London. Views of the Thames'

Frances Fowle Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Curator of French Art at the National Galleries of Scotland

And

Jackie Wullschläger Chief Art Critic for the Financial Times and author of ‘Monet, The Restless Vision’

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Producer: Simon Tillotson Studio production: John Goudie

Reading list:

Caroline Corbeau Parsons, Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904 (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Frances Fowle, Monet and French Landscape: Vétheuil and Normandy (National Galleries of Scotland, 2007), especially the chapter ‘Making Money out of Monet: Marketing Monet in Britain 1870-1905’

Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (Harry N. Abrams, 1983)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Yale University Press, 1990)

Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century (Yale University Press, 1998)

Katharine A. Lochnan, Turner, Whistler, Monet (Tate Publishing, 2005)

Nicholas Reed, Monet and the Thames: Paintings and Modern Views of Monet’s London (Lilburne Press, 1998)

Grace Seiberling, Monet in London (High Museum of Art, 1988)

Karen Serres, Frances Fowle and Jennifer A. Thompson, Monet and London: Views of the Thames (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2024 – catalogue to accompany Courtauld Gallery exhibition)

Charles Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective (Random House, 1985)

Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: The Triumph of Impressionism (first published 1996; Taschen, 2022)

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane, 2023)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" (1749) by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), one of the most influential of the early English novels and a favourite of Dickens. Coleridge wrote that it had one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned'. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays that were so painful for their targets in government that, from then until the 1960s, plays required approval before being staged; seeking other ways to make a living, Fielding turned to law and to fiction. 'Tom Jones' is one of the great comic novels, with the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest raconteur. While other authors might present Tom as a rake and a libertine, Fielding makes him the hero for his fundamental good nature, so offering a caution not to judge anyone too soon, if ever.

With

Judith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Henry Power Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter

And

Charlotte Roberts Associate Professor of English Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge, 1989)

J. M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2012) S. Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

J.A. Downie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Henry Fielding (ed. John Bender and Simon Stern), The History of Tom Jones (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Henry Fielding (ed. Tom Keymer), The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin Classics, 1996)

Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Wiley Blackwell, 2000)

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (first published 1972; Routledge, 2021)

Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

With

Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Erin Forbes Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Tom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)

Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)

Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)

Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp’ (Modern Philology, 2016)

Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)

Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)

Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot's last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as meditations on the relationship between time and humanity.

With

David Moody Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York

Fran Brearton Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast

And

Mark Ford Professor of English and American Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Jeremy Irons will be reading TS Eliot's greatest poems, from Prufrock to The Waste Land to Four Quartets, across New Year's Day here on Radio 4.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'.

With

Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery

David Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain

and

James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

"He who saw the Deep" are the first words of the standard version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the subject of this discussion between Melvyn Bragg and his guests. Gilgamesh is often said to be the oldest surviving great work of literature, with origins in the third millennium BC, and it passed through thousands of years on cuneiform tablets. Unlike epics of Greece and Rome, the intact story of Gilgamesh became lost to later generations until tablets were discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1853 near Mosul and later translated. Since then, many more tablets have been found and much of the text has been reassembled to convey the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk the sheepfold, and Enkidu who the gods created to stop Gilgamesh oppressing his people. Together they fight Humbaba, monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, and kill the Bull of Heaven, for which the gods make Enkidu mortally ill. Gilgamesh goes on a long journey as he tries unsuccessfully to learn how to live forever, learning about the Great Deluge on the way, but his remarkable building works guarantee that his fame will last long after his death.

With

Andrew George Professor of Babylonian at SOAS, University of London

Frances Reynolds Shillito Fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford and Fellow of St Benet's Hall

and

Martin Worthington Lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changes in the intellectual world of Western Europe in the 12th Century, and their origins. This was a time of Crusades, the formation of states, the start of Gothic architecture, a reconnection with Roman and Greek learning and their Arabic development and the start of the European universities, and has become known as The 12th Century Renaissance.

The image above is part of Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière, Chartres Cathedral, from 1180.

With

Laura Ashe Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of Oxford

Elisabeth van Houts Honorary Professor of European Medieval History at the University of Cambridge

and

Giles Gasper Reader in Medieval History at Durham University

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Animal Farm, which Eric Blair published under his pen name George Orwell in 1945.

A biting critique of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, the essay sprung from Orwell's experiences fighting Fascists in Spain: he thought that all on the left were on the same side, until the dominant Communists violently suppressed the Anarchists and Trotskyists, and Orwell had to escape to France to avoid arrest.

Setting his satire in an English farm, Orwell drew on the Russian Revolution of 1917, on Stalin's cult of personality and the purges. The leaders on Animal Farm are pigs, the secret police are attack dogs, the supporters who drown out debate with "four legs good, two legs bad" are sheep.

At first, London publishers did not want to touch Orwell's work out of sympathy for the USSR, an ally of Britain in the Second World War, but the Cold War gave it a new audience and Animal Farm became a commercial as well as a critical success.

Featuring:

Steven Connor - Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge

Mary Vincent - Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield

Robert Colls - Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2016.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first in 1789 with five hand-coloured copies and, five years later, with additional Songs of Experience poems and the explanatory phrase "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Blake drew on the street ballads and improving children's rhymes of the time, exploring the open and optimistic outlook of early childhood with the darker and more cynical outlook of adult life, in which symbols such as the Lamb belong to innocence and the Tyger to experience.

With

Sir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford

Sarah Haggarty Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens' College, University of Cambridge

And

Jon Mee Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greeks called mousike, 'the art of the Muses' from which we derive our word 'music.' While the number of Muses, their origin and their roles varied in different accounts and at different times, they were consistently linked with the nature of artistic inspiration. This raised a question for philosophers then and since: was a creative person an empty vessel into which the Muses poured their gifts, at their will, or could that person do something to make inspiration flow?

With

Paul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge

Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield

And

Penelope Murray Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Image: 'Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus)', 1631-1632. Oil on canvas. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).