• 54 minutes 5 seconds
    Handel's Messiah

    Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Testament texts: prophecies about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death and the Day of Judgement and redemption for all. Handel's Messiah had its premiere in 1742 in a secular Dublin music hall to great acclaim with a packed audience and Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances, often shaping the work to the choirs or individual singers available. Messiah proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world far beyond the scale of Handel’s original.

    With

    Donald Burrows Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University

    Ruth Smith Trustee and Council Member of the Handel Institute

    And

    Larry Zazzo Countertenor, and Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Donald Burrows, Messiah (full score, 2 vols, Hallische Händel Ausgabe, forthcoming)

    Donald Burrows, Messiah (Edition Peters, 1987)

    Donald Burrows, Messiah, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

    Donald Burrows, Handel: Master Musicians series, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2012)

    George Frideric Handel (ed. Donald Burrows et al.), Collected Documents vol. 3 (1734-42), vol 4 (1742-50), (Cambridge University Press, 2019, 2020)

    G.F. Handel, facsimile ‘Messiah’: the composer’s autograph manuscript (British Library, 2009)

    G.F. Handel, facsimile the composer’s Conducting Score of Messiah (Scolar Press, 1974) Arthur Holroyd, Reassuring 18th-Century Protestants: The Librettist’s Intended Message for Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Quacks Books, 2018)

    Charles King, Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday/Bodley Head, 2024)

    Jens Peter Larsen, Handel’s Messiah: Origins, Composition, Sources (Adam and Charles Black, 1957)

    Richard Luckett, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration (Victor Gollancz, 1992)

    Watkins Shaw, A Textual and Historical Companion to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Novello and Co, 1965)

    Ruth Smith, ‘The Achievements of Charles Jennens (1700–1773)’ (Music & Letters, 70, 1989)

    Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Handel House Trust/The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012)

    Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

    Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010)

    Judy Tarling, Handel’s Messiah: A Rhetorical Guide (first published 2014; Punnett Press, 2025)

    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.

    7 May 2026, 9:15 am
  • 55 minutes 22 seconds
    The Spanish-American War 1898

    Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a significant influence over the newly independent Cuba where the war broke out. The US had been eyeing Cuba for decades, waiting for the right moment and the right kind of action, and in April 1898 intervened in the long-running fighting on the island for independence from Spain. With a much stronger navy it was a very uneven battle and the US soon triumphed over Spanish forces from Manila to Santiago de Cuba. This brief war confirmed the US as a power on the world stage and made a shocked Spain turn inwards to ask what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, people in the Philippines were about to attempt a new and bloody independence fight with the US.

    With

    Frank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh

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

    And

    Stephen Wilkinson Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Buckingham

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923 (Clarendon Press, 1997)

    Sebastian Balfour, ‘Riot, Regeneration and Reaction: Spain in the Aftermath of the 1898 Disaster’ (The Historical journal 38.2, 1995)

    Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021)

    Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Torva, 2025)

    Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007)

    Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

    Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008)

    Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983)

    John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

    Mary Vincent, Spain, 1833-2002: People and State (Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3

    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.

    30 April 2026, 9:15 am
  • 52 minutes 50 seconds
    Silicon

    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.

    23 April 2026, 9:15 am
  • 50 minutes 58 seconds
    Dadaism

    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.

    16 April 2026, 9:15 am
  • 53 minutes 7 seconds
    Archaea

    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.

    9 April 2026, 9:15 am
  • 54 minutes 6 seconds
    Margaret Beaufort

    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.

    2 April 2026, 9:15 am
  • 52 minutes 40 seconds
    The Columbian Exchange

    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.

    26 March 2026, 10:15 am
  • 48 minutes 7 seconds
    John Keats

    Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, when Keats had been stung by some reviews labelling him an uncouth Cockney who should go back to his former work as an apothecary, work he had left for poetry only two years before with the encouragement of enthusiastic friends. Just over two years later, Keats was dead in Rome from tuberculosis, before his work found fame, though some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.

    With

    Fiona Stafford Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford

    Nicholas Roe Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews

    And

    Meiko O’Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

    Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (eds), John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2022)

    Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford University Press, 1967)

    John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2020)

    John Keats (ed. John Barnard), John Keats: Oxford 21st-Century Authors (University Press, 2017)

    John Keats (ed. John Barnard), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2007)

    John Keats (ed. John Barnard), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2nd edition, 1977)

    John Keats (ed. Jeffrey N. Cox), Keats’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)

    Carol Kyros Walker, Walking North with Keats (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

    Richard Marggraf Turley (ed.), Keats’s Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

    Lucasta Miller, Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, 2021)

    Michael O’Neill (ed.), John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

    Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974)

    Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012) Helen Vendler, The Odes of Keats (Belknap Press, 2004)

    Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

    Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

    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.

    19 March 2026, 10:15 am
  • 49 minutes 49 seconds
    The Code of Hammurabi

    Misha Glenny and guests discuss the laws that Hammurabi (c1810 - c1750 BC), King of Babylon, had carved into a black basalt pillar in present day Iraq and which, since its rediscovery in 1901 in present day Iran, has affirmed Hammurabi's reputation as one of the first great lawmakers. Visitors to the Louvre in Paris can see it on display with almost 300 rules in cuneiform, covering anything from ‘an eye for an eye’ to how to handle murder, divorce, witchcraft, false accusations and more. The Code of Hammurabi, as it became known, made such an impression in Mesopotamia that it was copied and shared for a millennium after his death and, since its reemergence, Hammurabi and his Code have been commemorated in the US Capitol and the International Court of Justice.

    With

    Martin Worthington Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin

    Frances Reynolds Shillito Fellow and Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College

    And

    Selena Wisnom Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Zainab Bahrani, Mesopotamia: Ancient Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2017)

    Dominique Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon (I.B. Tauris, 2021)

    Prudence O. Harper, Joan Aruz and Françoise Tallon, The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures from the Louvre (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992)

    J. Nicholas Postgate (ed.), Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern (British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2007), especially ‘Babylonian and Assyrian: A History of Akkadian’ by Andrew R. George

    Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd edition, Scholars Press, 1997)

    Marc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography (Wiley, 2005)

    Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC (4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)

    Selena Wisnom, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Allen Lane, 2025)

    Martin Worthington, Complete Babylonian: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Understanding Babylonian with Original Texts (Teach Yourself Library, 2012)

    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.

    12 March 2026, 10:15 am
  • 51 minutes 5 seconds
    Henry IV Part 1

    Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

    With

    Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

    Lucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London

    And

    Laurence Publicover Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

    Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

    Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018)

    Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999)

    Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997)

    William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024)

    William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition (Norton, 2003)

    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.

    5 March 2026, 10:15 am
  • 50 minutes 3 seconds
    The Roman Arena

    Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them.

    With

    Kathleen Coleman James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University

    John Pearce Reader in Archaeology at King’s College London

    And

    Matthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John’s College, Oxford

    Producer: Simon Tillotson

    Reading list:

    C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993)

    Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008)

    Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

    A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997)

    A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006)

    Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005)

    Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003)

    Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000)

    Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998)

    F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004)

    Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

    K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

    T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992)

    In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

    26 February 2026, 10:15 am
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