Melvyn Bragg whizzes like a fully charged toothbrush through the history of metaphors. Metaphor is when you compare one thing to another while not saying precisely what you mean....
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Was Henry VIII just a big fat sausage on legs who couldn’t control his loins? If you take the numerous plays, portraits and films that have been made of...
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Before we slag it off, let’s start off with science doing good. One of Brian Cox’s buddies gave the Haber – Bosch process as an example of good science....
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Psychologist Richard Wiseman did an experiment on over a thousand people. He gave them all a newspaper and told them to count the number of photos. On the second...
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Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is the sixteenth century equivalent of Saw 3D. It’s a gruesome tale of castration, decapitation and burning, with detailed illustrations in full colour – if...
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King Harold was King of England for just over nine months, he had no blood ties to the throne and the only thing he’s remembered for is losing, so...
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Two years to go. On the 21 December 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, the magnetic poles of the Earth will swap polarity, planets in the solar system...
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When I read the title ‘Invisibility Cloaks come closer’ I had to tune in. Does that mean it would be in Tescos in time for Christmas? I was wondering...
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Charles Schulz said ‘if you want to know me read my strip’. If that’s the case, and Charles Schulz was Charlie Brown, his life must have been one melancholy...
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If, a million years ago, elephants had developed apposable thumbs instead of those clunky old tree stumps they stand on today, the world would be a different place. I’m...
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If you’re over forty, you know who The Goodies are, if you’re under forty, lucky you. The Goodies met at Cambridge University in the early 60s, one year after...
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The Enlightenment was a movement which started in the seventeenth century and was all about reason and science and culture. Descartes was an inspiration for the movement and said...
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We think we’re pretty clever out here in the West, nestling triumphantly on the shores of the Atlantic. But our nestling, triumphant, cleverness is all down to one thing:...
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Drummers are not only physical, they’re also mental. That seems to be the summary of this programme. John Lennon kicks it off with his famous quip about Ringo. When...
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Are people who work in the public sector hard to dismiss? Preston Council was ruled to have acted unfairly in sacking an employee who had just been jailed for...
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John Ambrose Fleming changed the world. If you google Fleming it comes up with Alexander Fleming, rightly so because of penicillin, Ian Fleming, okay James Bond’s pretty good, then...
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I’m not going to tell my daughter this but the unicorn, apart from not being real (which I’m also not going to tell her) was, according to the ancient...
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On the whole, our parents are pretty chuffed with themselves, and don’t we know it. They stuck together, they worked it out, they had the stamina to see it...
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