Seashells

Seashells

Author: BBC July 30, 2026 Duration: 56:42
Misha Glenny and guests discuss a familiar feature of our beaches: seashells, from their astonishing shapes and patterns that teach us about Earth’s oceans, to the ways that humans have treasured shells throughout history. Seashells appear in the mythologies of countless cultures across the world - think of Botticelli’s Venus emerging from a giant scallop shell, Vishnu's sacred horn panchajanya, or the Aztec god Quetzalcōātl’s talisman cut from a conch shell. The urge to collect shells seems to be as old as our species. We’ve used them as decoration, currency, and musical instruments. But shells aren’t just beautiful objects washed up on our beaches. Many belong to one of the most diverse groups of the animal kingdom, Mollusca, and the remarkable morphology of forms and structures they grow in offer insight into the past, present, and future of the marine world. With Suzanne Williams Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum Liz Harper Professor of Evolutionary Malacology in the Department of Earth Sciences and Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge Helen Scales Marine biologist and Author. Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: S. Peter Dance, Shells (DK, 2022) A.R. Irwin, S.T. Williams, D.I. Speiser and N.W. Roberts, ‘The marine gastropod Conomurex luhuanus (Strombidae) has high-resolution spatial vision and eyes with complex retinas’ (Journal of Experimental Biology 225:16, 2022) Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, Animal Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2012) Andreia Salvador, Interesting Shells (The Natural History Museum, 2022) Helen Scales, Shell Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Molluscan Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2026) Helen Scales, The Shell Spotter's Guide (National Trust Books, 2024) Helen Scales, What a Shell Can Tell: Where They Live, What They Eat, How They Move, and More (Phaidon Press, 2022) Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015) Paul D. Taylor, Fossils: The Essential Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2025) Suzanne Williams, ‘Molluscan shell colour’ (Biological Reviews, 2017) 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.

For decades, Melvyn Bragg has convened some of the world's sharpest minds around a single, unassuming table, and the resulting conversations form the heart of In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg. This BBC podcast is less a formal lecture and more an eavesdropped dialogue, where complex ideas from religion, philosophy, science, and history are unpacked with genuine curiosity and clarity. Each episode focuses on a single concept, event, or figure-from the intricacies of Islamic philosophy to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, from the rise of the novel to the fall of ancient empires. Listeners are brought directly into a thoughtful, often lively discussion where experts debate, clarify, and connect the dots, guided by Bragg's probing yet generous questioning. You'll hear the context and contradictions behind the ideas that have shaped our spiritual and intellectual landscape, presented not as dry facts but as living, debated history. The enduring appeal of this podcast lies in its depth and accessibility, transforming daunting subjects into compelling narratives. It’s a weekly invitation to step back from the noise and spend forty-five minutes engaged in the kind of substantive, ad-free conversation that reminds us of the profound connections between all fields of human thought.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
Podcast Episodes
Archive: Rosalind Franklin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:16
Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His seventh choice is the pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958), first released in February 2018. During h…
In Our Time Returns for a New Series [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 3:11
In Our Time returns for a new series with host Misha Glenny. A world class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, philosophy, religion, s…
Archive: Empress Dowager Cixi [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:16
Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fifth choice, first released in May 2024, is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the…
Archive: Plate Tectonics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:54
Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fourth choice, first released in January 2008, explores how the science of plate tectonics revolutionised our underst…
Archive: Hatshepsut [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:58
Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His third choice, first released in November 2014, is the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, whose name means 'foremost of nobl…
Archive: Coffee [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:52
Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His second choice, first released in December 2019, is the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethio…
Pockets (from Here For The History) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:28
To the frustration of many, a lot of women’s clothes don’t have pockets. But why on Earth is that the case? Especially when men’s clothing seems to be full of pockets. On Here For The History, Alice Loxton and Ben Hender…
Archive: Aphra Behn, pioneering playwright and spy. [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:33
Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers across the ages. Thi…
Vigée Le Brun [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:21
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted arou…
The Delian League [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:14
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of an alliance which transformed the geopolitics of the classical world: the Delian League. Since the start of the 5th Century BCE, city states across Greece had…