Welcoming Misha Glenny

Welcoming Misha Glenny

Author: BBC Radio 4 February 5, 2026 Duration: 6:05

Misha Glenny introduces himself to you ahead of his first episode on 15th January, answering some questions from producer Simon Tillotson and sharing what's coming up in the first few weeks.

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production


For anyone with a restless mind, the weekly In Our Time podcast from BBC Radio 4 offers a deep and engaging conversation across the vast terrain of human thought and experience. Host Misha Glenny guides a panel of distinguished academics, not in lecture format, but through a lively, accessible discussion where ideas genuinely collide and unfold. You might find yourself immersed in the complex legacy of a figure like Napoleon one week, and the next be untangling the scientific principles of photosynthesis or the philosophical arguments of the Enlightenment. The scope is deliberately broad, covering history, religion, culture, science, and philosophy, because understanding one often requires context from another. What you hear is the genuine process of exploration-the questions, the debates, and the connections made in real time by leading experts. It’s the kind of podcast that doesn’t just recount the Sack of Rome or the intricacies of Russian court politics, but examines why these moments mattered and how their echoes are still felt. The result is a consistently stimulating hour that treats listeners as curious equals, offering the intellectual satisfaction of following a great conversation to its illuminating conclusion.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

In Our Time
Podcast Episodes
Little Women [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:16
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction. When Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women, she only did so as her publisher refused to publish h…
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:16
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peaceti…
Robert Graves [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:53
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the…
The Haymarket Affair [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:39
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious attack of 4th of May 1886 at a workers rally in Chicago when somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman, Mathias J. Degan. The chaotic shooting that followed left more peo…
Wormholes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:56
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tantalising idea that there are shortcuts between distant galaxies, somewhere out there in the universe. The idea emerged in the context of Einstein's theories and the challenge has be…
Benjamin Disraeli [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:21
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the major figures in Victorian British politics. Disraeli (1804 -1881) served both as Prime Minister twice and, for long periods, as leader of the opposition. Born a Jew, he was onl…
Bacteriophages [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:43
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that 'eat' bacteria. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their Petri dishes was making bacteria disappear and t…
Monet in England [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:48
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…
Karma [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:55
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the doctrine of Karma as developed initially among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists in India from the first millennium BCE. Common to each is an idea, broadly, that you reap what you sow: how y…
Fielding's Tom Jones [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:47
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 ha…