A Point of View

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of the mathematician Dame Mary Cartwright, the first woman mathematician to be elected to the Royal Society. During World War Two, she responded to a request from the British government to address an issue with early and still-secret radar systems. Together with her colleague Professor J. E. Littlewood, they were able to help war-time radar engineers circum...

Lisa Jardine celebrates the influence of art connoisseur Sir Denis Mahon and reflects on the impact of wealthy art collectors on public taste and government policy. "Art collectors with a fortune to spend inevitably exert an influence on artistic taste and on the art market. The question is: Is a collector who wins public praise for having a "good eye" or "flawless taste" being celebrated for thei...

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the "Winter Queen", and sees her relegation to the margins of history, "despite the pivotal role she played in international politics throughout much of the seventeenth century", as a reflection of our failure to recognise and value powerful women. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine defends his home city of Birmingham against a slur in Jane Austen's "Emma" as, "not a place to promise much", by celebrating its heritage and its current cultural renaissance. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine celebrates the saving of New York's now century old Grand Central Terminal and regrets the destruction of the city's other great beaux-arts station. "Many New Yorkers... had initially opposed, and subsequently regretted, the wanton destruction of Penn station as a deplorable act of civic irresponsibility and cultural philistinism." Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the enduring appeal of the teddy bear in contemporary culture. Why, he wonders, have they been such popular toys and featured so prominently in literature and song since they were first named after Theodore Roosevelt over a hundred years ago. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the history of American presidential inaugurations since Abraham Lincoln's, and compares presidents' speeches at the start of their first and second terms in office. "Second inaugurals...are often less up-beat and up-lifting, since it's no longer possible for a president, having already been four years in office, to offer a new deal or to proclaim, as President Obama di...

Will Self laments what he sees as an absence of rational urban planning in our big cities and a fashion for dramatic skyscrapers driven by short term commercial values. "It occurred to me that the contemporary metropolitan skyline is really only a fireworks display of decades-long duration: a burst of aerial illumination intended to provoke awe, but doomed eventually to subside into darkness." Pro...

Will Self wants to "nudge society in the direction of considering suicide acceptable" when the alternative is a slow and painful end. "I don't say any of these things idly," he writes, "like many of us in middle age, my last few years have been heavily marked by an increasing awareness of both my own mortality and that of those who I love." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self looks back over 2012 and reflects on the confused relationship between Britain and the US. Love and hate, he argues, are there in equal measure. Taking as his starting point the Tom Stoppard plays his American mother took him to see in the 1970s, he says our relationship with our friends across the pond has changed little in 40 years. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst?" asks Will Self as he appeals to the post-Christmas glutton to consider a major lifestyle change in the year ahead. "What I think we should all do", he says, "is throw up our very obsession with food itself, and enter the New Year purged". He takes us on a tour of foodie history, and explores how we've gone from being a culinary backwater to "the most food...

Will Self warns against the false prophets of the new priesthood of economics who base their analyses and predictions on "spurious notions of human behaviour". "In place of the vulgate we require the holy books of economics to be written in the language we actually speak, and along with this we should actively seek a liberty of individual conscience, so that we communicate directly with Mammon, fr...

Will Self reflects on the effect of digital technology on his perception of the passage of time. "Perhaps the reason I feel quite so liberated from the present while more and more attached, not to the individually recalled 'good old days', but to a collectively attested and ever-present past, is because the hard drive of my computer is overloaded with digital images of the places I've been and the...

Onora O'Neill reflects afresh on questions of trust, a decade after her Reith lectures on the subject. She argues that rather than asking, "how can we restore trust" in general, following recent scandals and failures, we should ask specific, practical questions about how better to measure trustworthiness. "Placing and refusing trust intelligently is not a matter of finding guarantees or proofs; we...

Mary Beard reflects on why universities are being consumed by "customer satisfaction" surveys. "When you're paying up to £9000 a year for the privilege of being at university, you want to make it pretty clear if you feel you're not getting your money's worth", she writes. But the deluge of forms - asking students for their views on the content, presentation, organisation of the course and the qual...

"Last weekend I spent a couple of hours with the remains of one of the human victims of the eruption of Vesuvius" writes Mary Beard, as she wanders through the rooms of a new exhibition about Pompeii, the "City of the Dead". The display at the J Paul Getty museum in Malibu is one of several Pompeii exhibitions running in different museums around the world - and very similar to one coming to the Br...

Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard on the long history of the rich looking down their noses - sometimes with a hearty Roman snort - at the poor. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In his final talk, he asks how the undemocratic Chinese state can enjoy legitimacy and authority in the eyes of its population. He...

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its history, development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In this third talk, he explores the nature of race in China. Over 90 per cent of the Chinese population regard themselves...

In this second talk, he examines the tributary system, the historical China-centric network of international relations which involved other parts of East Asia accepting the principle of Chinese superiority in return for protection and access to the Chinese market, an arrangement distinct to European forms of colonialism. He asks whether a system of this kind is now re-emerging. Martin Jacques is t...

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In this introductory talk, he argues that we cannot make sense of China by looking at it through a Western prism. China is not lik...

Sarah Dunant reflects on the role of history in society - and how it changes over time. Research and archaeology, as well as the views of the times in which historians live, change their perception of the past. Dunant also asks what historical fiction takes from academic study - and what it, in turn, can teach those who study the past. She also asks whether the humanities are as valued as they sho...

"For moneyed Americans", writes Sarah Dunant "perfect dentistry is a matter of course". For Europeans- and she counts herself within that number - the situation is rather different! Sarah takes a sideways look at teeth through the ages...and dentistry in times of austerity. And for those whose chief loathing is a mouthful of shining American teeth, she offers hope. "Yaeba", the latest craze to hit...

"Much of what some would call my eccentric wardrobe derives from charity shops...By temperament, I'm a historian and the sense of an object with a provenance somehow ties me more securely to the present" writes Sarah Dunant. As she rummages for bargains in her local charity shop, Sarah reflects on the history of charity shops and their growing importance in times of austerity. Producer Adele Armst...