Discover world history, culture and ideas with today's leading experts.
Radio 4,·75 episodes
Bridget Kendall and guests discuss subversion and inversion in a topsy-turvy world.
What shells can tell us about our past, present and future.
The marvellous ability to create almost anything we want in our minds.
Shape-shifting in everyday objects, our brains and plastic waste.
Should we bring the woolly mammoth back to life, and should ancient languages be revived?
The joys and perils of porcelain, kaolin and volcanic soils.
What is the future of graphene and other two-dimensional materials?
Bridget Kendall and guests explore how cells, molecules and robots achieve complexity.
How a spark of inspiration is transformed into a line on canvas or a line of verse.
Spatial processing in the brain, bird migration and natural navigational clues for all.
Bridget Kendall and guests discuss alien plants and animals, alien beings and alien dreams
Transforming biosciences with particles just a few billionths of a metre across.
The advantages and disadvantages of speaking more than one language.
The curious properties of bubbles in the oceans, in our bodies and in art.
Where is the dividing line between normal behaviour and a mental health problem?
What role can art play in the political discourse of post-apartheid South Africa?
When being alone is a blessing, and when it is a blight.
What is it like to be on the edge of Europe? And do modern societies create new outcasts?
Bridget Kendall and her guests explore the slender filaments that are essential to life.
Bridget invites listeners to zoom out into space, to gain new perspectives on reality.
Bridget Kendall asks why there are such lucrative markets in fake art and fake medicines.
Transforming waste into valuable products, with Bridget Kendall and guests.
Do our hands mark us out as human? Bridget Kendall and guests discuss.
Marvel at the frozen world of the polar ice caps with Bridget Kendall and guests.
Does the explosion of social media in China empower the individual or the state?
Bridget Kendall and guests explore the shadowy world of tracking and surveillance.
How different are our second attempts at something compared to the first time?
Good or bad? Useful or just an annoyance? Bridget Kendall and guests discuss dust and ash.
Bridget Kendall and her guests shine a light on crystals, both scientific and artistic.
Bridget Kendall and her guests discuss fragility, in humans and in ecosystems.
