In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings. This is the tale of a boy who lived in a pub and expected to leave school at 15 yet won a scholarship to Oxford. Derailed by a severe bre...

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg travels to the historic dockyard of Chatham to explore the life of a seaman in Nelson's navy. Our popular image of the 18th century sailor below decks is one of a downtrodden, press-ganged man who was a victim of regular beatings. While Bragg finds some evidence to support this view, h...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. At the beginning of his reign, King Charles I faced a perennial problem for English monar...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. In the decade following the conquest, the north of England was one of the main focuses of...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. We are extremely lucky to have an exceptional eyewitness account of a plague outbreak in...

The story of British Tommies sent 'over the top' to fight the Germans in the trenches of the First World War is a vivid emblem of powerlessness in the face of military discipline-and social pressures-that required young men to join up and do their duty. As the voices of the powerless become truly audible with the dawn of the recording era, we trav...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. The upheavals and turmoil of the sixteenth century transformed many aspects of religious...

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg is in urban Lancashire to explore the warp and weft of the Industrial Revolution-how the upheavals of the new mechanisation affected workers who found their traditional trades, like hand-loom weaving, superseded and marginalised by the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation. He...

Visiting the Hebridean island of Mull today, it's not long before someone mentions the steep decline in population that the Scottish highlands and islands suffered 150 to 200 years ago. And it was a depopulation that the crofters were powerless to do anything about-in a phrase that sounds a knell almost as chilling as today's 'ethnic cleansing', th...

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg visits Merthyr Tydfil to look at the plight of the miners in the Depression. The industrial communities of South Wales, built first on iron smelting in the 18th century, and coal in the 19th, had known great prosperity. Merthyr Tydfil was once the largest town in Wales, and in 1914, 25...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. The Peasants' Revolt began in the Essex village of Fobbing in May 1381. It started with t...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. Ulster, one of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, remained largely independent of Eng...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. The Norman Conquest is his starting point, a time when William the Conqueror's 'harrying...

Broadcaster and arts presenter Melvyn Bragg fronts 'The Written World', a five-part BBC Radio 4 series following the origins of writing from its first appearance 6,000 years ago and exploring how it has shaped the world's intellectual history. In the first programme he looks at the technology of writing, and how making signs on clay, wood or parchm...

Melvyn Bragg looks at dialects from around Britain: the Pitmatic of Northumberland, the dialect of (London/Derry), the increasingly elusive Cornish dialect, Pidgin, and Shropshire dialect, and then finishing up with a speculation on the future of English dialects.

Melvyn Bragg looks at how English has evolved over 1,000 years, looking at the disappearance of old dialects like that of Cumbria, and how it has been enriched by foreign languages, from Latin, Old French, and then dozens more as conquest, trade and immigration played their part in recent centuries.

In this episode taken from the BBC Radio 4 series, Melvyn Bragg voyages to Tasmania to find out what a sentence of transportation to Van Diemen's Land really meant to those who survived the journey 'beyond the seas'. We hear the forgotten voices of people such as Joseph Lingard, a respectable Derbyshire man who was wrongfully convicted of the theft...

Melvyn Bragg examines new coinages, puns and wordplay; how accents and social class are entwined; swear words; attempts to stop the evolution of language in its tracks; and, finally, the many varieties of English that are spoken around the world today.

Melvyn Bragg examines some of the many different varieties of English spoken around the world today, taking in Spanglish from the USA, Indian English, Caribbean English, Australian English, South African English, and finally a kind of "international English" used between non-native English speakers.

The language of sex and death, as Chaucer and others capture English speech of the time. Melvyn Bragg travels to the great mediaeval cathedral of Canterbury, with its shrine to the martyr, St. Thomas … Becket. It inspired the pilgrims described by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1395 in The Canterbury Tales, as they set out from the Tabard Inn in Southw...

With English now hailed on all sides as the world's first "global" language and the preferred medium of expression from United Biscuits to the United Nations, Melvyn Bragg meets people-like former Dome supremo P.Y. Gerbeau-for whom talking English is the most natural way to speak, yet who didn't absorb it with their mother's milk. Also taking part...