In Our Time - 2007 

BBC Radio 4
MP3: 56 and 64 kbps (mono); 44 kHz
29 hours 10 mins (42 episodes of approx 42 mins each)

In Our Time is a long-running, live BBC radio programme where Melvyn Bragg guides three expert guests through a 40 minute discussion of the weeks' subject. The show's tag-line is "exploring the history of ideas" and subject matter jumps eclectically from science to history, literature, religion and philosophy. 

The experts are almost always erudite and able to explain the sometimes-complex material so as to be understandable to the reasonably educated layman. There is none of the competitive one-upmanship often found in topical discussion shows.

This show is one of BBC Radio Four's flagship "high-brow" productions. If you haven't heard it before then try one of these episodes and see what you think. 

This torrent includes all 42 episodes of In Our Time that were broadcast in 2007.




Notes: 

These are not radio recordings. With two exceptions, all audio files are the MP3 downloads that the BBC makes available for one week only. The exceptions are the William Wilberforce special (2007-02-22) which was never available as MP3; and the Madame Bovary episode (2007-07-05) which aired while I was moving house and without an internet connection. Both of these files were recorded from the RealAudio "Listen Again" stream and so the quality is lower than for other episodes.

From the start of the 2007/08 season the BBC increased the bitrate of the MP3 downloads from 56 to 64kbps, hence the different bitrates in this torrent.




Programmes:

2007-01-04 Borges - the life and work of Argentina's best loved short story writer
2007-01-11 Mars - the search for life on the Red Planet
2007-01-18 The Jesuits - the school masters of Europe
2007-01-25 Archimedes - the Greek mathematician and his Eureka moments
2007-02-01 Genghis Khan - founder of one of the world's largest ever land-based empires
2007-02-08 Karl Popper - his ideas challenged our approach to the philosophy of science
2007-02-15 Heart of Darkness - one of the most influential novels of the 20th century
2007-02-22 William Wilberforce - the man and his legacy
2007-03-01 The History of Optics - from telescopes to microscopes, a new way of seeing the world
2007-03-08 Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe
2007-03-15 Epistolary Literature - great novels of fictional letters
2007-03-22 Bismarck - the Iron Chancellor
2007-03-29 Anaesthetics - from ether frolics to pain-free surgery
2007-04-05 St Hilda - the life and times of the Abbess of Whitby
2007-04-12 Opium Wars - a conflict that was to affect British-Chinese relations for generations
2007-04-19 Symmetry - the pattern at the heart of our physical world
2007-04-26 Greek and Roman Love Poetry - the pursuit of the Beloved from Sappho to Catullus
2007-05-03 Spinoza - believed that God and Nature were the same thing
2007-05-10 Victorian Pessimism - fear and loathing in the late 19th century
2007-05-17 Gravitational Waves - a new window on the universe
2007-05-24 The Siege of Orleans - did Joan of Arc really rescue France?
2007-05-31 Ockham's Razor - cutting medieval philosophy down to size
2007-06-07 Siegfried Sassoon - the poet who survived
2007-06-14 Renaissance Astrology - "we are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them"
2007-06-21 Common Sense Philosophy - "There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it"
2007-06-28 The Permian-Triassic Boundary - when 95% of life was killed off
2007-07-05 The Pilgrim Fathers - the original American dream
2007-07-12 The Trial of Madame Bovary - "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!"
2007-09-27 Socrates - the man and the myth
2007-10-04 Antimatter - where has it all gone?
2007-10-11 Divine Right of Kings - "there's such divinity doth hedge a king"
2007-10-18 The Arabian Nights - the art of story-telling
2007-10-25 Taste - the good, the bad and the ugly in 18th century Britain
2007-11-01 Guilt - what is it good for?
2007-11-08 Avicenna - wine, women and philosophy
2007-11-15 The Discovery of Oxygen - feuds and revolutions at the birth of modern chemistry
2007-11-22 The Prelude - the greatest poem in the English language?
2007-11-29 The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature
2007-12-06 Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
2007-12-13 The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
2007-12-20 The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
2007-12-27 The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God


Download the latest episode from the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/index.shtml