In Our Time with Melvyn, Lord Bragg

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To celebrate the great Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg as he steps down from presenting the best programme on Radio 4, my collection of the rare occasions on which he (subtly) expressed his own opinion.

• Of a cartoon depicting Marie Curie as being less intellectual and important than her husband, Pierre: ‘Well, it sums up the Vanity Fair, yeah, but we needn’t take that all that seriously, need we?’ (‘The Curies’, 26.3.2015)

• Someone says that Simone de Beauvoir was thought to be letting down the communist side by telling the truth. Melvyn [aside]: ‘that’s always been a problem.’ (‘Simone de Beauvoir’, 22.10.2015)

• ‘I think novels aren’t just fictional constructs. They’re the life of people we believe in. And our imagination goes out to them, and they become as real as you three. Tess was as real as any of you here.’ (‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, 5.5.2016)

• ‘A lot of those ideas must have seemed radical and revolutionary at the time. They’re quite commonplace today, aren’t they? And they’re quite good ideas.’ (‘The American Populists’, 15.6.2017)

• ‘[S]omebody who stood up and knew what his policies were […] would be handy.’ (‘Constantine the Great’, 5.10.2017)

• ‘Can we just swing a few statistics round the studio? Everybody else is doing it – we’ll do it quickly and get it over with.’ (‘Li Shizhen’, 28.11.2019)

• ‘They [coffee houses] got too lively and they were spreading ideas – heaven forbid, in this country.’ (‘Coffee’, 12.12.2019)

• Correcting his own use of the historical present: ‘He goes to Durham. He went to Durham.’ (‘Saint Cuthbert’, 28.1.2021)

• ‘So swindling with money or employing people on huge estates for next to nothing, they escape any sort of censure at all.’ (‘Booth’s Life and Labour Survey’, 10.6.2021)

• Steve Jones says that Karl Marx used coral as a metaphor for us: great when combined, contemptible as individuals. Melvyn: ‘I don’t like being lumped as puny, weak, and whatever else he said.’ (‘Corals’, 28.10.2021)

• Dickens thought that he was better than the other people in the blacking factory. Melvyn: ‘Well, he’s allowed to feel that.’ (‘A Christmas Carol’, 16.12.2021)

• ‘You read plenty of speeches – well, I do anyway – and you think, “Well, bit dead”.’ (‘Demosthenes’ Philippics’, 17.11.2022)

• ‘[A]re you sure that the blunt turning down of this, again and again, was not because […] the elite who’d had it so good for a long time in Parliament, thought that they didn’t want their tablecloth to be soiled by these working people?’ (‘Chartism’, 9.2.2023)