Gwyneth Lewis' main theme is the usefulness of depression in finding out what is wrong with your life and changing it accordingly. She uses her own life experiences to create this guide to coping with depression, which includes her development as a poet in Welsh and English, to create a personal and inspiring story.

Join the intrepid Michael Palin as he embarks on a comic race against time, travelling from the North Pole to the South Pole. As he crosses 16 countries by train, truck, raft, Ski-Doo, barge, balloon and bicycle, he experiences a fascinating range of characters and landscapes whilst his own endurance is tested to the limit.

To mark their thirtieth anniversary, the Medici String Quartet asked composer George Fenton and writer Alan Bennett to collaborate on a piece for performance at the Harrogate International Festival. The result was 'Hymn', a meditative piece, in which Bennett looks at the part which music played in his childhood. George Fenton's score, which accompa...

Humphrey Littleton presides over panellists Tim Brooke-Taylor, Willie Rushton, Graeme Greene and Barry Cryer in this compilation of ad-libbing from the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series. Includes the games 'Cheddar Gorge', 'Gargle Gargle' and 'Good News Bad News'.

This is the Radio 4 series that inspired the bestselling book 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves'. Over five programmes Lynne Truss explores changing fashions in punctuation; for example, she accompanies the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society through Berwick Street Market on the hunt for the 'greengrocer's apostrophe'!

Peter Fleming, brother of the author Ian, tells the story of his journey from England via the Trans-Siberian Express to China, and his subsequent attempts to become the first Westerner to reach the anti-communist front.

Born in 1725 to Italian and Spanish parents, Giacomo Casanova was a scholar and adventurer, not to mention a notorious seducer of women, who lived a long and exciting life. This first volume of his memoirs charts his childhood and life as a young man in Venice and Italy.

Down Your Way was a BBC radio series from 1946 to 1992, on the Home Service and then on BBC Radio Four. It visited towns around the United Kingdom and spoke to residents . Sometimes being described as having portrayed an increasingly outmoded and rose-tinted view of Britain concentrating on market towns with pre-industrial roots and ignoring indust...

Volume Three of David Reynolds' award-winning BBC Radio 4 series runs from the origins of the Cold War to the inauguration of Barack Obama. This epic narrative tells the saga of the United States through the voices of those who lived it, exploring three abiding national themes: empire, liberty and faith. Empire and Evil, the final series of thirt...

An exclusive edition of the perennially popular BBC Radio 4 series for gardeners everywhere. Gardening can be both a challenge and a joy. Get it right, and it can provide boundless pleasure; get it wrong, and it is a source of infinite frustration. Help is at hand, however, in this specially recorded 'Gardeners' Question Time' compilation, in which...

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time. Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young...

Four specially selected episodes of Radio 4's much-loved panel game, hosted by Nicholas Parsons. 'Welcome to Just a Minute! And as the Minute Waltz fades away... Please talk for 60 seconds on a random subject without repetition, hesitation or deviation...' First broadcast in 1968, 'Just a Minute' is one of the longest-running radio comedy shows. A...

After three years of research, bestselling journalist Joe McGinniss presents his already controversial and much anticipated investigative chronicle of Sarah Palin as an individual, politician, and cultural phenomenon. On Election Day 2008, McGinniss began his on-the-ground reporting that culminated, famously, in his moving next door to Sarah Palin...

The fourth and final episode, Propriety, Plants, Grandparents, and Growing Your Own, of the BBC Radio 4 comedy series, All of the Planets Wonders, in which award-winning comedian Josie Long attempts to better herself through learning from reference books, with help from Irish comedian Maeve Higgins. Originally broadcast 11 March 2009 and repeated o...

This ten-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind the calculations: the passions and rivalries of mathematicians struggling to get their ideas heard. Professor Marcus du Sautoy shows how these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world and proves that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science. He explores...

The first 25 episodes from the landmark BBC Radio series. Martin Sixsmith brings his firsthand experience of reporting from Russia to this fascinating narrative, witnessing the critical moment when the Soviet Union finally lost its grip on power. Power struggles have a constant presence in his story, from the Mongol hordes that invaded in the 13th...

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...

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...

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.

Orwell was arguably one of the first 'gonzo' journalists. In this unabridged, enlightening and often shocking expose of life on the streets of two of Europe's most romanticised and celebrated cities, Orwell describes in detail the day-to-day life of a 'down-and-out', which involves hunger, filth, derision and often prejudice and violence. Alcohol i...

"How to be a popular figure around town" Note: This is part one of a series of six parts.