Includes an episode from the second season of Sara Pascoe's award-winning Sex Power Money podcast where Sara talks to Fern Champion. The Sunday Times top 10 best seller Why do some women still expect men to buy their dinner? Why do some men feel depressed after masturbating? What the hell is going on with porn? Co...

This is John Grisham's first work of non-fiction. In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he left his hometown of Ada and went to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to sho...

In this audiobook Dawkins argues for the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm it has inflicted on society. He suggests that while Europe is becoming increasingly securalised, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dangerously dividing opinion around the world - and all from belief in a...

Is the Greek alphabet all Greek to you? Is geometry your Achilles heel and does your knowledge of Homer have more to do with The Simpsons than the Sirens? From engineering and architecture to drama and democracy, the world around us is founded on the principles and discoveries of the Ancient World, yet our understanding of it is episodic at best. S...

AT THE AIRLINES ...The starting pay for an American Eagle in $16,800 a year. Never let someone fly you up in the air who's making less than the kid at taco bell AT THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM... 240 school districts in thirty-one states have sold exclusive right to one of the big three soda companies to push their products in school

Interviews, discussions, readings and poems celebrating motherhood in all its diversity.This compilation of extracts from the much-loved BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour looks at the changing role of mothers over the last fifty years; the relationships that they have enjoyed with their children, how they have juggled the work/life balance and how...

Chris McManus uncovers the secrets of a collection of six thousand dusty old postcards which turned up in a forgotten cupboard in the Psychology Department of University College London. It started with two medium-sized cardboard boxes. When Richard Rawles of the Department of Psychology of University College London opened them, he found 6000 postca...

The power of English-and the "English of Power", as the language extends its influence from Court to Edinburgh. Melvyn Bragg goes to Edinburgh and the house of John Knox, the great Scottish apostle of the Reformation, who preached in English. Latin was replaced by English as the language of the Church when Henry VIII broke with Rome. And the 1611 K...

Conquest, trade and immigration have woven dozens of languages into English. Melvyn Bragg visits Liverpool, home of Scouse, an Irish-based variant of northern English made famous by the Beatles and countless comedians. By the mid-nineteenth century the port of Liverpool ranked second to London and became home to immigrants from all over the world w...

Before cars and planes, railways and steam engines were the main form of transport. And in the early days the engine driver was the fastest man on earth, travelling at 60 mph (and much faster than a car). No wonder it was every schoolboy's dream to become the driver of a locomotive, even though it was dirty and dangerous work. Some boys went straig...

The comprehensive three-level set takes language learners from basic words and phrases to advanced vocabulary and expressions.

This series explores how prime ministers have used their power and responded to the great challenges of their time and how they made the job what it is today. The prime ministers covered include: Sir Robert Walpole, the first and longest-serving prime minister; Lord North, remembered as the prime minister who lost America; Sir Robert Peel, who put...

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.

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 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.

Peter Ustinov had an astonishing range of accomplishments and credits to his name. He wrote 23 plays and 13 books, appeared in 50 films, and collected two Oscars, three Emmys and a Grammy. He was also a director, producer, graphic artist, photographer, raconteur and the recipient of many humanitarian awards. In this interview with John Bird, conduc...

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'!

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...

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.

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.

To tie-in with Radio 4's new versions of the Raymond Chandler classic thrillers aired in February 2011, Harriett Gilbert presents a reappraisal of the life and legacy of the man from Upper Norwood who invented the PI as we know him. 'I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had...