🏺In Our Time

One subject from the history of ideas, three academics who have spent their careers on it, and a presenter who keeps them moving. Weekly on the radio since 1998, with an archive of more than a thousand programmes.

One topic, three professors, a presenter in a hurry, about fifty minutes. On the radio since 1998, so there is an archive of over a thousand programmes on everything from a single poem to a single enzyme, and nobody on it is selling anything.

Sunday walks. Up to 🌳 Castle Mound and round is an hour, which is one programme and the bonus minutes at the end where the guests say what they did not get to. It began on Sunday 9 February with the programme on Stoicism, two days before the worst week of the winter, which I did not know was coming.

I use it in one particular way: before I read an old book, I hear three people who have read it properly disagree about it. Then the book is a place with a map.

• The presenter interrupts the moment anyone starts to enjoy their own sentence. I could use him in planning.
• The academics correct each other politely and it is the best part.
• It does not care whether I am productive.

For 🏛️ Seneca and 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius especially, who I had been reading alone for two years without once hearing either name said aloud by a classicist.

Sunday Walks

• 28 December. No programme. Walked up with Jonas before lunch, talking about September. The deciding happened later, at home, with a record on. Logged here because it is the same hill.
• 16 November. Marcus Aurelius again, two days after the promotion answer. Different programme the second time, though they had not changed a word of it.
• 29 June. The Hanseatic League: merchants, cog ships and a trading network with no capital and no king. Came home and looked up Hamburg.
• 2 March. Seneca. The tutor to an emperor who became the emperor's problem.
• 9 February. Stoicism. First one. Sat on the bench by the keep for the last ten minutes rather than walk down and lose the signal.

What It Prompted: 📕 Moral Letters to Lucilius · 📕 Meditations · 📰 On the Shortness of Life · 🔭 Stoic exercises that survive contact with a week · ⚓ Sort what is mine from what is not