Description
Melvyn Bragg considers the 150-year history of the Two Cultures debate. In 1959 the novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture in Cambridge suggesting that intellectual life had become divided into two separate cultures: the sciences and the humanities. The lecture is still celebrated for the furore it provoked - but Snow was returning to a battleground almost a century old. Melvyn Bragg visits the old Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, scene of many of modern science's greatest triumphs, to put the Two Cultures debate in its historical context - and Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, reveals the influence the Two Cultures debate had on his development as a scientist.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the meaning and value of culture in the twenty-first century. In a programme recorded in front of an audience at Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society, Melvyn and the panel consider whether Matthew Arnold's assessment of culture as 'the great help out...
Published 01/04/13
Melvyn Bragg considers how technology and increasing access to education made possible the rise of a true mass culture in the twentieth century. He examines how the rise of cinema and photography opened the cultural realms to millions, and how our understanding of what culture is, and what it's...
Published 01/03/13