• Abelard and Heloise - love, sex and theology in 12th century Paris
  • Alexander Pope - 'short is my date, but deathless my renown'
  • Alexander von Humboldt - the remarkable career of the Prussian naturalist
  • Altruism - how can evolutionary biology explain it?
  • Anaesthetics - from ether frolics to pain-free surgery
  • Anarchism - a question of authority?
  • Antimatter - where has it all gone?
  • Archaeology and Imperialism
  • Archimedes - the Greek mathematician and his Eureka moments
  • Asteroids - celestial bodies from the beginning of time

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  • Astronomy and Empire - the link between colonial expansion and scientific discovery
  • Averroes - the battle between faith and reason
  • Avicenna - wine, women and philosophy
  • Beauty - the philosophy of beauty
  • Bismarck - the Iron Chancellor
  • Borges - the life and work of Argentina's best loved short story writer
  • Carbon - the basis of life
  • Catherine the Great - the Enlightened Despot of Eighteenth Century Russia
  • Christopher Marlowe
  • Common Sense Philosophy - "There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it"

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  • Cynicism - bold and populist, the history of a shocking philosophy
  • Divine Right of Kings - "there's such divinity doth hedge a king"
  • Don Quixote - Spanish romance and the first novel
  • Epistolary Literature - great novels of fictional letters
  • Faeries - supernatural creatures that are neither gods nor humans
  • Field of the Cloth of Gold - a Renaissance entente cordiale
  • Friendship - thinking philosophically about our close companions
  • Galaxies - extra-galactic nebulae, black holes, stars and dark matter
  • Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
  • Genghis Khan - founder of one of the world's largest ever land-based empires

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  • Geoffrey Chaucer - the first Great English Poet
  • Goethe - formation of a German cultural icon
  • Gravitational Waves - a new window on the universe
  • Greek Comedy - sing as you revel and rout
  • Guilt - what is it good for?
  • Heart of Darkness - one of the most influential novels of the 20th century
  • Hell - its representation through the ages
  • Human Evolution - from early hominids to Homo sapiens
  • Indian Maths - laying the foundations for modern numerals and zero as a number
  • John Stuart Mill - one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th Century

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  • Karl Marx - In Our Time's Greatest Philosopher
  • Karl Popper - his ideas challenged our approach to the philosophy of science
  • King Alfred and the Battle of Edington
  • Magnetism - an attractive history
  • Mars - the search for life on the Red Planet
  • Mathematics and Music - the science behind sound and composition
  • Merlin
  • Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe
  • Negative numbers - how they spread across civilizations
  • Ockham's Razor - cutting medieval philosophy down to size

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  • Pastoral Literature - the romantic idealisation of the countryside
  • Perception and the Senses - how do we see what we see?
  • Pragmatism - a practical philosophy fit for 20th century America
  • Prime Numbers - the building blocks of mathematics
  • Relativism - the battle against transcendent knowledge
  • Renaissance Astrology - 'we are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them'
  • Renaissance Maths - the birth of modern mathematics?
  • Renaissance Paganism
  • Samuel Johnson and his Circle
  • Seventeenth Century Print Culture - piety, populism and political protest

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  • Siegfried Sassoon - the poet who survived
  • Socrates - the man and the myth
  • Symmetry - the pattern at the heart of our physical world
  • Taste - the good, the bad and the ugly in 18th century Britain
  • The Abbasid Caliphs - when Baghdad ruled the Muslim world.
  • The Aeneid
  • The Arabian Nights - the art of story-telling
  • The Carolingian Renaissance - the revival of early medieval Western Europe
  • The Diet of Worms - Luther's stand against the Church
  • The Discovery of Oxygen - feuds and revolutions at the birth of modern chemistry

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  • The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature
  • The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
  • The Great Exhibition - a wonder of the Victorian world
  • The Heart - its anatomical and cultural history
  • The History of Optics - from telescopes to microscopes, a new way of seeing the world
  • The Jesuits - the school masters of Europe
  • The KT Boundary - did the dinosaurs burn out or fade away?
  • The Needham Question - did China lay the foundations of modern science?
  • The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God
  • The Oath - guaranteeing law, government and the army in the Classical world

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  • The Oxford Movement - Anglicans and Catholics in the 19th century
  • The Peasants' Revolt - a lasting legacy for popular uprising?
  • The Permian-Triassic Boundary - when 95% of life was killed off
  • The Pilgrim Fathers - the original American dream
  • The Poincare Conjecture - how a 19th century mathematician changed how we think about the shape of the universe
  • The Prelude - the greatest poem in the English language?
  • The Rise of the Mammals - life in a cold climate
  • The Royal Society - the first club for experimental science
  • The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
  • The Search for Immunisation - and the battle against smallpox

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  • The Siege of Constantinople - the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire
  • The Siege of Orleans - did Joan of Arc really rescue France?
  • The Spanish Inquisition - one of the most barbaric episodes in European history
  • The Speed of Light - a cosmic speed limit?
  • The Terror - when Madame Guillotine ruled France
  • Thomas Hobbes and the political philosophy of 'Leviathan'
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin - the novel that started the American Civil War
  • Victorian Pessimism - fear and loathing in the late 19th century