Author: BBC Radio 4

Stonehenge is one of Britain’s most iconic monuments: an ancient stone circle still shrouded in layers of speculation and folklore. A new exhibition at the British Museum looks at the human story behind the stones, and offers new insights into the beliefs, rituals and worldview of our Neolithic ancestors. The curator Neil Wilkin tells Adam Rutherford about one of the objects on show – the metal Nebra Sky Disc – which is the world’s oldest surviving map of the sky.

The palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday looks even further back in deep time to reveal the Earth as it used to exist. In his new book Otherlands: A World in the Making he uses the latest technology and fossil records to examine ancient landscapes – from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins. While these distinct ecosystems appeared stable for millions of years, their disappearance is a reminder of the both the fragility and tenacity of the natural world.

Change and survival are at the centre of the writer and ecologist, Rebecca Nesbit’s book, Tickets for the Ark. As the current rate of extinction starts to resemble the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, conservationists appear to be fighting a losing battle. Nesbit questions the motives behind what we fight to save, in an examination of what we should conserve and why.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Forget the Victorians, the Georgian era is having its moment. Regencycore, a fashion style inspired by the Netflix period drama Bridgerton was shortlisted for Word of the Year 2021, and there will be more frocks and 18th century gossip when the television series returns in the Spring.

In The Georgians the historian Penelope Corfield explores all aspects of 18th century life, from politics and empire to culture and society, science and industry. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that Britain at the time was often seen as both a sentimental and enlightened place, where frippery and satire sat side by side.

Before the Industrial Revolution The Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood exemplified the era’s entrepreneurial spirit. He was, according to Tristram Hunt’s biography, The Radical Potter, the Steve Jobs of the 18th century. His innovative designs and marketing strategies made his wares popular throughout the country and further afield, and he was instrumental in building the infrastructure to enable the region to flourish economically.

What could today’s policies to ‘level up’ the regions learn from the 18th century, and Wedgwood’s championing of his home town. Professor Philip McCann is Chair in Urban and Regional Economics at the University of Sheffield. He argues that during the last century the system of localised finance was lost as the country became highly centralised. This has had a serious impact on poorer regions and smaller local firms, and today the UK has some of the worst regional inequality in the world.

Producer: Katy Hickman / Natalia Fernandez

Photo Credit: LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX Bridgerton, Series 2 (L to R) Bessie Carter as Prudence Featherington, Polly Walker as Lady Portia Featherington, Harriet Cains as Philip

The award-winning poet Fiona Benson retells the Greek myth of the Minotaur, upending the legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth. In a series of poems in her new collection Ephemeron we hear from the bull-child’s mother – the betrayed and violated Pasiphae. Benson tells Helen Lewis she wanted to explore male and female desire, and the extraordinary cycles of violence and abuse of power in the Greek myths.

The cultural historian Ivan Jablonka has taken his native France by storm with his history of Masculinity – From Patriarchy to Gender Justice, translated by Nathan Bracher. In it he asks what it means to be a good man? Using examples from the past he explores the origins and structure of male dominance. He argues that it’s time that men took more responsibility and fought harder for genuine equality.

The political philosopher Nina Power is more circumspect about the demonisation of men, which she believes is now rampant in today’s society. In What Do Men Want, Power looks at what happens when men feel beleaguered and retreat to the ‘manosphere’, and she explores ways in which men and women can live together more harmoniously.

The number of people living alone has increased over the last decade, but it’s still a path that goes against what society expects, according to the entrepreneur and Founder of the lifestyle magazine, About Time, Angelica Malin. She became single at the beginning of lockdown and has now brought together 30 women to explore what single womanhood means in the modern age, in Unattached.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Modernism is a cultural and philosophical movement that emerged in the West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a complex hydra-headed beast that was pervasive in the arts, but also spread through modern industrial societies influencing architecture and science.

As part of a series of programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4 celebrating modernism, Kirsty Wark presents an introduction to modernism – how and why did it arise at this time, and its legacy today. She is joined by the cultural historian Matthew Sweet who is presenting a 10-part series for BBC Radio 4 on a crucial year for modernism: 1922 – The Birth of Now.

Suzanne Hobson, from Queen Mary University of London, is an expert on modernist literature, and examines the defining characteristics of the genre, while the musician Soweto Kinch discusses the impact of modernism on music, especially the development of jazz, and how it plays out today.

While innovations in the arts including stream of consciousness, atonal music and abstract art are the headline acts for modernism the academic Charlotte Sleigh looks more closely at what was happening in the sciences, and how innovations in physics, psychology and technology changed the way people experienced the world.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image: Modulor le Corbusier. Cover template.