Misha Glenny introduces himself to you ahead of his first episode on 15th January, answering some questions from producer Simon Tillotson and sharing what's coming up in the first few weeks.

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

While you wait for the new season of In Our Time with Misha Glenny, we’re introducing you to The Global Story, a new daily podcast from the BBC. In this episode, writer and voracious reader James Marriott discusses the so-called 'death of reading'. He argues that we may be entering a post literate age – shaped by addictive screen culture, fragmented attention, and an overflow of trivial or unreliable information. The conversation traces how the 18th century 'reading revolution' helped shape the modern world, and what its decline could mean for education, culture, and democracy today. If you enjoy this episode, you can find new instalments of The Global Story every day wherever you get your BBC Podcasts.

Before Misha Glenny's first edition on 15th January, BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme Today has brought Melvyn Bragg and Misha Glenny together so they can share their ideas about In Our Time's success and discuss what, if anything, will change with Misha. While Justin Webb chaired this discussion, here you will hear Melvyn introduce it and at the end he has a message for Misha and for listeners around the world.

This is a longer version of the discussion broadcast on Today on Radio 4 on Christmas Eve 2025 which was produced by Jade Bogart-Preleur, when Melvyn Bragg was the guest editor.

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production.

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. The singer Joan Armatrading has selected the episode about Charles Dickens and recorded an introduction to it (this introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Dickens is best known for the strength of his plots and the richness of his characters, but he can also be regarded as a political writer. Some have seen him as a social reformer of great persuasiveness, as a man who sought through satire to expose the powerful and privileged, and whose scenes moved decision-makers to make better decisions. George Bernard Shaw said of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit that it was 'more seditious than Das Kapital'. Others argue that, although Dickens was a great caricaturist, he was really a conservative at heart. With Rosemary Ashton Professor of English at University College London Michael Slater Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism And John Bowen Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele Producers: Jonathan Levi and Charlie Taylor This programme was first broadcast in July 2001. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world. In Our Time is a BBC Studios production.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that Civility, in one of its meanings, is among the most valuable social virtues: the skill to discuss topics that really matter to you, with someone who disagrees and yet somehow still get along. In another of its meanings, when Civility describes the limits of behaviour that is acceptable, the idea can reflect society at its worst: when only those deemed 'civil enough' are allowed their rights, their equality and even their humanity. Between these extremes, Civility is a slippery idea that has fascinated philosophers especially since the Reformation, when competing ideas on how to gain salvation seemed to make it impossible to disagree and remain civil.

With

Teresa Bejan Professor of Political Theory at Oriel College, University of Oxford

Phil Withington Professor of History at the University of Sheffield

And

John Gallagher Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Polity Press, 1995)

Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Keith J. Bybee, How Civility Works (Stanford University Press, 2016)

Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Haig Z. Smith and Lauren Working, Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2021)

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Polity, 1992)

Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Austin Sarat (ed.), Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2018)

Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Polity, 2010)

Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.