In Our Time

Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Testament texts: prophecies about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death and the Day of Judgement and redemption for all. Handel's Messiah had its premiere in 1742 in a secular Dublin music hall to great acclaim with a packed audience and Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances, often shaping the work to the choirs or individual singers available. Messiah proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world far beyond the scale of Handel’s original.
With
Donald Burrows
Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University
Ruth Smith
Trustee and Council Member of the Handel Institute
And
Larry Zazzo
Countertenor, and Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Donald Burrows, Messiah (full score, 2 vols, Hallische Händel Ausgabe, forthcoming)
Donald Burrows, Messiah (Edition Peters, 1987)
Donald Burrows, Messiah, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Donald Burrows, Handel: Master Musicians series, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2012)
George Frideric Handel (ed. Donald Burrows et al.), Collected Documents vol. 3 (1734-42), vol 4 (1742-50), (Cambridge University Press, 2019, 2020)
G.F. Handel, facsimile ‘Messiah’: the composer’s autograph manuscript (British Library, 2009)
G.F. Handel, facsimile the composer’s Conducting Score of Messiah (Scolar Press, 1974)
Arthur Holroyd, Reassuring 18th-Century Protestants: The Librettist’s Intended Message for Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Quacks Books, 2018)
Charles King, Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday/Bodley Head, 2024)
Jens Peter Larsen, Handel’s Messiah: Origins, Composition, Sources (Adam and Charles Black, 1957)
Richard Luckett, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration (Victor Gollancz, 1992)
Watkins Shaw, A Textual and Historical Companion to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Novello and Co, 1965)
Ruth Smith, ‘The Achievements of Charles Jennens (1700–1773)’ (Music & Letters, 70, 1989)
Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Handel House Trust/The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012)
Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010)
Judy Tarling, Handel’s Messiah: A Rhetorical Guide (first published 2014; Punnett Press, 2025)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios 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 Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a significant influence over the newly independent Cuba where the war broke out. The US had been eyeing Cuba for decades, waiting for the right moment and the right kind of action, and in April 1898 intervened in the long-running fighting on the island for independence from Spain. With a much stronger navy it was a very uneven battle and the US soon triumphed over Spanish forces from Manila to Santiago de Cuba. This brief war confirmed the US as a power on the world stage and made a shocked Spain turn inwards to ask what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, people in the Philippines were about to attempt a new and bloody independence fight with the US.
With
Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh
Mary Vincent
Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield
And
Stephen Wilkinson
Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Buckingham
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923 (Clarendon Press, 1997)
Sebastian Balfour, ‘Riot, Regeneration and Reaction: Spain in the Aftermath of the 1898 Disaster’ (The Historical journal 38.2, 1995)
Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021)
Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Torva, 2025)
Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007)
Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008)
Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983)
John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Mary Vincent, Spain, 1833-2002: People and State (Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3
In Our Time is a BBC Studios 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 Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout the universe, the silicon we have here was made billions of years ago in dying stars. In its compounds we have long used silicon for glass and, more recently, purified silicon has become the foundation of modern electronics. Perhaps less appreciated is the role silicon compounds play in the biology of life on Earth, on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the cycling of elements between land, oceans and atmosphere that sustains us.
With
Kate Hendry
Oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and Bye-Fellow of Queen’s College, University of Cambridge
Andrea Sella
Professor of Chemistry at University College London
And
Monica Grady
Professor Emerita in Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University
Produced by Martha Owen
Reading list:
Christina De La Rocha and Daniel J. Conley, Silica Stories (Springer, 2017)
Bernard Quéguiner, The Biogeochemical Cycle of Silicon in the Ocean (John Wiley & Sons, 2016)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios 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 Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.
With
Dawn Ades
Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
Ruth Hemus
Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London
And
Stephen Forcer
Professor of French at the University of Glasgow
Produced by Martha Owen
Reading list:
Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)
Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)
Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)
Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)
David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios 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 Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny bacteria-sized organisms he was studying were not actually bacteria but from an entirely different branch of the tree of life. It became clear that archaea, as he named them, share aspects of the cells in all plants and animals even if they often live in places where other life struggles including salty lakes, acidic pools, under the sea bed and in the gut. While aspects of what followed from Woese are still under debate, further discoveries suggest that life on Earth has been on a journey of separation and reunion: that the first cells developed into bacteria and archaea billions of years ago and that some of those later combined to form the complex cells from which we are made.
With
Christa Schleper
Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Vienna
Thorsten Allers
Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of Nottingham
And
Buzz Baum
Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
John Archibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the evolution of complex life (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Buzz Baum, ‘I’: A Biography of the Biological Self (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2027)
Franklin M. Harold, In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005)
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford University Press, 1994)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios 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 Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.