The Wars of the Roses
In Our Time: History
05/18/00
•28m
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Wars of the Roses which have been the scene for many a historical skirmish over the ages: The period in the fifteenth century when the House of Lancaster and the House of York were continually at odds is described by Shakespeare, in the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III as a time of enormous moral, military and political turmoil - the quintessential civil war; but twentieth century historians like K.B. Macfarlane argued the political instability is wildly overstated and there were no Wars of the Roses at all. Opposing this position are the many Tudor historians who like to claim that the Wars of the Roses represent the final breakdown of the feudal system and lead directly to the Tudor Era and the birth of the modern age.With Dr Helen Castor, Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Professor Colin Richmond, Emeritus Professor of History, Keele University; Dr Steven Gunn is a Tudor historian and Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Merton College, Oxford.
Previous Episode
New Wars
April 13, 2000
•27m
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of modern warfare. In the early nineteenth century the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz seemed to define war for all time when he called it “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will” and “nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means”. But after the nuclear bomb, the Cold War and the brutal and perplexing recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe does his definition still hold true? Or are we in a new era when the idea of a continuation of peacetime politics and the notion of a national will is increasingly irrelevant? Are the technologically billion dollar new wars, coupled with the wars on the ground which are more like crimes, revolutions or more organised violence than war, a way of following Clausewitz’s notion of war as a continuation of politics by other means or do they constitute something completely different?With Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Oxford University; Dr Mary Kaldor, Director of the Programme on Global Civil Society, London School of Economics; General Sir Michael Rose, former Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia.
Next Episode
Biography
June 22, 2000
•28m
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss biography which sells more books now than ever before; last year people in this country spent 115 million pounds on 12 and a half million copies of biographies. And it’s not just in Britain that life stories are popular; the United States Library of Congress found recently that in the previous six months more people had read a biography than any other kind of book. But what drives this fascination in the lives of others; lives which have often long since passed. Why do the literary studies of often long dead characters make such popular books? And what is the role of the biographer who provides that account? Truthful chronicler, or inevitably biased re-inventor?With Richard Holmes, writer, biographer and the author of Sidetracks:Explorations of a Romantic Biographer; Nigel Hamilton, biographer, Director of the British Institute of Biography and Professor of Biography, De Montfort University, Leicester; Amanda Foreman, biographer of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
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