Assorted Podcasts

Mars
So what do we know about Mars – its conditions, now and in the past? What is the evidence that there might be water and thus life on Mars? And when might we expect man to walk on its surface?

Galileo's Crime

A Laconia survivor's memoir
In 1942, off the West Coast of Africa, Jim McLoughlin experienced a sailor's worst nightmare. His ship was sunk by a torpedo and he and others endured a month in a tiny, crowded lifeboat, with virtually no food or water. It is an immense story of survival - of humanity stretched to the limit

Politics in a poetic key
The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was born in 1901 and died in 1990, is a difficult man to pin down. He's frequently described as a conservative, but there isn't much in his thought that would have been of help to a political party, and his work is often seen as poetic and evasive. This week, we look at the work of a great - and strange – philosopher

Conversation: is it a dying art?

Heaven Doesn't Speak
Confucius said that we should learn to be human, and that by doing so we'll create harmony in the cosmos. What he didn't say was that God was necessarily part of this equation, but that hasn't stopped his brand of practical ethics being given a transcendental spin

Shape of Our Cities

Picasso and Africa