- Abelard and Heloise - love, sex and theology in 12th century Paris
- Alexander Pope - 'short is my date, but deathless my renown'
- Alexander von Humboldt - the remarkable career of the Prussian naturalist
- Altruism - how can evolutionary biology explain it?
- Anaesthetics - from ether frolics to pain-free surgery
- Anarchism - a question of authority?
- Antimatter - where has it all gone?
- Archaeology and Imperialism
- Archimedes - the Greek mathematician and his Eureka moments
- Asteroids - celestial bodies from the beginning of time
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- Astronomy and Empire - the link between colonial expansion and scientific discovery
- Averroes - the battle between faith and reason
- Avicenna - wine, women and philosophy
- Beauty - the philosophy of beauty
- Bismarck - the Iron Chancellor
- Borges - the life and work of Argentina's best loved short story writer
- Carbon - the basis of life
- Catherine the Great - the Enlightened Despot of Eighteenth Century Russia
- Christopher Marlowe
- Common Sense Philosophy - "There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it"
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- Cynicism - bold and populist, the history of a shocking philosophy
- Divine Right of Kings - "there's such divinity doth hedge a king"
- Don Quixote - Spanish romance and the first novel
- Epistolary Literature - great novels of fictional letters
- Faeries - supernatural creatures that are neither gods nor humans
- Field of the Cloth of Gold - a Renaissance entente cordiale
- Friendship - thinking philosophically about our close companions
- Galaxies - extra-galactic nebulae, black holes, stars and dark matter
- Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
- Genghis Khan - founder of one of the world's largest ever land-based empires
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- Geoffrey Chaucer - the first Great English Poet
- Goethe - formation of a German cultural icon
- Gravitational Waves - a new window on the universe
- Greek Comedy - sing as you revel and rout
- Guilt - what is it good for?
- Heart of Darkness - one of the most influential novels of the 20th century
- Hell - its representation through the ages
- Human Evolution - from early hominids to Homo sapiens
- Indian Maths - laying the foundations for modern numerals and zero as a number
- John Stuart Mill - one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th Century
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- Karl Marx - In Our Time's Greatest Philosopher
- Karl Popper - his ideas challenged our approach to the philosophy of science
- King Alfred and the Battle of Edington
- Magnetism - an attractive history
- Mars - the search for life on the Red Planet
- Mathematics and Music - the science behind sound and composition
- Merlin
- Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe
- Negative numbers - how they spread across civilizations
- Ockham's Razor - cutting medieval philosophy down to size
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- Pastoral Literature - the romantic idealisation of the countryside
- Perception and the Senses - how do we see what we see?
- Pragmatism - a practical philosophy fit for 20th century America
- Prime Numbers - the building blocks of mathematics
- Relativism - the battle against transcendent knowledge
- Renaissance Astrology - 'we are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them'
- Renaissance Maths - the birth of modern mathematics?
- Renaissance Paganism
- Samuel Johnson and his Circle
- Seventeenth Century Print Culture - piety, populism and political protest
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- Siegfried Sassoon - the poet who survived
- Socrates - the man and the myth
- Symmetry - the pattern at the heart of our physical world
- Taste - the good, the bad and the ugly in 18th century Britain
- The Abbasid Caliphs - when Baghdad ruled the Muslim world.
- The Aeneid
- The Arabian Nights - the art of story-telling
- The Carolingian Renaissance - the revival of early medieval Western Europe
- The Diet of Worms - Luther's stand against the Church
- The Discovery of Oxygen - feuds and revolutions at the birth of modern chemistry
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- The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature
- The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
- The Great Exhibition - a wonder of the Victorian world
- The Heart - its anatomical and cultural history
- The History of Optics - from telescopes to microscopes, a new way of seeing the world
- The Jesuits - the school masters of Europe
- The KT Boundary - did the dinosaurs burn out or fade away?
- The Needham Question - did China lay the foundations of modern science?
- The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God
- The Oath - guaranteeing law, government and the army in the Classical world
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- The Oxford Movement - Anglicans and Catholics in the 19th century
- The Peasants' Revolt - a lasting legacy for popular uprising?
- The Permian-Triassic Boundary - when 95% of life was killed off
- The Pilgrim Fathers - the original American dream
- The Poincare Conjecture - how a 19th century mathematician changed how we think about the shape of the universe
- The Prelude - the greatest poem in the English language?
- The Rise of the Mammals - life in a cold climate
- The Royal Society - the first club for experimental science
- The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
- The Search for Immunisation - and the battle against smallpox
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- The Siege of Constantinople - the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire
- The Siege of Orleans - did Joan of Arc really rescue France?
- The Spanish Inquisition - one of the most barbaric episodes in European history
- The Speed of Light - a cosmic speed limit?
- The Terror - when Madame Guillotine ruled France
- Thomas Hobbes and the political philosophy of 'Leviathan'
- Uncle Tom's Cabin - the novel that started the American Civil War
- Victorian Pessimism - fear and loathing in the late 19th century