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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I can’t recommend the In Our Time podcast enough. It’s a fabulous library of high quality discourse.

One of the great things about In Our Time is the breadth of topics: at the end of an episode about ancient Roman history, Melvyn will say that next week they will be talking about particle physics, and after an episode about palaeontology he will say next week they are talking about a 19th C. novelist. Fantastic :-)

They have an absolutely huge library of old editions of the programme. I quite like looking at their twitter feed https://twitter.com/bbcinourtime for suggestions about old episodes to listen to, because it gives me some of the randomness of listening to the latest weekly edition.

It's wonderful. Melvyn is an excellent 'man on the Clapham omnibus' - quietly intellectual, ever inquisitive, but never looking to show off his own knowledge and always more than happy to cede the limelight to the academics whom he hosts.

He did struggle to follow along just a little bit in the P vs NP episode, though :-) Worth a listen for the HN crowd if only to see what trying to get to grips with computational complexity feels like to a true outsider.

Absolutely. I’ve learned a tonne of things I never knew where interesting. Knowledgeable guests and a wide range of topics. It’s rare that I retain as much information as with this podcast.

And Melvyn Bragg, the host, is such a character. I’d listen to it for him alone.

I’m the beginning I tended to dislike him but he has definitely grown on me over time

I love this podcast for anything in British history or literature. The aristocracy episode was particularly interesting. But the further afield it gets from that I feel like I don't come away having learned much about the history. He'll make random talking points like "Ghengis Kahn is remembered as a great conqueror" and then 3 phDs try to use that as a jumping off point to say something intelligent but end up arguing in different directions.

If you’re into British history checkout of “fall of civilizations” podcast on YouTube and other podcast apps. The first episode is of how Rome departed Britain

That's a very ungenerous characterisation of the show. Melvyn is very careful to keep a coherent progression in each episode, and he invites experts in fields relevant to the topic at hand. Among the ~1,000 episodes I'm sure there are some weak ones, but the way you frame it is as if British academics are not capable of discussing topics outside of their own culture or Melvyn is some amateur host who just wants to hear some pop history fun facts.

Possibly I am judging too harshly on a few weaker podcasts (though isn't that always the risk when a show has so many episodes) but "pop history fun facts" is how I would characterize a lot of the non Western ancient/medieval history episodes. 45 minutes on "the Samurai" feels a little thin when we have no background on Japan prior to that episode. And "Maths in the early Islamic World" was really frustrating how sometimes the guests are in the middle of making an interesting technical point and he interrupts with a totally different question.

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