In Our Time

So vast was the scope of In Our Time (Radio 4) yesterday, in the first of two programmes on the history of the city, that even Melvyn Bragg sounded momentarily dazed by it. Already at ease stuffing his every sentence with a bewildering array of facts, concepts, allusions and tangly intellectual conundrums, Bragg had to speak twice as fast as normal to keep things on track. He laughed at how, following one massive plunge into a city's context and history, he had to whoosh the conversation into another. "Looking to Africa briefly," he suggested, stifling a laugh at the crazy pace. "Can we flash over there – a news flash from China?" he asked. You also got a sense of history being bigger than most of us can properly imagine. When Professor Greg Woolf referred to something happening "not long after the beginning of the current warm period", he didn't mean early March. He had 8000BC in mind. For all the haste, though, this was a terrific edition of the programme. Even if you thought you knew quite a bit about cities, as I did, this was full of clever insights across a quite dazzling range of places, topics and time frames. "Let's talk about the future next week," said Bragg, wrapping things up. "We'll start in 1800."