S01E01 The Written Self
In the first episode, The Written Self, Adam traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. From a Quaker woman who used the written word...
The Century that Wrote Itself
S01E03: A World Re-Shaped by Writing
Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more than 200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God. And it was writing that made this new mobility possible. Through the very words that kept them afloat in this mobile world, we meet a puritan family split asunder across an ocean, a lowly sailor able to document strange new worlds for those at home and a slave-trader laying the foundations for a new world economy. All these characters remoulded the medieval world into the one we recognise today. Their writings both reveal this turbulent world to us and helped write the change itself.
Overview
Episodes
S01E02 The Rewritten Universe
Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first. How did God work? How...
S01E03 A World Re-Shaped by Writing
Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more...
Cast
Adam Nicolson
Self - Presenter
