In Our Time

To the frustration of many, a lot of women’s clothes don’t have pockets. But why on Earth is that the case? Especially when men’s clothing seems to be full of pockets.
On Here For The History, Alice Loxton and Ben Henderson track the tumultuous and muddy history of women’s pockets. From capacious beginnings, through many fashion changes, to suffragette campaigning and societal expectations.
Alice and Ben unpick the surprising moments of pocket history that have contributed to the inconsistency of these sewn-in marvels today.
If you enjoy this episode, you can find more episodes of Here For The History on BBC Sounds. If you’re outside the UK, you can listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
KEY SOURCES:
Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close by Hannah Carlson
The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives by Arianne Fennetaux and Barbara Burman

Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers across the ages.
This archive episode, first released in October 2017, was selected as part of a ten-episode series by Misha Glenny. In the episode, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Behn, who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction during the Restoration. Virginia Woolf wrote of her: 'All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'. Behn may well have spent some of her early life in Surinam, the setting for her novel Oroonoko, and there are records of her working in the Netherlands as a spy for Charles II. She was loyal to the Stuart kings and refused to write a poem on the coronation of William of Orange. She was regarded as an important writer in her lifetime and inspired others to write but fell out of favour for two centuries after her death when her work was seen as too bawdy, the product of a disreputable age.
With
Janet Todd
Former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University
Ros Ballaster
Professor of 18th Century Literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford
and
Claire Bowditch
Post-doctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Reading list:

Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1991)

Aphra Behn (ed. Joanna Lipking), Oroonoko (Norton and Co, 1997)

Aphra Behn (ed. Paul Salzman), Oroonoko and Other Writings (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Aphra Behn (ed. Jane Spencer), The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko (Penguin Classics, 2003)

Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics, 1999)

Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), The Complete Works of Aphra Behn:7 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 1992-6)

Claire Bowditch, The Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (University of Auckland Press, 1961)

Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89 (Jonathan Cape, 1977)

Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)

Derek Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness: Oroonoko, Race and Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (Fentum Press, 2017)

Janet Todd and Derek Hughes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Northcote House, 1996)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a familiar feature of our beaches: seashells, from their astonishing shapes and patterns that teach us about Earth’s oceans, to the ways that humans have treasured shells throughout history. Seashells appear in the mythologies of countless cultures across the world - think of Botticelli’s Venus emerging from a giant scallop shell, Vishnu's sacred horn panchajanya, or the Aztec god Quetzalcōātl’s talisman cut from a conch shell. The urge to collect shells seems to be as old as our species. We’ve used them as decoration, currency, and musical instruments. But shells aren’t just beautiful objects washed up on our beaches. Many belong to one of the most diverse groups of the animal kingdom, Mollusca, and the remarkable morphology of forms and structures they grow in offer insight into the past, present, and future of the marine world.
With
Suzanne Williams
Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum
Liz Harper
Professor of Evolutionary Malacology in the Department of Earth Sciences and Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
Helen Scales
Marine biologist and Author.
Producer: Martha Owen
Reading list:
S. Peter Dance, Shells (DK, 2022)
A.R. Irwin, S.T. Williams, D.I. Speiser and N.W. Roberts, ‘The marine gastropod Conomurex luhuanus (Strombidae) has high-resolution spatial vision and eyes with complex retinas’ (Journal of Experimental Biology 225:16, 2022)
Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, Animal Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Andreia Salvador, Interesting Shells (The Natural History Museum, 2022)
Helen Scales, Shell Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Molluscan Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2026)
Helen Scales, The Shell Spotter's Guide (National Trust Books, 2024)
Helen Scales, What a Shell Can Tell: Where They Live, What They Eat, How They Move, and More (Phaidon Press, 2022)
Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015)
Paul D. Taylor, Fossils: The Essential Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Suzanne Williams, ‘Molluscan shell colour’ (Biological Reviews, 2017)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. The French Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.
With
Rosalind Polly Blakesley
Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge
Robert Wenley
Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
And
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds), Vigée Le Brun (exhibition catalogue in English, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016)
Joseph Baillio et al., Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842 (exhibition catalogue in French, Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16)
Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023), especially chapter 8 ‘The Triumphant Refugee’
Lucy Davies, Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (National Gallery Global, 2025)
Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1997)
Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists (Apollo, 2025)
Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Getty Publications, 2025)
Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press London, 2022)
Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (trans. Sian Evans), The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (Camden Press, 1989)
Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (first published 1869; Tredition Classics, 2012)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of an alliance which transformed the geopolitics of the classical world: the Delian League. Since the start of the 5th Century BCE, city states across Greece had been fighting a series of armed conflicts in the Greco-Persian Wars. After the defeat of a second Persian invasion in 478 BCE, a league of cities across Greece came together and formed a new alliance led by Athens. That alliance is now known as the Delian League, after the island of Delos where it was established. In the following decades, Athens used the Delian League to grow its own wealth and formidable naval power. Cities which tried to leave the alliance found themselves violently put down and their lands confiscated by the Athenians. What had begun as a cooperative alliance sworn to resist the Persian Empire gradually started to seem like it may have created another imperial power: the Athenian Empire.
With
Leah Lazar
Lecturer in Hellenistic Culture at the University of Manchester
Polly Low
Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham
And
Paul Cartledge
AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge
Producer: Martha Owen
Aristophanes (trans. David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein), The Birds and Other Plays (Penguin Classics, 2003)
Mary Beard, The Parthenon (Profile Books, 2010)
M. Canevaro and D. M. Lewis, 'Between ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’ and The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (and beyond): The Popularity of the Athenian Empire Revisited' (Polis 41:1, 2024)
Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Lisa Kallet and John H. Kroll, The Athenian Empire: Using Coins as Sources (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Leah Lazar, Athenian Power in the Fifth Century BC (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Polly Low (ed.), The Athenian Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
Malcolm F. McGregor, The Athenians and their Empire (UBC Press, 1987)
Robin Osborne (ed. and trans.), The Athenian Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Empire (Clarendon Press, 1985)
Thucydides (trans. Robin Waterfield, introduced by Polly Low), The History of the Peloponnesian War (Basic Books, 2025)
Thucydides (ed. Robert B Strassler), The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1998)
Thucydides (trans. Rex Warner), History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin Books, 2000)
Thucydides (trans. Martin Hammond), The Peloponnesian War (Oxford University Press, 2009)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.