ALSO LOOK OUT FOR…
One of the recurring strengths of In Our Time (Radio 4) is the way it alerts listeners to characters from history we really should know more about. The episode devoted to sixth- century pre-Islamic knight and poet Antarah ibn Shaddad ( Thursday 28 February) may well fall into this category. Listen out too for an episode about Queen Elizabeth I’s advisor William Cecil ( Thursday 7 March), where the expert guests include Diarmaid MacCulloch. Another upcoming highlight on Radio 4 is a new adaptation of A Passage to India (Monday 11 March), EM Forster’s masterpiece exploring life in the British Raj. Storyville: Under the Wire (BBC Four, February) looks back at Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy’s mission to Homs, Syria in February 2012. It was an assignment that left Colvin dead after artillery fire hit an international media centre. A US court recently found the Syrian government liable for her killing. Highlights on PBS America include
The Circus ( Tuesday 26 February), which takes as its starting point the intertwining stories of impresarios such as PT Barnum. Meanwhile,
Decoding Watson ( Tuesday 12 March) explores the work of molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist James Watson, one of those who won a Nobel Prize for putting forward the idea of the double helix structure of DNA.