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Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro

Opera on 3 Antonio Pappano conducts Mozart's great comic opera The Marriage of Figaro.

The Verb

David Crystal/Simon Barraclough/Darrell Lloyd/Science Writing/Bestsellers of 1910

Episode image for David Crystal/Simon Barraclough/Darrell Lloyd/Science Writing/Bestsellers of 1910

Duration: 45 minutes

How big is your vocabulary?

Linguistics expert Prof David Crystal responds to recent reports that teenage vocabulary can be limited to as little as 800 words, and sheds light on how vocabulary size can be measured.

In memoriam Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Poet Simon Barraclough pays tribute to the sole survivor of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts, who has died aged 93.

Darrell Lloyd

Previous Verb competition winner Darrell Lloyd introduces 3 pieces of flash fiction (tiny short stories) - Fresh Bullet Holes, Love Story and The Edge of the World.

Science Writing

Botanist Sandy Knapp and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock recommend the best scientific books for the lay reader.

Bestsellers of 1910

Phil Stone, Charts Editor of The Bookseller, takes a look at the most successful books in the UK and US a hundred years ago.

  • Sandy and Maggie's Science Writing Recommendations

    The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russell Wallace

    Naturalist, by E.O. Wilson

    The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

    The Hidden Landscape, by Richard Fortey

    Mr Tompkins in Wonderland and Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom, by George Gamow

    Six Easy Pieces; What do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman

    Los Alamos, by Joseph Kanon

    Cosmos, by Carl Sagan

    The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes

    Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre

    13 things that don’t Make Sense, by Michael Brooks

  • Bestsellers of 1910

    Britain only began keeping track of bestselling books in the 1970s, but some of the most popular of 1910 were...


    Chatham, by Lord Rosebery

    Rewards and Fairies, by Rudyard Kipling

    Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, by Baroness Orczy

    Howard's End, by EM Forster

    The History of Mr Polly, by HG Wells

    The Bestseller list for the US was as follows:

    1. The Rosary, Florence Barclay
    2. A Modern Chronicle, Winston Churchill
    3. The Wild Olive, anonymous (Basil King)
    4. Max, Katherine Cecil Thurston
    5. The Kingdom of Slender Swords, Hallie Erminie Rives
    6. Simon the Jester, William J. Locke
    7. Lord Loveland Discovers America, C. N. and A. M. Williamson
    8. The Window at the White Cat, Mary Roberts Rinehart
    9. Molly Make-Believe, Eleanor Abbott
    10. When a Man Marries, Mary Roberts Rinehart

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