Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethiopia, coffea arabica spread through the Ottoman Empire before reaching Western Europe where, in the 17th century, coffee houses were becoming established.
There, caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer and were more animated, and this helped to spread ideas and influence culture. Coffee became a colonial product, grown by slaves or indentured labour, with coffea robusta replacing arabica where disease had struck, and was traded extensively by the Dutch and French empires; by the 19th century, Brazil had developed into a major coffee producer, meeting demand in the USA that had grown on the waggon trails.
With
Judith Hawley
Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Markman Ellis
Professor of 18th Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London
And
Jonathan Morris
Professor in Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In this episode of “The Way I See It,” actor and comedian Steve Martin looks at paintings by two early pioneers of American abstraction and takes us on a journey of seeing—shape and color transform into mountains, sky, and water. Find “The Way I See It” on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. 
Time brings new colour to old materials, and what makes Ways of Seeing so enduring might not be the same as what made it so electrically influential when it first appeared. We are now more aware of the fissures in the show, in its slight hesitations and indecisions, and in the hedges to what was otherwise such a freight train of an argument. The pictorial tradition of the female nude, Berger argues throughout the second episode, was not a celebration of humanist virtue but a fantasy of the acquisitive ‘male gaze’ (the term was coined a year later by Laura Mulvey).
In this episode of “The Way I See It,” Janna Levin brings her celestial expertise to Vincent van Gogh’s star-filled vision, in conversation with senior curator of Drawing and Prints Jodi Hauptman. Levin helps us see how certain 
features of the night sky, including “turbulent air,” the light from a star, and the planet Venus, are rendered visible by Van Gogh’s brush. She also points out that her approach is not so different from Van Gogh’s: “People who observe the world, whether they are artists or scientists, are always on the cusp of what they see and then what is internal.”
Kathy O’Shaughnessy talks to Mariella about her novel charting the life of George Eliot.
Boomers Daily 