Where else could a presenter get away with saying 'Can I move on to Burckhardt?'

The first, In Our Time, has been described as 'the most cerebral 45 minutes on British radio'. In the course of just one series, for instance, it has tackled Homer's Odyssey, Eighteenth Century Politeness, Agincourt, The Origins of Life, Jean-Paul Satre, and Pi. In each edition, Melvyn Bragg chairs a sustained discussion between three academic experts. On paper the format is utterly forbidding; it is certainly characterized by a high level of seriousness. As one reviewer points out, where else could a presenter get away with saying 'Can I move on to Burckhardt?' or talk of 'the Renaissance reaction against scholasticism and the Ciceronian reaction against Olympian theology'?

D. Hendy, Life on air: a history of Radio Four (2007), 397

To be its Controller was like inheriting a long-established country estate

[David Hatch] talked of Radio Four as 'the soul of the BBC', 'the last bastion' of the Reithian mission to inform, educate, and entertain. To be its Controller was like inheriting a long-established country estate that has to be handed on intact.

D. Hendy, Life on air: a history of Radio Four (2007), 299

The bloodiest outrage he had ever known

Asked during an interview whether he [Kenneth Tynan] would allow the National Theatre to stage a play in which there was sexual intercourse, he had replied 'Oh, I think so' - and then added with characteristic mischief, 'I doubt if there are very many rational people in the world to whom the word "fuck" is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.' It was, a Daily Express columnist declared with predictable irrationality, 'the bloodiest outrage' he had 'ever known'.

D. Hendy, Life on air: a history of Radio Four (2007), 101

It was the kind of series that would not have felt out of place in the 1950s

Kenneth Clark's Civilization. This was to be expensively produced, erudite in an unashamedly patrician manner, and blithely uninterested in anything other than the highest cultural artefacts of western art. Technical polish and colour film aside, it was the kind of series that would not have felt out of place in the 1950s.

D. Hendy, Life on Air: a history of Radio Four (2007), 20