Doing time

Nine on a Thursday morning is University Hour for those of us who don’t commute to an office every day. We time the clearing away of breakfast to coincide with Radio 4’s In Our Time. Melvyn Bragg, with his deadpan questioning, is our Thursday educator.

Last week’s programme was a classic of the genre: about an obscure 17th-century physician I’d never heard of, Sir Thomas Browne — and here were three university professors who’d devoted their entire working lives to studying him. ‘With me to discuss…’, Melvyn said, introducing them all. These professors (one male and English, two female and American) would propel the nation’s knowledge-graph of Sir Thomas Browne from 0 per cent to 95 per cent before Book of the Week.

As they chatted about what it must have been like to be a physician in Norwich as the Civil War raged, I found myself getting more and more caught up in another battle that was raging: the Battle of the Tenses.