The Essay

Martin Carver tells the sensational story of the unearthing of Britain's richest ever grave, at Sutton Hoo, in spring 1939. He goes on to describe the role of his own team from the University of York in the second wave of excavations there, and vividly recreates the life, death and burial of its probable inhabitant, King Raedwald. With a fabulous eye for detail, he describes some of the 263 objects of gold, silver, bronze, iron, gems, leather, wood, textiles, feather and fur, laid out in a wooden chamber at the centre of a buried ship. And he uses these to recreate the life and turbulent times of this early Anglo-Saxon king and his clever, devoted wife. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind. Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer. When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowd funding website. Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details? And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind. Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer. When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowdfunding website. Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details? And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind. Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer. When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowd funding website. Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details? And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind. Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer. When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowd funding website. Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details? And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind. Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer. When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowd funding website. Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details? And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

The final run of Essays in the long-running series which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work of art.4.Alex Walton recalls the Australian artist, Isobel - "Iso" - Rae, who spent the war in the Etaples art colony in the South of France, but whose work, as a female artist, has long been overlooked. Born in Australia in 1860 and trained at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Rae travelled to France in 1887 and spent most of the rest of her life there. A longstanding member of the Étaples art colony, Rae lived in the area from the 1890s until the 1930s, painting the world she witnessed at Etaples Army Base Camp and exhibiting her work in London and Paris.She was one of only two female Australian artists to live and paint in France during the war, but neither were included in their country's first group of official war artists. Alex Walton, a curator at the Imperial War Museum, revisits her life and re-evaluates her largely forgotten work for a contemporary audience. Producer: Beaty Rubens

The final run of Essays in the long-running series which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work of art.3.Jane Potter on The Forbidden Zone, a depiction of nursing life at the Front by Mary Borden. Mary Borden was an Anglo-American novelist who served for four years as a nurse in a military hospital at the Front. Jane Potter celebrates a work which, like those of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, vividly depicts the horror of the Trenches and yet is far less well known. Producer; Beaty Rubens.

The final run of Essays in the long-running series which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work of art.2.Janet Montefiore on Rudyard Kipling's 1922 collection, EpitaphsOn 27 September 1915, 8,000 out of the 10,000 British troops who took part in the disastrous Battle of Loos were killed or wounded. One of these, 2nd Lieutenant John Kipling, eighteen years old, the son of Rudyard Kipling, was reported ‘missing believed killed.’ His body was never found. Four years later, Rudyard Kipling published his ‘Epitaphs of the War 1914-1918’: thirty-one brief poems giving voice to those who died in the Great War: soldiers, airmen, nurses, non-combatants, Canadians, Indians, sailors, politicians, cowards and heroes. These days, Kipling is often criticised for his imperialist views on "the white man's burden", but in this Essay, Kipling scholar, Janet Montefiore uncovers a more sympathetic figure. She tells the story behind a poignant collection of poems which express Kipling's personal grief whilst giving voice to a wider sense of outrage about the victims of the war, including the famously succinct condemnation : If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.Producer: Beaty Rubens

The final run of Essays in the long-running series which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work of art. 1.Imaobong Umoren tells the story behind W.E.B. Dubois' seminal editorial, Returning Soldiers, which laid the early foundations of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, Du Bois was raised by a single mother who descended from African, English and Dutch ancestors. Growing up in the racially mixed town of Great Barrington, Du Bois attended public school alongside both white and black pupils and, at an early age, was singled out for his intellect. He was to grow up to become one of the leading scholars and activists of the twentieth century on what was then termed the ‘Negro Problem’. Published in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Returning Soldiers’, was based on the experiences that Du Bois had during his three-month visit to France from December 1918 to March 1919. Imaobong tells the story behind its writing and uncovers its continuing importance in today's Black Lives Matter campaign. Dr Imaobong D Umoren is Assistant Professor of International History of Gender at London School of Economics and Political Science.