Sir Ian McKellen reads the poetry, Michael Wood traces the journey on the ground. Together they conjure up the extraordinary life, times and words of China’s greatest poet, Du Fu. In this film, the first to ever be made about Du Fu in the west, Michael follows his tracks by road, train and...
Shakespeare's Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman
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Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary woman in a time of revolution. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, Mary Arden is the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer, but she marries into a new life in the rising Tudor middle class in Stratford-upon-Avon. There she has eight children,...
Historian Michael Wood returns to his first great love, the Anglo-Saxon world, to reveal the origins of our literary heritage. Focusing on Beowulf and drawing on other Anglo-Saxon classics, he traces the birth of English poetry back to the Dark Ages. Travelling across the British Isles from East...
Michael Wood explores village life in 14th century England, a time of plague, war and famine. Through the use of a remarkably complete set of documentary records, he explores one village - that of Codicote in Hertfordshire - looking at its boom times and its poorer times. Wood brings the period to...
Michael Wood explores the life, works and influence of one of the world's greatest storytellers who died 2,000 years ago. When an Elizabethan literary critic said that the witty soul of Ovid lived on in 'honey tongued Shakespeare', they were just stating the obvious. Ovid, everyone knew, was simply...
Gilbert White was a "parson-naturalist", a pioneering English naturalist, ecologist and ornithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Michael Wood explores the scientific life of the remarkable man.
Working in ancient Greece, Phineas is an established myth writer who has finished his latest tale about a father and a son. He meets with two young, ambitious Roman publishers, Julius and Atilus, in an attempt to sell it and put his work into the world.
