Lord Bragg is a British broadcaster and author. A grammar-school boy from Cumbria, he left the north but kept its vowels—and his autodidactic zeal. He has written several books.
Lord Bragg presented "In Our Time", a BBC Radio 4 programme, for 26 years from 1998. The series was first commissioned for just a six-month run. Each week he grilled three academics on a particular topic that had to be academic, in every sense. Where other programmes strain to be topical, he was determined his would be "never knowingly relevant". Among its archive of more than 1,000 episodes are programmes on "Hildegard of Bingen", "Feathered Dinosaurs" and "The Ontological Argument". The show became one of the BBC's most downloaded programmes, attracting international attention; the New Yorker described it as "aggressively uncommercial".
In September 2025, at the age of 85, Lord Bragg retired from the programme.
Never have children, only grandchildren.