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. Would these three professors manage to drag Melvyn into the historic present?

Like most of us, Bragg subscribes to the view that when you’re talking about the past, it’s normal to talk in the past tense. The professors, on the other hand, subscribe to the campus convention that when you’re talking about things that happened a very long time ago, and about which you know a great deal, you talk in the historic present tense. They don’t do this, oddly enough, when they’re talking about something like D-Day. That was too recent. But if it happened centuries or millennia ago, they always talk in the present.

For the first five minutes, Melvyn got Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London) talking on Browne’s childhood. She did start off in the past tense (Browne ‘went to Winchester and Oxford’ etc.).