Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss TS Eliot's Four Quartets, written just before and during World War II as meditations on humanity's relationship with time.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot's last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as meditations on the relationship between time and humanity.

With

David Moody

Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York

Fran Brearton

Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast

And

Mark Ford

Professor of English and American Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Jeremy Irons will be reading TS Eliot's greatest poems, from Prufrock to The Waste Land to Four Quartets, across New Year's Day here on Radio 4.