Creatures of Leisure

Available for over a year

While Chris Maslanka's series about the history of Puzzling has been constructed from a series of puzzling strands reaching across the centuries this programme concentrates on just one century, the 19th, and the rise of a leisured class in Western Europe and the United States which resulted, amongst many other things, in the inexorable rise of the printed puzzle. There was also a focal figure in the form of Lewis Carroll. Chris discusses his importance with the graph theorist Robin Wilson as well as contemplating the Dodo in Oxford's Natural History Museum, the creature that inspired Carroll and prompts Chris to reflect on the way Puzzles can sometimes become extinct.