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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, and good news,

Your Dead to Me, is back for a new series.

Here we go.

Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Mary Beard and Patton Oswald.

I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire.

We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dolion with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Wozniak and Rihelina. I'm excited. You're dead to me. The comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

My name's Matthew Sweet and you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. On the 22nd of January 2001, an old woman breathed her last in a well-ventilated bedroom on the Isle of White.

She had not been ready to die, not quite.

The previous day, she'd looked her doctor in the eye and said,

I should like to live a little longer, as I have still a few things to settle.

It was almost a command he proved unable to fulfil it.

Henry James found a word to describe the silent crowds that gathered in London to mourn the

death of Queen Victoria, motherless. His fellow novelist Marie Carelli, whose name became the source of

the Cockney rhyming slang for Telly, reached for an astronomical metaphor. England's Queen is

dead. The words sound as heavily as though one should say

the sun is no longer in the sky.

But here's a fact to put beside these accounts of grief

and cosmic darkness.

By the time of Victoria's death,

the word Victorian was already a pejorative,

mid-Victorian, even more so. And once the First World War was over, the meaning of Victoria and her age had calcified into something

...