Pick of the Day: The Century That Wrote Itself
9pm, BBC4
Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today’s globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication, when London tripled in size and more than 200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God.
Through the very words that kept them afloat, we meet a slave trader, a puritan family split asunder and a sailor who documented strange new worlds for those at home.