In Our Time - 25/11/2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of metaphor. "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players", says Jaques in Shakespeare's As You Like It. This is one of the best known uses of metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is used to describe another. Writers from Homer to Orwell, the Metaphysical poets to Derrida, have explored its manifold possibilities. Is metaphor just a literary device, or is it evidence of the complex ways in which we seek to understand the world? Producer: Thomas Morris.