It may be the state broadcaster and utterly supine in the face of power, but the BBC has some very useful stuff on it. Among my favourites is In Our Time on Radio 4, where they take a Big Idea, something you may have heard of but not understood, and get experts to answer the question: what’s that all about then?

This week it was The Siege of Münster, which features in Luther Blissett‘s astonishing anti-authoritarian retelling of the Reformation, Q. IOT, available to download (but not for long), has sections about the Peasants’ Revolt, the surprisingly advanced democratic form in Munster and the Anabaptists’ reading of the New Testament leading them to demand all property to be held in common. (Not something you hear from modern Biblical literalists.) At the time of the birth of the merchant / capitalist class, this is early anti-capitalism (communism) expressed in the only language then available to the peasantry, that of the Bible

I can’t recommend Q highly enough, it’s both eye-opening and a rollicking good thriller. In my ideal world, more people read this than the Da Vinci Code.

In one of those happy coincidences, I discovered on the same day I heard this programme, that Luther Blissett (now writing as Wu Ming) have a new novel out in English translation.  deals with the “discovery” of the New World and I’m hoping that it does for that period what Q did for the Reformation – reclaiming history from the bottom up, and giving us new myths to replace those of Empire and Christendom.

History may be written by the victors, but we can still read between the lines.