Kenneth Clark looks at the beginnings of revolutionary politics in the 18th Century.

His theme takes him from great palaces like Blenheim and Versailles, to Edinburgh, and to the hills of Virginia where Thomas Jefferson made his home in the 1760s.

Kenneth Clark journeys from the Loire through Tuscany and Umbria, to the cathedral at Pisa. He explores the aspirations of the later Middle Ages in France and Italy, looking at the work of Giotto and Dante among other artists.

Kenneth Clark continues his personal reflections on civilisation with a look at Renaissance man.

Clark visits Florence, where the resurrection of a classical past first gave a new impetus to European thought, and then journeys to the palaces of Urbino and Mantua, where the Renaissance manifested itself in glorious architecture.

He talks of Humanism and of perspective, of Donatello, Botticelli and Van Eyck.

Sir Kenneth Clark begins his classic 1969 series on the history of civilisation with the re-establishment of civilisation in Western Europe, in the tenth century after the fall of Rome to barbarism. He travels from Byzantine Ravenna to the Celtic Hebrides examining aqueducts, cathedrals, the lives of the Vikings and of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.