Arts & Ideas
1,985 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 268 ratingsLeading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives – looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Broadcast as Free Thinking, Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari and Anne McElvoy.
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Episodes
New Thinking: Women and Slavery
January 13, 2021 13:00 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBNew research on female slave owners in Britain, women on Caribbean plantations, and the daughter of a prominent slave trader. Christienna Fryar talks to researchers Katie Donnington, Meleisa Ono-George, and Hannah Young. We hear about the daughter of Thomas Hibbert - one of the most prominent slave traders in Kingston, Jamaica - and the revelation that before she died she had intended to ask her mother to free the enslaved people she held; the risks taken by women who had children with the...
Women and Slavery
January 13, 2021 13:00 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBNew research on female slave owners in Britain, women on Caribbean plantations, and the daughter of a prominent slave trader. Christienna Fryar talks to researchers Katie Donnington, Meleisa Ono-George, and Hannah Young. We hear about the daughter of Thomas Hibbert - one of the most prominent slave traders in Kingston, Jamaica - and the revelation that before she died she had intended to ask her mother to free the enslaved people she held; the risks taken by women who had children with thei...
Autism, film and patterns
January 12, 2021 12:03 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBIf, and, then are the 3 words which underpin Simon Baron-Cohen's exploration of how humans reason and develop solutions to problems in his latest book The Pattern Seekers. He joins author Michelle Gallen, film historian Andrew Roberts and Bonnie Evans whose research includes the history of childhood and developmental science in a discussion about how we understand autism presented by Matthew Sweet. Michelle Gallen's novel Big Girl, Small Town is available now. Simon Baron-Cohen is clinical ...
New Thinking: Aphra Behn
January 08, 2021 19:29 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBFrom spy to one of the first professional woman writers in Britain - Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer in the Restoration period. Claire Bowditch has spent years comparing different printed versions of her dramas to work out what were printer errors and how involved was Aphra Behn in the printing process. Annalisa Nicholson is researching a French salon in London created by the French noblewoman Hortense Mancini - whom Behn dedicated a play to. Is this...
Dostoevsky
January 06, 2021 11:41 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBFrom exile in Siberia to the novels which set a template - Rana Mitter and his guests Alex Christofi, Muireann Maguire, Claire Whiteheadand Viv Groskop look at the life and writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 27 January 1881). Crime and Punishment published in 1886 was the second novel following Dostoevsky's return from ten years of exile in Siberia. It examined ideas about rationality, morality and individualism which Dostoevsky also examined in Notes from the Underground in 1...
Mildred Pierce
January 05, 2021 14:26 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBMildred Pierce, James M Cain's 1941 novel was turned into a noir film starring Joan Crawford which earnt her an Academy Award. Matthew Sweet and his guests crime writers Denise Mina & Laura Lippman + academics Sarah Churchwell & Lizzie Mackarel have been re-watching the film and comparing it with the novel as they consider how the social realism and depiction of suburban female life differs from his other books which became hit films The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Laur...
Marlene Dietrich
December 17, 2020 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBMarlene Dietrich: sensual screen siren, political radical, 20th-century sex symbol, and - eventually - septuagenarian cabaret star. Cabraret legend Le Gateau Chocolat, film historian Pamela Hutchinson, writer Phuong Le, and academic Lucy Bolton join Matthew Sweet to delve into a life fully lived. From her formative collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, to entertaining the troops throughout World War II, to a late blossoming live performance career and touring as a cabaret artist into her...
Winter Light
December 16, 2020 17:34 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBBrian Cox on the stars and planets. Archaelogist Susan Greaney on Stonehenge and Maes Howe at solstice, the shadowy paintings of Wright of Derby and Artemisia Gentileschi and the candlelight of Hanukkah in art and literature picked out by Alexandra Harris and the philosophy of Plato and light giving ideas from Sophie-Grace Chappell: Shahidha Bari and guests look at light as BBC Radio 3 broadcasts a series of music programmes, concerts, walks and features looking at Light in Darkness. Physic...
Hegel's Philosophy of Right
December 15, 2020 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBWhat links Beethoven & Hegel's philosophy of freedom? Anne McElvoy talks to New Generation Thinker Seán Williams, Christoph Schuringa, Gary Browning, and Alison Stone about Hegel's discussion of freedom, law, family, markets and the state in his Principles of the Philosophy of Right 1820. Dr Christoph Schuringa is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London Gary Browning is Professor in Political Thought at Oxford Brookes University Alison Stone is Professor of E...
Ancient wisdom & remote living
December 10, 2020 12:19 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBThe solitude of remote lands and medieval monks; mapping and navigating by the stars and the survival strategies of Indigenous Peoples living around the Arctic circle as the ice melts are all part of today's conversation as Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is joined by British Museum curator Amber Lincoln, author and GP Gavin Francis and historian and New Generation Thinker Seb Falk. Gavin Francis is the author of Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession; Shapeshifters: On Medicine and Human Change ...
New Thinking: Hey Presto!
December 09, 2020 18:51 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBMagic in medicine, surgery, and business; cross-dressing on the panto stage; and the history of pantomime and magic. Lisa Mullen is joined by Kate Newey, Will Houston, and Naomi Paxton. Naomi Paxton is a researcher at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, a magician and performer as Ada Campe, and is a member of the Magic Circle and their first Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Her research includes popular entertainment and the suffragettes, and she has performed as a magi...
New Thinking: Ways of Talking about Health
December 09, 2020 16:58 - 53 minutes - 49 MBDes Fitzgerald talks to the winners of the AHRC and Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Awards 2020. Each has looked at how the arts can help our understanding of health and wellbeing - and, includes research into how the stigma surrounding obesity contributes to the obesity crisis and innovative art therapy techniques with long term mental health benefits for patients. AHRC and Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Awards 2020 • Best Research Award: The Hearing the Voice team at Durham Univers...
The 1920s - Philosophy's Golden Age
December 08, 2020 22:43 - 44 minutes - 41 MBWittgenstein changed his mind, Heidegger revolutionised philosophy (and the German language), and both the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle were in full swing. Matthew Sweet is joined by Wolfram Eilenberger, David Edmonds and Esther Leslie. Plus, a report on the plight of the Lukacs Archive in Budapest. Wolfram Eilenberger's book Time of the Magicians, translated by Shaun Whiteside, is a group portrait of four young philosophers in the aftermath of World War I. He is the founding edit...
Times of Change
December 03, 2020 13:53 - 51 minutes - 46.7 MBJared Diamond, Camilla Townsend, Tom Holland and Emma Griffin talk to Rana Mitter. What lessons for the pandemic are there in looking back at times of upheaval in history from the rise and fall of the Aztec Empire to the move from rural to urban living in Britain's Industrial Revolution. Tom Holland's books include Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic; Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind; Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. Camilla Townsend is th...
Mould-Breaking Writing
December 01, 2020 16:44 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBFrom surrealism and science fiction to inspiration drawn from historic objects in stately homes and the painting of Francis Bacon: Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation with Will Harris, who has written long-form poems; new Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Max Porter and Chloe Aridjis, who have written poetic novels which play with form; and academic Xine Yao, who looks at speculative fiction. Max Porter is the author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and Lanny. He has also collabo...
When Shakespeare Travelled with Me
November 27, 2020 08:00 - 13 minutes - 12.3 MBApril 1916. By the Nile, the foremost poets of the Middle East are arguing about Shakespeare. In 2004, Egyptian singer Essam Karika released his urban song Oh Romeo. Reflecting on his travels and encounters around the Arab world, New Generation Thinker Islam Issa, from Birmingham City University, discusses how canonical English writers (Shakespeare and Milton) creep into the popular culture of the region today. Recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinki...
Leadership & authority
November 26, 2020 12:00 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBFrom Tudor courts to plantations to the Arab Spring and modern political philosophy: a debate in partnership with Bristol Festival of Ideas hosted by Shahidha Bari. Jeffrey Howard is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College London. He writes and teaches about the moral obligations of democratic citizens and political leaders, focusing on the topics of counter-extremism, crime and punishment, and free speech. Joanne Paul, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Uni...
Politician and Pioneer
November 26, 2020 08:00 - 13 minutes - 12.6 MBThe colourful life of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh overturns everything we think we know about disabled people’s lives in the 19th century. Born without hands and feet, he was an adventurous traveller and a Member of Parliament, a tiger-hunting landowner whose attempts to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism were ultimately defeated, and whose amazing career has been largely forgotten. But how did his first biographer meet the challenge of writing his life? New Generation Thinker Clar...
Beastly Politics
November 25, 2020 08:00 - 13 minutes - 12.5 MBFrom pension schemes for police force dogs to political rights - can other animals be regarded as members of our democratic communities, with rights to political consideration, representation or even participation? New Generation Alasdair Cochrane, from the University of Sheffield, believes that the exclusion of non-humans from civic institutions cannot be justified, and explores recent attempts in court to re-imagine a political world that takes animals seriously. The Essay was recorded in...
Bedrooms
November 24, 2020 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBFrom sleeping space to work space? Matthew Sweet is joined by historian of emotions Tiffany Watt Smith, expert on the suffragettes and a history of sex Fern Riddell, author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World Laurence Scott and Tudor historian Joe Moshenska. Matthew Sweet's guests recording in their bedrooms are all New Generation Thinkers, which now has 100 early career academics on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to ...
Byron, celebrity and fan mail
November 24, 2020 08:00 - 14 minutes - 13.3 MBCorin Throsby looks at the extraordinary fan mail received by the poet Lord Byron. The New Generation Thinkers scheme is ten years old in 2020. Jointly run by BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each year it offers ten academics at the start of their careers a chance to bring fascinating research to a wider public. This week we hear five essays from this last decade of stimulating ideas. We think of fan mail as a recent phenomenon, but in the early 19th century the poet Byron ...
Should biographers imitate their subjects?
November 23, 2020 08:00 - 13 minutes - 12.7 MBWould you don a diving suit or take a drug in a quest to understand the life of someone else? "Following in the footsteps" is an obsession for biographers as they travel the world to bring their subjects to life, sometimes with dangerous consequences. Hull University Professor of Creative Writing Martin Goodman, biographer of the sorcerer Carlos Castaneda, the Indian mystic Mother Meera and the scientist John Scott Haldane, draws on visits to high peaks, the seabed, coal mines and monasteri...
Democracy, Hong Kong and USA
November 19, 2020 14:12 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBDemocracy, Hong Kong and USA Free Thinking Hong Kong has seen elections postponed, pro-democracy protesters arrested and a sweeping new national security law imposed by Beijing this year outlawing sedition and subversion. Rana Mitter asks whether Hong Kong can retain its unique identity and how the city's culture can help us make sense of these turbulent times. And, is there Trumpism without President Trump? Following the fortunes of the Republican Party in the US elections, we consider whe...
Helen Mort and Blake Morrison, Oulipo
November 18, 2020 14:00 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBTeaching writing - mentors Helen Mort and Blake Morrison compare notes. Plus as Georges Perec's memoir I Remember is published in English for the first time, we look at the rules of writing proposed by the Oulipo group which was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Georges Perec (1936 – 1982) came up with a "story-making machine" and created a novel in which the letter 'e' never appears. Queneau's Exercices de Style recounts a bus journey ninety-nine times. Shahidha B...
New Thinking: Films and Research
November 18, 2020 13:04 - 43 minutes - 39.8 MBMelting glaciers, cacophonous refugee camps, voices in heads, bathroom altercations and indigenous communities in crisis are the subjects of this year's AHRC Research In Film Awards. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to researchers and filmmakers from the winning films, which are: Inspiration Award: ‘To Be A Marma’ - Ed Owles Best Doctoral of Early Career Film: ‘Voices Apart’ - David Heinemann Best Climate Emergency Film: ‘A Short Film About Ice’ - Adam Laity Best Animated Film: ‘Bathroom...
New Thinking: Face Transplants and Researching Nose Injuries
November 13, 2020 15:33 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBWould you change your nose if you could? What about an entire face transplant? Des Fitzgerald speaks to researchers investigating the past and future of facial difference and medical intervention and looks at videos from participants in the AboutFace project, which are being launched as part of the Being Human Festival this November. Emily Cock, from the University of Cardiff, looks at our relationship with our noses throughout history – from duels and sexual diseases to racial prejudice. ...
Postcolonial Derby: Privateers, Pieces of Eight and the Postwar Playhouse
November 12, 2020 14:00 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBWhat connects a "double elephant" sized map, an academy of dissenters and Daniel Defoe? Shahidha Bari makes a virtual visit to the University of Derby's hub for the Being Human Festival 2020. Today the East Midlands city of Derby is often overlooked, but it was one of the powerhouses of the industrial revolution. Historians and archivists have been exploring Derby as a postcolonial city and uncovering its hidden past. We hear how an intricate set of world maps by the 18th-century cartographe...
The Imperial War Museum BBC Radio 3 Remembrance Debate 2020
November 11, 2020 15:07 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBWhat does it mean to make art to commemorate histories of conflict? Anne McElvoy's guests are artists Es Devlin and Machiko Weston, Art Fund director Jenny Waldman, chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group Ekow Eshun and Paris Agar from the IWM as Radio 3 joins with the Imperial War Museum for the 2020 Remembrance Debate. Es Devlin and Machiko Weston worked together on a digital artwork commission to mark the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima. What images and words were appropriate to use...
Charity shops' history and role, our relationship with 'stuff', and musical typewriters
November 10, 2020 17:29 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBMatthew Sweet and guests discuss the history and ideas behind the charity shop, our relationship with 'stuff', and musical typewriters - aspects of November's Being Human Festival. Matthew talks to researchers whose work is featured in the festival, which showcases research from a series of UK universities. His guests are anthropologist and soprano Jennifer Cearns from University College London; George Gosling, a historian at the University of Wolverhampton; Georgina Brewis of University Col...
Charity shop history, our relationship with 'stuff', and musical typewriters
November 10, 2020 17:29 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBMatthew Sweet and guests discuss the history and ideas behind the charity shop, our relationship with 'stuff', and musical typewriters - aspects of November's Being Human Festival. Matthew talks to researchers whose work is featured in the festival, which showcases research from a series of UK universities. His guests are anthropologist and soprano Jennifer Cearns from University College London; George Gosling, a historian at the University of Wolverhampton; Georgina Brewis of University Co...
Billy Wilder
November 05, 2020 12:00 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBMr Wilder & Me is the title of the new novel from Jonathan Coe, who won the Costa Prize for his book Middle England. He is one of Matthew Sweet's guests in a programme exploring the life and work of the Austrian born director behind Hollywood hits including Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity and Some Like it Hot. They are joined by film critics Phuong Le and Melanie Williams and Paul Diamond, the son of Billy Wilder's long time writing partner I.A.L. Diamond who worked on scripts for Some Li...
New Thinking: Depicting disability in history and culture
November 04, 2020 10:00 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBThis November sees the 25th anniversary of the UK Disability Discrimination Act. As we consider what contemporary progress has been made we'll uncover the long history of disabled people’s political activism, look back at the treatment of disabled people in Royal Courts and at fictional portrayals of disability in 19th-century novels from Dickens and George Eliot to Charlotte M Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough presents. Professor David Turner is the author of Disab...
War in fact and fiction
November 03, 2020 14:31 - 44 minutes - 41 MBFrom East Africa to Arabia, the First World War to Mozambique, Rana Mitter discusses the impact of war on society and culture. Margaret MacMillan's most recent book is called War: How Conflict Shaped Us and takes a deep dive into the history of conflict. Rob Johnson considers what we gain by exploring the overlooked side of Lawrence of Arabia - his thoughts on warfare and military strategy. And, the end of the Gaza empire, and the clash in East Africa between Belgian, German, British and Fre...
Thinking about audiences in a time of pandemic
October 29, 2020 19:04 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBFrom online dance, pavement performances of plays, and the part played by audiences in Greek theatres and Shakespeare's Globe - how is performance adapting in the Covid era, and how are we rethinking what an audience is? Shahidha Bari hosts a discussion, with Kwame Kwei-Armah of the Young Vic; Kirsty Sedgman from the University of Bristol, who looks at theatre from Ancient Greece on; Lucy Weir, who teaches dance at the University of Edinburgh and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker; and Ted...
Individualism and Community
October 29, 2020 09:41 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBFrom carers and refugees, New Deal America in the 30s back to Enlightenment values - Anne McElvoy explores the intersections between community and the individual, care and conscience with: Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, authors of The Upswing, arguing for a return to the communitarian American values of the New Deal-era1920s Madeleine Bunting, whose book Labours of Love looks at the crisis of care in the UK today New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel, whose book Conscien...
The post-Covid city
October 27, 2020 12:00 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBHow has the pandemic changed our experience of urban space and what is the future for cities like London? Caleb Femi was young people's poetry laureate for London. Katie Beswick and Julia King research the way we use our streets. Irit Katz studies how the urban environment is shaped by crisis. Caleb Femi's Poor - a collection of poetry and photographs of the lives of young black men in Peckham - is published in November 2020. Katie Beswick is the author of Social Housing in Performance: Th...
The Writing of Aime Cesaire
October 22, 2020 17:02 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBHis stinging critique of European colonial racism and hypocrisy Discours sur le Colonialisme was first published in 1950. How does it resonate today? A founder of the Négritude movement, Aimé Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) also wrote poetry and a biography of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. To discuss the influence of Césaire's writing, Rana Mitter is joined by Sudhir Hazareesingh, who has just published his own biography of Toussaint; New Generation Thinker Alexan...
Polari Prize winners
October 21, 2020 14:47 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBSunil Gupta says his photographs ask what does it mean to be a gay Indian man? Shahidha Bari looks at his work and talks to the winners of the 2020 Polari Prize, which usually takes place at London's Southbank Centre, and to Paul Burston, founder of the salon. https://www.polarisalon.com/ Amrou Al-Kadhi's memoir Life as a Unicorn deals with their life growing up as a queer Arab Muslim drag queen through stories of tropical aquariums, quantum physics and Egyptian divas. They are the winner o...
Seances, Science and Art - A Haunting, A Telepathy Experiment, and an Exhibition of Supernormal Art.
October 20, 2020 18:00 - 49 minutes - 45 MBHow a Croydon housewife baffled a 1930s ghost hunter - the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale, talks to Matthew Sweet about her discovery of a dossier of interviews about a poltergeist "terrorising" Alma Fielding which made headlines in the 1938 Sunday Pictorial newspaper. 30 artists interested in seances and spirituality are on show in an exhibition co-curated by Simon Grant and the Drawing Room Gallery in partnership with Hayward Touring. Plus we return to a radio e...
Post Truth & Derrida
October 15, 2020 12:36 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBJacques Derrida was the superstar philosopher of the 1980s and 90s. Often associated with the philosophical movement known as 'poststructualism', he made the enigmatic statement that 'There is nothing outside the text'. Today, one conspiracy theorist has commented that he studied poststructualism in college and learned from it that everything is narrative. Is Derrida and his style of thought a pathway to the 'post-truth' age? Or is that a crude distortion of an important body of philosophica...
Poet Daljit Nagra and crime writer Val McDermid
October 14, 2020 13:00 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBPoet Daljit Nagra and crime writer Val McDermid discuss capturing different forms of speech, a sense of place, and politics - in a conversation organised with the Royal Society of Literature and Durham Book Festival, and hosted by presenter Shahidha Bari. Plus, how the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox has lessons for us all today. As a new translation and retelling by Anne Louise Avery is published, she joins Shahidha to discuss the book with Noreen Masud - a BBC/AHRC New Generation Think...
New Thinking about Museums
October 13, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBFrom a VR version of Viking life and what you can learn from gaming, to describing collections in military museums, to the range of independent museums and the passions of their founders for everything from old engines to bakelite, witchcraft to shells. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough looks at new research into a range of collections, why more are opening and what is missing. Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology at Birkbeck, University of London. She leads the MAPPING MUSEUMS research proje...
The Frieze BBC Radio 3 Debate: Museums in the 21st Century
October 08, 2020 11:21 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBDirectors of the Hermitage, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the National Gallery, Singapore explain how they are dealing both with the challenge of Covid-19 and the greater accountability demanded by worldwide social justice movements. Anne McElvoy hosts a discussion organised in collaboration with Frieze Masters and Frieze London, talking to: Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, Director of the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art...
Writing a Life: Hermione Lee, Daniel Lee and Rachel Holmes
October 06, 2020 21:45 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBBiographers of Tom Stoppard, Sylvia Pankhurst and a little known SS soldier compare notes. How does the process differ if your subject is alive, if their story has already been enshrined in history, if they were active in the Nazi regime? Anne McElvoy talks to three authors about researching and writing a life history and the journeys it has taken them on from a Nazi letter discovered in an armchair, to the play scripts by a living dramatist who fled Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia and has...
New Thinking: African Europeans; Fidel Castro & African leaders; WEB Du Bois
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBFrom Roman emperor Septimius Severus to Senegal's Signares to the ten days in Harlem that Fidel Castro used to link up with African leaders at the UN, through to the missed opportunity to enshrine racial equality in post war negotiations following World War I; Olivette Otele, Simon Hall and Jake Hodder share their research findings with New Generation Thinker Christienna Fryar. Olivette Otele is Professor of the History of Slavery at the University of Bristol and Vice-President of the Royal...
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Seamus Heaney. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
October 01, 2020 15:39 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBNew critical biographies of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and a reissue of Anne Sexton's poems prompt a conversation for National Poetry Day about our image of a poet. Is it possible to separate a poet's life from their work? Shahidha Bari is joined by New Generation Thinkers Sophie Oliver and Peter Mackay, and by Plath biographer Heather Clark. And she talks to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi about her new novel, The First Woman – a coming of age story of a young girl in Uganda, mixing modern f...
Cows in culture and soil
September 30, 2020 21:00 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBFrom Cuyp's paintings, to Wordsworth's wanderings to modern dairy management and soil fertility via Victorian Industrial farming and talking Swiss satirical cows - Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks joins Matthew Sweet in a programme marking the anniversary of the poet Wordsworth, who helped shape attitudes to landscape. Other guests include New Generation Thinker Seán Williams from the University of Sheffield and Professor Karen Sayer from Leeds Trinity University who is writing Farm Animals in ...
Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize 2020
September 29, 2020 15:45 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBThe tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, having a Jamaican Welsh identity, the idea of freedom and anti-colonial resistance, the alarming rise of youth suicide among Indigenous people in Canada and how a group of pioneering cultural anthropologists – mostly women – shaped our interpretation of the modern world: these are the topics tackled in the shortlist for the 2020 prize for a book fostering global understanding. Rana Mitter talks to the authors. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Isl...
Conservatism, Philanthropy, Liberal and socialist futures
September 24, 2020 21:45 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBEdmund Fawcett's latest book focuses on the historic and contemporary conflicts in Conservatism. He describes how the constant tensions within the Conservative political thought have been exposed and what it might mean for the continuation of the tradition. Paul Vallely argues that philanthropy is about more than mere altruism. It is always an expression of power, regardless of any desire to make the world a better place. He discusses the contradictions at the heart of philanthropy from the...
New Thinking: The impact of being multilingual
September 23, 2020 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBHow German argument differs from English, the links between Arabic and Chinese and different versions of The 1001 Nights to the use of slang and multiple languages in the work of young performers and writers in the West Midlands: John Gallagher looks at a series of research projects at different UK universities which are exploring the impact and benefits of multilingualism. Katrin Kohl is Professor of German Literature and a Fellow of Jesus College. She runs the Creative Multilingualism pro...