Arts & Ideas
1,985 episodes - English - Latest episode: 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
James Ellroy
June 20, 2019 21:45 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBPhilip Dodd is in conversation with the American author James Ellroy, whose books include LA Confidential and his latest, This Storm, part of his ongoing project to write a novelistic history of the USA from 1941 to 1972. As he tells Philip Dodd, in a conversation that ranges from Calvinism to Chandler, Count Basie to late Beethoven: "As my literary sensibility becomes more patriotic, more conservatism, more religious, more sentimental, more fraternal, I find an era to write about where I...
'Bedford, do you call this thing a coat?' The history of the three-piece suit
June 20, 2019 21:45 - 20 minutes - 18.4 MBNew Generation Thinker Sarah Goldsmith's Essay introduces an audience at York Festival of Ideasto Beau Brummel and others who have understood the mixed messages of suits through time. England football coach Gareth Southgate's pitch-side waistcoats and 007's exquisite collection of Tom Ford suits all make one thing clear: sweatpants are out and the formal man's suit, along with its tailor, has triumphantly returned. From the colourful flamboyances of the eighteenth century to the dandy dict...
Catch 22, Recycling fashion, Fred D'Aguiar, Wu Mali
June 20, 2019 10:35 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBAnne McElvoy, former Colonel Lincoln Jopp MC & novelist Benjamin Markovits on the new TV Catch-22. Jade Halbert on recycling fashion. Poet Fred D'Aguiar on winning the Cholmondeley Prize and Wu Mali on socially engaged art. Producer: Zahid Warley
Comrades in Arms
June 19, 2019 22:00 - 21 minutes - 19.3 MBNew Generation Thinker Tom Smith's Essay argues that the East German army had a reputation for unbending masculinity so it's surprising how central queerness was to the enterprise. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. Brutality along the Berlin Wall, monumental Soviet-style parades, rows of saluting soldiers: these are the familiar images of the East German military. Army training promoted toughness, endurance and self-control and forced its soldiers into itchy, shapele...
Landmark: Finnegans Wake
June 19, 2019 14:11 - 50 minutes - 46.2 MBEimear McBride is the author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians Professor Finn Fordham from Royal Holloway, University of London is the author of Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: I do I undo I redo: and he edited Finnegans Wake for Oxford World Classics Eleanor Lybeck is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker teaches at the University of Oxford and is the author of All on Show: The Circus in Irish Literature and Culture. Derek Pyle is the director of Waywords & Meansigns, an ...
Sword to Pen. Redcoat and the rise of the military memoir
June 18, 2019 22:00 - 19 minutes - 17.5 MBNew Generation Thinker Emma Butcher on the first soldier memoirs to talk about pain, terror and trauma. The Napoleonic Wars, like all wars, had their celebrities. Chief among them, Wellington and Napoleon, whose petty rivalry and military bravado ensured their status as household names long after Waterloo. But these wars also saw the rise of a new genre of personal and emotional war literature which took the public by storm. The writers were foot soldiers rather than officers, infantrymen li...
The well-groomed Georgian
June 17, 2019 22:00 - 21 minutes - 20.1 MBNew Generation Thinker Alun Withey on what made 18th-century men shave off centuries of manly growth. Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. You can hear audience questions from the event as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. To be clean-shaven was the mark of a C18 gentleman, beard-wearing marked out the rough rustic. For the first time, men were beginning to shave themselves instead of visiting the barber, and a whole new market emerged to cater for rising deman...
Afropean Identities. Filming the Arab Spring.
June 14, 2019 03:30 - 45 minutes - 41.9 MBJohny Pitts, Caryl Phillips and Nat Illumine discuss the idea of Afropean identity with Matthew Sweet. Plus New Generation Thinker Dina Rezk on Jehane Noujaim's Oscar nominated documentary The Square and Egyptian politics. Georgia Parris discusses her first film Mari - a family drama of birth, death and contemporary dance. Johny Pitts is one of the team behind https://afropean.com/ an online multimedia, multidisciplinary journal exploring the social, cultural and aesthetic interplay of bla...
Michael Rakowitz, Archaeology Now, Epic Journeys and Facial Disfigurement
June 12, 2019 21:45 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBThe American sculptor Michael Rakowitz on how his own Iraqi heritage drove him to make art about the disappearance of artefacts and people. From shame to sympathy - New Generation Thinker Emily Cock looks at the way the British State used facial disfigurement to mark criminals for life. Nicholas Jubber has travelled Europe from Iceland to Turkey exploring the popularity of ancient epic tales - and ahead of the British Academy's summer showcase, we hear from Turkey about new ways of involving...
Breaking Down the Barriers
June 11, 2019 21:45 - 44 minutes - 41 MBRana Mitter hears about a project that assesses the experiences of Muslim women in the UK cultural industries and talks to political artist John Keane. Author Katherine Rundell explains why adults should be reading children's books. Plus New Generation Thinker Majed Akhter on the sailor and activist Dada Amir Haider Khan and why his global approach to workers' rights has lessons for us now. Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today which includes work by Usarae Gul is at the Whitworth, Manch...
Orwell's 1984. A Landmark of Culture.
June 06, 2019 21:45 - 53 minutes - 49 MBPeter Pomerantsev, Joanna Kavenna, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and Dorian Lynskey join Matthew Sweet to debate George Orwell's vision of a world of surveillance, war and propaganda published in June 1949. How far does his vision of the future chime with our times and what predictions might we make of our own future ? Dorian Lynskey has written The Ministry of Truth Joanna Kavenna's new novel Zed - a dystopian absurdist thriller is published in early July. Peter Pomerantsev's new bo...
Is the Law keeping up with our changing world?
June 05, 2019 21:46 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MBA panel of researchers share insights into the law and warfare, gender and AI & Anne McElvoy talks to David Brooks and Hilary Cottam about compassion and creating communities. Part of a week long focus Free Thinking the Future. You can find more interviews and discussions to download and catch up with on the playlist on our website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zwn4d Best selling US author and columnist David Brooks has just published The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life....
AI and creativity: what makes us human?
June 04, 2019 21:46 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBJoy Buolamwini founder of the Algorithmic Justice League and MIT media lab researcher, Anders Sandberg of the Future of the Human Institute at Oxford, artist Anna Ridler & Sheffield Robotics' Michael Szollosy join Matthew Sweet and an audience at the Barbican to debate whether creativity is something uniquely human. AI: More Than Human runs at the Barbican Gallery until August 26th 2019. Part of a week long focus Free Thinking the Future. You can find more interviews and discussions to d...
Simon Schama, Siri Hustvedt, Catherine Fletcher at Hay.
May 30, 2019 21:45 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBHow does writing about art help us embrace a new way of seeing the work ? Rana Mitter is joined at the Hay Festival by the novelist and art essayist Siri Hustvedt , the writer and broadcaster Simon Schama and, marking the 500th anniversary of the Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci, the Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe Catherine Fletcher. Siri Hustvedt’s books include her novels What I Loved, The Summer without Men and The B...
Landmark: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
May 29, 2019 21:45 - 46 minutes - 42.6 MBRachel Carson’s passionate book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962 is said to be the work which launched the environmental movement. But how does it speak to us now? For a recording of Free Thinking’s Cultural Landmark series at the Hay Festival, presenter Rana Mitter is joined by guests Tony Juniper, Emily Shuckburgh, Dieter Helm and Kapka Kassabova. Tony Juniper is a campaigner, sustainability adviser and writer of work including Saving Planet Earth and How many lightbulbs does it ...
Stanley Spencer, Domestic Servants, Surrogacy
May 22, 2019 21:45 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBAuthor Nicola Upson has imagined the life of Stanley Spencer from the viewpoint of his maidservant. Ella Parry-Davies researches the lives of women from the Philippines who work as domestic and care workers. The novel The Farm by Joanne Ramos imagines a surrogacy service provided by Filippina women for wealthy American clients. Gulzaar Barn researches the ethics of surrogacy. Naomi Paxton presents. Nicola Upson has turned from novels featuring Josephine Tey as a detective to write a potrai...
Censorship and sex
May 22, 2019 03:00 - 54 minutes - 49.4 MBMatthew Sweet hears from Naomi Wolf about ways in which the state interfered in the private lives of its citizens in the 19th century, resulting in a penal codification of homosexuality with long-reaching consequences. They're joined by literary scholar Sarah Parker who tells the story of Michael Field, the pseudonym of two female poets and dramatists who sought literary fame in the late 19th century, and by philosopher Luis de Miranda who explains why neon is good to think with as a metapho...
Sebald. Anti-semitism. Carolyn Forché
May 16, 2019 21:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBThe walking & photographs of WG Sebald on show in Norwich, American poet Carolyn Forché on the stranger who gave her an insider's view of politics in El Salvador whilst she was in her '20s. Plus an exhibition of money and Jewish history. Laurence Scott presents. Adam Scovell, Philippa Comber and Sean Williams discuss the influence of the German writer WG Sebald who settled in Norfolk. His novel The Rings of Saturn follows a narrator walking in Suffolk, and in part explores links between the...
Rivers, different cultures, different values
May 15, 2019 16:00 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBShould we widen the net of who has a say over river management and would this be better for our rivers and ultimately ourselves. What are rivers themselves trying to tell us. Shahidha Bari meets four people with artistic, scholarly and personal relationships with fresh running water. Veronica Strang has studied the way peoples and rivers interact around the world and contributed the UN's work on bringing culture into water management; poet John Clarke is working on a poetic soundscape of on...
Free Thinking:Homi Bhabha: On Memory and Migration
May 15, 2019 03:30 - 1 hour - 68.2 MBWith an audience at the British Library, Professor Bhabha gives a short talk and discusses ideas about nations and a postcolonial approach to politics, literature and history. Shahidha Bari hosts in a Free Thinking event organised with the Royal Society of Literature. ‘Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphori...
Rivers and geopolitics
May 14, 2019 16:00 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBThe worlds large water infrastructure projects often result in geo-political flashpoints - Rana Mitter hears from Majed Akhter about problems from the US to Pakistan while Dustin Garrick outlines a water crisis that is also a crisis in governance and why new management of the Murray-Darling basin in Australia may provide hints about a way forward. And aside from Romulus and Remus, what prompted the founding of Ancient Rome. Archaeologist Andrea Brock outlines her new research that shows the...
Sergio Leone, Kubrick, Magic & the Mind.
May 10, 2019 03:30 - 45 minutes - 42 MBMatthew Sweet talks Spaghetti Westerns and Sergio Leone with Christopher Frayling and Samira Ahmed. They also look at the film worlds of Stanley Kubrick as an exhibition runs at London's Design Museum. Plus magic, mind games and the role of the magician's assistant. New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton and Gustav Kuhn from Goldsmiths, University of London bring their conjuring tricks into the studio. You can hear Christopher Frayling with Brian Cox and the actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwoo...
Chaucer. Bernardine Evaristo.
May 08, 2019 21:45 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBAnne McElvoy reads a new biography of Chaucer by Marion Turner called Chaucer: A European Life and talks to writer Bernardine Evaristo about her depiction of 12 characters aged 12 to 93 in her novel Girl, Woman, Other and to Candice Carty-Williams about her best-selling first novel and podcast Queenie. Plus Matt Wolf looks at representations of money, capitalism and the American dream on stage. You can hear Queenie being read on BBC Radio 4 here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p075drzy A...
Wolfson History Prize Discussion.
May 08, 2019 17:00 - 1 hour - 65.9 MBRana Mitter and an audience at the British Academy hear from the six historians on this year's shortlist. The books are: Building Anglo-Saxon England by John Blair Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Mary Fulbrook Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words by Jeremy Mynott Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis Empress: Queen Victoria and India by Miles Taylor The winner o...
Free Thinking: 1819-The American Model
May 07, 2019 21:45 - 50 minutes - 46.7 MBElaine Showalter, Michael Schmidt, Peter Riley and Katie McGettigan with Laurence Scott on the 19th century writers who shaped the idea of America. 1819 was the year that Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe were born. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, , Melville's novels Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and Julia Ward Howe's passionate opposition to slavery and her advocacy of women's suffrage gave birth to the idea of America. But these authors also have a connection with England -...
Learning about love from Kierkegaard & Socrates. The Wellcome Book Prize
May 02, 2019 21:45 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBKierkegaard humiliated the woman he was due to marry by publicly breaking the engagement - yet one of his most important books is a detailed analysis of the meaning of love. Socrates loved asking the question 'What is love?' but his conversations on the topic are often inconclusive. Matthew Sweet discusses new biographies of each thinker, with their authors Clare Carlisle and Armand D'Angour. Plus Matthew talks to the winner of this year's Wellcome Book Prize for writing which illuminates...
Landmark: Audre Lorde
April 30, 2019 21:45 - 53 minutes - 48.8 MBPoet Jackie Kay & performer Selina Thompson plus Jonathan Rollins and Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins the children of Audre Lorde discuss the influence of the US writer & civil rights activist whose work considers feminism, lesbianism, civil rights and black female identity. Shahidha Bari presents. In her famous essay The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (1980), Lorde wrote: "Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of ...
Introducing the 2019 New Generation Thinkers
April 25, 2019 21:00 - 53 minutes - 49 MBFrom Berlin techno music to the Glasgow ‘rag trade’, divisive dams to fake news - hear the research topics of 10 early career academics introduced by New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough at the Free Thinking Festival New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 researchers to work on ideas for radio Dr Jeff Howard - University College London - is investigating how to respond to ‘dangerous speech’, l...
20 Words for Joy ... Feelings Around the World.
April 24, 2019 21:00 - 51 minutes - 47.3 MBWe talk about “human emotion” as if all people, everywhere, feel the same. But three thinkers with an international perspective discuss how the expression and interpretation of emotions differs around the world. China specialist and Radio 3 presenter Rana Mitter hosts this Free Thinking Festival discussion. Aatish Taseer is a writer and journalist who was born in London, grew up in New Delhi and now lives in Manhattan. His first novel, The Temple-Goers was shortlisted for the Costa First N...
Does My Pet Love Me?
April 23, 2019 21:00 - 49 minutes - 45.5 MBTwo animal psychologists and a historian of animal studies join Eleanor Rosamund Barraclought to discuss whether it's possible to recognise similar traits in humans, chimps, crows, hawks, dogs and cats in terms of affinity and attachment, despite different evolutionary paths. How do we know when a chimp wants to play? How does one crow decide what to feed its mate? The Free Thinking Festival explores the emotional similarities and differences between humans & animals. Nicky Clayton is a...
The New Age of Sentimentality
April 18, 2019 21:00 - 54 minutes - 49.6 MBCharles Dickens. Walt Disney. The Romantic poets..These renowned artists and entertainers were all accused of being “over-sentimental”. But is our own age topping them all – with its culture of grief memoirs, gushing obituaries and feel-good fiction? Three Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature join Rana Mitter at the Free Thinking Festival to take a hard look at whether contemporary culture has “gone soft”. Lisa Appignanesi is the author of books including Everyday Madness: On Grief, ...
Why We Need Weepies
April 17, 2019 21:00 - 48 minutes - 44.4 MBPoet and critic Bridget Minamore, TV drama expert John Yorke and film expert Melanie Williams join Matthew Sweet for a Brief Encounter at the Free Thinking Festival to look at the devices – music, close ups and the cliffhangers that cinema and TV employ to make us cry. From Bambi to Titanic, how have directors managed to trigger our tear ducts? And has the big screen actually shaped our understanding of emotion in modern life. John Yorke is the author of How Stories Work and Why We Tell Th...
The Spirit of a Place: A Free Thinking Royal Society of Literature Discussion
April 17, 2019 16:39 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBPascale Petit’s collection of poetry, Mama Amazonica, which explores motherhood, illness and pain through the foliage and creatures of the Amazon rainforest, won the 2018 Prize. Peter Pomerantsev’s winning book in 2016, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, is a journey into the political and ethical landscape of modern Russia. In 2013, former Home Secretary Alan Johnson won the Prize with This Boy, a visceral memoir of growing up poor in 1950s and 60s London. Hisham Matar’s debut n...
Should Doctors Cry?
April 16, 2019 21:00 - 58 minutes - 53.1 MBAnne McElvoy debates at the Free Thinking Festival with intensive care doctor Aoife Abbey, GP & Prof Louise Robinson, Naeem Soomro expert in using robotic surgery and Michael Brown medical historian. Does emotion have any place in relationships with patients in a more open age? Medical professionals are trained to adopt “clinical distance” when dealing with patients. Tradition says that getting emotional weakens their judgement of medical evidence and can cause safeguarding issues. But how c...
Where Do Human Rights Come From?
April 12, 2019 21:45 - 14 minutes - 13.4 MBYou don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the drivers of liberty and equality make the modern conception of human rights more religious, and le...
The Essay: The Ottoman Empire, Power and the Sea
April 11, 2019 22:00 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MBMichael Talbot asks how can power be exerted over water? What do borders mean in the featureless desert of the ocean? These were questions faced by the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries when an imaginary line was used to create a legally enforced border at sea for the Sultans in Istanbul who called themselves “rulers of the two seas”, the Black and the Mediterranean. Michael Talbot lectures about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Gr...
The Unsaid
April 11, 2019 21:45 - 53 minutes - 49.2 MBSarah Moss is a novelist and Professor at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book Ghost Wall articulates the tangled space of love, abuse and resistance. Her previous novels include Cold Earth, Night Waking, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone. She has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, The Independent and BBC Radio. Michael Richardson is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University. He has longstanding research interests in masculinities and intergenerational ...
Should Salman Rushdie Live and Let Die ?
April 10, 2019 21:45 - 22 minutes - 20.5 MBYou are a liberal who opposes art being banned. But would a movie that calls for you to be killed change your view of censorship? This was the quandary facing Salman Rushdie when filmmakers in Pakistan produced a James Bond-style action thriller in which a trio of Islamist guerrillas are inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa to track down and kill the author of The Satanic Verses. In the year of the 30th anniversary of the fatwa against the novelist from Iranian clerics, film historian Dr I...
The Way We Used To Feel
April 10, 2019 21:00 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBCan we ever really know the feelings of byegone generations? Author and TV historian Tracy Borman shares the clues we have to the emotional lives of Tudor royalty and archaeologist Penny Spikins explains what million year old human remains tell us about how prehistoric people felt. Paul Pickering explores what we know about the emotions of the Manchester Chartists and the way songs have carried political feelings. New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson teaches a course on the history of emot...
Who Wrote Animal Farm?
April 09, 2019 21:45 - 20 minutes - 19 MBWas George Orwell’s wife his forgotten collaborator on one of the most famous books in the world? Lisa Mullen takes a new look at Animal Farm from the perspective of the smart and resourceful Eileen Blair – and uncovers a hidden story about sex, fertility, and the politics of women’s work. Why are some contributions less equal than others? Lisa Mullen is Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford and the author of Mid-century gothic: uncanny objects i...
How They Manipulate Our Emotions
April 09, 2019 21:00 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBAccording to Madmen’s ad executive Don Draper, “what you call love was invented by guys like me… to sell nylons.” So how does advertising and gaming grab us by our emotions? Can we know when we’re being manipulated? And is there anything we can do about it? Presenter Shahidha Bari hosts a Free Thinking Festival debate at Sage Gateshead. Ad man Robert Heath worked on campaigns including the Marlboro Cowboy, Castrol GTX Liquid Engineering, and Heineken “Refreshes the Parts”. He is the author ...
Start the Week gets emotional at the Free Thinking Festival
April 09, 2019 12:40 - 50 minutes - 46.7 MBHarriet Shawcross is a film-maker whose first book Unspeakable reflects on how, as a teenager, she stopped speaking at school for almost a year, communicating only when absolutely necessary. It mixes personal experience with travel diaries and interviews. Ambassador William J. Burns is known as America’s ‘secret diplomatic weapon’. Having served five presidents and ten secretaries of state, he has been central to the past four decades’ most consequential foreign policy episodes. Now retire...
Marble, Muscle and Manly Bodies in the 18th Century
April 08, 2019 21:45 - 19 minutes - 18.3 MBWhat was more important in the construction of an eighteenth-century man’s body: the dumbbell or the dumbwaiter? Who had the most enviable body shape: the svelte Apollo Belvedere or the rotund John Bull? Dr Sarah Goldsmith, from the University of Leicester, explores the early origins of modern gym culture in the tantalisingly elusive and occasionally surprisingly sweaty world of eighteenth-century male physicality. Sarah Goldsmith is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centure for Urban...
The Emotion of Now
April 08, 2019 21:45 - 46 minutes - 42.1 MBMatthew Sweet and a panel of experts stand-up for their emotion of choice in a debate about the most pertinent emotion for understanding Britain today. Is it Joy? Anger? Anxiety? Schadenfruede or shame? The panel express their feelings and an audience vote at the 2019 Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead has the final say. Kehinde Andrews is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. His books include Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century and Res...
Healthy Eating Edwardian Style
April 05, 2019 21:45 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBElsa Richardson uncovers the early history of the wellbeing industry and introduces Eustace Hamilton Miles, a diet guru who made his name selling health to Edwardian Britons. Reformers promoted the ‘simple life’, one that emphasised fresh air, exercise and the consumption of ‘sun-fired’ foods such as wholegrains, fruits and vegetables but this ‘simple life’ was also a highly profitable enterprise. Elsa Richardson teaches on the history of the emotions and is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Un...
'Calm Down Dear' - How Angry Should Politics Get?
April 05, 2019 13:33 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBWhat does it mean to feel that your political position is righteous? At a time of rising tempers among electorates, should we all “calm down - or harness our rage? Kehinde Andrews is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. His books include Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century and Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement. He writes for The Guardian, Independent and Ebony Magazine. Dr Fern Riddell is a historian...
Shopping Around the Baby Market
April 04, 2019 21:45 - 17 minutes - 16.4 MBCommercial surrogacy – the practice of paying another woman to carry a pregnancy to term – has been criticised for being exploitative, particularly when poorer women are recruited. Even if these women were paid more, and the exploitation element were reduced, would unease remain about “renting out” your body in this way? This essay from New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn will explore what, if anything, is different about the buying and selling of bodily services from other forms of trade. S...
Why Trespassing Is the Right Way To Go
April 03, 2019 21:44 - 19 minutes - 17.6 MBHave you ever been somewhere you shouldn't? In this essay, New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson creeps around, and explains how trespassers in the early-twentieth century helped create new attitudes to nature by stepping off the path. Descriptions of late-nineteenth century trespass and rock-climbing show how different experiences of nature led to fights with landowners and gamekeepers for the rights of urban people. People going off-piste also led to efforts to expose environmental inequali...
Being Diplomatic
April 03, 2019 21:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBHow much emotion should you show if you are a diplomat, a news reporter or a conciliation expert? Anne McElvoy chairs a Free Thinking Festival debate at Sage Gateshead with Gabriel Gatehouse, Gabrielle Rifkind and William J Burns. In the world of international affairs, the overriding philosophy for global professionals has been one of restraint and rationality – whether you are negotiating, mediating or observing. So how is this traditional idea of “being diplomatic” and even-handed faring...
The Essay: Cooking and Eating God in Medieval Drama
April 02, 2019 22:00 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBDaisy Black looks at religious imagery, food, anti-semitism and product placement in medieval mystery plays. Eaten by characters, dotted around the stage as saliva-prompting props, or nibbled by audiences - a medieval religious drama is glutted with food but Christianity’s vision of God as spiritual nutrition could provoke horror and fear as well as hunger. We'll hear about some of the gristly, crunchy medieval episodes of culinary performance as the Essay investigates the relationship betwe...