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
What is normal?
January 19, 2024 09:29 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBNeurodiversity, madness and disability are at the centre of the work being undertaken by three academics who join Matthew Sweet to look at the history of ideas about "normality". Dr Robert Chapman is Assistant Professor of Critical Neurodiversity Studies at Durham University and author of Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Dr Louise Creechan is also at Durham University and is working on a book about literacy in the nineteenth century. Dr Sarah Chaney researches the history ...
Shakespeare's Women
January 17, 2024 07:00 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBFrom Lady Macbeth to Portia, Viola and Rosalind - Shakespeare's female characters continue to hold the highest appeal for actors, but less is known about the women in his own life. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is embarking on a year of events and exhibitions looking a the women who made Shakespeare, many of them forgotten, exploring their influence in his lifetime and the women who shaped his legacy beyond. Anne McElvoy hears about the latest research looking at the women in Shakespeare'...
Dust, dirt and domesticity
January 16, 2024 12:04 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBWhat is the composition dirt and dust? Is there a better place to hang the washing? And how can I make my home more comfortable? These are all questions which preoccupy our guests. Jay Owens first became interested in the nature of dust around fifteen years ago. Her book entitled ‘Dust’ considers its global significance as a factor in both the dirt in our homes and major economic and political events from the dustbowls of the 1930s to the fallout from nuclear testing. Architect Marianna Ja...
Essay writing
January 10, 2024 14:00 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBMontaigne's literary self portraits led to him popularising the Essay form in the mid 1500s. With online articles, long reads in newspapers and magazines and a number of publishing houses interested in promoting essays and reprinting authors, Rana Mitter and guests look at what makes a good Essay drawing on examples from the past and present. Rana's guests are the author Kirsty Gunn; the essayist Chris Arthur, author of Hidden Cargoes; Paul Lay, Senior Editor at Engelsberg Ideas and a former...
Travel, pleasure and peril
January 03, 2024 12:00 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBGoing on a trip ? get ready to get uncomfortable, pack grease to treat your sore bum, and laudanum for the inevitable travel sickness - and perhaps you might also be in need of an anti-strangulation collar to ward off those potential murderers? We’re delving into the perils of travelling in the past. Back in the 1700s there was no such thing as a relaxing weekend break, travelling could be a fraught and even deadly undertaking. Such was the danger, making a will before you set off seemed rea...
Dickens, Disney and copyright
December 21, 2023 10:27 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBMickey Mouse in his first incarnation in a short film from 1928 becomes available for public viewing without infringing Disney's copyright next year. In a programme looking back at the copyright history which affected authors including Charles Dickens and at current questions around legislation, Matthew Sweet is joined by David Bellos, author of Who Owns This Sentence? – A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, Katie McGettigan, lecturer in C19th American literature and Hayleigh Bosher, Reader in...
New Thinking: Carols and Convents
December 20, 2023 11:23 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBWhat links carol singing with dogs? Medieval musicologist Micah Mackay reveals that carols aren’t just for Christmas – they began life as communal songs for anything from lullabies to drinking songs. She explains the detective work required to bring to life a fundamentally oral culture from a small number of manuscript sources, and what the origin of carols can tell us about the concept of Englishness in the medieval period. Englishness is also a key point of interrogation for Dr Caroline Le...
Greek myth, goddesses and art
December 20, 2023 11:13 - 44 minutes - 41.2 MBGreek goddesses are the focus of Natalie Haynes' most recent book. She joins Ian Collins, curator of an exhibition at Pallant House celebrating the paintings made by John Craxton, who relocated from England to Crete after visiting in 1947; Minna Moore Ede, curator of an exhibition inspired by Leda and the Swan at the Victoria Miro Gallery and Dr Lucy Jackson talks about her research into the chorus in Greek drama. Shahidha Bari hosts Natalie Haynes' books include Divine Might, A Thousand S...
Prize Winners 2023
December 19, 2023 13:33 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBCultural revolution memories, European resistance in occupied Poland and France and early attempts to establish trade with Mughal leaders in India are the topics explored in prize winning history books. Rana Mitter talks to authors Tania Branigan, Halik Kochanski and Nandini Das about digging in the archives and seeking out interviewees to help shape our understanding of these different periods in world history. Plus prize winning science books by John Vaillant, who considers the incredible ...
Harry Belafonte
December 15, 2023 12:16 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBPopularising calypso music, performing with Sinatra's Rat pack, Nana Mouskouri, Miriam Makeba and Charlie Parker, starring in films including Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, the hip hop film he produced called Beat Street, Robert Altman's Kansas City and Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman: Harry Belafonte's career in film and music ran from 1949 to 2018 but he was also a tireless political activist who was inspired by Paul Robeson. As the BFI programmes a season of his films in December, Matthew Swee...
Margaret Cavendish
December 13, 2023 12:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBScientist, novelist, poet, philosopher, feminist, it's 400 years since the birth of Margaret Cavendish. An extraordinary character in many ways - she lived in a tumultuous time, when ideas around science, religion and the very nature of existence were being challenged and changed. And she had a view on them all. Margaret Cavendish’s writings are vast and broad and yet detailed and thoughtful. However for most of the last 400 years she has languished in obscurity before being rediscovered in ...
Narnia and CS Lewis
December 06, 2023 20:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBSixty years after the death of C. S. Lewis's, his best known work, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is still for many a childhood favourite and it's also the subject of a new literary study. Christianity was central to all of Lewis's his novels, his academic writing and generalist non-fiction. It is also his Christianity that divides his admirers and detractors. This tension lies at the heart of a new film which stages a clash between two ways of thinking, the psychoanalytic and the rel...
Humboldt, soil, gardens and Frank Walter
December 05, 2023 16:22 - 44 minutes - 41.2 MB7th Prince of the West Indies was the title that Frank Walter gave himself. An artist who created over 5,000 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 600 sculptures, 2,000 photographs, 468 hours of recordings, and a 50,000-page archive, tried to become Prime Minister and was the first Black man to manage a sugar plantation in Antigua - a show about him at the Garden Museum in London has been curated by Professor Barbara Paca. She talks to Jade Munslow Ong, plus New Generation Thinker Jim Scown, who's been...
New Thinking: Disability in Music and Theatre
December 01, 2023 19:38 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBWhen Hugh Jackman starred in the 2022 revival of ‘The Music Man’, he was taking on a classic Broadway musical with a little known connection to disability. Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh at the University of Sheffield has been digging through the archives to uncover how early drafts of the show originally focused on the experience of a young wheelchair user – an idea which was then scrapped by writer Meredith Wilson due to commercial and social pressures. Megan Steinberg is the Lucy H...
Kadare, Gospodinov, Kafka and Dickens
December 01, 2023 13:25 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBThe Palace of Dreams is a novel from 1981 that is ostensibly set in the 19th century Ottoman empire, but the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare cleverly smuggles in thinly veiled criticism of the totalitarian state presided over by Enver Hoxha. The book was duly banned shortly after publication. Matthew Sweet looks at this and other examples of fiction that satirise bureaucratic overreach from Dickens to Kafka to Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian novelist who won the 2023 International Booker p...
Libraries
November 29, 2023 12:00 - 44 minutes - 41 MBThe Great Library of Alexandria had a mission to collect every book in the world. In attempting to do so it created the foundations for the systems and structures of public libraries that we know today. We discuss the development of libraries, our emotional attachment to them and their pupose in the digital age. Islam Issa's new book traces the development of Alexandria. He joins Andrew Pettegree, author of The Library: A Fragile History, Fflur Dafydd whose murder mystery story The Library ...
Lorca
November 28, 2023 13:27 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBWomen in the villages of Spain and the repression and passions of five daughters are at the heart of Lorca's last play the House of Bernarda Alba, completed two months before he was assassinated in 1936. Rana Mitter looks at the life and writing of Lorca, with guests including The Observer's theatre critic, Susannah Clapp and Professor Maria Delgado of the Central School of Speech and Drama and Professor Duncan Wheeler, Chair of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds and Dr Federico Bona...
AS Byatt and The Children's Book
November 24, 2023 17:40 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBThe perfect childhood and the failure of utopian experiments in living in Edwardian England were explored by AS Byatt in her 2009 novel The Children's Book. In this conversation with Matthew Sweet recorded in that year, they discuss her writing life, mythologising childhood and her meetings with Iris Murdoch, about whom she wrote two critical studies. A lecturer in English literature, AS Byatt's books drew on a wide range of reading and visiting art galleries and museums. In 1990 she won the...
Post-War Germany
November 22, 2023 16:00 - 44 minutes - 41.2 MBRe-invention and moral struggles are at the heart of the story of post-war Germany traced by Frank Trentmann in his new book Out of the Darkness. Anne McElvoy talks to him, to Thomas Meaney the new editor of Granta who is bringing out an edition called Deutschland, to journalist Stefanie Bolzen and to New Generation Thinker Dr Tom Smith who has studied the techno scene in German cities. How have 70 years of political struggles shaped Germany's culture and identity? Producer Ruth Watts
Sam Selvon and The Lonely Londoners
November 21, 2023 10:28 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBCaribbean migrants striving to make their lives in London are the focus of this 1956 novel by Samuel Selvon. Written in creolized English, it established him as an important Caribbean voice. In an event organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library, Shahidha Bari is joined by the poet Anthony Joseph, the writer Guy Gunaratne and by Susheila Nasta who is a writer, critic and literary executor and representative for the Sam Selvon literary estate. Guy G...
New Thinking: Rediscovering women making film and sculpture
November 17, 2023 16:35 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBOver 200 women sculptors have been uncovered in the research of Sophie Johnson from Bristol University. She describes some of their creations and discusses the challenges of working with the incomplete personal archives of these artists – including Mrs Goldsmith, Patience Wright, and Catherine Andras, who created wax portrait miniatures and effigies, and Anne Seymour Damer, who carved in marble. Kathleen Collins died in her 40s and left un-filmed screenplays and unpublished stories which Al...
Ursula Le Guin and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
November 16, 2023 23:16 - 45 minutes - 42 MBA miserable child and a summer festival are at the heart of the short work of philosophical fiction first published by Ursula Le Guin in 1973. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was sparked by "forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards" was the answer given by the author when asked where she got the idea from. Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including the authors Una McCormack, Naomi Alderman, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson and Kevan Manwaring, and political philosopher Sophie Scott-B...
Women, art and activism
November 15, 2023 14:25 - 44 minutes - 41 MBThe first women’s liberation conference in the UK, Miss World protests, the formation of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the politics of who cleans the house are all explored in a new exhibition at Tate Britain. Whilst activism and art linked to ecology by 50 women and gender non-conforming artists are on display at the Barbican Centre in London and eco-feminist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) is celebrated in a show opening at Modern Art Oxford. Naomi Paxton is joined by the academics Sophie Ol...
Shakespeare as inspiration
November 08, 2023 23:19 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBMatthew Sweet is joined by Professor Preti Taneja – author of a novel We That Are Young which sets the King Lear in Delhi, by Dr Iain Robert Smith who studies films from around the world, and by Andrew Dickson, journalist and author of Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe. As part of Radio 3’s day of music inspired by Shakespeare, Free Thinking looks at paintings by the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, at films from India and Turkey, and at the way Shakespeare’s plays resonate...
New Thinking: The Box Office Bears project
November 08, 2023 17:38 - 31 minutes - 29.3 MBGoldilocks, Robin Hood, Little Bess of Bromley, Moll Frith were star performers on the bear baiting circuit in Elizabethan England. New evidence of bear bones uncovered in archaeological digs and over 1,100 accounts in letters and documents from the period, are being studied in a research project called Box Office Bears. Andy Kesson delves into bears’ impact on the literary culture of the time and asks if bear baiting was not so much a sporting contest as a staged spectacles akin to contem...
New Thinking: How and why we talk
November 08, 2023 17:30 - 44 minutes - 41 MBUltrasound tests in Burnley market hall will help the phonetics lab at Lancaster University explore tongue positions and accents as part of this year's Being Human Festival. Claire Nance joins John Gallagher to explain more. Alongside them are Rob Drummond from Manchester Met University, author of a new book You're All Talk, Andrea Smith from the University of Suffolk, who is researching early radio voices and Shane O'Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin, ...
The Imperial War Museum Remembrance discussion 2023
November 07, 2023 12:37 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBFrom Iraq and Afghanistan and news headlines today back to earlier battles in the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, the relationship between war, photography and the press has affected attitudes towards conflicts. In the annual Remembrance discussion organised in partnership with the Imperial War Museum, Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy's panel are: Toby Haggith Senior Curator, Department of Second World War and Mid 20th Century Conflict; Irish Iraqi artist Jananne Al-Ani, whose work ...
New Thinking: Playhouses and opera-going
November 06, 2023 18:06 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBFrom Lyons’ Corner House opera performances in the 1920s to 1980s productions staged in fish and chip shops in Scotland – Alexandra Wilson has been studying the history of opera going and presents us with a wider audience for the art form than current stereotypes might have you think. Callan Davies has looked at what went on in Elizabethan playhouses aside from plays by the likes of Shakespeare. New archaeological digs and legal documents featuring complaints are giving us evidence for a k...
New Thinking: Food
November 05, 2023 16:26 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBLady Fanshawe’s ‘Receipt Book’ (c.1651-1707) provides the inspiration for a public cooking event at Tamworth castle hosted by the academic Sara Read which includes preserving vegetables and a look at etiquette. Ideas about hospitality and how we behave when we eat are at the heart of a quiz organised by researchers at Edge Hill University. Both are part of the Being Human Festival and Sara Read and Zayneb Allak join Lindsay Middleton, who is researching food poverty, luxury ingredients and t...
New Thinking: Writing exile and overcoming statelessness
November 02, 2023 16:36 - 31 minutes - 29 MBAround 3 million Bengali Pakistanis now live in Pakistan it is estimated and a research project has been exploring their experiences, mixing oral testimony and art projects with analysis of recent history. Humera Iqbal explains their findings to presenter Sarah Jilani. And Ahmad Naji Bakhti discusses his novel about the dreams of a boy growing up in Lebanon and how writing it in exile in Wales has led him to reflect on the language and phrasing he uses and what audience he is addressing. ...
African identity via China and photography
November 02, 2023 12:00 - 45 minutes - 41.9 MBWriters Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa and Tate curator Osei Bonsu talk to Laurence Scott. The exhibition A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern has a mission statement - to confront reductive representations of African peoples and cultures. All the images are from an African perspective, and explore ideas about masks, spiritual worlds, royalty, family portraits and shared dreams. The lives of African settlers in China are at the heart of the new book Black Ghosts ...
Robert Aickman
November 02, 2023 09:49 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MB"Strange stories" is the way Robert Aickman (1914-1981) described his fiction and to be honest that's putting it mildly. When he wasn't writing fiction that leaves both his protagonists and his readers in some very weird places, he was involved in an investigation into the haunting of Borley Rectory, was a member of The Ghost Club and he also co-founded the British Inland Waterways Association to restore canals. Matthew Sweet is joined by three fans of his work - critic Suzy Feay, writer An...
Eliza Flower and non-conformist thinking
October 27, 2023 13:37 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBThe first live concert in 175 years of songs and music written by Eliza Flower (1803-1846) takes place tomorrow. A friend of JS Mill, Harriet Martineau and Robert Browning, Flower set to music some of Walter Scott's romantic songs, composed music for her sister Sarah Flower Adams, who penned hymns including Nearer, My God, to Thee. Singer Frances M Lynch, accompanied on piano by Laurence Panter, joins New Generation Thinker and historian Oskar Jensen and Dr Clare Stainthorp, who is researchi...
Sleep
October 24, 2023 11:48 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBSleep science pioneer Nathaniel Kleitman descended into a cave in 1938 to investigate the nature of our sleep cycle. The experiment was not a success. And while it may not have yielded much evidence - a thrilling news report detailing the subterranean sleep project caught the public imagination. It's one of the stories told in a new book by Kenneth Miller tracing the history of research into sleeping patterns and the impact of sleep deprivation which takes in figures including Pavlov, Joe Bo...
Sankofa and Afrofuturism
October 23, 2023 15:08 - 44 minutes - 41 MBEkow Eshun is curating an exhibition exploring the idea of Sankofa, taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present. Sarah Jilani teaches novels written by Ama Ata Aidoo (1942-2023) and Flora Nwapa (1931-1993). Sculptor Zak Ové is showing a work called The Mothership Connection as part of Frieze Sculpture display in London's Regents Park which brings together the form of a Pacific Northwest totem and a rocket with elements relating to African culture like tribal masks. The...
Valis and Philip K Dick
October 20, 2023 13:02 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBA series of revelatory hallucinations that Philip K Dick experienced in 1974, radically altering his view of belief, time and history, were the inspiration for his quasi-autobiographical novel Valis which was published in 1981. Roger Luckhurst, Sarah Dillon, Beth Singler and Adam Scovell join Matthew Sweet to unravel this deeply strange book and to discuss how Dick's experience of mental illness and his tireless attempts at self-diagnosis thread their way through his novels and short stories...
Humours and The Body
October 18, 2023 07:19 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBBach's view of the body and how that comes through in his cantatas is being studied by violinist and contributor to Radio 3's Early Music Show, Mark Seow. He joins presenter Naomi Paxton and historians of medicine Alanna Skuse and Michelle Pfeffer, alongside evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane. Together they look at music, metaphors and the idea that vital bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) and links with five elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space) could regulate...
Victorian colour, jewellery and metalwork
October 17, 2023 07:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBMan-made gems are the subject of research being undertaken by jeweller Sofie Boons. She joins presenter Nandini Das alongside Matthew Winterbottom, the curator of an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which explores the explosion of colour in design, textiles, paintings and jewellery in the Victorian period. Dinah Roe has been looking at the the way colour infuses the pages of Victorian literature and in 1773, Birmingham Assay Office was founded to provide testing and hallmarking o...
New Thinking: Work and protest
October 13, 2023 15:47 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBJane Eyre and Shirley by Charlotte Bronte both refer to the unrest in Yorkshire which took place in the early years of the nineteenth century as new technology threatened jobs in the mills. Literary historian Sophie Coulombeau discusses parallels between the Luddites and concerns over AI now, and looks at what is real and what is fictional in the novels studied by Jonathan Brockbank of the University of York. Tania Shew shares some of the accounts of strikes outside the workplace which she ...
Being Blonde
October 12, 2023 22:00 - 44 minutes - 41 MBWhat links “the British Marilyn” Diana Dors, the last women to be hanged in Britain Ruth Ellis, the artist Pauline Boty and the soap and film star Barbara Windsor? Professor Lynda Nead is giving a series of lectures this Autumn exploring Blondes, attitudes to desire and technological changes in film-making. She joins presenter Matthew Sweet alongside film critics Phuong Le and Christina Newland, and philosopher Heather Widdows. Producer Luke Mulhall The Paul Mellon Lectures run from on 5 W...
The Frieze/Radio 3 Museum Directors Debate 2023
October 11, 2023 09:13 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBNicholas Cullinan from the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG) and Elvira Dyangani Ose from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA) join Anne McElvoy to discuss the challenges of running a major art museum and their visions for the future of their respective institutions. They discuss connecting with a wider community which has involved the NPG showing a David Beckham portrait in the hospital he was born in, and plans at MACBA to open out the ground floor and use the squares...
Art, Kew, a symphony and nature
October 10, 2023 16:28 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBAn accidental invention which revolutionised plant collecting has inspired an artwork from Mat Collishaw, created in collaboration with video artists based in Ukraine, which is being premiered in a gallery at Kew Gardens. The nine minute video, accompanied by music by Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings, draws on the discovery in 1829 that a Wardian case could allow plants to grow under airtight glass. And the way art and music respond to environmental concerns is at the heart of this Free Th...
New Thinking: Modernism, exile and homelessness
October 09, 2023 16:45 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MBDH Lawrence described outcasts living by the Thames, Mina Loy made art from trash, calling her pieces “refusées", Wyndham Lewis moved from England to North America in search of fame and stability after having been spurned by the cultural establishment in Britain. In this conversation about new research, Jade Munslow Ong discusses the way widening the canon of writers traditionally labelled as “modernist” might allow a greater understanding of attitudes towards homelessness and poverty in the...
Faith, consciousness and creating meaning in life
October 05, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutes - 41 MBI've been Thinking is the title of a memoir from philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. Philip Goff is a Professor at Durham University who's written Why ? The Purpose of the Universe. The Bishop Auckland Project is opening a new museum exploring faith and their curator Amina Wright joins them and podcaster and former director of Theos Liz Oldfield for a discussion about finding meaning. The presenter is Chris Harding. Producer: Luke Mulhall You can find a collection of pr...
Refuge and National Poetry Day
October 04, 2023 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBLoss and belonging are explored in an installation at the Barbican Centre in London from Sierra Leonian poet and artist/filmmaker Julianknxx which hears choirs and musicians from cities across the world voice a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’. Momtaza Mehri has been Young People's Poet Laureate for London. A poem from her collection Bad Diaspora Poems is picked out in a selection for this year's National Poetry Day on October 5th, which has the theme of refuge. Matthew Sweet explo...
Slavic culture and myth
October 03, 2023 08:25 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBTales of adventure and magic connect the Slavic lands: East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria). Matthew Sweet has been reading a new collection of Slavic myths. The authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak join academic Mirela Ivanova to talk about the way Slavic tales connect with stories from Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia and how they were used to bolster power in new Slav...
Hobbes and New Leviathans
September 28, 2023 17:00 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MB"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is the way Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in a state of nature in his 1651 book The Leviathan. The seventeenth century philosopher reasoned that what men needed was a "common power to keep them in awe". It was a conclusion that has not endeared him to the enlightenment and liberal thinkers of the centuries that followed. The philosopher John Gray thinks that Hobbes' bleak vision of the human condition might help us understand the recent dis...
Childbirth and parenthood: Contains Strong Language Festival
September 26, 2023 18:35 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBFrom the forceps inventor Peter Chamberlen to letters written by Queen Victoria about giving birth saying ‘Dearest Albert hardly left me at all, & was the greatest support & comfort’: John Gallagher and his guests discuss childbirth and parenting. Dr Jessica Cox is the author of In Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Dr Laura Sellers is programmes curator at the medical history museum in Leeds The Thackray. We also hear from the dramatist Testame...
Betty Miller and Marghanita Laski
September 26, 2023 14:01 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBRejected by her usual publisher, Farewell Leicester Square is a novel by Betty Miller, written in 1935, exploring antisemitism, Jewishness and "marrying out". Marghanita Laski may now be best known for her contributions to broadcasting on programmes like The Brains Trust but was also a published author of many stories including The Victorian Chaise-Longue and Little Boy Lost. Both writers have now been republished by Persephone Books. Matthew Sweet's guests are the novelist Howard Jacobson, ...
Notebooks and new technology
September 21, 2023 17:30 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBNovelist Jonathan Coe joins book historians Roland Allen, Prof Lesley Smith and Dr Gill Partington and presenter Lisa Mullen. As Radio 3’s Late Junction devotes episodes this September to the cassette tape and the particular sound and way of recording and assembling music which that technology provided, we look at writing. At a time when there’s a lot of chat about AI and chatbots creating writing, what does it mean to write on a page of paper which is then printed and assembled into a book....