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
Free Thinking: The Wolfson Prize
May 09, 2017 21:00 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBRana Mitter is joined by the 6 shortlisted authors and an audience at the British Academy for a discussion about writing history. This is the first year that the Wolfson History Prize has announced a shortlist. The winner will be named on May 15th. Daniel Beer, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: SIBERIAN EXILE UNDER THE TSARS Chris Given-Wilson, HENRY IV Christopher de Hamel, MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS Sasha Handley, SLEEP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Lyndal Roper, MARTIN LUTHER: RENEGADE AND...
Free Thinking: Breaking Free: Landmark - Paradise Lost
May 05, 2017 10:25 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBProfessor John Carey joins New Generation Thinkers Islam Issa and Joe Moshenska and presenter Philip Dodd to discuss Milton's poem, the first version of which was published in 1667. The discussion explores the influence of Protestant thinking, the Reformation and the Renaissance on Milton's depiction of religious and political beliefs as part of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring the impact of Martin Luther's Revolution. Dr Islam Issa from Birmingham City University has ...
Free Thinking: Breaking Free - Martin Luther’s Revolution. New Research into the Reformation
May 03, 2017 21:45 - 43 minutes - 40 MBRana Mitter looks at new research into the way daily life changed in Britain after the Reformation for Radio 3's series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution. His guests are: Alec Ryrie, Professor in Religion and Theology at the University of Durham and author of: Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World 201; Tom Charlton, New Generation Thinker is currently studying the history of Protestant nonconformity at Dr Williams's Library, London Elizabeth Goodwin from the Un...
Free Thinking - Breaking Free: Martin Luther's Revolution
May 02, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBPeter Stanford, Ulinka Rublack and Diarmaid MacCulloch join Anne McElvoy to explore the question Martin Luther - Fundamentalist, Reactionary or Enlightened Creator of the Modern World? The discussion was recorded in front of an audience at theLiterary Festival for Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution. 500 years ago Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation when he nailed a sheet of paper to the door of a church in a small university town i...
Free Thinking - Wellcome Book Prize, Civil Wars: Susan Buck-Morss and A.C. Grayling, Louisa Egbunike and Akachi Ezeigbo.
April 27, 2017 21:45 - 43 minutes - 40.3 MBA novel by Maylis de Kerangal which traces a heart transplant is the winner of this year's Wellcome Book Prize and the inspiration for a film out in the UK this week. Also, Anne McElvoy discusses nation states and war with US Professor of Political Philosophy Susan Buck-Morss and Professor AC Grayling. The 50th anniversary of the Biafran war and fictional representations of it are explored with New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike - organiser of the Igbo Conference at SOAS - and Professor ...
Free Thinking - What now for environmentalism? With Paul Kingsnorth, James Thornton and Martin Goodman
April 26, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBPaul Kingsnorth, former deputy-editor of The Ecologist, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of novels including The Wake and Beast, talks about his changing attitude to the environmental movement. Environmental lawyer James Thornton and writer Martin Goodman recount their travels from Poland to Ghana, Alaska to China, to see how citizens are using public interest law to protect their planet. Plus, critic Maria Delgado and biographer Adam Feinstein consider the lost poems of th...
Free Thinking - Smell: Michele Roberts, A history of dentistry
April 25, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 41 MBMichèle Roberts' latest novel evokes Victorian London. Matthew Sweet asks how it smelt and what do museums do to create past smells. Plus a cultural history of dentistry with the medical historian Richard Barnett. The Walworth Beauty by Michèle Roberts is out now. The Smile Stealers: The Fine and Foul Art of Dentistry by Richard Barnett is out now. Producer: Fiona McLean.
Free Thinking - Taking the Long View with the Animal Kingdom
April 13, 2017 21:40 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBTim Birkhead and Phyllis Lee explore long-lived animal species and their survival strategies. If the modern world is obsessed with short term success, could animals offer a better understanding of the long term state of our planet? Want to sample the health of our oceans? Ask a migratory bird. Or the advantage of becoming a mother later in life? Ask an elephant. Free Thinking presenter Rana Mitter hears how their lives have shaped the minds and emotions of the field scientists who study th...
Free Thinking - My Body Clock is Broken
April 12, 2017 21:00 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBJay Griffiths, Vincent Deary, Louise Robinson and Matthew Smith discuss our mental health. How do depression and dementia affect our sense of time and the rhythms of daily life? Our body clocks have long been seen by scientists as integral to our physical and mental health – but what happens when mental illness disrupts or even stops that clock? Presenter Anne McElvoy is joined by those who have suffered depression and dementia and those who treat it – and they attempt to offer some soluti...
Free Thinking Festival: Time, Space and Science
April 11, 2017 22:00 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBCarlos Frenk, Eugenia Cheng, Jim Al-Khalili and Louisa Preston debate time and space with presenter Rana Mitter and an audience at Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. We can measure time passing but what actually is it? What do scientists mean when they suggest that time is an illusion. Can time exist in a black hole? Is everyone’s experience of time subjective? What is the connection between time and space? How does maths help us understand the universe? Professor Carlos F...
Free Thinking Festival: Writing Life
April 10, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBPoet Simon Armitage and writer Alexandra Harris explore time and place in modern Britain. Presented by Philip Dodd and recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. Simon Armitage, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, has been described as ‘the best poet of his generation’. His latest collection The Unaccompanied explores life against a backdrop of economic recession and social division where globalisation has made alienation a common ...
Free Thinking at Uproot Festival
April 07, 2017 11:00 - 43 minutes - 40.3 MBIsland city mentality or gateway to the world? Hull-based crime writer and former journalist David Mark, poet Adelle Stripe and Slung Low artistic director Alan Lane join Matthew Sweet to debate Hull's links with the wider world, while playwright Esther Wilson suggest what residents can learn from another port city which has been City of Culture - Liverpool. Recorded with an audience at Hull Truck Theatre as part of Radio 3's Uproot festival for Hull 2017. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
Free Thinking: An interview with Haemin Sunim
April 05, 2017 21:45 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MB‘Is it the world that’s busy, or is it my mind?’ Haemin Sunim, the multi-million selling author of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, discusses East and West and calm in a fast-paced world with New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding and presenter Rana Mitter. Born to Korean-American parents and educated at Harvard, Haemin Sunim is known for books, podcasts and a popular YouTube series exploring Buddhism in the 21st century. He studied at UC Berkeley, Harvard and Princeto...
Free Thinking Festival: New Generation Thinkers 2017
April 04, 2017 22:00 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBAn introduction to the academics whose ideas will be making radio waves across 2017. The New Generation Thinkers is an annual competition run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 researchers at the start of their careers who can turn their fascinating research into stimulating programmes. In this event, the 2017 selection make their first public appearance together: their topics include music and health and Shakespeare in Arabic. Hosted by Eleanor Rosa...
Free Thinking Festival: Education Slow and Fast
April 03, 2017 21:00 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBTony Sewell and Mike Grenier discuss the challenges of education in the 21st century with Philip Dodd and an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival. Can idle curiosity, slow burning passion and a time for reflection be at the heart of our schools? Or does the increasingly rapid pace of technological change make that sort of teaching a luxury at best - or, at worst, an educational philosophy stuck in a time warp? Mike Grenier is a House Master at Eton College...
Free Thinking Essay: Killing Time in Imperial Japan
March 31, 2017 22:00 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBChristopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of ‘time’ was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless ‘clock time’ of new factories and businesses and the ‘leisure time’ of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechan...
Free Thinking Festival: The Time of Your Life
March 30, 2017 21:45 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBThe former Health Minister, now broadcaster and writer, Edwina Currie; the journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer; and the English teacher and columnist Lola Okolosie discuss the different times of our lives with Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy. Recent scientific research has found that women have the time of their lives at the age of 34. Later though, as they juggle parenthood and work they are at their most stressed. But, by the age of 58 they start to get their life-work balance ...
The Essay - Creating Modern India
March 30, 2017 21:40 - 19 minutes - 17.5 MBNew Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University, on the creation of modern India. How did a modernist style develop in India between the 1900s and the 1950s? Preti Taneja, who grew up in Letchworth Garden City, traces the way the Garden City Movement inspired the work of Edwin Lutyens in his reshaping of her parents’ New Delhi. The first generation of post-Independence architects built on this legacy, drawing also from Le Corbusier, who de...
Free Thinking Essay: England's First European
March 29, 2017 22:00 - 24 minutes - 22.3 MBJohn Gallagher, New Generation Thinker, marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of what might be the greatest, but littlest-known, book of travels of early modern England. Fynes Moryson was a young fellow of a Cambridge college when he left on a journey to Jerusalem and back. His monumental book 'An Itinerary' is a colourful, funny and touching account of one man's curious journey, meeting bandits in northern Germany, disguising himself as a Catholic Italian in order to see Rome and b...
Free Thinking Festival: The Never-Ending Workday
March 29, 2017 21:45 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBSathnam Sanghera, Judy Wajcman, Griselda Togobo and Robert Colvile join Radio 3 presenter Matthew Sweet to look at the history of the workplace from factory floor to hot desk to the gig economy and debate whether the merging of workplace and home creates more stress. Bosses have always monitored and changed our working day, clocking staff in and out the factory, analyzing productivity through time and motion studies, using remote monitoring, introducing flexible working and “logging on late...
The Essay - The Magic Years
March 28, 2017 21:45 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBMatthew Smith, a New Generation Thinker, goes deep into the American Psychiatric Association archives, where lies an unpublished historical manuscript entitled The Magic Years. Written during the early 1970s, it eulogised the giant strides of post-war American psychiatry made in this period of hope and promise when even the complete eradication of mental illness was thought possible. As a medical historian Matthew argues that, while psychiatrists today might dismiss The Magic Years - and the...
Free Thinking Festival: The Speed of Revolution
March 28, 2017 21:00 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBThree leading historians, Bettany Hughes, Sir Richard J Evans and John Hall join Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd to consider tumultuous times and how we make sense of sweeping change from classical times, through empire building and the industrial revolution to the present day. True revolutions are rare game-changers in the slow unravelling of the human story. Others fizzle out like small showy rockets, all light and no heat. But how obvious is it at the time ? Dr Bettany Hughes is well...
Essay - The Magic Years
March 28, 2017 21:00 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBMatthew Smith, a New Generation Thinker, goes deep into the American Psychiatric Association archives, where lies an unpublished historical manuscript entitled The Magic Years. Written during the early 1970s, it eulogised the giant strides of post-war American psychiatry made in this period of hope and promise when even the complete eradication of mental illness was thought possible. As a medical historian Matthew argues that, while psychiatrists today might dismiss The Magic Years - and the...
The Essay - Faith, Fire and the Family
March 27, 2017 21:45 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBFrom 1941 to 1968 Catherine Fletcher’s grandfather Donald Hudson was a missionary in India. Catherine tells his story during those turbulent years and reflects on the way British people with family history in India understand that past – in this the anniversary year of the end of colonial India. Originally from Yorkshire, Donald Hudson arrived in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, to find a city in chaos amid communal riots. He stayed for two years and then moved to one of the most significant Briti...
Free Thinking Festival: Doing Time/Confinement
March 27, 2017 21:00 - 56 minutes - 51.4 MBIn our fast moving, busy world it is hard – if not impossible – to imagine what it would be like to be incarcerated on our own. Captured in Beirut while working as an envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite spent five years as a hostage mostly held in solitary confinement. The writer Erwin James served 20 years of a life sentence in prison before his release in 2004. They discuss the experience of isolation with Dr Cleo Van Velsen, a Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychother...
Free Thinking Essay: Russia's Sacred Ruins
March 24, 2017 23:00 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBNew Generation Thinker Victoria Donovan from the University of St Andrews explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia and asks why the atheist Communist regime was prepared to spend millions on the restoration of religious architecture. On encountering the war-charred ruins of historic Novgorod in 1944, the Soviet historian Dmitry Likhachev mourned Russia’s transformation into a ‘graveyard without headstones’. Yet, just 20 years later, the town had risen from the ashes...
The Essay - The British Writer and the Refugee
March 23, 2017 22:45 - 19 minutes - 18.1 MBNew Generation Thinker Katherine Cooper looks at literary refugees in the Second World War and tells the untold story of the work done by British writers to save their European colleagues. She shows how HG Wells, Rebecca West and JB Priestley became intertwined with the lives of writers fleeing persecution on the continent. Katherine peeps into drawing rooms, visits the archives of PEN, scrutinises the correspondence and draws on the fiction of key literary figures to explore crucial allegia...
Free Thinking Festival: Quick Reactions
March 23, 2017 22:00 - 43 minutes - 39.4 MBDamon Hill, Tanni Grey-Thompson and former Colonel Lincoln Jopp consider whether the rush of adrenaline makes us think better? It brings us an increase in our strength, heightened senses, a lack of pain and a burst of energy. How is it connected to our expertise in handling crises and what is the aftermath? Joining Radio 3 presenter Rana Mitter and an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead are guests who have lived and observed decision-making under pressure, at top speed:...
The Essay - In the Shadows of Biafra
March 22, 2017 22:45 - 20 minutes - 18.3 MBNew Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike from Manchester Metropolitan University considers images of war and ghosts of the past. News reports of the Biafran war (1967-1970), with their depictions of starving children, created images of Africa which have become imprinted. Biafra endured a campaign of heavy shelling, creating a constant stream of refugees out of fallen areas as territory was lost to Nigeria. Within Igbo culture specific rites and rituals need to be performed when a person die...
Free Thinking Festival: How Short is a Short Story?
March 22, 2017 22:00 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBGeorge Saunders, Kirsty Logan, Jenn Asworth and Paul McVeigh discuss writing fiction short and long with presenter Matthew Sweet. Acclaimed American short story writer George Saunders talks about travelling in time to explore Abraham Lincoln’s life during the American Civil War when the President’s beloved young son died. These historical events have inspired Saunder’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, whilst his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeeney’s and GQ. ...
Free Thinking Essay: Alexander the Great's Lost City
March 21, 2017 23:00 - 19 minutes - 17.7 MBNew Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson with the story of Alexander the Great’s lost city, buried beneath Bagram airbase, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks. For centuries, it was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1832, it was discovered by the unlikeliest person imaginable: a ragged British con-man called Charles Masson, on the run from a death sentence. Today, Alexander’s lost civilization is lost again. And Masson? For his next trick, he accidentally start...
Free Thinking Festival: Harriet Harman - Politics Fast and Slow
March 21, 2017 22:45 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBHarriet Harman, who has just written her autobiography A Woman’s Work, was first elected a Labour MP in 1982 and has served as the acting leader of her party twice in her career. She talks to Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd about championing women’s rights and sustaining a political career in a fast-changing political landscape. In his final year of office, President Obama talked about how difficult it is today to keep the public focused on the long term when the short term response ha...
Free Thinking Essay: Monks, Models and Medieval Time
March 21, 2017 15:13 - 23 minutes - 22 MBThe ruined priory of Tynemouth nestles on a Northumbrian cliff top, staring out at the fog and foam of the North Sea. In the 14th century it was a proving ground – and occasional prison camp – for monks from the wealthy mother monastery of St Albans. But the monks here didn’t just isolate themselves, pray and complain about the food (though they did do those things). They also studied astronomy. Writing treatises, computing tables and designing new instruments, they contemplated the nature o...
Free Thinking Festival: Faster, Faster, Faster?
March 21, 2017 12:55 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBCan the steady tortoise still beat the rapid hare in today’s world? Our panel, chaired by Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy, compare experiences of life in the fast lane with taking the slow route – in business, writing, leisure time. Pinky Lilani is an author, motivational speaker, food expert and women’s advocate, and nominated in the Woman’s Hour Power List. She was appointed a CBE in 2015 for services to women in business. Denise Mina wrote her first crime novel, Garnethill, while...
Free Thinking: Sleep - Freedom to Think
March 17, 2017 22:00 - 1 hour - 63.6 MB“Take control of your sleep,” says Professor Russell Foster CBE, leading neuroscientist and this year’s opening lecturer on the festival theme of the Speed of Life. Sleeping consumes a third of our lifetimes, but Professor Foster believes our sleeping hours are still not properly appreciated. His research shows how our bodies, honed by three million years of evolution, follow a natural clock and not the man-made one in daily use. He believes that all life on the planet has developed a 24-hou...
Free Thinking - Rodney Graham at BALTIC, The Amber Collective.
March 17, 2017 17:57 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBNew Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari talks to Rodney Graham about making music, and art from film, video and photographs. Graham Rigby and Sirkka Liisa Konttinen describe documenting the North East as the Side Gallery celebrates its 40th year of displaying and collecting work from the Amber Film and Photography Collective. Artist Lucy Wood talks about her project Distant Neighbours which highlights the plights of refugees and migrants. Plus, Leyla Al-Sayad on the once thriving Yemeni communi...
Free Thinking: Images of America
March 15, 2017 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBEdward Luce, Sarah Churchwell, Michael Goldfarb and Michael Prodger join Anne McElvoy. As Grant Wood's painting American Gothic is on show at the Royal Academy in London, while US pop art is displayed at the British Museum, Free Thinking explores the changing idea of The American Dream and America First and the way these ideas are represented in political rhetoric, art and fiction. Michael Prodger writes on art for the New Statesman Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and...
Free Thinking - Michael Lewis.
March 09, 2017 22:00 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBThe Big Short, Liar's Poker and Flash Boys expose the culture of Wall Street trading works. The Blind Side, Coach and Moneyball explore the world of sport. For his latest book ‘The Undoing Project’, Michael Lewis looks at the friendship of two Nobel Prize-winning psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Matthew Sweet talks to Michael Lewis about his investigative methods and how this latest book fits into his interest in the psychology of sportsmen, bankers and risk takers. The Und...
Free Thinking: Neglected Women: Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Robinson.
March 08, 2017 23:05 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBThe work of scientist Margaret Cavendish, poet Lady Mary Wroth, and interior designer Charlotte Robinson are explored in a programme looking at why women are left out of some historical accounts. Tracy Chevalier's novels include stories inspired by fossil hunter Mary Anning, by early settlers of the American west, by women in the lives of painters including Vermeer and William Blake. Tracy Chevalier joins Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Emma Wilkins and Miranda Garrett who'll be sharing their new rese...
Free Thinking: Landmark: Machiavelli's The Prince
March 07, 2017 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBAuthors Sarah Dunant and Erica Benner, MP Gisela Stuart and historian Catherine Fletcher join Philip Dodd to explore the continuing relevance of Machiavelli's The Prince which was first circulated in 1513. Sarah Dunant's series of Renaissance novels include Blood and Beauty: the Borgias and In The Name of The Family: A Novel of Machiavelli and The Borgias. Erica Benner has written Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest For Freedom. Catherine Fletcher is the author of The Black Prince...
Free Thinking - Neil Jordan, Flat Time House, Teletubbies
March 02, 2017 23:01 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBWorlds within worlds - Matthew Sweet talks to filmmaker and author Neil Jordan about his new novel Carnivalesque, which features a hall of mirrors and stolen children. He makes a tour of Flat Time House in south London and speaks to the Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost and curator Gareth Bell-Jones about the house's creator, the pioneering British conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006). And to round things off, he ventures into the lush green world of the Teletubbies with broadc...
Free Thinking: India/Pakistan: Mohsin Hamid. Gurinder Chadha's Viceroy's House. Preti Taneja and Sam Goodman
March 01, 2017 22:45 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBMohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, has now written a love story unfolding against today's refugee crisis. He joins Anne McElvoy to explore migration past and present. They're joined in the studio by New Generation Thinkers Preti Taneja and Sam Goodman who share their research and compare notes about Partition in film and fiction. Gurinder Chadha talks about her new film Viceroy's House, which features Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, and Mi...
Free Thinking - Japan Now Festival at the British Library.
February 28, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBNew Generation Thinker Christopher Harding meets novelist Yoko Tawada, filmmaker Momoko Ando, Elmer Luke editor of a new series of chapbooks and Japanologist Alex Kerr. Alex Kerr is the author of Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons. Yoko Tawada's books include Memoirs of a Polar Bear which has just been translated into English. The Keshiki Series edited by Elmer Luke includes writing by Yoko Tawada, Aoko Matsuda, Keiichiro Hirano, Misumi Kubo, Masatsugo Ono and Natsuki Ekezawa. Momoko Ando gradu...
Free Thinking: 'Play' in urban design, Gillian Allnutt
February 23, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBPhilip Dodd considers the importance of 'play' in the way our city centres are designed, built, look and feel in the 21st century with architect Stephen Witherford, social anthropologist Clare Melhuish, urban planner Ben van Bruggen, and Jonathan Glancey author of 'What's So Great About the Eiffel Tower?'. Plus, Durham poet Gillian Allnutt discusses a life in words and receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. What's So Great About the Eiffel Tower? by Jonathan Glancey is published on...
Soil Stories Old and New
February 22, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBMatthew Sweet talks to poet and writer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, environmental scientist, Jules Pretty and geologist, Andrew Scott, and historians Matthew Kelly and Philip Coupland about Soil and Culture and Survival Stories For some Soil is where they come from, for others it is an object of aesthetic beauty, for most of us it is the means by which we get what we need to live. Poet and writer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's forthcoming A Dictionary of Soil explores the lives lived within and throug...
Free Thinking - Shakespeare in cartoons; Jess Phillips; Sidney Nolan's Australian legends.
February 21, 2017 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBMP Jess Phillips on life in the public eye. Plus Ned Kelly, Lady Macbeth, one once flesh and blood, the other imagined into being, yet both have done sterling work as ciphers to the human condition. Anne McElvoy talks to Rebecca Daniels, curator of an exhibition marking the centenary of Australia’s great myth-maker, the artist Sidney Nolan and to David Taylor, curator of an exhibition at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre about the way memorable images work and legends are made—they are joined by...
Free Thinking: Hull: A trip down memory lane.
February 16, 2017 22:45 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBMatthew Sweet visits Hull - the city where he grew up - and seeks out Basil Kirchin's sound world, Richard Bean's version of Hull during the Civil War and the re-opened Ferens Art Gallery where he used to spend Saturday mornings. You can hear more of Basil Kirchin's music for films in tonight's Late Junction which follows at 11pm and Radio3 is recording Mind on the Run featuring Goldfrapp's Will Gregory with members of the BBC Concert Orchestra - the event takes place 17th - 19th Feb at Hul...
Free Thinking: Martin Luther- fundamentalist reactionary or enlightened creator of our modern world
February 16, 2017 14:15 - 1 hour - 69.9 MBIts 500 years since the German friar, Martin Luther, challenged the authority of the Pope and sparked the Reformation. The violent upheavals that followed have tended to obscure his character, his beliefs and his legacy. Nowadays when we think of him we usually conjure up the image of a jowly zealot. To uncover a truer likeness Anne McElvoy was joined at the London School of Economics by Luther's latest biographer, Peter Stanford and the historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Ulinka Rublack -- ...
Free Thinking: Paolozzi; Daniel Dennett
February 15, 2017 22:45 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBDubbed the "godfather of British pop art", Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) is the subject of an exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery. Philip Dodd and his guests art historians Richard Cork and Judith Collins, philosopher Barry Smith and writer Iain Sinclair discuss Paolozzi's legacy. Plus an interview with American philosopher Professor Daniel Dennett Co-Director Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. Eduardo Paolozzi runs at the Whitechapel Gallery in London from 16 February...
Rude Valentines. Neil Gaiman, Translating China's Arts
February 14, 2017 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBNeil Gaiman on his enduring attraction to the world of giants, gods and rainbow bridges of Norse myths and why he's produced his own version; plus research into the ugly side of Valentines from classical times to the 19th century with Annebella Pollen and Edmund Richardson, and, as the RSC prepares to bring Snow in Midsummer to the stage, the first of a planned series of Chinese classics, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig explains her play's 13th century origins and along with Craig Clunas, author of Ch...