A weekly reflection on a topical issue.
David Cannadine reflects on the enduring appeal of the teddy bear in contemporary culture. Why, he wonders, have they been such popular toys and featured so prominently in literature and song since they were first named after Theodore Roosevelt over a hundred years ago. Producer: Sheila Cook.
David Cannadine reflects on the history of American presidential inaugurations since Abraham Lincoln's, and compares presidents' speeches at the start of their first and second terms in office. "Second inaugurals...are often less up-beat and up-lifting, since it's no longer possible for a president, having already been four years in office, to offer a new deal or to proclaim, as President Obama did in 2009 that 'change is coming to America'". Producer: Sheila Cook.
Will Self laments what he sees as an absence of rational urban planning in our big cities and a fashion for dramatic skyscrapers driven by short term commercial values. "It occurred to me that the contemporary metropolitan skyline is really only a fireworks display of decades-long duration: a burst of aerial illumination intended to provoke awe, but doomed eventually to subside into darkness." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Will Self wants to "nudge society in the direction of considering suicide acceptable" when the alternative is a slow and painful end. "I don't say any of these things idly," he writes, "like many of us in middle age, my last few years have been heavily marked by an increasing awareness of both my own mortality and that of those who I love." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Will Self looks back over 2012 and reflects on the confused relationship between Britain and the US. Love and hate, he argues, are there in equal measure. Taking as his starting point the Tom Stoppard plays his American mother took him to see in the 1970s, he says our relationship with our friends across the pond has changed little in 40 years. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
"Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst?" asks Will Self as he appeals to the post-Christmas glutton to consider a major lifestyle change in the year ahead. "What I think we should all do", he says, "is throw up our very obsession with food itself, and enter the New Year purged". He takes us on a tour of foodie history, and explores how we've gone from being a culinary backwater to "the most food-obsessed nation in Europe - if not the world". Producer: Adele Armstrong....
Will Self warns against the false prophets of the new priesthood of economics who base their analyses and predictions on "spurious notions of human behaviour". "In place of the vulgate we require the holy books of economics to be written in the language we actually speak, and along with this we should actively seek a liberty of individual conscience, so that we communicate directly with Mammon, freed from the intercession of a priesthood who, when not arguing about how many angels can be fitted ...
Will Self reflects on the effect of digital technology on his perception of the passage of time. "Perhaps the reason I feel quite so liberated from the present while more and more attached, not to the individually recalled 'good old days', but to a collectively attested and ever-present past, is because the hard drive of my computer is overloaded with digital images of the places I've been and the people I've met, all of them time-coded to within a tenth of a second." Producer: Sheila Cook....
Onora O'Neill reflects afresh on questions of trust, a decade after her Reith lectures on the subject. She argues that rather than asking, "how can we restore trust" in general, following recent scandals and failures, we should ask specific, practical questions about how better to measure trustworthiness. "Placing and refusing trust intelligently is not a matter of finding guarantees or proofs; we often have to assess complex and incomplete evidence, which the masters of spin and PR may be massa...
Mary Beard reflects on why universities are being consumed by "customer satisfaction" surveys. "When you're paying up to £9000 a year for the privilege of being at university, you want to make it pretty clear if you feel you're not getting your money's worth", she writes. But the deluge of forms - asking students for their views on the content, presentation, organisation of the course and the quality of the handouts will - she argues, do little to improve "the learning experience". She admits ha...
"Last weekend I spent a couple of hours with the remains of one of the human victims of the eruption of Vesuvius" writes Mary Beard, as she wanders through the rooms of a new exhibition about Pompeii, the "City of the Dead". The display at the J Paul Getty museum in Malibu is one of several Pompeii exhibitions running in different museums around the world - and very similar to one coming to the British Museum in the spring. As she makes her way through the bodies - or "anti-bodies" as she refers...
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Mary Beard on the long history of the rich looking down their noses - sometimes with a hearty Roman snort - at the poor. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In his final talk, he asks how the undemocratic Chinese state can enjoy legitimacy and authority in the eyes of its population. He argues that the Chinese state is held in such high esteem because it is seen as the embodiment, pro...
Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its history, development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In this third talk, he explores the nature of race in China. Over 90 per cent of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, the Han. This is a stark contrast to the multi-racial composition of...
In this second talk, he examines the tributary system, the historical China-centric network of international relations which involved other parts of East Asia accepting the principle of Chinese superiority in return for protection and access to the Chinese market, an arrangement distinct to European forms of colonialism. He asks whether a system of this kind is now re-emerging. Martin Jacques is the author of 'When China Rules the World'. Producer: Rosamund Jones.
Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today. In this introductory talk, he argues that we cannot make sense of China by looking at it through a Western prism. China is not like a Western nation-state and never will be. Western nations are countries constituted on the basis o...
Sarah Dunant reflects on the role of history in society - and how it changes over time. Research and archaeology, as well as the views of the times in which historians live, change their perception of the past. Dunant also asks what historical fiction takes from academic study - and what it, in turn, can teach those who study the past. She also asks whether the humanities are as valued as they should be. Do we underrate them at our peril? Producer Rosamund Jones.
"For moneyed Americans", writes Sarah Dunant "perfect dentistry is a matter of course". For Europeans- and she counts herself within that number - the situation is rather different! Sarah takes a sideways look at teeth through the ages...and dentistry in times of austerity. And for those whose chief loathing is a mouthful of shining American teeth, she offers hope. "Yaeba", the latest craze to hit Japan where young fashonista girls are getting their teeth cosmetically altered to appear more croo...
"Much of what some would call my eccentric wardrobe derives from charity shops...By temperament, I'm a historian and the sense of an object with a provenance somehow ties me more securely to the present" writes Sarah Dunant. As she rummages for bargains in her local charity shop, Sarah reflects on the history of charity shops and their growing importance in times of austerity. Producer Adele Armstrong.
As the Man Booker shortlist is published, Sarah Dunant explores how new writers and readers find each other. "While an unhappy 19th century Russian marriage which leads to a fatal adulterous affair may be irresistible to one reader" she writes, "a man who wakes up as a beetle may be what presses the button of another. That is both the wonder and nightmare of selling novels". Sarah explores how - in the "brutal climate" facing the publishing industry (with the onslaught of supermarket and interne...
"Once again the snake pit of policing sexual behaviour and the conflict between men and women's attitudes of it have become news" writes Sarah Dunant. She discusses the remarks by the American would-be senator who claimed that after "legitimate rape", women's bodies protect them from pregnancy. She looks at George Galloway's assertion that what Julian Assange did or didn't do in bed was simple bad sexual etiquette. And she discusses the controversy surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. She starts fr...
John Gray explores the role of memory in giving meaning to our lives. Through the writings of J.G. Ballard, he reflects on how we struggle to preserve our past but at the same time sometimes long to leave it behind. Gray praises the power of Ballard's imagination - and his enchanting fables - to make good all this. His conclusion is upbeat. "Through the alchemy of memory the leaden buildings in which [Ballard] wandered as a boy became the golden vistas of his fiction, and the traumas of his chil...
"We like to tell ourselves an uplifting story in which freedom expands whenever tyranny is overthrown" writes John Gray. "We believe that...when a dictator is toppled the result is not only a more accountable type of government but also greater liberty throughout society". But Gray believes otherwise. Using the nineteenth century liberal John Stuart Mill and his god-son Bertrand Russell, he advances his argument that liberty is one thing, democracy another. "The reality" he says "is that when a ...
John Gray reflects on the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes at a time when we've lost confidence in the power of reason alone to solve problems. "Seeming to find order in the chaos of events by using purely rational methods, he actually demonstrates the enduring power of magic." Producer: Sheila Cook.
John Gray reflects on the climate needed for culture to thrive, recalling Orson Welles' quote from the film "The Third Man" that despotism in Italy produced the Renaissance whereas democracy in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock."We know that art can flourish under despots but we're reluctant to admit it: if creativity and tyranny can co-exist, the value of freedom seems diminished." Producer: Sheila Cook.
The philosopher John Gray wonders what bulk buying of stamps ahead of the price rise tells us about economic gloom. "The relative security that many people enjoyed in the recent past is fading from memory". Producer: Sheila Cook.
The philosopher John Gray reflects on the nature of immortality as expressed by the writer Theodore Powys, 'The longest life may fade and perish but one moment can live and become immortal.' "Powys captures a paradox at the heart of our thinking about death and the afterlife: there's a kind of immortality that only mortals can enjoy." Producer: Sheila Cook.
John Gray takes a fresh look at the thinking of John Maynard Keynes and wonders what he would have really thought about the current economic crises and how to solve them. "It's still Keynes from who we have most to learn. Not Keynes, the economic engineer, who is invoked by his disciples today. It's Keynes the sceptic, who understood that markets are as prone to fits of madness as any other human institution and who tried to envision a more intelligent variety of capitalism". Producer: Sheila Co...
John Gray reflects on the nature of violence which he sees as an inevitable part of the human condition. He analyses the impulses which drive us to fight one another and takes issue with the philosopher Hobbes' view that violence can be tamed principally by the use of reason. "The vast industrial style wars of the last century may have been left behind, but they have been followed by other forms of human conflict, in their way no less destructive". Producer: Sheila Cook.
