In the aftermath of recent headlines coming out of the Commons, Sarah Dunant explores sexual equality through the ages. She looks in particular at the idea that 'women are temptresses who cannot - by definition of their sex - be trusted'. "So ingrained is this within Christian culture," Sarah writes, "that it defined attitudes towards women for millennia". Biblical accounts, renaissance sculpture, fairy tales and politics are all put under the spotlight. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bo...
May 06, 2022•10 min
Will Self presents a very British solution to the issues surrounding the legalisation of marijuana. Considering the pervasiveness of cannabis in the UK, he says the question that should currently be preoccupying us as a society is not whether marijuana should be legalised, but how. "My model here would be the old Tote," he says, "a form of nationalised gambling that for many years mitigated its worst effects by limiting opportunities and hence possible losses." He says that we must avoid the "co...
May 01, 2022•11 min
"It is a terrible thing to be in possession of a truth that people don't want to hear," writes Howard Jacobson. By way of Primo Levi, the great chronicler of the Holocaust, Coleridge's 'The Ancient Mariner' and stories emerging today from Ukraine, Howard argues that stories of truth must be listened to, no matter how uncomfortable or challenging we find them. "No deceit is ever so perfected," he says, "that it doesn't require the connivance of the deceived". Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Pete...
Apr 22, 2022•10 min
Zoe Strimpel asks the seemingly simple question 'what is a woman', but finds no simple answer as she explores the question through a brief history of feminist thought. She explores the ongoing controversy over trans women in women's competitive sport, and the reluctance of public figures to define what a woman is. while revealing her own views on the issue. "As the history of feminism itself makes clear, gender and sex are genuinely complicated. That overconfident or oversimplified definitions o...
Apr 15, 2022•10 min
The everyday repression of life in Russia, as experienced by an anonymous dissident playwright. In this essay, she reflects on the war in Ukraine and asks what role she and her fellow Russians might have played in it, what they might have done to stop it - and what Ukrainians must think of them now. In turn, she explains how the Russian state is actively controlling the narrative about the war - and reveals the harsh consequences for those who dare veer from the approved 'truth'. "They arrest pr...
Apr 08, 2022•10 min
'Perhaps, like me,' writes A L Kennedy, 'you can now only picture Cabinet meetings as gatherings where ministers and staff sing la-la-la with their fingers in their ears while dancing between the wine fridges.' In the midst of a lot of bad news, Alison finds some room for cheer. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Vadon
Apr 01, 2022•11 min
Adam Gopnik seeks enlightenment for our time in Tolstoy's War and Peace, finding parallels in Tolstoy's thinking for today's war in Ukraine. Reflecting on how Russian characters in the book converse in fluent French, Adam considers how mixed identities should not undermine national integrity, writing that the composite nature of Ukrainian identity does not cast doubt on its integrity as a country. He also explores Tolstoy's debunking of the 'great man' theory of history, and a reminder that 'his...
Mar 25, 2022•11 min
"When war smashes its way into our living rooms as it did three weeks ago", writes Sarah Dunant, "it is pictures rather than words that hit hardest". Sarah discusses the impact of images from war through the centuries and the history they write. And she ponders which image from Putin's war will represent this moment in the future. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Hugh Levinson
Mar 18, 2022•11 min
For the past five years, Rebecca Stott and a Russian friend have spent time together... digging heavy soil, planting hawthorn trees and pruning wild roses. Veronika is a translator and a university lecturer, with a talent for gardening. She's helped Rebecca in her garden; Rebecca has discussed translations with Veronika. Now, in the light of events in Ukraine, Rebecca talks about their friendship. Producer: Adele Armstrong Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Penny Mu...
Mar 11, 2022•10 min
Will Self tells the story of Vasily Arkhipov, the commander of a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine, who during the Cuban Missile Crisis refused to fire his vessel's nuclear weapon and averted, many believe, a Third World War. In the light of President Putin's actions this week, Will argues that the threat of nuclear apocalypse has never really gone away, however much we've tried to convince ourselves otherwise. Producer: Adele Armstrong Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Rod Farquhar Edito...
Mar 04, 2022•10 min
Sara Wheeler reflects that the attack on Ukraine is not the war of the Russian people she has known. "The calamitous news eroding any remote sense we might have nurtured of peace in our time is, we now know, not going to cease any time soon. Yet while the image of a villainous Russia dominates the news agenda, I remember Russians I have met over the years on my travels in their land. This is not their war." Producer: Sheila Cook Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Pe...
Feb 25, 2022•10 min
John Connell reflects on planting trees on his family farm in Ireland as reparation for the years he has spent flying round the world, and also as an intrinsic good. "For so many the planting of the tree for nature itself, not for politics, or development or climate change or remembrance of some brutal war but for the contribution of life is never thought of....We do not measure success in knowing the way of the earth because for the most part, the greater part of society is cut off from the pol...
Feb 18, 2022•11 min
Sara Wheeler reflects on the harm done by seeing the world only from our own point of view. "At the heart of both day-to-day thoughtlessness and internecine slaughter lies a failure to see things through the eyes of another. If we all tried to see clearly rather than selectively - well, you know, I think the planet would get on quite a lot better." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Penny Murphy
Feb 11, 2022•11 min
Will Self deplores the British attitude to children, seeing a mix of sentimentality and cruelty, and a culture which for decades allowed child sex abuse to hide "in plain view". "I'd argue that under cover of a positively Dickensian level of sentimentality that sees every child as a Tiny Tim, our cruelty and disdain for actual children continues to hold sway....The nauseating oscillation between outrage at the news of another child murdered by its parents or carers, often as a result of poverty ...
Feb 04, 2022•10 min
As she leaves academia, Rebecca Stott says an audit culture is stifling universities. "Once universities had been turned into businesses and forced to compete with each other for students and fees, scores and league tables followed. And now we are assessed and monitored all the time too. It has eroded trust....When a seminar works you can feel the electricity crackle...You can't bottle this or record it or give it a score or sell it because it happens in the moment and in the room. " Sound Engin...
Jan 28, 2022•10 min
Sarah Dunant asks if we should judge the past by the standards of the present or future, as shifting social attitudes colour our view of how the past is portrayed. "What current historians share with those historians of the past whose vision we vehemently decry, is that they too thought they were right at the time...If we now find their views abhorrent and unjust then how about us; what might there be about our present moral certainty that the future might take issue with. What might we be missi...
Jan 21, 2022•10 min
David Goodhart rejects what he calls the 'Eton conspiracy myth' of a cabal of his old school's alumni at the top of politics and welcomes its declining influence as a sign of growing equality. "The Eton obsession not only overlooks progress made in slowly detaching our elite institutions from privilege, it also distracts from a hard-headed discussion about what we want from our elite." Producer: Sheila Cook
Jan 14, 2022•11 min
Zoe Strimpel reflects on the impact of rapid home delivery on the way we live our lives, and asks what our human experience might lose from this democratisation of laziness. "A whole generation is about to come of age experiencing goods and service as simply things you can have delivered to your doorstep, fast. Will their brains cease to distinguish between different types of desire and demand?...Will they lose the capacity to form plans and commit to them, plans as minor as what to cook later t...
Jan 07, 2022•9 min
Adam Gopnik on why a visit to get his phone repaired resulted in an unlikely revelation. Watching those waiting alongside him, Adam comes to the realisation that we have poured ourselves so completely into our phones that the devices, paradoxically, are the one place where we can picture ourselves as selves. They have become the equivalent of the confession booths of old, or the diary in the 18th century. "We all need some box to hold our fears and desires as the winds of the world threaten to b...
Dec 31, 2021•10 min
Howard Jacobson ponders why he's always associated Christmas with the sea. Strange, he reckons, given he's not exactly maritime by temperament. 'Long ago at Blackpool,' he writes, 'I was lifted onto a donkey and afterwards told to make a sandcastle, but I fell off the donkey and wilder boys in Brillo-pad swimming trunks trampled over my battlements'. He looks to Matthew Arnold for an explanation of this 'mysterious nexus of sea and Santa'. Producer: Adele Armstrong...
Dec 24, 2021•9 min
Will Self reflects on his B&B renaissance. From early memories of B&Bs with his parents...to the anonymous isolation of corporate hotels...to the 'pseudo-hygge' of Airbnbs, Will looks at our changing relationship with property. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Dec 17, 2021•9 min
A junk shop, a wooden chest, and some old newspapers from 1941 get Sarah Dunant pondering how we can deal with a world turned upside down. "The last time the world shook", Sarah writes, "there was an element of learned resilience". But today, she believes, most of us don't have the benefit of that. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Dec 10, 2021•9 min
"Landscape made us', writes Sara Wheeler, 'and now, in the dying phase of our divorce from our environment, we are unmaking the landscape'. Sara discusses the importance of place names in linking us to the land. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Dec 03, 2021•10 min
Tom Shakespeare explains why he can't get enough of University Challenge. Starter for ten, picture round and music round.....it's all here! But thirty-five years after he first appeared on the show, he asks if Britain is a better country. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Nov 26, 2021•9 min
AL Kennedy attempts to work out why, and how, everything these days seems to annoy us. But, she says, it's up to us to resist the work of 'the crisis engineers, political extremists and paid agents who turned up our emotional thermostat'. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Nov 19, 2021•10 min
Zoe Strimpel on the difficulty of deciding whether to have, or not have, children. She describes the 'paralysis of ambivalence'. But this ambivalence is surely, she writes, 'a natural response to the idea of setting in train the most unknowable outcome on earth'. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Nov 12, 2021•10 min
Sarah Dunant argues that if we can't agree on wearing masks in a crowded space, this doesn't bode well for our ability to adapt to the monumental changes we'll soon have to make to avert the climate crisis. She reports from the Italian city of Mantova where she finds a rather un-Italian attitude to all of this. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Nov 05, 2021•10 min
Will Self argues that the car is anything but a source of freedom. While drivers think it gives them the ability to go anywhere, in truth 'they're shackled to a grotesque and Sisyphean go-round: they have to make the money, to pay for the car, to sit in the traffic jam, to make the money to pay for the car'. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Oct 29, 2021•10 min
"Who owns a story?" asks Adam Gopnik. "The storyteller? The subject? Or do all stories in some sense own themselves?" Adam explores the drama being played out in the US in two stories of feuding writers, caught up in the ethics of artistic appropriation. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Oct 22, 2021•10 min
"In the 1880s," writes Sara Wheeler, "the scientific community began to recognise and categorise neurodiversity." We've come a long way since then, she says. But there's a long way to go. And as neurological research presses on, she argues that we, as a society, must try to keep up with its findings. Producer: Adele Armstrong
Oct 15, 2021•10 min
