Tom Shakespeare on why we need to rethink our use of the mental illness metaphor. Is President Trump really "mad"?, he asks. Is Brexit "bonkers"? Or is the latest government policy "schizophrenic"? He says we all do it. "Within five minutes of starting to write this talk, I find I'm doing it myself!" But he says we need to break the habit since it shows a profound lack of understanding towards people with real mental health conditions. Producer: Adele Armstrong....
Apr 13, 2018•10 min
"Western liberals", writes John Gray, "are horrified by the rise of Xi Jinping". But as China's parliament votes to allow him to be President for life, John Gray argues that the future of the liberal West ironically depends on the continuing success of the world's most powerful authoritarian state. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Apr 06, 2018•9 min
John Gray says the idea that empire has had its day is one of the delusions of our age. Old empires, he says, are being replaced by new ones - in China, Russia and - he argues - in Europe. He examines the idea of a European "empire of the good" - one that is liberal and democratic throughout. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Mar 30, 2018•9 min
There was Chick Lit, then Grit Lit....now it's "Up Lit" - uplifting stories about kindness and community that we all seem to be reading. Kamila Shamsie says she, too, has been carried along with this wave of escapism from "dark times". But she says the idea that "upliftment" should be marketed to the reading public as the only fictional response to difficult times strikes her as problematic. "The best fiction always makes us look at - rather than away from - the world". Producer: Adele Armstrong...
Mar 23, 2018•9 min
At a time when the word "civilisation" is the subject of great debate, Kamila Shamsie explores the meaning of the word through the prism of Indian art. "If you really want to understand how the world's civilisations interact and meld", she writes, "go and look at the art of Gandhara". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Mar 16, 2018•10 min
Tom Shakespeare tells us why he believes the phrase "going forward" is an inelegant and negative replacement for "in future". When you talk about the future, he says, you are using a temporal concept. It's a different time from now - the time to come - and "invites us to open out our imaginative space". It offers the possibility that things might be different. "Going forward", on the other hand, is a spatial concept - "nothing but the present, infinitely extended". Producer: Adele Armstrong....
Mar 09, 2018•10 min
"We're in one of those recurring periods in history", writes John Gray, "when the idea of revolution has become appealing again". In this context, John says we should dust off the work of Teffi - one of the best known writers in Russia before the revolution. "I doubt", he says, "if anyone has written with such luminous clarity of what it means to live in a time of chaos". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Mar 02, 2018•9 min
John Gray argues that, throughout history, highly educated people have often made the worst decisions. Taking George Orwell as his starting point "There are some ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them", he asks why we're still so reluctant today to give credence to the views of ordinary people. He examines the role of universities in teaching critical thought in the humanities and social sciences and wonders if students who have "swallowed this mishmash" really have a better ...
Feb 23, 2018•9 min
In 1967, the philosopher Philippa Foot developed a thought experiment about a runaway trolley. It involved countless dilemmas designed to illustrate human behaviour. But whatever the scenario, the rhetoric was always the same....the overwhelming desire was for the trolley to kill fewer people and save more. AL Kennedy argues that today that rhetoric is in danger of being turned on its head. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Feb 16, 2018•9 min
"Death's not great for selling yoghurt" writes AL Kennedy, "but making Death dance through a culture seems to do more than reinforce dominant ideologies....it can lend power to the powerless". She says for millennia, the human race has searched for everlasting life. Instead of resisting our mortality, she argues that it's empowering to reflect on it. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Feb 09, 2018•10 min
"Winning - isn't it great?" asks AL Kennedy. But she argues that our "winner takes all" mentality is suffocating democracy. "On both sides of the Atlantic, in regimes around the world", she writes, "we can watch the chaotic dissolution of administrations based on winning at any price". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Feb 02, 2018•10 min
AL Kennedy on why Hollywood has never been a nice place. In 1919, barely three decades after the advent of moving pictures, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and others thought things were bad enough in the studio system to break away and form an independent creative producing collective, United Artists. There are many other examples of Hollywood's woes in the C20th. But in this time of political instability, Alison writes, "don't we need entertainment to get everybody through, aiming higher?" Prod...
Jan 26, 2018•10 min
"How long", asks Howard Jacobson, "before the protocols of looking forbid our looking appreciatively at anyone?" He explores the enormous difficulties surrounding the language of appreciation, "no matter whether the viewer in question is a mechanic ogling a pin-up in his workshop or an art critic pausing at a wall of French nudes in the Wallace Collection". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Jan 19, 2018•10 min
Howard Jacobson ponders why misanthropy is out of fashion. "Where have they gone?", he asks, "such great haters of mankind as Juvenal, Swift, Flaubert". Mankind, he believes, has not grown less tribal over time. But instead of a general enemy, he says, "we each have our own individual tormentor - a private phobic for every one of us". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Jan 12, 2018•10 min
Howard Jacobson on why we need to preserve Bohemia. London's Soho, he says, is the nearest the UK has to a Bohemia but "you don't sniff aesthetic licence in the streets of Soho as you once did". But one day recently, writes Howard, Soho recovered its spirit - at the funeral of the leopard-skin jacketed "Prince of Soho". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Jan 07, 2018•9 min
"It isn't just because they have become platforms for propaganda and interpersonal odiousness that we should declare war on the social media", writes Howard Jacobson. "It is because they reduce all discourse to a shout". Howard appeals for a re-discovery of the subtlety of language and explains why he believes we should leave behind the "frozen wastes of Emojiland". "A thumb up or thumb down culture has given up on the idea that difference of opinion comes in shades, that thought is gradual and ...
Dec 29, 2017•10 min
Howard Jacobson on the art of the feuilleton....and the joy of the ordinary. He says the feuilletonists - those writers of short observational pieces - show "you don't have to be tendentious to be of consequence". He asks us to step back and seek what's important around us...and even question whether there's such a thing as importance at all. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Dec 22, 2017•10 min
"Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels", writes Zia Haider Rahman "and taking with it many excellent writers". He says that many novels have already moved in the direction of the televisual - written with an eye to a film or TV adaptation. "If novelists are relinquishing the very things that are exclusively the province of the novel", he writes, "then they are complicit in the demise of the novel".
Dec 15, 2017•9 min
"It's not merely facts that are under assault in the polarised politics of the UK, the US and other nations twisting in the winds of what some call populism" writes Zia Haider Rahman. "There's also a troubling assault on reason". He argues that authoritarian tendencies know that warping the facts is only a start. "Warping reason and logic and clarity of thought is the holy grail". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Dec 08, 2017•9 min
"On my computer", writes Zia Haider Rahman, "I have a folder of exchanges with organisations and corporations, a folder called 'Hope'". Zia describes the letters he's written to some of Britain's foremost institutions on their lack of diversity. He says empirical research of cognitive scientists points ever more clearly to the immense difficulty of changing minds. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Dec 01, 2017•9 min
Will Self reflects on the epidemic of sleeplessness. He explores the "heady cocktail" of modern life that's keeping us awake and argues that we all need the imaginative sustenance of dreams. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Nov 24, 2017•10 min
Will Self on how wearing glasses has become something that is entirely unremarkable. "Nowadays the acquisition of glasses", he writes, "is simply another opportunity for the conspicuous consumption we've all become so very expert at". But he says there are drawbacks to seeing too clearly. He suggests that a National No Glasses Day might be an idea "so we can all wander about the place in blurry bliss". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Nov 17, 2017•10 min
"As the years have passed", writes Will Self, "so gnawing on a bloody piece of cow rump has come to seem, to me, more and more...well, vulgar". Via Leviticus and Arcimboldo, he charts his conversion to vegetarianism. And he explains why it's not just personal morals that are "propelling me headlong towards the horror of Quorn"! Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Nov 10, 2017•9 min
Will Self says we need creative solutions to end institutional misogyny and abuse. "Rather than addressing - as parliamentarians currently are - the business of shutting the stable door after the stallions have run amok", he writes, "we should be thinking about how to keep it closed in the first place". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Nov 03, 2017•10 min
Will Self on why he loves space.... From childhood dreams of being "strapped into the command module of a Saturn 5 rocket about to blast off from Cape Kennedy" to contemplating 1000-million-star mega-clusters in the sky today, Will describes why space is - for him - "both sublime and restful". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Oct 27, 2017•10 min
Mary Beard ponders why email is governed by so few rules and conventions. "Fifty years ago, when I was at high school", Mary writes, "we spent many hours learning how to write a letter". She wonders why no one today seems to be teaching the art of writing a persuasive email. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Oct 20, 2017•10 min
Andrew Sullivan says a type of "cultural Marxism" is sweeping through American universities. Conservative ideas, he says, are increasingly being banished from campuses and free speech is seen as a delusion. "It's an ideology that is fast resembling a new religion". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Oct 13, 2017•10 min
Andrew Sullivan says Donald Trump is teaching a generation that the key to advancement in society is to bully, lie, slander and cheat. He examines the long-term effects of the Trump Presidency. "It may be that in the future", Andrew writes, "his appalling conduct will mark a cautionary tale - and future candidates and presidents will learn not to follow in his steps". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Oct 06, 2017•9 min
Andrew Sullivan on how America has become "a truly tribal society". "I've lived here since the Reagan era", he writes, "and there have been plenty of divides. But none quite as tribal or as rooted in non-negotiable identity as this one". He warns of what the outcome might be and reminds the listener that a liberal democracy is always a precarious enterprise. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Sep 29, 2017•10 min
Monica Ali with a personal take on why she believes the history of the British Empire must be taught in our schools. She recalls a conversation with her father where he told her that at primary school he'd been taught about the Black Hole of Calcutta and how the British gave India railways. At secondary school - post Independence and Partition, her Dad's history curriculum changed dramatically...it ceased to cast a rosy glow over British rule. When she was at school, Monica was taught nothing ab...
Sep 22, 2017•9 min
