At the end of a year which has seen Britain vote for Brexit, the rise of political parties claiming patriotism in other European countries and a sense of national pride being invoked by politicians in Russia and China - Free Thinking hears from some of the key thinkers exploring these current debates. Our week long focus begins in France where Philip Dodd talks to the public intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut and the novelist and film-maker Karim Miské. Alain Finkielkraut is a member of the Académ...
Dec 20, 2016•45 min
Are public enquiries good government? At the end of a year where we have seen the Hillsborough and Chilcot reports are these the best way of calling to account? Margaret Hodge and Bronwen Maddox join Anne McElvoy to discuss. Plus, Matthew Parris considers the concept of scorn and those who are best at pouring it. Matthew Parris has written an updated version of Scorn: The Wittiest and Wickedest Insults in Human History Margaret Hodge has written Called To Account: How Corporate Bad Behaviour and...
Dec 16, 2016•43 min
John Simpson joins Philip Dodd to discuss fifty years of reporting from around the world for the BBC and what the future holds for foreign correspondents. Once our news came from three primary sources: newspapers, radio and TV. But in a digital world which offers a proliferation of 'news' how do we separate fact from opinion or even fakery? Former director general of the BBC and current CEO of The New York Times Company, Mark Thompson, journalist Susie Boniface (aka Fleet Street Fox), author and...
Dec 14, 2016•45 min
Classicist Professor Edith Hall, New Generation Thinker Chris Kissane, novelist Elif Shafak, and Dr Alan Mendoza from the Henry Jackson Society join Matthew Sweet to consider what might be on a reading list to prepare for a post Brexit world. Reading List: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Moniza Alvi, Europa Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Voltaire, Candide Sun Tzu, The Art Of War Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians At The Gate Ali Smith, Autumn Hannah Arendt, Men In Dark Times Producer: Lu...
Dec 13, 2016•45 min
Shahidha Bari and guests look at our relationship with animals. Chris Packham discusses his 'animal symphony' composed with musician Nitin Sawhney for a new documentary exploring animal reactions to music. Darwin expert and New Generation Thinker Will Abberley reviews an exhibition considering our relationship with the rest of the living world. Science writer Helen Pilcher explains the new science behind 'De-extinction'. Alan Hook describes his research into playfulness and computer games for ca...
Dec 08, 2016•44 min
Anne McElvoy meets David Rooney curator of the Winton Mathematics gallery at the Science Museum which has been redesigned by Zaha Hadid architects and explores the way maths skills are increasingly needed for jobs. She discusses the changing attitudes to mathematics in history and the present day with Alex Bellos, writer on maths puzzles, maths historian Serafina Cuomo and maths lecturer Vicky Neale. They are joined by astro-physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson who is director of the Hayden Planetariu...
Dec 08, 2016•44 min
Colin Grant, author of a book exploring his brother's epilepsy, joins presenter Matthew Sweet, New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore who writes about Wilkie Collins and Charles Fernyhough - who studies hearing voices. Plus director Josie Rourke on Joan of Arc on stage at the Donmar Warehouse and theatre critic David Benedict. St Joan by George Bernard Shaw starring Gemma Arterton is at the Donmar Warehouse in London from December 9th - January 18th. It will be broadcast live in cinemas in par...
Dec 06, 2016•44 min
What price the self in the 21st century? We may be living in the age of the "selfie" and of social media narcissism but is there anything fixed about the self? Philip Dodd and his guests, the novelist, Tom McCarthy, the sociologist, Susie Scott, the neuroscientist, Daniel Glaser and the painter, Dexter Dalwood explore the notion of identity today taking in the major Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern, Erving Goffman's seminal work of sociology, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Lif...
Dec 01, 2016•45 min
Matthew Sweet discusses elites and their role in contemporary politics, with Douglas Carswell, MP for Clacton;Professor David Runciman, Head of the Department of Politics & International Studies at the University of Cambridge; Eliane Glaser, writer and Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University; and Lynsey Hanley, visiting Fellow in Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. Eliane Glaser's most recent book is called Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life ...
Nov 30, 2016•45 min
Wierd fiction presents the universe as an irrational place, totally indifferent to human concerns. Is 'the wierd' a more general approach that can bextended beyond fiction to encompass the other arts, or even politics and science? Rana Mitter discusses the idea of the wierd with literary scholar Nick Freeman of the University of Loughborough, cultural theorist Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck, University of London, and astronomer Marek Kukula of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Continuing to expl...
Nov 29, 2016•45 min
Juliet Stephenson and Lia Williams decide which role to play on the toss of a coin in Robert Icke's version of Schiller's Mary Stuart at the Almeida. The director explains why. Just before he died in 2015 the Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass completed his last book. Karen Leeder has been reading the English translation of it. And New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja has been reading a selection of other newly translated fiction. Plus MP Rachel Reeves has written a history of a campaigning ...
Nov 24, 2016•45 min
Zadie Smith talks dance, depicting teenage friendships and US/UK differences with Philip Dodd as her new novel Swing Time is published in Britain and BBC TV dramatises her book NW starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox. Producer: Robyn Read
Nov 23, 2016•44 min
Matthew Sweet tries to separate out the clichés from the reality when it comes to male masculinity in 2016 with the director of the forthcoming Being A Man festival at London’s Southbank and Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum, the husband and wife team behind a new documentary that charts the emotional turmoil of childbirth on a man reluctant to grow up. Plus, Matthew travels to the Florence Nightingale Museum in London to meet New Generation Thinker and historian of beards, Alun Withey, who reve...
Nov 22, 2016•45 min
Matthew Sweet visits little known locations in London to meet researchers drawing on archives of the past to cast new light on the present. The Cross Bones Graveyard in Southwark was used in the Middle Ages to bury sex workers and others living on the fringes of respectable society. We visit the site with Sondra Hausner, an anthropologist of religion who's studied modern practices for memorializing the women buried at the site. Vicky Iglikowski and Rowena Hillel are researchers at the National A...
Nov 17, 2016•44 min
New Generation Thinkers Shahidha Bari and Laurence Scott present a programme looking at new research into supernatural fiction writer Vernon Lee with Francesco Ventrella. Lee used the phrase "iron curtain" and declared herself a "cosmopolitan from her birth, without any single national tie or sympathy". They also debate what it means to lie, examine the life of communist informer Harvey Matusow with Doug Haynes, and look at new scientific research into the way consistent lying can change behavio...
Nov 16, 2016•43 min
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss famously said that ‘animals are good to think with’. Rana Mitter with Sarah Peverley, Charles Forsdick, Alasdair Cochrane, Eveline de Wolf, Michael Szollosy and an audience at FACT, Liverpool debate robots, humans and animals. The broadcast will preview upcoming events organised by the University of Liverpool as part of their Being Human festival programme and is part of a week of programmes on Radio 3 focusing on new research and the UK wide festival su...
Nov 15, 2016•59 min
Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize-winning Maus - a father-son memoir about the Holocaust drawn with cats and mice - is one of the classics of graphic novels. He's now collaborating with the Jazz composer Phillip Johnston on a show that puts music alongside the images. Naomi Alderman talks to them and to the performance artist Marina Abramovic who's written a memoir. Plus Sarah Churchwell watches a film version of Philip Roth's American Pastoral which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Ewan McGregor d...
Nov 10, 2016•44 min
Bernardine Evaristo, Keith Piper, Miranda Kaufmann and Kehinde Andrews consider the question what it means to be Black British and how should a wider history be taught and reflected in literature. New Generation Thinker Nandini Das presents. Kehinde Andrews is at Birmingham City University where his research includes looking at black activism. He is series editor of Blackness in Britain with Rowman and Littlefield International Miranda Kaufmann is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commo...
Nov 09, 2016•42 min
Matthew Sweet talks to 21st-century novelists Sarah Perry and Carol Birch about why the 19th century illuminates their writing. And can the Victorians still make us laugh? Cultural historians Fern Riddell and Bob Nicholson, consider the question raised by a new exhibition. Plus neo-Victorians - historian Mark Llewellyn on the curiously enduring presence of the 19th century in contemporary culture. Victorian Entertainments: There Will Be Fun at the British Library in London runs from Fri 14 Octob...
Nov 08, 2016•44 min
Today perhaps, Brand Britain is showing its age, but once upon a time it was nothing less than one of the most dynamic political projects in the world. In a Free Thinking Landmark on Walter Scott's Waverley, Rana Mitter reflects on the writer and the books which helped the British like the idea of Britain. Joining Rana in discussion: the writer, Jenni Calder who has recently adapted 'Waverley' for a modern audience; the poet and literary historian, Robert Crawford, who is interested in the origi...
Nov 03, 2016•44 min
A TB clinic in the countryside is the location of Linda Grant's new novel which follows a Jewish brother and sister from the East End who are sent to recover in an institution where the class divide persists even as the new National Health Service challenges this. Stephen Poliakoff's new BBC drama series follows an intelligence officer whose final Army role is to ensure that cutting edge technology is made available to the British armed forces. Philip Dodd discusses the period of immediate post-...
Nov 02, 2016•45 min
Anne McElvoy explores some historic tussles over who read what, when, how and why. Bodleian scholar Dennis Duncan reveals how disputatious monks took the book out of the monastery; the novelist and New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau uncovers public frothing over political pamphlet reading in pubs in the 18th century; 19th century literature expert Katie McGettigan celebrates a loophole in copyright law which resulted in American literature dominating British bookshelves; Katherine Cooper f...
Nov 01, 2016•45 min
New Generation Thinker Chris Harding presents a discussion with writer Chris Hannan and director Roxana Silbert about a new Birmingham Rep play about Enoch Powell. Also James Zirin describes what he calls the partisan nature of the Supreme Court in America and artists Jananne Al-Ani and John Keane and curator Vivienne Jabri talk about providing an alternative to the visual language of war employed by the media. What Shadows runs at Birmingham Rep Theatre from October 27th to November 12th and st...
Oct 27, 2016•44 min
Does art have to reflect politics and history in South Africa? Is it harder to make art now than it was in the past? As major exhibitions of South African art open in London and Edinburgh Philip Dodd discusses the challenges of creating a visual language for a country with the artists William Kentridge, Vivienne Koorland and Gavin Jantjes. Joining them is Professor Stephen Chan from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, an expert on the country's recent history. South Afric...
Oct 27, 2016•46 min
Richard Hakluyt who died on 23 November 1616 was an English writer whose writings promoted the British colonisation of North America by the English. Nandini Das talks to Matthew Sweet about Hakluyt's travels and his legacy. Alex Clark reports live from the prize ceremony for this year's Man Booker Prize. We discuss new research into the signficance of chickens in the Anthropocene and ahead of Halloween we look at the haunting writing of Shirley Jackson as a new biography of her life is published...
Oct 25, 2016•48 min
Artes Mundi was established in 2003 as a biennial contemporary visual arts initiative - the poet, author and playwright Owen Sheers and Catherine Fletcher, historian and New Generation Thinker, report back on the exhibition opening in Cardiff this week with work by the chosen artists including Britain's John Akomfrah, Nástio Mosquito and Bedwyr Williams. Amitav Ghosh argues that fiction writers need to be bolder in tackling the big themes of today's world and why thinking about Climate Change is...
Oct 20, 2016•44 min
Artist Dave McKean on the way Paul Nash's dreams have inspired a graphic novel. Ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, Philip speaks to poet George Szirtes, who left the country as a boy in 1956, and writer Tibor Fischer, whose parents came to Britain that same year. They are joined by historians Nora Berend and Simon Hall to discuss the revolt, the history of Islam in Hungary and the political debates going on today. Paul Nash runs at Tate Britain from 26 October 2016 – 5 Ma...
Oct 19, 2016•45 min
How do you restore a silent film? Kevin Brownlow is in conversation with Matthew Sweet about his life's work documenting the early history of cinema and preserving many lost classics - including the culmination of a 50 year project which sees Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon re-released in cinemas around the UK and on DVD. Described by Martin Scorsese as 'a giant among film historians', Brownlow received an Academy Honorary Award in 2010. As part of Southbank Centre's Film Scores Live, Carl Davis...
Oct 18, 2016•44 min
The award of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is discussed by writer Toby Litt and by Anthony Wall, the Editor of BBC TV's Arena series who co-produced the Martin Scorsese documentary about Dylan: No Direction Home and who has made several other films with and about Dylan. As the death of Italian playwright and activist Dario Fo is announced, David Greig Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh is joined by playwright Anders Lustgarten to reflect on Dario Fo's...
Oct 13, 2016•45 min
The US-based author Teju Cole talks to Philip Dodd about a range of subjects from James Baldwin and the pressing political realities of Black Lives Matter to the creative potential of social media. Teju Cole is a photographer, art historian and writer. He was raised in Nigeria and lives in Brooklyn. His books are Open City, Every Day is For The Thief and his new collection of essays Known and Strange Things. The conversation was part of the London Literature Festival at South Bank Centre. Produc...
Oct 12, 2016•54 min
