Philip Dodd and guests explore the art of negotiation and discuss JT Rogers' play Oslo which opens at the National Theatre this week. It draws on the experiences of Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul and her husband, social scientist Terje Rød-Larsen who fixed secret meetings between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Sir John Jenkins is a former diplomat and Executive Director of The International Institute for Strategic Studies - Middle East. He's been HM Consul-General i...
Sep 20, 2017•45 min
Anne Applebaum talks to Anne McElvoy about Russian nationalism and Ukrainian history in a programme exploring the importance of borders and the way identities are bound up with a sense of place. Nick Tandavanitj and Rhiannon White discuss creating drama out of the specific histories of Hull and Port Talbot. St John Simpson, curator of a British Museum exhibition devoted to a nomadic culture of antiquity, explains the ethos of the Scythians. Anne Applebaum is a Professor at LSE and a columnist fo...
Sep 15, 2017•40 min
Philip Dodd and Joanna Kavenna discuss the challenges of art in an age of irony as the work of Käthe Kollwitz goes on display in Birmingham at the Ikon Gallery. Lawrence Norfolk pays tribute to the work of the great American poet, John Ashbery, who died last week. Plus a discussion of social conservatism in the USA, Europe and the UK with Sophie Gaston from the think tank, Demos and the political commentators, Tim Stanley and Charlie Wolf. Kollwitz was born in Königsberg in East Prussia in 1867 ...
Sep 14, 2017•45 min
Public pools, the "steamie" and the Turkish bath; debates about hygiene and the role and revival of these public spaces are explored by Matthew Sweet and guests as Scottish theatres host a 30th anniversary tour of Tony Roper's play depicting 1950s Glasgow women washing their clothes in a public washhouse. Joining Matthew will be Chris Renwick, author of 'Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State', and Claire Launchbury, who has studied women's use of public baths in Middle Eastern cities. ...
Sep 12, 2017•45 min
The Booker Prize winning novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, talks to Anne McElvoy about the art of fiction and his new book, The Sparsholt Affair Producer: Zahid Warley
Sep 04, 2017•20 min
Anne McElvoy is joined by historians Helen Rappaport and Victor Sebestyen to consider the figure of Lenin, as the Proms marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Victor Sebestyen, author of Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait And Helen Rappaport, author of Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd 1917
Sep 01, 2017•41 min
Professor Kathleen Burk, University College London, reflects on Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address with BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Joanna Cohen. Event hosted by Rana Mitter.
Aug 29, 2017•27 min
Matthew Sweet talks to the classicist, writer and stand- up comedian, Natalie Haynes, about the glory that was Rome -with readings by the actor, Peter Marinker,from Virgil, Sulpicia, Gibbon and Dickens. Producer: Zahid Warley
Aug 29, 2017•40 min
Michelangelo and Coleridge, Dickens and the Impressionists, all left work that they or others deemed unfinished, interrupted or incomplete. In front of a BBC R3 Proms audience at Imperial Collge in London, the poet and broadcaster, Ian McMillan is joined by the writer Meg Rosoff who completed the novel ‘Beck’ for her friend, the late Mal Peet, and art historian and curator, Karen Serres from the Courtauld Gallery to talk about what is meant by unfinished art and literature and why it disturbs, p...
Aug 23, 2017•32 min
Ian McMillan and a pre-Proms audience at Imperial College London have the smoky essence of Djinn conjured for them by literary scholar and New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari and novelist Elif Shafak whose books are full of djinn. Shafak reads from her novel The Bastard of Istanbul and reflects on her grandmothers' very different versions of personal genie while Shahidha explores the idea that djinn and their abilities to fly and build huge castles in one night are part of the human drive to te...
Aug 18, 2017•32 min
Nick Littlehales, sports sleep coach and chair of the British Sleep Council, talks with novelist A. L. Kennedy about sleep and insomnia. The event is hosted by Rana Mitter.
Aug 16, 2017•22 min
A pre-Prom audience at Imperial College in London listens in as Shaidha Bari talks to Assyriologist Irving Finkel about cuneiform; how the script survived, what it tells us about life in the cities of Ur, Ninevah and Babylon and the way some of the most memorable stories ever told travelled from culture to culture. On the fare demonic puns, a four thousand year old joke, why the Ark might have been round and just how painful life was for Sumerian school chidren.
Aug 08, 2017•41 min
Kevin LeGendre and Claire Martin discuss Ella Fitzgerald
Aug 07, 2017•21 min
Anne McElvoy is joined by New Generation Thinker Seán Williams and writer Rachel Hewitt to consider Friedrich Schiller’s essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and what it means to be sentimental in that period?
Aug 03, 2017•21 min
Will Abberley asks novelist Charlotte Mendelson why writers seem reluctant to engage with happiness and why so much literature is full of unhappy people; they are joined by psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond.
Aug 02, 2017•20 min
Rana Mitter is joined by Sir Barry Cunliffe and Professor Edith Hall to consider epic sea journeys in history.
Aug 01, 2017•21 min
Novelist Lawrence Norfolk makes a selection of European writers who have considered the idea of ‘Europe’, with readings performed by Peter Marinker. Hosted by New Generation Thinker Nandini Das.
Aug 01, 2017•22 min
From Thomas De Quincy via Coleridge to Berlioz, a second-generation opium addict, Daisy Hay and Richard Davenport-Hines discuss why drugs were thought integral to creativity first in England and later in France. They tell Matthew Sweet and an audience at Imperial College London about opium as pain relief and creator of dreams and constipation, why arsenic was the Viagra of its day, and why it's just possible that Paris was as revolutionary as it was in the 19th century because it was full of dru...
Jul 24, 2017•28 min
Thomas Dixon, Director of the Centre for the History of Emotions, and musicologist Wiebke Thormählen look at mood: how composers and writers have engaged with themes of sentimentality, happiness and sorrow in their work, presented by Matthew Sweet. Producer: Fiona McLean
Jul 18, 2017•21 min
Rana Mitter talks to geologist Iain Stewart and geographer Nicholas Crane about the concept of "Deep Time".
Jul 17, 2017•39 min
Simon Heffer, novelist and co-director of the Fun Palaces campaign Stella Duffy, New Generation Thinker Will Abberley and the writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins join Matthew Sweet and an audience at the University of Sussex to debate the ideas explored by Matthew Arnold and their resonance today. The series of periodical essays were first published in Cornhill Magazine, 1867-68, and subsequently published as a book in 1869. Arnold argued that modern life was producing a society of 'Philistin...
Jul 13, 2017•52 min
Tate Modern offers a retrospective on the Art of the Black Power Movement in America and explores how 'Black Art' was defined by artists across the United States and its interplay with the civil rights movement. Rana Mitter is joined by Gaylene Gould, writer and artist and Head of Cinema and Events at the BFI, who reviews the 'Soul of A Nation' exhibition. Rana is also joined by the reggae poet and recording artist, Linton Kwesi Johnson "Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weap...
Jul 12, 2017•44 min
Shahidha Bari discusses LGBTQ in the history of philosophy.As part of the BBC's Queer Icons series Philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell discusses Plato's Symposium, and novelist Adam Mars-Jones talks about Bruce Bagemihl's book Biological Exuberance which explored homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Plus, we hear from the winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. Queer Icons is a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures...
Jul 11, 2017•54 min
The Punjabi "Romeo and Juliet" is explored at Bradford Lit Fest plus New Generation Thinker Catherine Fletcher talks to Jonathan Dollimore about his memoir and the influence of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence which he set up at Sussex University. The Greek poet Sappho is championed by Professor Margaret Reynolds as part of Queer Icons - a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures choose an LGBT artwork that is special...
Jul 06, 2017•44 min
Matthew Sweet talks to Philip Hoare about literary history and the ocean. Poet Elizabeth Jane Burnett performs snippets from her collection, Swims. Writer Jake Arnott reassesses the film Prick Up Your Ears as it's re-released in cinemas. Continuing the 'Queer Icon' series, Philip Hoare plumps for Cecil Beaton's image of Stephen Tennant. Philip Hoare's new book is called RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR Queer Icons is a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which ...
Jul 05, 2017•44 min
Can going out for a meal really be an aesthetic experience, like going to a gallery or a theatre? What kind of statement are we making when we say we don’t like beetroot? And what can the great thinkers of history – the philosopher David Hume, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss – tell us about table manners? And which thousand islands are we talking about when we talk about a thousand island dressing? Matthew Sweet explores the joys of food with philosopher Barry Smith, restaurant critic cum...
Jul 04, 2017•42 min
Matthew Sweet looks at the Canadian influence on British TV drama in the early 1960s, with director Alvin Rakoff, Sydney Newman biographer, Ryan Danes, and Graeme Burk, contributor to the publication of Newman's memoirs. Newman was instrumental in setting up Armchair Theatre, The Avengers and Doctor Who and The Wednesday Play at a time when broadcasting was in an excitingly fluid state. The British-Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo on her Forward Prize winning collection Measures of Expatriation a...
Jun 29, 2017•44 min
Shahidha Bari and Laurence Scott look at images of Canada from First Nations art through Anne of Green Gables on TV to poems and art posted on Instagram and Twitter by Rupi Kaur. Their studio guests are author Alison MacLeod, Robbie Richardson and Deborah Pearson. Plus film maker Kevan Funk. Rupi Kaur has published a book called Milk and Honey and you can find images of her art via her website https://www.rupikaur.com/ Robbie Richardson from the University of Kent is writing a book about the con...
Jun 29, 2017•44 min
Philip Dodd explores the influence of Canadian history and the difference between stand up and performing a one man show. Katherine Ryan is based in the UK and about to perform at summer festivals and in an autumn tour. The French Canadian playwright, performer and opera director Robert Lepage recently staged his autobiographical "memory play", 887, at the Barbican in London. He has directed a ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera which was featured in a 2012 documentary Wagner's Dream and produ...
Jun 27, 2017•44 min
Garry Kasparov talks to Philip Dodd about being defeated by a supercomputer in the chess match he played in 1997 and how this affected his view of AI. 100 years ago, Wyndham Lewis was first commissioned as a war artist; Richard Slocombe, curator of a new exhibition and art historian Anna Grueztner Robins discuss his art with John Keane who was a war artist in the Gulf War. 2017 New Generation Thinker Simon Beard outlines his research into overpopulation and our attitude towards death. Garry Kasp...
Jun 22, 2017•44 min
