Shahidha Bari looks at the voices of women emerging from new writing in novels, plays and histories. Zenobia, Mavia, and Khadijah are Arabian queens and noblewomen who feature in the new book by Emran Iqbal El-Badawi which looks at the way female rulers of Arabia were crucial in shaping the history of the region. Hannah Khalil's new play at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in London imagines a writers room of women weaving the tales that will last Scheherazade for 1,001 nights. And, Abdu...
Nov 23, 2022•45 min
House of the Dragon was inspired by a medieval period known as The Anarchy. What do the real historical conflicts tell us about power, succession, class, and the status of women in medieval times, and why are fantasy writers so drawn to them? New Generation Thinker Sarah Peverley is Professor English Literature at Liverpool University. She is joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College Oxford, and Danielle Park, lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York. A 12th...
Nov 23, 2022•31 min
House of the Dragon draws on ‘The Anarchy’ - a 12th century war of succession. What does this conflict tell us about power, succession, class, and the status of medieval women ? New Generation Thinker Sarah Peverley is joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College Oxford, and Danielle Park, lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York. A 12th century war of succession between Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and her cousin Stephen of Blois which caused widespre...
Nov 23, 2022•31 min
St Teresa formulated a specifically Catholic version of contemplative religion in response to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation; Vivekananda was a Hindu holy man who articulated a religious path that set the template for much 20th-century spiritual thinking; Friedrich Nietzsche set out to subvert 1,800 years of religious thinking in his iconoclastic book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which has been newly translated by poet Michael Hulse. Rana Mitter is joined by New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mil...
Nov 22, 2022•44 min
As Nottingham’s network of 800 man-made caves inspire an exhibition called ‘Hollow Earth’ at the city’s contemporary art gallery, Shahidha Bari and guests explore the underground world. Archaeologist Chris King discusses discoveries under Nottingham's streets, literary historian Charlotte May suggests stories to read, curator Sam Thorne picks out images, and award-winning cave explorer Andy Eavis, tells us about his career discovering more territory on earth than anyone else alive - all of it un...
Nov 22, 2022•43 min
"Creative daring" is the quality rewarded by the Goldsmiths Prize, now in its tenth year. What does it mean for an artist or writer to be daring and experimental? Shahidha Bari is joined by this year's winners Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams who have co-written their novel Diego Garcia, composer Matthew Herbert whose latest project is making music from the skeleton of a horse, and poet Stephen Sexton who has written a poetry collection structured round every level of the 90s video game Su...
Nov 22, 2022•44 min
The African American inventor Lewis Latimer who lived in South London and worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison on developing light bulbs; Benjamin Franklin was one of the founders of the United States of America but what was he doing pouring oil on Derwent Water in the Lake District? How did theatrical department store demonstrations help sell Kenwood Chefs ? And Ganzflicker - the online experiment that depending on your neural pathways might make you see animals, fairies, and mon...
Nov 22, 2022•42 min
What does zero carbon look like if you are planning a new housing development in your town. The UK’s building stock is one of the oldest in Europe, accounting for nearly 40% of the nation’s total carbon emissions, so how possible is it for our cities to cut them to zero before 2050? Lecturer Lara Salinas explains how she has worked with local residents in the borough of Southwark in South London, encouraging them to take up zero carbon building design and retrofit. Professor Ljubomir Jankovic de...
Nov 18, 2022•28 min
Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has a translation of the book and written Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, and from France, the writer, Marie Darrieussecq. The actor Peter Marinker tackles the difficult task of giving an English voice to Proust. The novel In Search of Lost Time is a modernist masterpiece which offers a symphonic ac...
Nov 18, 2022•44 min
Disillusionment with war and how you sue for peace are at the heart of Shaw's drama Arms and the Man, being staged in Richmond this autumn. Whilst in Bath a touring production of Mrs Warren's Profession stars Caroline Quentin and her daughter Rose Quentin as the former prostitute and her disapproving daughter. Anne McElvoy is joined by director Paul Miller, Professor Sos Eltis who has edited Shaw's work and theatre critic and writer Mark Lawson to look at Shaw's ability to construct arguments on...
Nov 16, 2022•51 min
It revolutionised domestic chores, signified modernity and has been made into packaging, textiles, electrical machinery but plastic has also contributed to our throw-away society. Clay is turned into bricks, cookware and used in industrial processes including paper making, cement production, and chemical filtering and increasingly contemporary artists are taking up the material. As exhibitions at the V&A Dundee and the Hayward Gallery in London display the different qualities and association...
Nov 09, 2022•44 min
Do video games help explore war? An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum includes Sniper Elite 5, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and a military training simulator. For the 2022 discussion about how we look at warfare past and present Anne McElvoy is joined by writer & broadcaster Louise Blain, retired Colonel Lincoln Jopp, game designer Florent Maurin and IWM curator Chris Cooper. War Games runs at IWM London until May 2023 and is a free exhibition. Louise Blain presents Radio 3's Sound o...
Nov 08, 2022•44 min
The Scottish theologian and preacher John Knox died on 24th November 1572, bringing to an end a life packed with drama and controversy. Matthew Sweet is joined by historian Steven Reid, literary historian Lucy Hinnie and New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel to go through some of the most vivid and important episodes in that life, including his periods in exile, his highly antagonistic meetings with Mary Queen of Scots, and his time on the high seas as a prisoner forced to row a French gall...
Nov 03, 2022•45 min
Putting I at the centre, the Ich, was the creed of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte whilst Friedrich Schelling, saw the self as at one with the rest of nature: naturphilosophie. These competing ideas were debated in literary salons in the German town of Jena in the 1790s and Andrea Wulf's new biography Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self tells this story. She joins Anne McElvoy alongside New Generation Thinker Dr Seán Williams and the musicologist and Classica...
Nov 02, 2022•45 min
King of Asia and Pharoah are two of the titles taken by Alexander, ruler of Macedonia from 336 B.C. to 323 B.C. He died aged 32 having conquered a vast area and founded the city of Alexandria in present day Egypt but his reputation stretched even further as a kind of philosopher king, and in myths and stories, as someone who travelled to paradise, created the first flying machine and explored underwater. Rana Mitter has been to visit a new exhibition at the British Library which illustrates thes...
Nov 01, 2022•45 min
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough takes a look at the latest research shaping our understanding of the great Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. She’ll be finding out about the insights that digital approaches are bringing to the tale of gold-hoarding dragons, sword-wielding heroes and murderous fenland beasties. We discover what video games and grammar have to tell us about Old English literature. Andrew Burn Andrew Burn is Professor of English, Media and Drama at University College London’s Institute of Edu...
Oct 28, 2022•31 min
The director and writer of Ghostwatch Lesley Manning and Stephen Volk join Matthew Sweet and academic Lucy Arnold to look back at the reality–horror/pseudo-documentary TV, which aired on British tv screens on Halloween night 1992. The BBC switchboard received an estimated 1,000,000 phone calls on the night of the broadcast and it has never been repeated on British tv although it is now part of a BFI season exploring horror. Producer: Luke Mulhall A BFI Horror season In Dreams are Monsters is run...
Oct 27, 2022•46 min
A pandemic, crumbling empire and new nationhood are the backdrop for Orhan Pamuk's latest novel Nights of the Plague. He talks to Rana Mitter about the historical basis for his novel. They're joined by historian and BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot and literary scholar Keya Anjaria. Some of the books they recommend at the end of the conversation are Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901 – 1962) whose The Time Regulation Institute and A Mind at Peace have been published in English by Penguin H...
Oct 26, 2022•45 min
John Gallagher discusses the latest research on the languages of the ancient world that weren't Latin and Greek. We associate places like Italy and Cyprus with those two best known ancient languages. But both were linguistically diverse. What informed people's choice of language in these places? How were alphabets developed and used? Plus, an exhibition at the British Museum explores the world opened up when Egyptian hieroglyphics were deciphered 200 years ago, and how the invention of the Cyril...
Oct 26, 2022•45 min
The creator of much-loved children's TV classics including The Clangers, Bagpuss and Pogles' Wood is discussed by Matthew Sweet and his guests Daniel Postgate who took over Smallfilms from his father, singer Sandra Kerr who was the voice of Madeleine in Bagpuss, composer and author Neil Brand, and writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed. Oliver Postgate's father was a communist and his mother was a political activist, daughter of prominent Labour figure George Lansbury - how much of this political b...
Oct 21, 2022•45 min
Deafness and communication, writing Chinese, women as killers in Chile, German postwar history, testimony from a Swedish village and a global history of science are the topics explored in the books shortlisted for this year's prize for Global Cultural Understanding run by the British Academy. Rana Mitter talks to the six authors about their findings. The books are: The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness by Katie Booth Aftermath: Life in the ...
Oct 18, 2022•45 min
The ridiculous side of Romanticism, a new biopic of Emily Brontë and an exhibition about Fuseli and women are on today's agenda as Shahidha Bari is joined by New Generation Thinkers Emma Butcher, Sophie Oliver, Chris Harding and by Andrew McInnes. Emily from writer/director Frances O'Connor starring Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë opens at cinemas across the UK this week. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism runs at the Courtauld Gallery in London from Oct 14th to Jan 8th 2023 Sa...
Oct 13, 2022•45 min
Hong Kong, Paris and New York galleries and museums are in the spotlight as we hear the latest in a series of discussions exploring what it means to run museums and galleries in the 21st century. For the Frieze/Radio 3 Museum Directors Debate 2022 Anne McElvoy is joined by Suhanya Raffel (director of M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong), Richard Armstrong (director of the Guggenheim Museum, NYC) and Nathalie Bondil (head of museums and exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris). The ...
Oct 12, 2022•44 min
How Manc are the Gallaghers? John Gallagher hears about the results of a project to map accents in the city talking to Prof Rob Drummond. In Northumbria Dr Robert McKenzie has discovered that a Northern accent can cost you marks at school and job opportunities. However you speak, your accent reveals something about you. Dr John Gallagher talks to two researchers whose projects explore the variation in accents across England, and the way those accents shape our place in society. Rob Drummond is R...
Oct 12, 2022•45 min
From James Brown to Stockhausen, the influences which fed into Miles Davis's 1972 album On The Corner are explored by Matthew Sweet and guests, 50 years after its release. Bill Laswell, Chelsea Carmichael, Kevin LeGendre and Paul Tingen join Matthew to celebrate an album that was dismissed by some jazz critics as evidence of Davis 'selling out' when it came out, but that has gone on to be appreciated as an important and influential milestone. Producer: Torquil MacLeod Bill Laswell's many recordi...
Oct 11, 2022•45 min
The word 'reading' may appear to describe something specific and universal, but in reality it's more of an umbrella term, covering a huge range of ways in which people interact with text. Dyslexia and hyperlexia may be two of the more obvious departures from normative ideas of reading, but whether we're neurodivergent or not we all read in different ways that can vary significantly depending on what we're reading and why we're reading it. Matthew Sweet is joined by Matt Rubery, Louise Creechan a...
Oct 07, 2022•45 min
Kamila Shamsie's new novel Best of Friends follows two women from Pakistan who take different route to power. Rona Munro's new plays explore the courts of James IV and Mary Stuart. Caroline Moorehead has written a biography of Edda Mussolini, the Italian leader's favourite daughter. Anne McElvoy talks to them about power and influence past and present. Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie is out now. You can hear her discussing her novel Home Fire and the Antigone story in a previous episode of Fre...
Oct 05, 2022•45 min
A world of sprites and spirits encountered by childhood sisters in the 1988 animated feature film by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and Studio Ghibli has been adapted for stage by the original composer Joe Hisaishi working with playwright Tom Morton-Smith and Director Phelim McDermott. Chris Harding and guests look at how this story relates to Japanese beliefs about ghosts and nature, and how Miyazaki used ideas of childhood innocence to critique post-War Japanese society. Chris Harding is joine...
Oct 04, 2022•44 min
With their casts of outsiders, deviants and miscreants, the novels of John Cowper Powys explore where meaning can be found in a world without God. Very often, the answer is in semi-mystical communion with nature and landscape. Heir of both Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche, Powys was admired by contemporaries like Iris Murdoch, and anticipated lots of the concerns of ecocritical writers and thinkers of today. But few of his books are currently in print. To mark the 150th anniversary of his bi...
Sep 29, 2022•54 min
From a farming family in Jamaica to travelling in Europe and Northern Africa, the writer Claude McKay became a key figure in the artistic movement of the 1920s dubbed The Harlem Renaissance. Publishing under a pseudonym, his poems including To the White Friends and If We Must Die explored racial prejudice. Johnny Pitts has written an essay about working class community, disability and queer culture explored in Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille, which was published for the first time in 2020. P...
Sep 28, 2022•45 min
