Long Irish novelist Edna O'Brien in conversation. As she publishes her latest novel The Little Red Chairs she looks back at her literary career which has included short stories, a memoir, plays and poems. Her first novel The Country Girls was published in 1960 and it was banned by the Irish censor for its discussion of sex and social attitudes. Her latest story The Little Red Chairs depicts a multi-cultural Ireland in which a wanted war criminal from the Balkans settles in a west coast village c...
Nov 04, 2015•44 min
Matthew Sweet is joined by chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, and former British ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, to discuss Putin and Putinism. BBC 6 Music's Stuart Maconie author of The Pie at Night - a book which explores northern leisure pursuits - reviews an exhibition about Salford Lads Club. Feminist and co-founder of the group Justice for Women, Julie Bindel, and Rachael Jolley, editor of Index on Censorship magazine look at the phenomenon of 'no platforming'. Radio journalist Gillian...
Nov 03, 2015•45 min
New Generation Thinker, Dr Alun Withey has researched an unusual experiment in health care which took place in the 18th century in Bamburgh in Northumberland.
Oct 29, 2015•10 min
Anne McElvoy talks to New Generation Thinker and medical historian Alun Withey and former NHS executive Mark Britnell about health systems past and present. She discusses with Abigail Morris of the Jewish Museum an exhibition there exploring the cultural significance of blood and hears from Jane Taylor about her lecture and play exploring a strange but true tale of resurrection which is part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities running across UK universities. Professor Daniel Pick discu...
Oct 29, 2015•45 min
Erica Jong has followed her book "Fear of Flying" with "Fear of Dying". She talks to Philip Dodd about feminism and ageing. Richard Jones discusses Eugene O'Neill's 1922 drama The Hairy Ape - which stars Bertie Carvel as the ship labourer trying to find a way to belong in the divided society of New York. Ben Bernanke, former chair of the US Federal Reserve, has a more contemporary view of the divide between rich and poor in New York. The Hairy Ape is at The Old Vic Theatre in London from October...
Oct 29, 2015•44 min
As Halloween fast approaches, Matthew Sweet is joined round the Free Thinking cauldron by guests including Marina Warner and Suzannah Lipscomb to consider the season of the witch. Film critic Larushka Ivan-zadeh and Claire Nally from Northumbria University review new blockbuster The Last Witch Hunter starring Vin Diesel, and consider the depictions of witches on film ahead of a screening of Vincent Price's 1968 horror classic Witchfinder General. Catherine Spooner of Lancaster University and his...
Oct 27, 2015•44 min
The new James Bond film Spectre is reviewed by New Generation Thinker Sam Goodman. The Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi talks to Rana Mitter about facing death threats and surviving prison - and her novels which include Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and God Dies by the Nile. Lord Browne, former CEO of BP, makes the case for business to engage with society in a discussion with Mark Littlewood from the Institute of Economic Affairs. Dr Elisabeth Kendall has been studying the way so called Isl...
Oct 23, 2015•44 min
Marilynne Robinson, Thomas Harding, Imtiaz Dharker discuss ideas of home with Philip Dodd. Are we becoming increasingly rootless, or simply finding new ways to put down roots. Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson is the author of a novel called Home and finds her own roots in Iowa and in her Calvinist faith. In her new collection of essays The Givenness of Things, she explores the ideas that make up the religious and philosophical homeland of Europe and America – Calvinism, Humanism,...
Oct 21, 2015•45 min
Matthew Sweet talks to Richard Mabey about his new book The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination and hears how so much of our history has been driven by our discovery and exploitation of their properties but it's time to put our own human social preoccupations aside. Joining them, Andrea Wulf presents her findings on the extraordinary scientist Alexander von Humboldt, a seminal figure in human attempts to understand nature. And it was nearly fifty years ago that The Black Panther Party ...
Oct 21, 2015•44 min
The actress and author Meera Syal and playwright Tanika Gupta discuss adapting Syal's novel Anita and Me for the stage. Chosen as a GCSE set text, the novel Anita and Me depicts the friendship of a Punjabi teenager Meena and Anita, a white more rebellious girl living in the same West Midlands village in the 1970s. Filmed in 2002, the autobiographical novel has now been adapted for stage by Tanika Gupta, directed by the Artistic Director of Birmingham Rep Roxana Silbert. Rana Mitter chairs a disc...
Oct 15, 2015•44 min
Salman Rushdie talks to Philip Dodd about a sense of belonging, why we are living in strange times and how his new novel mixes 1001 Nights with comic book heroes. Also historian Niall Ferguson on Henry Kissinger and cold war politics. Salman Rushdie's novel is called Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights. Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is called Kissinger: Volume I: The Idealist, 1923-1968
Oct 14, 2015•44 min
Matthew Sweet hears from Alex Clark direct from the 2015 Man Booker Award ceremony on this year's winning novel. There's discussion of imaginative histories of Weather and Twilight with Alex Harris and Peter Davidson. They'll be explaining why painters first noticed the witching hour at the end of the 18th century, and why Anglo-Saxons only told stories about the winter, why April showers were precious in the middle-ages and fog was the novelists' weather of choice in the 19th century. Plus the ...
Oct 13, 2015•45 min
The American poet Mark Doty, Professor Sarah Churchwell and the young British poet Andrew McMillan join Matthew Sweet for a programme on National Poetry Day dedicated to one of the classics of American poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Readings will be performed by William Hope.
Oct 08, 2015•44 min
Antony Sher and the stars of next Sunday's Drama on 3: Death of a Salesman, Zoë Wanamaker and David Suchet, discuss acting Arthur Miller with Philip Dodd. Also, are university campuses becoming places where free speech and debate is difficult? To discuss Free Thinking brings together Director of Curriculum for Cohesion and university lecturer Dr Matthew Tariq Wilkinson, journalist and Deputy Editor of the New Statesman Helen Lewis, and lawyer and author Anthony Julius.
Oct 07, 2015•45 min
James Fenton discusses his career as a poet and journalist ahead of collecting the PEN Pinter Prize 2015 in a ceremony tonight. New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton researches the plays performed by Suffragettes. She offers her verdict on the film Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Mulligan. And Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street 25 years ago. Anne McElvoy is at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester to discuss her legacy with her official biographer, C...
Oct 06, 2015•46 min
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro discusses 1606 - the year Macbeth was written. And Matthew Sweet is joined by Sonia Massai and Andrew Hilton to review the new film starring Michael Fassbender and look at other cinematic versions of "the Scottish play". Matthew also talks to playwright Barrie Keeffe about a revival of his 1977 play Barbarians, while Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Fern Riddell offers her take on the controversy surrounding the Jack The Ripper Museum in London's East End.
Oct 01, 2015•45 min
On the final day of Jeremy Corbyn's first Labour Party conference as Leader, Philip Dodd presents a discussion about populism in politics, with philosopher Roger Scruton, historian Justin Champion, journalist and commentator John Lloyd, and activist Sirio Canos Donnay, a representative of the Spanish populist movement Podemos. Romola Garai stars in a new production of Measure for Measure directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins. They discuss this drama of puritanism and carnal desire.
Sep 30, 2015•45 min
Margaret Atwood's new novel imagines the future of sexual desire in a social experiment. Professors Yuval Harari and Barry Cunliffe explore the long history of mankind. And Rana Mitter visits the new exhibition about Celts at the British Museum and discusses it with historian and author Dr Janina Ramirez and Professor Barry Cunliffe.
Sep 25, 2015•44 min
Orhan Pamuk, novelist and Nobel Prize winner is in conversation with Edmund de Waal - the potter and best-selling author of the Hare with Amber Eyes - who has been on a quest to explore the history of porcelain. Philip Dodd chairs a conversation ranging across the colours white and red, appreciating and conserving craft skills, the way historic objects are displayed in museums, and the changing identity of cities such as Desden, Jingdezhen and Istanbul.
Sep 24, 2015•44 min
Rana Mitter explores why we sleep with pioneering researcher into the body clock, Russell Foster; Matt Berry, actor, comedian and writer who wrestles with insomnia; Brigitte Steger who has explored Japanese and other global sleeping cultures and Katharine Craik, a renaissance scholar whose new opera project for children is called Watching...back in the 16th century the watching hours were part of a segmented sleep pattern which only disappeared with the industrial revolution.
Sep 23, 2015•44 min
Professor Lynda Nead has curated an exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London which looks at depictions of "the Fallen Woman" in Victorian England by artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Redgrave, George Frederic Watts and Thomas Faed. The display includes a specially-commissioned sound installation by musician and composer Steve Lewinson. Lynda Nead joins Anne McElvoy along with James Bartholomew, an historian of the Welfare State who has studied Victorian responses to poverty. ...
Sep 23, 2015•45 min
Rana Mitter is joined by young academics who are exploring Indian history during British rule and looking at India in the second world war
Sep 17, 2015•44 min
Frederick Forsyth discusses spy fiction and fact as he publishes his memoirs and Matthew Sweet explores our emotions with New Generation Thinker Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith, Thomas Dixon and Susie Orbach. Also a review of portraits chosen at the National Portrait Gallery by Simon Schama
Sep 16, 2015•45 min
South African artist William Kentridge discusses making animated films, drawings and directing the opera Lulu. William Boyd's latest novel Sweet Caress traces the life and work of a photographer. Philip Dodd talks to him about viewing 20th century history and news events through the lens of a fictional photo journalist. New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge, documentary photographer Anna Fox and Eamonn McCabe – portrait photographer and former picture editor of the Guardian newspaper - discuss the...
Sep 15, 2015•45 min
Radio 3 presenter Ian McMillan, poet Kate Clanchy and Judith Palmer of the Poetry Society introduce the winning entries in this year's Proms Poetry Competition. The Poems are read by Carolyn Pickles.
Sep 08, 2015•33 min
dha Bari and Houda Echouafni on this powerful islamic folk-cycle - Arabian Nights
Sep 07, 2015•21 min
David Hare, one of Britain's leading playwrights, discusses his new memoir, 'The Blue Touch Paper', with Matthew Sweet. When the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. He explains how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.
Sep 04, 2015•20 min
Michael Cox explores the history of the London School of Economics with Stephanie Flanders
Sep 02, 2015•20 min
The American novelist Willa Cather's 'The Song of the Lark' was first published a hundred years ago in 1915. Her biographer Dame Hermione Lee talks to New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon about Cather's story of a young girl who leaves her home town in Colorado to pursue a career as an opera singer. The reader is Laurel Lefkow. Recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music.
Aug 31, 2015•20 min
Ian Christie on the Lumiere brothers' invention of the world's first film camera in 1895.
Aug 22, 2015•19 min
