Anne McElvoy investigates the role of culture within historic Soviet expansionism and current Russian geopolitics. She talks to Charles Clover, author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism about Eurasianism, an old idea with considerable traction in Putin's Russia and why bad ideas tend to win out over good ones . Historian Polly Jones, author of Myth Memory Trauma: Rethinking the Soviet past, 1953-70 and Clem Cecil, in-coming Director of Pushkin House, are in the studi...
Feb 25, 2016•44 min
The novelist, Karl Ove Knausgård , talks to Philip Dodd as the fifth instalment of his acclaimed My Struggle series is published in the UK. The programme also considers what it means to be Scandinavian today with the Swedish journalist, Ingrid Carlberg - author of a new biography of Raoul Wallenberg; the Danish writer and translator, Dorthe Nors; and Nicholas Aylott, an expert on models of democracy in Nordic and Baltic Europe who teaches in Stockholm. Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgard i...
Feb 24, 2016•44 min
The novelist, Karl Ove Knausgård , talks to Philip Dodd as the fifth instalment of his acclaimed My Struggle series is published in the UK. The programme also considers what it means to be Scandinavian today with the Swedish journalist, Ingrid Carlberg - author of a new biography of Raoul Wallenberg; the Danish writer and translator, Dorthe Nors; and Nicholas Aylott, an expert on models of democracy in Nordic and Baltic Europe who teaches in Stockholm. Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgard i...
Feb 24, 2016•44 min
Rana Mitter discusses religion and modernity, including a conversation with Buddhist thinker Stephen Batchelor on how ancient traditions can adapt to meet modern needs. They are joined by Kader Abdolah, who's recently produced a new translation of The Qur'an, classicist Tim Whitmarsh, who has written on atheism in the Ancient Greek World, and the sociologist of religion Linda Woodhead who has investigated what people really mean when they tick the 'No Religion' box on surveys. Tim Whitmarsh is t...
Feb 23, 2016•44 min
Is politics about building a better world, or simply the art of the possible? In a special debate recorded at the London School of Economics to mark the anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia, politicians and historians debate the balance between idealism and realism in politics, international relations and political history. Chaired by Anne McElvoy. With Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London Dr John Guy, Fellow of Clare College, Uni...
Feb 18, 2016•1 hr 20 min
Jonathan Lynn, author of Yes, Minister talks to Philip Dodd about his new play Patriotic Traitor which imagines the relationship between Petain and de Gaulle as that of father and son and follows them from their first meeting in World War I to the end of the Second World War, by which time, each had sentenced the other to death. Suhdir Hazareesingh, author of In The Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle, and writer and political columnist, Anne Elisabeth Moutet join Dani...
Feb 17, 2016•45 min
Tom Shakespeare, film director Peter Greenaway and art historian Matthijs Ilsink join Matthew Sweet in Holland for an exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the death of artist Hieronymus Bosch. Matthew also talks to Plebaan Geertjan van Rossem, priest at St John's Cathedral in 's-Hertogenbosch, to get a religious perspective on Bosch's work. Het Noordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch, Holland, presents the Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius exhibition from February 13 to May 8, 2016....
Feb 16, 2016•44 min
Playwright James Graham talks to Anne McElvoy about his new comedy which puts Screaming Lord Sutch on stage. Graham's previous plays include The Vote, The Angry Brigade, This House. Historian Margaret MacMillan explores the question 'what difference do individuals make to history?' in her book History's People: Personalities and the Past. Figures include Bismarck, Babur and Roosevelt. Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, talks about his work on neural ...
Feb 11, 2016•45 min
Matthew Sweet looks at the founding of the Dada movement 100 years ago in Zurich, as the city celebrates the anniversary with a series of exhibitions and cabarets which run throughout the year. New Generation Thinker Will Abberley visits an exhibition in Oxford that plays with our notion of time as Modern Art Oxford begins a year-long celebration of 50 years, Kaleidoscope, with a show called The Indivisible Present. Janet Street Porter and Michael Grade debate when does a celebrity become a 'nat...
Feb 09, 2016•45 min
Matthew Sweet looks at the founding of the Dada movement 100 years ago in Zurich, as the city celebrates the anniversary with a series of exhibitions and cabarets which run throughout the year. New Generation Thinker Will Abberley visits an exhibition in Oxford that plays with our notion of time as Modern Art Oxford begins a year-long celebration of 50 years, Kaleidoscope, with a show called The Indivisible Present. Janet Street Porter and Michael Grade debate when does a celebrity become a 'nat...
Feb 09, 2016•45 min
Long Matthew Sweet looks at the founding of the Dada movement 100 years ago in Zurich, as the city celebrates the anniversary with a series of exhibitions and cabarets which run throughout the year. New Generation Thinker Will Abberley visits an exhibition in Oxford that plays with our notion of time as Modern Art Oxford begins a year-long celebration of 50 years, Kaleidoscope, with a show called The Indivisible Present. Janet Street Porter and Michael Grade debate when does a celebrity become a...
Feb 09, 2016•45 min
Anne McElvoy profiles the painter Joseph Crawhall (1861-1913). Born in Northumberland, he exhibited alongside Degas and Whistler and has been credited as the leader of the young radical Scottish painters The Glasgow Boys. His father was also an artist who published "A Beuk o' Newcassell Sangs Collected by Joseph Crawhall" in 1888 - a pictorial book illustrating the lyrics and music with woodcuts. Anne will be joined in her quest by the director of the Fleming Collection in London, James Knox, wh...
Feb 04, 2016•45 min
Philip Dodd interviews John Irving - author of novels including The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany. His new book is called Avenue of Mysteries and imagines the life of a crippled street-child from Mexico, Juan Diego, and his sister Lupe, who can read minds. The action cuts between Diego's present as a globe trotting, best selling writer visiting the Philippines, and his memories of his childhood in Mexico and working at a circus. The Avenue of Mysteries b...
Feb 03, 2016•44 min
As Dad's Army inspires a new film, Matthew Sweet looks at the history of the fifth column with historians Juliet Gardiner and Steven Fielding. He also meets robot designer Lola Cañamero who, along with writer Laurence Scott, talks about modelling emotions and how interacting with AI affects us. New Generation Thinker Jonathan Healey explores utopia in sci-fi as a series of events mark the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's text Utopia. Dad's Army is directed by Oliver Parker and includes perform...
Feb 02, 2016•45 min
As Radio 3 broadcasts Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun as the Sunday Drama hear theatre directors Kwame Kwei-Armah, Yael Farber and Dawn Walton and historians Kit Davis and Althea Legal Miller on her life, work and its resonances today.
Jan 29, 2016•44 min
Gardening writer Anna Pavord visits the Royal Academy exhibition Painting the Modern Garden and talks to Anne McElvoy about her new book Landskipping. New Generation Thinker Peter Mackay joins the conversation about landscapes and - as Radio 3 marks the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow with a focus on folk - he explores the way folk traditions have fed into Scottish poetry. As arguments about whether the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford should be allowed to remain in place c...
Jan 29, 2016•44 min
Philip Dodd presents a programme for Holocaust Memorial Day. Howard Jacobson discusses reinventing Shylock and exploring anti-semitism as he publishes his new novel. Historian Karen Leeder has been reading about Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth in Ostend 1936 - and a collection of Zweig's writings Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink. Sculptor Michael Sandle is known for creating memorials. He shows Philip Dodd round his new exhibition which marks his 80th year. Key works of his include S...
Jan 27, 2016•43 min
Matthew Sweet and guests explore the art of the con.... If you've ever fallen for a scam, you'll be reassured by Maria Konnikova's new book The Confidence Game, in which she explains why most of us are easy prey to con artists. Orson Welles was infamous early in his career for a radio broadcast of HG Wells' War of the Worlds which - it's said - caused genuine panic that aliens were invading earth. For Free Thinking Larushka Ivan-Zadeh discusses Welles's last film, F For Fake, which tells the tan...
Jan 26, 2016•45 min
Anne McElvoy looks at what happened to the Arab Spring five years on, talking to Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany - whose new novel is called The Automobile Club of Egypt - and to satirist and critic Karl Sharro. They will be joined by Lebanese actress Sahar Assaf talking about performing in Dario Fo and Franca Rame's monologue An Arab Woman Speaks. Also in the programme, Owen Hatherley discusses his latest book The Ministry of Nostalgia. And, lexicographer Tony Thorne and writer Hannah Jane Par...
Jan 21, 2016•45 min
Rana Mitter goes underground to discover a world which long fed the human imagination and which fulfils all humanity's practical needs outside of food and yet which has become something we like to ignore, hide, conceal and forget. Counting the potential costs for all our futures, three enthusiasts for all that lies beneath, the engineer Professor Paul Younger from Glasgow University ; Ted Nield editor of the bi-monthly magazine Geoscientist and MIT's Rosalind Williams. Professor Paul Younger fro...
Jan 20, 2016•44 min
Merlin Holland, Will Self and Fiona Shaw join Matthew Sweet for a discussion about Oscar Wilde's novel which was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in the July 1890 issue and then as a book 121 years ago in 1891. It prompted discussions about censorship and hedonism and went on to play a considerable part in the writer's downfall. Endlessly filmed, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to communicate directly to successive generations - but how much about its writer can it really tell us. Mer...
Jan 19, 2016•44 min
Matthew Sweet is joined by Professor Christopher Frayling to look at the revival of Westerns and Bryony Hanson and Laurence Scott consider the 2016 Oscar contenders.
Jan 14, 2016•45 min
Philip Dodd wrestles with an especially knotty question – does France have to stop being French to survive? Its a question which owes its urgency to recent events from the massacres of last year to the rise of the Right and an apparent erosion of the secular values that underpin the Fifth Republic. What price the France of Camus and New Wave Cinema in the face of globalisation? To answer these questions Philip is joined by the political commentator Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, the historian Liz Buettn...
Jan 14, 2016•46 min
Anne McElvoy talks to the winner of this year's TS Eliot poetry prize Sarah Howe - who won for her first collection; Anne talks to leading physicist Lisa Randall - author of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs and explores new architecture with Douglas Murphy and Owen Hopkins. New Generation Thinker Jonathan Healey looks at what history can tell us about coping with flooding.
Jan 12, 2016•45 min
Anne McElvoy looks at changing fashions and values in the art world as she talks to Observer critic Laura Cumming about her researches into a 19th-century court case involving a Velázquez portrait. New Generation Thinker Joe Moshenska joins the conversation to explain more about the trip to Spain during which the future Charles I was painted by the Spanish artist. Curator Liz Gilmore and dealer Julian Hartnoll discuss the British painter John Bratby who was celebrated and seen as an enfant terri...
Jan 08, 2016•45 min
With two plays by Lorraine Hansberry being staged in the UK in 2016, Philip Dodd looks at her writing and its resonance today. When A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959 it was the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. It is now touring the UK and being broadcast at the end of January on BBC Radio 3. Les Blancs - written 11 years later - is set in an African country on the brink of civil war and is staged at the National Theatre in Spring. The new production of Raisin in ...
Jan 07, 2016•45 min
Storm up the stairs and slam your bedroom doors, because Matthew Sweet and guests are considering The Teenager on Free Thinking tonight. David Aaronovitch remembers the trials of growing up in a Stalinist household as his new book Party Animals is published. He's joined in the studio by his brother Ben - who is also an author. Plus, Matthew Sweet considers the social history of those difficult years talking to the neuroscientist Iroise Dumontheil of Birkbeck University of London and musician Viv...
Jan 05, 2016•45 min
Ruth Scurr discusses her biography of the 17th-century antiquary and biographer John Aubrey - which has appeared on many of the newspaper selections of Books of the Year. Christopher Hampton and actress Adjoa Andoh talk to Anne McElvoy about a new production of Hampton's version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses which opens at London's Donmar Warehouse. New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough reviews a new TV version of Beowulf and how it compares to the poem she teaches. And the science w...
Dec 17, 2015•44 min
Tonight, Philip Dodd and guests reflect on safe cities, past and present - on how literature, technology, law and social engineering imagine safety and its absence in cities - and whether safe cities are in the end an oxymoron. Philip is joined by senior urban fellow at LSE Cities, Adam Greenfield, writer Beatrix Campbell, criminologist Peter Fussey, director of The Runnymede Trust Omar Khan, and historian of London Jerry White, who will be discussing Joseph Conrad's terrorist novel, The Secret ...
Dec 16, 2015•44 min
Long As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season, Matthew Sweet discusses Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries with the writer Colm Toibin, the film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and the Swedish cultural attache Ellen Wettmark. Released in 1957 and inspired by Bergman's own memories of childhood holidays in a summerhouse in the north of Sweden, Wild Strawberries tells the story of elderly professor Isak Borg, who travels from his home in Stockholm to receive an honorary doctorate. On the way, he's vi...
Dec 15, 2015•45 min
