How do you put the Bible on stage or make a modern medieval mystery play? Shahidha Bari talks to the National Theatre of Brent's Patrick Barlow as his play The Messiah starts at UK tour. New Generation Thinker Daisy Black watches a new medieval mystery play in Stoke. Plus the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library sees a giant Northumbrian Bible returned to Britain for the first time in 1300 years. And historian Iona Hine discusses her research into how we understand biblical sto...
Oct 23, 2018•46 min
Matthew Sweet takes to the woods with thoroughly modern witch, William Hunter, and writer and folklorist, Zoe Gilbert, to look for green men and suitable spots for a ritual. If modern magic is all about re-enchanting the world then old magic was more about fear and keeping witches out but as a new exhibition opens in Oxford, Dafydd Daniel and Lisa Mullen discuss whether magical thinking is an inevitable part of being human while in Marie Darrieussecq's new novel set in a not very far away and dy...
Oct 18, 2018•47 min
What's it like to be banned from your own country or to have your writing spark a row? Rana Mitter's guests talk identity, borders, forest landscapes and the long impact of the Ottoman empire. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama is associated with the phrase "the end of history". His latest book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment looks at what he sees as the threats to Liberalism. Alev Scott has travelled through 12 countries, talking to figures includi...
Oct 18, 2018•50 min
Putting women back into the C20th history of British philosophy. Shahidha Bari talks to Alex Clark about the 2018 Man Booker Prize, considers the thinking of Mary Midgley whose death at the age of 99 was announced last week and puts her alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch who were undergraduates at Oxford University during WWII. The In Parenthesis project of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman asks whether you can call them a philosophical school. Plus, Mark Robinson...
Oct 16, 2018•46 min
Is soap opera the heir to the gothic novel? Is America seeing a resurgence of gothic TV and fiction? Shahidha Bari looks at new Gothic research with Nick Groom and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Vampires weren’t invented by horror writers, but were first encountered by doctors, priests and bureaucrats working in central Europe in the mid 17th century - that's the argument of The Vampire: A New History written by "the Goth Prof" Nick Groom from Exeter University. Xavier Aldana Reyes researches at the Gothi...
Oct 16, 2018•38 min
Helena Kennedy on #MeToo and the message it sends that the British legal system needs to get its house in order. Plus power in Pinter's plays and rape in Chaucer. Shahida Bari talks to theatre directors Jamie Lloyd and Lia Williams about language and the roles for women on stage in the Pinter at the Pinter Season, an event featuring all of Harold Pinter's short plays, performed together for the first time. And Professor Elizabeth Robertson has been researching references to rape in Chaucer's wri...
Oct 11, 2018•46 min
The Scottish Clearances by Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh. The Farm, a new novel by Hector Abad is translated by Anne McLean The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College. Anne McElvoy presents a short film Is Capitalism Here to Stay for BBC Ideas https://www.bbc.com/ideas/ Browse their A-Z of Isms
Oct 11, 2018•45 min
Does LSD open the doors of perception or just mess with your head? Leo Butler tells Matthew Sweet about writing a play inspired by taking part in the world's first LSD medical trials since the 1960s. Philosophers Peg O'Connor and Barry Smith lock horns with neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt over whether drug-induced hallucinations allow access to a deeper reality. Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Oct 10, 2018•47 min
How does Chaucer write about rape and consent ? What links Kim Kardashian West & Margery Kempe - an English Christian mystic and mother of 14 children who wrote about her religious visions in the 1420s in what has been called the first autobiography in English. Alicia Spencer-Hall, Elizabeth Robertson and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about new research and what a feminist take brings to our understanding of the medieval period. Made with the assist...
Oct 06, 2018•41 min
. Museum directors from USA, Austria and Britain look at the challenges of displaying their collections for new audiences. Anne McElvoy's guests include Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA, Sabine Haag, Director, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum. Recorded with an audience at the Royal Institution in London as one of the events for the 2018 Frieze London Art Fair. Find our playlist of discussions about the Visua...
Oct 04, 2018•44 min
Matthew Sweet talks to the author of The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry, about her re-imagining of the Melmoth story, first published in 1920 by the Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. His Melmoth the Wanderer was a critique of Catholicism following a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for living 150 years longer. Sarah Perry's version begins in Prague with a female scholar who feels she's being watched. Plus, experts on the Gothic Roger Luckhurst and Helen Whe...
Oct 03, 2018•46 min
Gandhi's power, portable citizenship and Indian writing. Rana Mitter talks to Ramachandra Guha about his new biography of Gandhi, hears about "portable citizenship from Indrajit Roy and discusses Indian writing and literary tradition with Amit Chaudhuri and Sandeep Parmar. Rana also breaks off from the subcontinent briefly to explore the mysterious disappearance of China's biggest film star, Fan Bingbing with the historian, Julia Lovell. Ramachandra Guha has written Gandhi: The Years that Change...
Oct 02, 2018•50 min
Lisa Appignanesi, prize-winning writer and Freudian scholar, with a personal memoir that explores public and private loss and anger. Presenter Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough also looks at a Festival of Canadian and North American writing meeting authors Heather O'Neill and Cherie Dimaline whose novels explore the meaning of family in dystopian visions of Canada, urban and rural. And, as the Oceania exhibition opens at the Royal Academy in London and a new Pacific Gallery opens at the National Mari...
Sep 27, 2018•45 min
Can causing offence be a good thing? Philip Dodd explores this question with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, the American author, Camille Paglia and the Danish journalist, Flemming Rose. Camille Paglia is a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia whose Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson was rejected by seven publishers before it became a best-seller. Flemming Rose was Culture Editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when in Septemb...
Sep 26, 2018•52 min
Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie talk to Matthew Sweet about how humour changes and the targets of their TV comedy show which ran during the '70s and early '80s. A box set of the 67 half hour episodes is being released. Producer: Harry Parker.
Sep 25, 2018•46 min
How Nietzsche might have responded to current debates, including Trump, 'post-truth', identity and Europe. Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about his new work on identity and biographer Sue Prideaux and philosophers Hugo Drochon and Katrina Mitcheson join Matthew Sweet to think about Nietzsche. I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux is published on October 30th. Her books include Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Strindberg: A Life,...
Sep 20, 2018•46 min
Rana Mitter talks to poet and writer Ben Okri and writer and journalist Agnes Poirier about the contemporary resonance of The Outsider by Albert Camus (1913-1960), and as a new biography of the anthropological giant, Claude Levi-Strauss by Emmanuelle Loyer comes out in English, he talks to anthropologist, Adam Kuper about travel, anthropology and how we classify. Rana is also joined by Peter Moore who has written a history of the ship Endeavour which carried James Cook on his first explorations ...
Sep 19, 2018•45 min
Ideas of tryanny, martyrdom, sin and grace in a new play set against Indian politics today and an exhibition which might be called pornographic. April De Angelis has relocated a Lope De Vega play to contemporary India, and a backdrop of political unrest. The original Fuenteovejuna was inspired by an incident in 1476 when inhabitants of a village banded together to seek retribution on a commander who mistreated them. The Spanish Baroque artist and printmaker, Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) is known...
Sep 18, 2018•45 min
Bettany Hughes and Alex Clark discuss feminist retellings of The Iliad. Rachel Stirling reads extracts.
Sep 18, 2018•22 min
The author of Birdsong talks to Anne McElvoy in one of the first conversations about his new novel. Sebastian Faulks discusses depicting France past and present from World War I to Algeria and immigration now as he publishes his latest novel called Paris Echo. Recorded with an audience at the BBC Proms. Producer: Fiona McLean
Sep 13, 2018•45 min
Deborah Frances-White host of podcast The Guilty Feminist joins Catherine Fletcher. Novelist Michèle Roberts reviews a portrait of artist Louise Bourgeois woven from conversations, and comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes discusses co-writing a modern political comedy based on The Assembly Women by Aristophanes, whilst Jeanie O'Hare talks about filling in the gaps in Shakespeare's depiction of Queen Margaret in her new play. Now, Now Louison written by Jean Frémon, translated by Cole Swensen a...
Sep 12, 2018•45 min
A silent room and a design to encourage disobedience are amongst the exhibits that Matthew Sweet and Laurence Scott visit at the London Design Biennale as they consider the role of Design in the week the V&A opens a new museum in Dundee. New Generation Thinker Kylie Murray talks about her discoveries of scribblings in the margins of books and what they tell us about Dundee's connections with France in late medieval times. Plus film critic Peter Biskind explores the effect of superhero and zo...
Sep 11, 2018•46 min
The Booker long-listed crime writer, Belinda Bauer and the novelist, Patricia Duncker, join Matthew Sweet to discuss sex and death in literature. Embracing everything from Emily Bronte to Margaret Atwood they consider the challenges and the pitfalls posed by both subjects and whether they’re easier to approach now than they were in the past. Producer: Zahid Warley
Sep 03, 2018•36 min
The appearance of the aurora borealis has entranced and intrigued people from cultures across the world, inspiring art, music and stories, including tonight's Proms world premiere of Iain Bell's Aurora. But what creates it? Why is it green? Physicists Melanie Windridge, author of Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights, and Nathan Case of Aurorawatch UK discuss the science that lies behind the Northern Lights. BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is the author of Beyo...
Aug 29, 2018•21 min
W H Auden called his longest poem, The Age of Anxiety a baroque eclogue - a description which hints at its rich complexity. Its account of a meeting between four strangers in a New York bar inspired Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony and was much admired by T S Eliot. The writers Glyn Maxwell and Polly Clark explore some of the intricacies of the poem with Matthew Sweet and explain how Auden has influenced their poetry and prose. Producer: Zahid Warley
Aug 29, 2018•31 min
Novelist Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard and Stone Cradle, talks to writer Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places, about their shared Romany heritage and the culture of the wider Romany diaspora. Presenter: Sophie Coulombeau
Aug 23, 2018•37 min
Fairy tales are not just familiar stories told to children but are also a means of conveying dark truths about morality and behaviour to adults. There are similarities between stories shared in different cultures . Composer Kerry Andrew has published her first novel Swansong and she performs many traditional songs. She talks to writer Katherine Langrish, author of Seven Miles of Steel Thistles and a “Troll Trilogy” about the cultural legacy of fairy tales and the lessons we can learn from them i...
Aug 21, 2018•32 min
Novelist Will Self, shark expert Gareth Fraser and film expert Ian Hunter join Matthew Sweet for a discussion about sharks, whales and the impact of the book and film Jaws. Jaws started out as a novel which reads as a sociological study of a small American coastal resort full of rather unlikeable characters. It ended up as an iconic film whose heroes engage in a fight to the death with a Great White Man-Eating Machine. Matthew Sweet discusses how the shark came to fill the space once held by the...
Aug 20, 2018•45 min
Christopher Harding talked to the philosopher Mark Vernon and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes about figures from the past and present who have searched for a sense of transcendence and experienced ecstatic states.
Aug 14, 2018•22 min
Historians Laura Rowe and Saul David discuss the controversy surrounding the 1915 German torpedo attack that sank the RMS Lusitania, killing 1198 passengers and crew. Presented by Anindya Raychaudhuri.
Aug 12, 2018•27 min
