From classical birds to Nazi legacies, Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria in India, early building to maritime trading: Rana Mitter and an audience at the British Academy debate history writing and hear from the six historians on the 2019 shortlist. The books are: Building Anglo-Saxon England by John Blair Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Mary Fulbrook Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln Birds in the Ancient ...
May 14, 2020•44 min
New takes on Chaucer, the Bible and African trading - Rana Mitter presents the first of 2 prograrmmes featuring 3 of the historians shortlisted for this year's history writing prize. Marion Turner has written Chaucer: A European Life Toby Green is the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution John Barton is nominated for A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths A second programme will be broadcast on Tues May 19th hearing from the...
May 13, 2020•44 min
Matthew Sweet looks at new research from Ludivine Broch, Daniel Lee, Hannah Elias and Cathy Mahoney into religion & propaganda on the radio + French soldiers in Yorkshire & a post WWII gratitude train sent by France and Italy to the USA. Daniel Lee is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who teaches at Queen Mary, London. His books include Pétain's Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–42 and The SS Officer’s Armchair due to be published in September 2020. Ludivine...
May 06, 2020•46 min
Jimmy Wales talks Diderot & collecting knowledge + Tariq Goddard on Mark Fisher aka k-punk. The French writer Diderot was thrown into prison in 1749 for his atheism, worked on ideas of democracy at the Russian court of Catherine the Great and collaborated on the creation of the first Encyclopédie. Biographer Andrew S. Curran and Jenny Mander look at Diderot's approach to editing the first encyclopedia. Plus writer and publisher Tariq Goddard on the work and legacy of his collaborator and fri...
May 04, 2020•45 min
The Porpoise, Haddon's latest novel is now out in paperback. Anne McElvoy talks to him about the language of bloke, writing female characters and taking inspiration from Shakespeare and the legend of Pericles. The conversation ranges across his career in theatre, children's writing and stories for adults, the impact of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which he published in 2003 and his recent illness. Recorded in front of an audience as part of the BBC Proms Plus series of discu...
Apr 29, 2020•44 min
The double life of the Bristol born Hollywood star of films including Suspicion, The Philadelphia Story and Charade. Matthew Sweet and guests imagine an evening in the film star's company. Born Archie Leach in 1904, he starred in films by Alfred Hitchcock, played opposite actors including Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Sophia Loren and Katherine Hepburn, and sat on the board of MGM films, before his death in 1986. Charlotte Crofts runs the bi-annual Cary Grant Festival and is an Ass...
Apr 29, 2020•45 min
Presenter Rana Mitter is joined by guests Tony Juniper, Emily Shuckburgh, Dieter Helm and Kapka Kassabova to discuss Rachel Carson’s passionate book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962 and said to be the work which launched the environmental movement. Recorded at the 2019 Hay Festival. Tony Juniper is a campaigner, sustainability adviser and writer of work including Saving Planet Earth and How many lightbulbs does it take to change a planet? Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and mathem...
Apr 22, 2020•44 min
From a Victorian Maths Professor to Aldous Huxley, AJ Ayer and Barbara Ehrenreich - Shahidha Bari explores the impact of life changing experiences & the fourth dimension talking to Mark Blacklock, Jeffrey Kripal and Lisa Mullen. Mark Blacklock has written a novel called Hinton which traces the life and ideas of Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907) who wrote an article in 1880 called What is the Fourth Dimension. Jeffrey Kripal holds the J Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Though...
Apr 21, 2020•45 min
Rana Mitter is joined by Edith Hall, Nandini Das and Beatrice Groves to explore the books which inspired Shakespeare from the Bible and classical stories to the writing of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Edith Hall is Professor in the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London. Her books include Introducing The Ancient Greeks and has co-written A People's History of Classics with Henry Stead. Nandini Das is Professor of English Literature at the University...
Apr 16, 2020•44 min
Lewis Dartnell, Gaia Vince and David Farrier join Rana Mitter to look at deep ecology. Gaia Vince is the author of Transendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty And Time Lewis Dartnell's book is called Origins: How the earth shaped history David Farrier has written a book called In Search of Future Fossils. You can find a Free Thinking programme exploring rivers and geopolitics https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051hb Matthew Sweet talks to animal expert Jane Goodall https://w...
Apr 09, 2020•57 min
Philip Dodd talks to actor Christopher Eccleston and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards and asks them for their views on the way identity and a sense of belonging are shifting. Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can hear Christopher Eccleston in BBC Radio 3's Drama Schreber, see him in the RSC Macbeth production as part of the BBC Culture in Quarantine season and in the latest series of the TV drama the A Word. Ruth Dudley Edwards' books include The Seven — The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers o...
Apr 08, 2020•44 min
From the experiences of Quaker wives in the seventeenth century to the samplers and bibles in the homes of workers in the Industrial Revolution - Dr Naomi Pullin from the University of Warwick, and Professor Hannah Barker of the University of Manchester join historian and New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton to compare notes on the way their research marks a shift in the way religious beliefs of past times are being studied. Naomi Pullin is the author of Female Friends and the Making of Transatla...
Apr 07, 2020•43 min
University Challenge star Bobby Seagull, writer and critic Jordan Erica Webber, games consultant and researcher Dr Laura Mitchell, and British Museum curator Irving Finkel join Shahidha Bari in the Free Thinking studio to get out the playing cards and the board games and consider the value of play, competitiveness and game theory. Bobby Seagull has published The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers. Irving Finkel has written Ancient Board Games, the Lewis Chessmen, Cuneiform, The Writing in Stone. He ...
Apr 04, 2020•42 min
From dance to prayer, servants to scientists, knees ups to being on our knees - Matthew Sweet talks to art critic Louisa Buck, historian and New Generation Thinker Joe Moshenska, author Tracy Chevalier and dancer and choreographer Russell Maliphant. Tracy Chevalier's novels include A Single Thread - a novel depicting the work of "broderers" creating cushions and kneelers for Winchester Cathedral in the 1930s. Russell Maliphant formed Russell Maliphant Company in 1996 and has worked with companie...
Apr 02, 2020•43 min
April 7th 1770 was the day William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumbria. As we prepare to mark this anniversary, poet and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jackson is joined by Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature, and Simon Bainbridge, Professor of Romantic Studies – Co-Directors of The Wordsworth Centre for the Study of Poetry at the University of Lancaster to discuss new insights into Wordsworth's writing. Sally Bushell has edited The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical...
Mar 31, 2020•43 min
Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath and Scottish politics today. She is joined by Kylie Murray, New Generation Thinker and Fellow in Early Scottish Literature at Cambridge University; Robert Crawford, poet and Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews; John Lloyd, journalist and author of new book, Should Auld Aquaintance Be Forgot -The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence; and by Richard Finlay, Professor of Scotti...
Mar 25, 2020•44 min
Artist and photographer Sunil Gupta, authors CN Lester (Trans Like Me) and Tom Shakespeare (The Sexual Politics of Disability), and Barbican curator Alona Pardo join Matthew Sweet in a discussion prompted by the Barbican exhibition called Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography to debate whether the old construct of masculinity in our culture is broken? As new ideas and thinking enter the debate, what is essential and what we can do away with as we look to build a new masculinity? Producer...
Mar 24, 2020•45 min
Deborah Levy and Laurence Scott talk to Shahidha Bari about the writer's work from his earliest novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to his Essay Aspects of the Novel (1927). Recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library. Producer: Torquil MacLeod Laurence Scott is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic, Comma, Lightning. He presented a Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Merchant Ivory which includes interviews about their film adpatations of EM Fo...
Mar 23, 2020•58 min
Mark Honigsbaum historian of epidemics, literary scholars Lisa Mullen & Sarah Dillon, UNESCO's Riel Miller & philosopher Rupert Read talk with Matthew Sweet. If uncertainty is a feature of our situation at the moment, it's the stock in trade of people who try to think about the future. Riel Miller is an economist at UNESCO, who works on future literacy. Rupert Read is an environmental campaigner with Extinction Rebellion and is speaking here in a personal capacity. Sarah Dillon is New Ge...
Mar 20, 2020•40 min
Matthew Sweet investigates viruses and how they could disrupt our understanding of the nature of organisms, and looks at what history can teach us about the current pandemic. With philosopher John Dupré, historian Mark Honigsbaum, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and artist Matt Adams who works with Blast Theory. Mark Honigsbaum is the author of The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris. Lisa Mullen has written Mid-Century Gothic: The Uncanny Objects of Modernity in...
Mar 19, 2020•41 min
From Roman sandals to trainers and stilettos. Shahidha Bari looks at the shoe trade, with guests including Thomas Turner, who has written about sneakers in his book The Sports Shoe, A History From Field To Fashion; Tansy Hoskins, who examines global commerce in her book Footwork: What Your Shoes Are Doing To The World; Rebecca Shawcross, Shoe Curator at Northampton Museum & Art Gallery; and Roman shoe expert Owen Humphreys from Museum of London Archaeology. Producer: Emma Wallace...
Mar 19, 2020•45 min
It's sometimes defined as 'the literature of cognitive estrangement'. In other words, it's a genre that helps us see things in a new light. Hetta Howes discusses current academic thinking on science fiction, as a way of thinking that extends beyond writing, film and TV to architecture and beyond. With Caroline Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and Amy Butt, Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Reading. This conversation w...
Mar 18, 2020•48 min
The rate of social and technological change in the 20th century was unarguably frenetic. A key measure used by politicians, economists and journalists in that time has been GDP growth. But is Growth as a pointer still fit for purpose? And should all countries still aspire to achieve growth? Is the world on a longer-term slowdown? Would that be a bad thing? And as the shock of coronavirus echoes through communities and economies around the world, will our conceptions of value and cost be redefine...
Mar 17, 2020•48 min
Entertainment writer Caroline Frost, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and historian & podcast host Greg Jenner join Matthew Sweet as exhibitions about Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol open in London. Greg Jenner presents the BBC Sounds podcast You're Dead to Me and has just published a book called Dead Famous: An Unexpected history of celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things runs at the National Portrait Gallery from March 12th to June 7th. Andy Warhol runs...
Mar 12, 2020•46 min
New Generation Thinker Catherine Fletcher and Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones join Rana Mitter to discuss how women's stories have shaped art and advertising from the baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi to the suffragettes promoting boot polish in 20th-century England. And against the backdrop of the Me Too movement, Rana hears how the best-selling novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 became a rallying cry for young women in south Korea. Catherine Fletcher's new book about the Italian Renaissance p...
Mar 11, 2020•45 min
Maaza Mengiste, Christina Lamb, Julie Wheelwright join Eleanor Barraclough to look at women's experience of fighting from Ethiopia's war with Mussolini to modern day Sudan back to Amazonians and British and French colonial troops in Canada. And academic Shawn Sobers discusses his research into the years Haile Selassie spent living in Bath after he escaped from a war-torn Ethiopia. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields by Christina Lamb looks at rape as a weapon in war. Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow...
Mar 10, 2020•45 min
Howard Jacobson, Bari Weiss, Hadley Freeman, and Jonathan Freedland join Matthew Sweet.
Mar 06, 2020•45 min
What is a writer's duty? Katie Cooper considers Storm Jameson's campaigning for refugees, her 1940 appeal To the Conscience of the World and why her fiction fell out of favour but is now seeing a revival of interest. Born in Yorkshire in 1891, she wrote war novels and speculative fiction, collections of criticism - including an analysis of modern drama in Europe, the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and a host of novels set in European countries. During the Sec...
Mar 05, 2020•15 min
Shahidha Bari looks at the legacy of Frank Ramsey who died in 1930 aged 27, but not before doing work that changed the course of philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics. Shahidha is joined by Cheryl Misak, who has recently published the first biography of Ramsey, and philosopher Steven Methven. Plus, philosopher Emily Thomas on the role travel has played in the development of philosophy. Cheryl Misak's biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is out now. Emily Thomas' The Meaning of...
Mar 05, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Hetta Howes learns how Sylvia Xueni Pan from Goldsmiths, University of London is using VR to do everything from training GPs not to overprescribe antibiotics to creating a groundbreaking Peaky Blinders game. While Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the RSC, is working with researchers and practitioners like Sylvia to create extraordinary virtual experiences for theatre audiences. They are among the many women playing key roles in the creative industries - the fastest growing sector ...
Mar 05, 2020•45 min
