Sunil Gupta says his photographs ask what does it mean to be a gay Indian man? Shahidha Bari looks at his work and talks to the winners of the 2020 Polari Prize, which usually takes place at London's Southbank Centre, and to Paul Burston, founder of the salon. https://www.polarisalon.com/ Amrou Al-Kadhi's memoir Life as a Unicorn deals with their life growing up as a queer Arab Muslim drag queen through stories of tropical aquariums, quantum physics and Egyptian divas. They are the winner of the...
Oct 21, 2020•44 min
How a Croydon housewife baffled a 1930s ghost hunter - the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale, talks to Matthew Sweet about her discovery of a dossier of interviews about a poltergeist "terrorising" Alma Fielding which made headlines in the 1938 Sunday Pictorial newspaper. 30 artists interested in seances and spirituality are on show in an exhibition co-curated by Simon Grant and the Drawing Room Gallery in partnership with Hayward Touring. Plus we return to a radio experim...
Oct 20, 2020•49 min
Jacques Derrida was the superstar philosopher of the 1980s and 90s. Often associated with the philosophical movement known as 'poststructualism', he made the enigmatic statement that 'There is nothing outside the text'. Today, one conspiracy theorist has commented that he studied poststructualism in college and learned from it that everything is narrative. Is Derrida and his style of thought a pathway to the 'post-truth' age? Or is that a crude distortion of an important body of philosophical wo...
Oct 15, 2020•54 min
Poet Daljit Nagra and crime writer Val McDermid discuss capturing different forms of speech, a sense of place, and politics - in a conversation organised with the Royal Society of Literature and Durham Book Festival, and hosted by presenter Shahidha Bari. Plus, how the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox has lessons for us all today. As a new translation and retelling by Anne Louise Avery is published, she joins Shahidha to discuss the book with Noreen Masud - a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker fro...
Oct 14, 2020•44 min
From a VR version of Viking life and what you can learn from gaming, to describing collections in military museums, to the range of independent museums and the passions of their founders for everything from old engines to bakelite, witchcraft to shells. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough looks at new research into a range of collections, why more are opening and what is missing. Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology at Birkbeck, University of London. She leads the MAPPING MUSEUMS research project an...
Oct 13, 2020•45 min
Directors of the Hermitage, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the National Gallery, Singapore explain how they are dealing both with the challenge of Covid-19 and the greater accountability demanded by worldwide social justice movements. Anne McElvoy hosts a discussion organised in collaboration with Frieze Masters and Frieze London, talking to: Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, Director of the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Was...
Oct 08, 2020•45 min
Biographers of Tom Stoppard, Sylvia Pankhurst and a little known SS soldier compare notes. How does the process differ if your subject is alive, if their story has already been enshrined in history, if they were active in the Nazi regime? Anne McElvoy talks to three authors about researching and writing a life history and the journeys it has taken them on from a Nazi letter discovered in an armchair, to the play scripts by a living dramatist who fled Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia and has bec...
Oct 06, 2020•45 min
From Roman emperor Septimius Severus to Senegal's Signares to the ten days in Harlem that Fidel Castro used to link up with African leaders at the UN, through to the missed opportunity to enshrine racial equality in post war negotiations following World War I; Olivette Otele, Simon Hall and Jake Hodder share their research findings with New Generation Thinker Christienna Fryar. Olivette Otele is Professor of the History of Slavery at the University of Bristol and Vice-President of the Royal Hist...
Oct 02, 2020•44 min
New critical biographies of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and a reissue of Anne Sexton's poems prompt a conversation for National Poetry Day about our image of a poet. Is it possible to separate a poet's life from their work? Shahidha Bari is joined by New Generation Thinkers Sophie Oliver and Peter Mackay, and by Plath biographer Heather Clark. And she talks to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi about her new novel, The First Woman – a coming of age story of a young girl in Uganda, mixing modern femin...
Oct 01, 2020•46 min
From Cuyp's paintings, to Wordsworth's wanderings to modern dairy management and soil fertility via Victorian Industrial farming and talking Swiss satirical cows - Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks joins Matthew Sweet in a programme marking the anniversary of the poet Wordsworth, who helped shape attitudes to landscape. Other guests include New Generation Thinker Seán Williams from the University of Sheffield and Professor Karen Sayer from Leeds Trinity University who is writing Farm Animals in Brit...
Sep 30, 2020•54 min
The tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, having a Jamaican Welsh identity, the idea of freedom and anti-colonial resistance, the alarming rise of youth suicide among Indigenous people in Canada and how a group of pioneering cultural anthropologists – mostly women – shaped our interpretation of the modern world: these are the topics tackled in the shortlist for the 2020 prize for a book fostering global understanding. Rana Mitter talks to the authors. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands ...
Sep 29, 2020•44 min
Edmund Fawcett's latest book focuses on the historic and contemporary conflicts in Conservatism. He describes how the constant tensions within the Conservative political thought have been exposed and what it might mean for the continuation of the tradition. Paul Vallely argues that philanthropy is about more than mere altruism. It is always an expression of power, regardless of any desire to make the world a better place. He discusses the contradictions at the heart of philanthropy from the Gree...
Sep 24, 2020•45 min
How German argument differs from English, the links between Arabic and Chinese and different versions of The 1001 Nights to the use of slang and multiple languages in the work of young performers and writers in the West Midlands: John Gallagher looks at a series of research projects at different UK universities which are exploring the impact and benefits of multilingualism. Katrin Kohl is Professor of German Literature and a Fellow of Jesus College. She runs the Creative Multilingualism project....
Sep 23, 2020•44 min
The film starring Michael Caine was adapted from a 1970 Ted Lewis novel set in an underworld of gangsters and teenage pornography. Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Pamela Hutchinson and John Gray talk with Matthew Sweet about the influence of the book and film. Originally set in Scunthorpe, Lewis' novel Jack's Return Home was relocated to Newcastle/Gateshead for the film which Mike Hodges adapted and directed. A series of events marking what would have been Ted Lewis's 80th birthday are taking place a...
Sep 22, 2020•46 min
From the influential part played by Sikh queens, through the ties of marriage and religion which helped shape the Western world, back to the links between Neanderthals and early man: Rana Mitter talks to Priya Atwal, Joseph Henrich, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes about family ties, power networks, and history. Priya Atwal has published Royal and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire. Dr Atwal is a Teaching Fellow in Modern South Asian History at King's College London. Joseph Henrich is a Profess...
Sep 17, 2020•45 min
From fancy dress parties using native American head-dresses to the continuing significance of Wampum belts made of shells - how do particular objects help us tell the story of the colonisation of America and what is the legacy of the ideas brought by Puritan settlers who left English port cities like Plymouth and Southampton 400 years ago? Eleanor Barraclough talks to 3 academics whose research helps us answer these questions - Sarah Churchwell, Kathryn Gray and Lauren Working - and we hear cont...
Sep 16, 2020•49 min
Susanna Clarke, Adam Scovell, Lucy Arnold and Anton Bakker are Matthew Sweet's guests. Susanna Clarke talks about the inspiration behind the follow up to her best-selling first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Piranesi is the springboard for a discussion about haunted spaces and mind-bending architecture in film, fiction and art from MC Escher to Christopher Nolan's Inception, Shirley Jackson to Mervyn Peake. The print maker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was born 300 years ago on Oct 4t...
Sep 15, 2020•45 min
The BBC Radiophonic workshop was founded in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram. This group of experimental composers, sound engineers and musical innovators provided music for programmes including The Body in Question, Horizon, Quatermass, Newsround, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chronicle and Delia Derbyshire's iconic Doctor Who Theme before being shut down by Director General John Birt in 1998. Tying into the 2020 celebration of classic Prom concerts, this episode of Free Thinking...
Aug 06, 2020•43 min
Classicists Edith Hall and Barry Cunliffe explore the importance of the sea in the classical world in a discussion hosted by Rana Mitter. Pat Barker and Giles Fraser look at Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and the depiction of faith in those novels with presenter Ian McMillan. The Ancient Greeks often preferred to take sea journeys rather than risk encounters with brigands and travelling through mountain passes inland and colonised all round the Black Sea and Medi...
Jul 29, 2020•42 min
Novelist Ben Okri, playwright Oladipo Agboluaje and academic Louisa Egbunike join Matthew Sweet to look at the influential writing of Nigerian playwright and author Wole Soyinka - and specifically at his play 1975 Death and the King's Horseman. In 1986 he became the first African author to be given the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has worked teaching at many universities in the USA, and began playwriting after studying at University College Ibadan, and then at Leeds University and working as a ...
Jul 29, 2020•46 min
The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has written a philosophical take on the current pandemic and what it tells us about society. He talks with Stella Sandford, Director of the Society for European Philosophy in the UK and author of How to Read Beauvoir, whose own research looks at sex, race and feminism, and with Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard-Henri Lévy is out now. You can find a philosophy ...
Jul 28, 2020•45 min
Anne Applebaum's new book The Twilight of Democracy has the subtitle The failure of democracy and the parting of friends. She talks to Anne McElvoy about what happened when she tried to connect up with past friends whose politics are now different to her own. The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Will Abberley tells us about her view of fashion and why women should not seek to stand out because a focus on their appearance was co...
Jul 23, 2020•45 min
Subversion in art and writing and a project to re-imagine Dada. Curator Jade French, artist Jade Montserrat, writer Lottie Whalen and 2020 New Generation Thinker Noreen Masud are in conversation with Shahidha Bari. You can find more about today's guests and their research at https://jademontserrat.com/ https://www.jadefrench.co.uk/research http://www.takedadaseriously.com/ http://lucywritersplatform.com/author/lottie-whalen/ https://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/staff/?id=17758 New Generation Th...
Jul 22, 2020•45 min
Former musician and record producer Daniel Levitin is now a leading neuroscientist and best selling author. In this year marking the anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, Rana Mitter introduces a Proms Lecture called "Unlocking the Mysteries of Music in Your Brain", which uses Beethoven's compositions to set the Proms audience it was recorded with, in 2015, a series of challenges which reveal the relationship between memory and music. You can also find Daniel Levitin talking to Rana Mitter abou...
Jul 22, 2020•59 min
Gilbert White was born on July 19th 1720 at his grandfather's vicarage in Hampshire. His Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) influenced a young Charles Darwin and he's been called England's first ecologist. Dafydd Mills Daniel from the University of Oxford tracks his influence on contemporary debates about the impact of man on the planet and the beginnings of precise and scientific observations about birds and animals. Dr Pippa Marland from the University of Leeds runs the Landlin...
Jul 15, 2020•43 min
Matthew Sweet delves into the deep history of magic, its evolution into religion and science and its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Joining his coven are novelist and historian Kate Laity, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University Chris Gosden, Jessica Gossling who's one of the leaders of the Decadence Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London and John Tresch, Professor of the History of Science and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute. The History of Magic - Fr...
Jul 14, 2020•46 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 inspired by the Barbican exhibition called Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography which has this week re-opened to visitors. They 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...
Jul 13, 2020•44 min
Dina Rezk from the University of Reading looks at politics and the role of humour as she profiles Bassem Youssef “the Jon Stewart of Egyptian satire”. As protests reverberate around the world she looks back at the Arab Spring and asks what we can learn from the popular culture that took off during that uprising and asks whether those freedoms remain. You can hear her in a Free Thinking discussion about filming the Arab Spring https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005sjw and in a discussion about Mo...
Jul 09, 2020•13 min
New Generation Thinker Brendan McGeever traces the links between anti-semitism now and pogroms in the former Soviet Union and the language used to describe this form of racism. Brendan McGeever lectures at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London. You can hear him discussing an exhibition at the Jewish Museum exploring racial stereotypes in a Free Thinking episode called Sebald, anti-semitism, Carolyn Forché https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00050d2 New ...
Jul 09, 2020•14 min
The Roman statesman Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy around the year 524 when he was incarcerated. It advises that fame and wealth are transitory and explores the nature of happiness and belief. Former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway has been wrestling with the way we understand belief. He joins Professor Seth Lerer and New Generation Thinker Kylie Murray in a discussion chaired by Matthew Sweet. Richard Holloway's new book is called Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in ...
Jul 09, 2020•45 min
