Images of Cyril and Methodios adorn libraries, universities, cathedrals and passport pages in Slavonic speaking countries from Bulgaria to Russia, North Macedonia to Ukraine. But the journeys undertaken as religious envoys by these inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet have led to competing claims and political disagreements. Mirela Ivanova's essay considers the complications of basing ideas about nationhood upon medieval history. Mirela Ivanova teaches at the University of Sheffield and was select...
May 27, 2022•15 min
Sculptures like mouldy fruit, sea creatures that look like oil, blocks of ice carved from a melting glacier and transported to a gallery, reforesting a disused quarry: Vid Simoniti looks at different examples of environmental art and asks whether they create empathy with nature and inspire behaviour change or do we really need pictures of loft insulation and ground source heat pumps displayed on gallery walls? Vid Simoniti lectures at the University of Liverpool. He hosted a series of podcasts A...
May 27, 2022•15 min
The discovery of goffering irons, the tools used to shape ruffs, by an archaeological dig in North America, gives us clues about the way the first English settlers lived. Lauren Working's essay looks at the symbolism of the Elizabethan fashion for ruffs. Now back in fashion on zoom, they were denounced by Puritans, shown off in portraits of explorers like Raleigh and Drake, and seen by the Chesapeake as a symbol of colonisation, whilst the starch was used for porridge at a time of scarcity and w...
May 27, 2022•15 min
Henry VIII from a female perspective is on offer at the Globe Theatre this summer in a new adaptation of the play written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Globe writer in residence Hannah Khalil explains some of the more surprising innovations in this production, while New Generation Thinker Emma Whipday presents the familiar saga of Henry VIII as the story of a step-family and historian Joanne Paul reveals the machinations of the Dudley family in its quest for power and influence at the Tudor ...
May 26, 2022•45 min
Royal Trumpeter John Blanke's image is on show alongside portraits of the Tudor monarchy in an exhibition opening at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool. Blanke is the only black Tudor for whom we have an identifiable picture, painted on horseback in the royal retinue. New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday has been looking at these and other Tudor artworks. She joins Helen Hackett, author of The Elizabethan Mind and music historian Eleanor Chan for a discussion chaired by New Generation Thinker J...
May 25, 2022•45 min
The Forty Thieves gang, Buffalo Bill, designs chosen by sailors, convicts, lovers: Shahidha Bari looks at the history of tattoos with Matt Lodder, Zoe Alker and Tanya Buxton from the opening of the first commercial parlour in London’s West End in 1889 to the most popular images now and their use to enhance wellbeing. Zoe Alker has studied over 75,000 tattoos seen on convicts between 1790-1925. She teaches in the criminology department at the University of Liverpool. Matt Lodder is a Senior Lectu...
May 19, 2022•44 min
From monumental sculpture from ancient Greece, Egypt and India, wall hangings from Japan and China, to Western fine art, a British Museum exhibition asks: what does female spiritual power mean past and present? Christopher Harding is joined by the curator Belinda Crerar and by Ronald Hutton, whose new book explores Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, along with the writer Gavanndra Hodge who has investigated goddess cults of the past and present, and Anjali Sanyal from the London Durgostav Comm...
May 18, 2022•44 min
The man who killed Gandhi is the subject of a new play opening at the National Theatre by Anupama Chandrasekhar. She's one of Rana Mitter's guests along with Balkrishna Doshi, a Riba Gold Medal winner for his buildings, which include low-cost housing and research into environmental design. He studied with Le Corbusier and historian Vikram Visana joins Rana to trace the links between Corbusier, Doshi and Charles Correa. And as she directs a new play at Hampstead Theatre, the Tamasha Theatre Artis...
May 18, 2022•45 min
John Gallagher digs deep into the significance of soil with food grower and gardener Claire Ratinon, Dr Jim Scown, who has researched the role of soil in the novels of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and Anna da Silva, Project Director of Northern Roots, the UK’s largest urban farm and eco-park in the heart of Oldham in Greater Manchester. And philosopher and art historian Vid Simoniti reviews two major new exhibitions exploring our relationship with the world around us - Ra...
May 17, 2022•45 min
TV shows Hinterland and Hidden are bilingual using Welsh and English. Caryl Lewis, who has written scripts for these TV dramas and award-winning novels, joins Catherine Fletcher for an exploration of Cymraeg, the Welsh language. We hear from Richard King, whose book Brittle with Relics is an oral history of Wales in the second half of the twentieth century, Dr Elen Ifan from Cardiff University, and composer, performer and actor Seiriol Davies, whose new musical Milky Peaks is set in the 'bosom o...
May 16, 2022•45 min
How decoding Erewash, Trent, Averham and other field, river and place names from old maps can help us understand flooding patterns in Britain. Dr Richard Jones, Associate Professor of Landscape History at the University of Leicester is one of Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough’s guests. Her second guest is Dr Rebecca Wright, a Social and Cultural Historian of Energy from Northumbria University. The research projects featured are: Flood and Flow: https://waternames.wordpress.com/team/ Forthcoming manus...
May 16, 2022•34 min
Soho in films from 1948-1963 and the 1970s glamour and porn industry discussed by Matthew Sweet and his guests Jingan Young, Benjamin Halligan and David McGillivray. Producer: Torquil MacLeod Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Fillm and the Permissive Society by Benjamin Halligan is out now and so is Soho On Screen: Cinematic Spaces of Bohemia and Cosmopolitanism, 1948-1963 by Jingan Young David McGillivray is the author of Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film You c...
May 13, 2022•45 min
From a death row prisoner to the schemes to raise money dreamt up by his father: human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has written a memoir exploring the impact of mental health on his family, his clients in the legal system and himself. New Generation Thinker Sabina Dosani is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. She writes a postcard for Mental Health Week about Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Curator George Vasey discusses activism on air pollution and curator James Tayl...
May 06, 2022•45 min
Isaac Babel, born in Odessa in 1894, became a journalist and writer before being executed in 1940 in Stalin's purges. In stories of extreme economy and compression, he depicted the Polish-Soviet War of 1918-21, and the exploits of Jewish gangsters in Odessa in the years before the Soviet revolution. Matthew Sweet is joined by Linda Grant, AD Miller, Boris Dralyuk, and Diana Vonnak to discuss Babel's work and its resonances today. Producer: Luke Mulhall You might also be interested in Radio 3's s...
May 05, 2022•45 min
From full stops to emojis, a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic. The first parentheses appear in a 1399 manuscript by the Italian lawyer Coluccio Salutati, but - as her essay outlines - it took over 500 years for the sign born at the same time as the bracket, the exclamation mark (which printers rather aptly call “bang”) to find its true environment: the interne...
May 05, 2022•14 min
Linking tea, sugar, opium, addiction and trade, Fariha Shaikh's essay looks at the novel An Insular Possession published in 1986 by Timothy Mo, and at Amitav Ghosh's trilogy which began in 2008 with Sea of Poppies and how their depiction of the opium trade differs from the publication in 1821 of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which paved the way for drug memoirs. She also quotes from her researches into The Calcutta Review, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country and the book ...
May 05, 2022•13 min
What made him great? Celebrated as a military leader, Alexander took over an empire created by the Persians. Julia Hartley's essay looks at two examples of myth-making about Alexander: The Persian Boy, a 1972 historical novel by the English writer Mary Renault and the Shānāmeh or ‘Book of Kings’, an epic written by the medieval Persian poet Abdolghassem Ferdowsi. Julia Hartley lectures at King's College London. She was selected in 2021 as a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3...
May 04, 2022•13 min
From Hitchcock to George Formby, stained glass to Rachel Whiteread, Cindy Sherman to Rembrandt. A new exhibition called Reframed: The Woman in the Window is the starting point for today's conversation about windows covering everything from voyeurism and vandalism to stained glass and modernism. Shahidha Bari is joined by film scholar Adam Scovell, art curator Dr Jennifer Sliwka, architectural critic Hugh Pearman and stained glass expert Jasmine Allen. Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs at th...
May 04, 2022•45 min
Frogs, farting competitions, art connoisseurs, courtesans and crows all feature in the art of Kawanabe Kyōsai,- a key Japanese figure who challenged traditions of Japanese art. Kyōsai blurred the lines between popular and elite forms and we take a look at a new exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy. In today’s Free Thinking, Chris Harding looks at both his art and the writing of Yukio Mishima. Mishima was one of Japan's most infamous writers when he died in 1970, writing both for the mass ...
May 03, 2022•45 min
Xangô (the god of thunder) and Paso Ñañigo’, composed by the Cuban Moises Simons, were two of the numbers performed by Elsie Houston in the clubs of Paris in the 1920s. Also able to sing soprano in Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, Elsie's performances in Afro-Brazilian dialects chimed with the fashion for all things African. Adjoa Osei's essay traces Elsie's connections with Surrealist artists and writers, (there are photos of her taken by Man Ray), and looks a...
May 02, 2022•15 min
An 1856 portrait shows a 40 year old man from Benin who managed to secure his freedom after being captured. Dasalu was taken from Dahomey to Cuba, alongside over five hundred adults and children in the ship Grey Eagle. Once in Havana, he worked for the Count of Fernandina but managed to get a letter to a missionary Charles Gollmer back in Africa. Jake Subryan Richard's essay traces the way one man’s migrations reveal the shifting boundaries of slavery and freedom. Jake Subryan Richards teaches a...
Apr 29, 2022•15 min
The People's History Museum researcher Dr Shirin Hirsch, folk expert Tim Healey and writer Zoe Gilbert join Matthew Sweet to explore rituals and beliefs associated with May Day, including the otherworldly figure of Herne the Hunter, and ideas about community and collective action. Shirin Hirsch is one of the 2022 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC to turn research into radio. Tim Healey is author of The Green Man in Oxfordshire. Zoe Gilbert's latest novel Misch...
Apr 29, 2022•44 min
Africa's first filmmakers boldly revealed how, and why, colonialism lived on after the independences. Sarah Jilani takes a closer look at the works of Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé. The Malian director's 1982 film Finye (the Bambara word for wind) considers students as the winds of change, whilst Sembène's Mandabi, made in 1968, takes its title from a Wolof word deriving from the French for a postal money order – le mandat postale. Adapting his own novel about the frustrations of bureaucr...
Apr 27, 2022•14 min
A New Age mystic who fell out of favour for his apolitical views - how true a characterisation is this of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)? Anne McElvoy discusses the work and legacy of the visionary poet, from his idiosyncratic use of figures and images from both Classical mythology and Christianity to explore existential themes. Her guests are Lesley Chamberlain, author of a new biography; composer Ninfea Crutwell-Reade whose Vigil I is a setting of the first poem in the sequ...
Apr 27, 2022•45 min
Comrade or "marra" in North East dialect, and the "dharma" or the way - were put together in a portmanteau word by poet Bill Martin (1925-2010). Poet and New Generation Thinker Jake Morris-Campbell reflects on this idea of Marradharma and what it offers to future generations growing up in the post Brexit and post industrial landscape of the North East. In his essay, Jake remembers the pilgrimage he made in 2016 carrying Bill Martin's ashes in a ram's horn from Sunderland (Martin was born in a ne...
Apr 25, 2022•14 min
Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778-79) set off a new conversational style in books aimed at teaching children. She was just one of the female authors championed by Joseph Johnson, who was also responsible for publishing Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and her first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). Daisy Hay has written a history of the publisher and she joins New Generation Thinker Louise Creechan to chart changes in ideas about education from ...
Apr 21, 2022•45 min
The first pathologist in English writing? Andrea Smith looks at the figure of Warwick in Shakespeare's Henry VI. Owen Horsley is directing a new production for the RSC which involves a large community chorus. Derek Dunne's research looks at revenge - and at forgery and bureaucracy in the Tudor period whilst Ellie Chan's focus is on dissonant music. Shahidha Bari host the conversation. Owen Horsley has directed parts 2 and 3 of Henry VI at the RSC. Henry VI Rebellion runs at the RSC in Stratford ...
Apr 20, 2022•45 min
A collection of knitting patterns held in Southampton, an archive of Victorian greeting cards in Manchester, information about music hall and pantomime pulled together in Kent and the National Archives holdings of boat maps come under the microscope in today's conversation. New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton's guests are Rachel Dickinson, Eleonora Gandolfi, Helen Brooks and Lucia Pereira Pardo. The research projects featured are: Rachel Dickinson, Manchester Metropolitan University - Celebratio...
Apr 19, 2022•44 min
Who's doing the cleaning and looking after the kids? Are we all shouldering an equal share of the domestic burden and if not, why not? Matthew Sweet and guests on housework, gender & class from early 20th century domestic appliance ads via1960s feminist critiques such as Hannah Gavron's The Captive Wife to the age of TikTok cleanfluencers. MIchele Roberts is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and the author of twelve novels, including The Looking Glass an...
Apr 15, 2022•44 min
What nationalities served in the British navy of the 18th century and what difference did peacetime and wartime conditions have on the make-up of crews? How does visiting a landlocked village that was once a thriving Gloucestershire port change our view of history? What did enslaved people think about their rescue by anti-slavery rescue ships? These are the questions Rana Mitter will be asking three writers and historians: Sara Caputo, Tom Nancollas and New Generation Thinker Jake Subryan Richar...
Apr 13, 2022•45 min
