Virginia Woolf has a premonition of the microwave, protein bars are launched and a cookbook offers a recipe for iguana soup: New Generation Thinker John Gallagher is joined by food historians Annie Gray and Elsa Richardson for a conversation about what we might have eaten in 1922 Producer: Luke Mulhall You can find other discussions about art and culture from the 1920s in a collection called Modernism on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh
Dec 22, 2022•15 min
Reader’s Digest magazine is celebrating its centenary this year. In the first of a series of features looking back at cultural milestones in 1922 – the year the BBC was founded – New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough finds out about the history of the Reader’s Digest talking to Professor Sarah Churchwell and Dr Victoria Bazin. Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can find a playlist about books, art and philosophy from 1922 in a collection called Modernism on the Free Thinking programme w...
Dec 22, 2022•15 min
Louise Jameson joins Matthew Sweet to recall the women who ran the digs she stayed in as a touring actor and the landladies that she's played (including a homicidal one!). Historian Gillian Williamson looks at how life in boarding houses in Georgian London has been portrayed both in contemporary accounts and in fiction, while Lillian Crawford encounters some memorable landladies in Ealing comedies and other post-war British films. Gillian Williamson is the author of Lodgers, Landlords, and Landl...
Dec 16, 2022•45 min
Are animals a human invention? What is a lama like? Do plants have sex? Was Amelia Earhart eaten by crabs? These are just some of the questions posed by Shahidha Bari and addressed by her guests Katherine Rundell, Dan Taylor, Helen Cowie and Stella Sandford, as they trace the history of human conceptualisations of animals and the natural world. From the Medieval tendency to draw moral lessons from animals, to Linnaeus' attempts to organise them into taxonomies, via Darwin's abolition of the dist...
Dec 14, 2022•45 min
The list of contributors joining Lisa Mullen: Henry Eliot, author of a book of bookish lists which details everything from the different deaths of Greek tragedians to the contents of Joan Didion's travel bag; Florence Hazrat, New Generation Thinker and historian of punctuation; Liam Young, author of a book about lists as a way of organising knowledge, from Ancient Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed; and Joanna Nolan, a researcher in sociolinguistics at SOAS who asks whether lists are ever private languages...
Dec 13, 2022•45 min
Russell T. Davies is joined by his friend and author of Love from the Pink Palace, Jill Nalder, to discuss their importance in one another’s lives, the role of literature in their lives, and the TV series It’s a Sin with New Generation Thinker and psychiatrist Sabina Dosani and chair Matthew Sweet in a conversation recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library. Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Dec 08, 2022•45 min
From a Norwich workhouse to performing as "The American Voltigeur" - Pablo Fanque, or William Darby as he was born, was a star of 1830s circus in Britain. Nearly a hundred years later one of the names topping the bill was Lillian Leitzel. Kate Holmes is also an aerial performer and she shares her research into female aerialists with John Woolf, author of Black Victorians. Plus the presenter Shahidha Bari is also joined by New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton who compares researching early music h...
Dec 07, 2022•45 min
Why Hardy's spelling matters, how Lancashire reflected on the American Civil War through dialect poems printed in local newspapers, how education inspectors at Victorian schools policed pupils dropping the letter "h" : a quartet of academics: Greg Tate, Louise Creechan, Lynda Mugglestone and Simon Rennie join John Gallagher for the latest part of Free Thinking's series looking at the way we speak, accents and multilingualism. With recent research from the Sutton Trust showing prejudice against r...
Dec 06, 2022•45 min
What does sound add to looking at a painting? Four ambitious multi-media installations make up the shortlist for this year's Turner prize, addressing issues from environmental change to identity politics to motherhood. There is a trend for immersive art experiences but does triggering other senses than the visual help us understand art better? Meanwhile a set of exhibitions in London explores sight itself and how we see and are seen by others. We'll be asking what happens when we open ourselves ...
Nov 30, 2022•44 min
Soil degradation threatens our ecosystem and is among the most significant problems at a global level for agricultural production, food security and sustainability. World Soil Day 2022 on December 5th aims to heighten soil awareness so ahead of this, Anne McElvoy explores changes to both rural and urban farming. Mike Collins charts the evolution of the city farm; Jim Scown considers the relationship between soils, science and literary realism in Victorian Britain; Catherine Oliver asks why a gro...
Nov 29, 2022•43 min
The first interracial kiss on American TV, a decidedly internationalist cast of characters: Star Trek has always been a deeply political programme but what are those politics? How did they arise in the Cold War America in which the show was initially developed? And where does the vision of an international (or even intergalactic) Federation developed in the series fit into the politics of today? Matthew Sweet is joined by George Takei, who played Lieutenant Sulu in the original Star Trek series,...
Nov 25, 2022•45 min
A smouldering gorilla suited man racing through London on a motorbike is one of many striking images from Karel Reisz's 1966 film that starred David Warner (who had just played Hamlet at the RSC) alongside Vanessa Redgrave and Robert Stephens. Matthew Sweet is joined by Stephen Frears who worked as assistant director on the film, the director's son Matthew Reisz and film historian Lucy Bolton to look back at the talents of both Karel Reisz (21 July 1926 - 25 November 2002) and David Warner (29 J...
Nov 24, 2022•45 min
Shahidha Bari looks at the voices of women emerging from new writing in novels, plays and histories. Zenobia, Mavia, and Khadijah are Arabian queens and noblewomen who feature in the new book by Emran Iqbal El-Badawi which looks at the way female rulers of Arabia were crucial in shaping the history of the region. Hannah Khalil's new play at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in London imagines a writers room of women weaving the tales that will last Scheherazade for 1,001 nights. And, Abdu...
Nov 23, 2022•45 min
House of the Dragon was inspired by a medieval period known as The Anarchy. What do the real historical conflicts tell us about power, succession, class, and the status of women in medieval times, and why are fantasy writers so drawn to them? New Generation Thinker Sarah Peverley is Professor English Literature at Liverpool University. She is joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College Oxford, and Danielle Park, lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York. A 12th...
Nov 23, 2022•31 min
House of the Dragon draws on ‘The Anarchy’ - a 12th century war of succession. What does this conflict tell us about power, succession, class, and the status of medieval women ? New Generation Thinker Sarah Peverley is joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College Oxford, and Danielle Park, lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York. A 12th century war of succession between Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and her cousin Stephen of Blois which caused widespre...
Nov 23, 2022•31 min
St Teresa formulated a specifically Catholic version of contemplative religion in response to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation; Vivekananda was a Hindu holy man who articulated a religious path that set the template for much 20th-century spiritual thinking; Friedrich Nietzsche set out to subvert 1,800 years of religious thinking in his iconoclastic book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which has been newly translated by poet Michael Hulse. Rana Mitter is joined by New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mil...
Nov 22, 2022•44 min
As Nottingham’s network of 800 man-made caves inspire an exhibition called ‘Hollow Earth’ at the city’s contemporary art gallery, Shahidha Bari and guests explore the underground world. Archaeologist Chris King discusses discoveries under Nottingham's streets, literary historian Charlotte May suggests stories to read, curator Sam Thorne picks out images, and award-winning cave explorer Andy Eavis, tells us about his career discovering more territory on earth than anyone else alive - all of it un...
Nov 22, 2022•43 min
"Creative daring" is the quality rewarded by the Goldsmiths Prize, now in its tenth year. What does it mean for an artist or writer to be daring and experimental? Shahidha Bari is joined by this year's winners Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams who have co-written their novel Diego Garcia, composer Matthew Herbert whose latest project is making music from the skeleton of a horse, and poet Stephen Sexton who has written a poetry collection structured round every level of the 90s video game Su...
Nov 22, 2022•44 min
The African American inventor Lewis Latimer who lived in South London and worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison on developing light bulbs; Benjamin Franklin was one of the founders of the United States of America but what was he doing pouring oil on Derwent Water in the Lake District? How did theatrical department store demonstrations help sell Kenwood Chefs ? And Ganzflicker - the online experiment that depending on your neural pathways might make you see animals, fairies, and mon...
Nov 22, 2022•42 min
What does zero carbon look like if you are planning a new housing development in your town. The UK’s building stock is one of the oldest in Europe, accounting for nearly 40% of the nation’s total carbon emissions, so how possible is it for our cities to cut them to zero before 2050? Lecturer Lara Salinas explains how she has worked with local residents in the borough of Southwark in South London, encouraging them to take up zero carbon building design and retrofit. Professor Ljubomir Jankovic de...
Nov 18, 2022•28 min
Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has a translation of the book and written Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, and from France, the writer, Marie Darrieussecq. The actor Peter Marinker tackles the difficult task of giving an English voice to Proust. The novel In Search of Lost Time is a modernist masterpiece which offers a symphonic ac...
Nov 18, 2022•44 min
Disillusionment with war and how you sue for peace are at the heart of Shaw's drama Arms and the Man, being staged in Richmond this autumn. Whilst in Bath a touring production of Mrs Warren's Profession stars Caroline Quentin and her daughter Rose Quentin as the former prostitute and her disapproving daughter. Anne McElvoy is joined by director Paul Miller, Professor Sos Eltis who has edited Shaw's work and theatre critic and writer Mark Lawson to look at Shaw's ability to construct arguments on...
Nov 16, 2022•51 min
It revolutionised domestic chores, signified modernity and has been made into packaging, textiles, electrical machinery but plastic has also contributed to our throw-away society. Clay is turned into bricks, cookware and used in industrial processes including paper making, cement production, and chemical filtering and increasingly contemporary artists are taking up the material. As exhibitions at the V&A Dundee and the Hayward Gallery in London display the different qualities and association...
Nov 09, 2022•44 min
Do video games help explore war? An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum includes Sniper Elite 5, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and a military training simulator. For the 2022 discussion about how we look at warfare past and present Anne McElvoy is joined by writer & broadcaster Louise Blain, retired Colonel Lincoln Jopp, game designer Florent Maurin and IWM curator Chris Cooper. War Games runs at IWM London until May 2023 and is a free exhibition. Louise Blain presents Radio 3's Sound o...
Nov 08, 2022•44 min
The Scottish theologian and preacher John Knox died on 24th November 1572, bringing to an end a life packed with drama and controversy. Matthew Sweet is joined by historian Steven Reid, literary historian Lucy Hinnie and New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel to go through some of the most vivid and important episodes in that life, including his periods in exile, his highly antagonistic meetings with Mary Queen of Scots, and his time on the high seas as a prisoner forced to row a French gall...
Nov 03, 2022•45 min
Putting I at the centre, the Ich, was the creed of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte whilst Friedrich Schelling, saw the self as at one with the rest of nature: naturphilosophie. These competing ideas were debated in literary salons in the German town of Jena in the 1790s and Andrea Wulf's new biography Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self tells this story. She joins Anne McElvoy alongside New Generation Thinker Dr Seán Williams and the musicologist and Classica...
Nov 02, 2022•45 min
King of Asia and Pharoah are two of the titles taken by Alexander, ruler of Macedonia from 336 B.C. to 323 B.C. He died aged 32 having conquered a vast area and founded the city of Alexandria in present day Egypt but his reputation stretched even further as a kind of philosopher king, and in myths and stories, as someone who travelled to paradise, created the first flying machine and explored underwater. Rana Mitter has been to visit a new exhibition at the British Library which illustrates thes...
Nov 01, 2022•45 min
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough takes a look at the latest research shaping our understanding of the great Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. She’ll be finding out about the insights that digital approaches are bringing to the tale of gold-hoarding dragons, sword-wielding heroes and murderous fenland beasties. We discover what video games and grammar have to tell us about Old English literature. Andrew Burn Andrew Burn is Professor of English, Media and Drama at University College London’s Institute of Edu...
Oct 28, 2022•31 min
The director and writer of Ghostwatch Lesley Manning and Stephen Volk join Matthew Sweet and academic Lucy Arnold to look back at the reality–horror/pseudo-documentary TV, which aired on British tv screens on Halloween night 1992. The BBC switchboard received an estimated 1,000,000 phone calls on the night of the broadcast and it has never been repeated on British tv although it is now part of a BFI season exploring horror. Producer: Luke Mulhall A BFI Horror season In Dreams are Monsters is run...
Oct 27, 2022•46 min
A pandemic, crumbling empire and new nationhood are the backdrop for Orhan Pamuk's latest novel Nights of the Plague. He talks to Rana Mitter about the historical basis for his novel. They're joined by historian and BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot and literary scholar Keya Anjaria. Some of the books they recommend at the end of the conversation are Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901 – 1962) whose The Time Regulation Institute and A Mind at Peace have been published in English by Penguin H...
Oct 26, 2022•45 min
