Montaigne's literary self portraits led to him popularising the Essay form in the mid 1500s. With online articles, long reads in newspapers and magazines and a number of publishing houses interested in promoting essays and reprinting authors, Rana Mitter and guests look at what makes a good Essay drawing on examples from the past and present. Rana's guests are the author Kirsty Gunn; the essayist Chris Arthur, author of Hidden Cargoes; Paul Lay, Senior Editor at Engelsberg Ideas and a former edi...
Jan 10, 2024•45 min
Going on a trip ? get ready to get uncomfortable, pack grease to treat your sore bum, and laudanum for the inevitable travel sickness - and perhaps you might also be in need of an anti-strangulation collar to ward off those potential murderers? We’re delving into the perils of travelling in the past. Back in the 1700s there was no such thing as a relaxing weekend break, travelling could be a fraught and even deadly undertaking. Such was the danger, making a will before you set off seemed reasona...
Jan 03, 2024•45 min
Mickey Mouse in his first incarnation in a short film from 1928 becomes available for public viewing without infringing Disney's copyright next year. In a programme looking back at the copyright history which affected authors including Charles Dickens and at current questions around legislation, Matthew Sweet is joined by David Bellos, author of Who Owns This Sentence? – A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, Katie McGettigan, lecturer in C19th American literature and Hayleigh Bosher, Reader in Int...
Dec 21, 2023•44 min
What links carol singing with dogs? Medieval musicologist Micah Mackay reveals that carols aren’t just for Christmas – they began life as communal songs for anything from lullabies to drinking songs. She explains the detective work required to bring to life a fundamentally oral culture from a small number of manuscript sources, and what the origin of carols can tell us about the concept of Englishness in the medieval period. Englishness is also a key point of interrogation for Dr Caroline Lesema...
Dec 20, 2023•28 min
Greek goddesses are the focus of Natalie Haynes' most recent book. She joins Ian Collins, curator of an exhibition at Pallant House celebrating the paintings made by John Craxton, who relocated from England to Crete after visiting in 1947; Minna Moore Ede, curator of an exhibition inspired by Leda and the Swan at the Victoria Miro Gallery and Dr Lucy Jackson talks about her research into the chorus in Greek drama. Shahidha Bari hosts Natalie Haynes' books include Divine Might, A Thousand Ships, ...
Dec 20, 2023•45 min
Cultural revolution memories, European resistance in occupied Poland and France and early attempts to establish trade with Mughal leaders in India are the topics explored in prize winning history books. Rana Mitter talks to authors Tania Branigan, Halik Kochanski and Nandini Das about digging in the archives and seeking out interviewees to help shape our understanding of these different periods in world history. Plus prize winning science books by John Vaillant, who considers the incredible powe...
Dec 19, 2023•45 min
Popularising calypso music, performing with Sinatra's Rat pack, Nana Mouskouri, Miriam Makeba and Charlie Parker, starring in films including Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, the hip hop film he produced called Beat Street, Robert Altman's Kansas City and Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman: Harry Belafonte's career in film and music ran from 1949 to 2018 but he was also a tireless political activist who was inspired by Paul Robeson. As the BFI programmes a season of his films in December, Matthew Sweet is...
Dec 15, 2023•45 min
Scientist, novelist, poet, philosopher, feminist, it's 400 years since the birth of Margaret Cavendish. An extraordinary character in many ways - she lived in a tumultuous time, when ideas around science, religion and the very nature of existence were being challenged and changed. And she had a view on them all. Margaret Cavendish’s writings are vast and broad and yet detailed and thoughtful. However for most of the last 400 years she has languished in obscurity before being rediscovered in the ...
Dec 13, 2023•45 min
Sixty years after the death of C. S. Lewis's, his best known work, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is still for many a childhood favourite and it's also the subject of a new literary study. Christianity was central to all of Lewis's his novels, his academic writing and generalist non-fiction. It is also his Christianity that divides his admirers and detractors. This tension lies at the heart of a new film which stages a clash between two ways of thinking, the psychoanalytic and the religio...
Dec 06, 2023•54 min
7th Prince of the West Indies was the title that Frank Walter gave himself. An artist who created over 5,000 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 600 sculptures, 2,000 photographs, 468 hours of recordings, and a 50,000-page archive, tried to become Prime Minister and was the first Black man to manage a sugar plantation in Antigua - a show about him at the Garden Museum in London has been curated by Professor Barbara Paca. She talks to Jade Munslow Ong, plus New Generation Thinker Jim Scown, who's been res...
Dec 05, 2023•45 min
When Hugh Jackman starred in the 2022 revival of ‘The Music Man’, he was taking on a classic Broadway musical with a little known connection to disability. Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh at the University of Sheffield has been digging through the archives to uncover how early drafts of the show originally focused on the experience of a young wheelchair user – an idea which was then scrapped by writer Meredith Wilson due to commercial and social pressures. Megan Steinberg is the Lucy Hale Do...
Dec 01, 2023•39 min
The Palace of Dreams is a novel from 1981 that is ostensibly set in the 19th century Ottoman empire, but the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare cleverly smuggles in thinly veiled criticism of the totalitarian state presided over by Enver Hoxha. The book was duly banned shortly after publication. Matthew Sweet looks at this and other examples of fiction that satirise bureaucratic overreach from Dickens to Kafka to Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian novelist who won the 2023 International Booker prize fo...
Dec 01, 2023•45 min
The Great Library of Alexandria had a mission to collect every book in the world. In attempting to do so it created the foundations for the systems and structures of public libraries that we know today. We discuss the development of libraries, our emotional attachment to them and their pupose in the digital age. Islam Issa's new book traces the development of Alexandria. He joins Andrew Pettegree, author of The Library: A Fragile History, Fflur Dafydd whose murder mystery story The Library Suici...
Nov 29, 2023•45 min
Women in the villages of Spain and the repression and passions of five daughters are at the heart of Lorca's last play the House of Bernarda Alba, completed two months before he was assassinated in 1936. Rana Mitter looks at the life and writing of Lorca, with guests including The Observer's theatre critic, Susannah Clapp and Professor Maria Delgado of the Central School of Speech and Drama and Professor Duncan Wheeler, Chair of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds and Dr Federico Bonaddio...
Nov 28, 2023•45 min
The perfect childhood and the failure of utopian experiments in living in Edwardian England were explored by AS Byatt in her 2009 novel The Children's Book. In this conversation with Matthew Sweet recorded in that year, they discuss her writing life, mythologising childhood and her meetings with Iris Murdoch, about whom she wrote two critical studies. A lecturer in English literature, AS Byatt's books drew on a wide range of reading and visiting art galleries and museums. In 1990 she won the Boo...
Nov 24, 2023•44 min
Re-invention and moral struggles are at the heart of the story of post-war Germany traced by Frank Trentmann in his new book Out of the Darkness. Anne McElvoy talks to him, to Thomas Meaney the new editor of Granta who is bringing out an edition called Deutschland, to journalist Stefanie Bolzen and to New Generation Thinker Dr Tom Smith who has studied the techno scene in German cities. How have 70 years of political struggles shaped Germany's culture and identity? Producer Ruth Watts...
Nov 22, 2023•45 min
Caribbean migrants striving to make their lives in London are the focus of this 1956 novel by Samuel Selvon. Written in creolized English, it established him as an important Caribbean voice. In an event organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library, Shahidha Bari is joined by the poet Anthony Joseph, the writer Guy Gunaratne and by Susheila Nasta who is a writer, critic and literary executor and representative for the Sam Selvon literary estate. Guy Gunara...
Nov 21, 2023•45 min
Over 200 women sculptors have been uncovered in the research of Sophie Johnson from Bristol University. She describes some of their creations and discusses the challenges of working with the incomplete personal archives of these artists – including Mrs Goldsmith, Patience Wright, and Catherine Andras, who created wax portrait miniatures and effigies, and Anne Seymour Damer, who carved in marble. Kathleen Collins died in her 40s and left un-filmed screenplays and unpublished stories which Alix Be...
Nov 17, 2023•40 min
A miserable child and a summer festival are at the heart of the short work of philosophical fiction first published by Ursula Le Guin in 1973. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was sparked by "forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards" was the answer given by the author when asked where she got the idea from. Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including the authors Una McCormack, Naomi Alderman, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson and Kevan Manwaring, and political philosopher Sophie Scott-Brown...
Nov 16, 2023•46 min
The first women’s liberation conference in the UK, Miss World protests, the formation of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the politics of who cleans the house are all explored in a new exhibition at Tate Britain. Whilst activism and art linked to ecology by 50 women and gender non-conforming artists are on display at the Barbican Centre in London and eco-feminist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) is celebrated in a show opening at Modern Art Oxford. Naomi Paxton is joined by the academics Sophie Oliver...
Nov 15, 2023•45 min
Matthew Sweet is joined by Professor Preti Taneja – author of a novel We That Are Young which sets the King Lear in Delhi, by Dr Iain Robert Smith who studies films from around the world, and by Andrew Dickson, journalist and author of Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe. As part of Radio 3’s day of music inspired by Shakespeare, Free Thinking looks at paintings by the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, at films from India and Turkey, and at the way Shakespeare’s plays resonate in ...
Nov 08, 2023•44 min
Goldilocks, Robin Hood, Little Bess of Bromley, Moll Frith were star performers on the bear baiting circuit in Elizabethan England. New evidence of bear bones uncovered in archaeological digs and over 1,100 accounts in letters and documents from the period, are being studied in a research project called Box Office Bears. Andy Kesson delves into bears’ impact on the literary culture of the time and asks if bear baiting was not so much a sporting contest as a staged spectacles akin to contemporary...
Nov 08, 2023•32 min
Ultrasound tests in Burnley market hall will help the phonetics lab at Lancaster University explore tongue positions and accents as part of this year's Being Human Festival. Claire Nance joins John Gallagher to explain more. Alongside them are Rob Drummond from Manchester Met University, author of a new book You're All Talk, Andrea Smith from the University of Suffolk, who is researching early radio voices and Shane O'Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin, who ...
Nov 08, 2023•45 min
From Iraq and Afghanistan and news headlines today back to earlier battles in the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, the relationship between war, photography and the press has affected attitudes towards conflicts. In the annual Remembrance discussion organised in partnership with the Imperial War Museum, Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy's panel are: Toby Haggith Senior Curator, Department of Second World War and Mid 20th Century Conflict; Irish Iraqi artist Jananne Al-Ani, whose work expl...
Nov 07, 2023•45 min
From Lyons’ Corner House opera performances in the 1920s to 1980s productions staged in fish and chip shops in Scotland – Alexandra Wilson has been studying the history of opera going and presents us with a wider audience for the art form than current stereotypes might have you think. Callan Davies has looked at what went on in Elizabethan playhouses aside from plays by the likes of Shakespeare. New archaeological digs and legal documents featuring complaints are giving us evidence for a kind of...
Nov 06, 2023•37 min
Lady Fanshawe’s ‘Receipt Book’ (c.1651-1707) provides the inspiration for a public cooking event at Tamworth castle hosted by the academic Sara Read which includes preserving vegetables and a look at etiquette. Ideas about hospitality and how we behave when we eat are at the heart of a quiz organised by researchers at Edge Hill University. Both are part of the Being Human Festival and Sara Read and Zayneb Allak join Lindsay Middleton, who is researching food poverty, luxury ingredients and tin c...
Nov 05, 2023•45 min
Around 3 million Bengali Pakistanis now live in Pakistan it is estimated and a research project has been exploring their experiences, mixing oral testimony and art projects with analysis of recent history. Humera Iqbal explains their findings to presenter Sarah Jilani. And Ahmad Naji Bakhti discusses his novel about the dreams of a boy growing up in Lebanon and how writing it in exile in Wales has led him to reflect on the language and phrasing he uses and what audience he is addressing. Humera ...
Nov 02, 2023•32 min
Writers Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa and Tate curator Osei Bonsu talk to Laurence Scott. The exhibition A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern has a mission statement - to confront reductive representations of African peoples and cultures. All the images are from an African perspective, and explore ideas about masks, spiritual worlds, royalty, family portraits and shared dreams. The lives of African settlers in China are at the heart of the new book Black Ghosts by Noo...
Nov 02, 2023•46 min
"Strange stories" is the way Robert Aickman (1914-1981) described his fiction and to be honest that's putting it mildly. When he wasn't writing fiction that leaves both his protagonists and his readers in some very weird places, he was involved in an investigation into the haunting of Borley Rectory, was a member of The Ghost Club and he also co-founded the British Inland Waterways Association to restore canals. Matthew Sweet is joined by three fans of his work - critic Suzy Feay, writer Andrew ...
Nov 02, 2023•45 min
The first live concert in 175 years of songs and music written by Eliza Flower (1803-1846) takes place tomorrow. A friend of JS Mill, Harriet Martineau and Robert Browning, Flower set to music some of Walter Scott's romantic songs, composed music for her sister Sarah Flower Adams, who penned hymns including Nearer, My God, to Thee. Singer Frances M Lynch, accompanied on piano by Laurence Panter, joins New Generation Thinker and historian Oskar Jensen and Dr Clare Stainthorp, who is researching t...
Oct 27, 2023•45 min
