Ben Cottam puts on full waterproofs to cross the causeway to Sunderland Point, in search of the grave of a black slave. There are 43 tidal islands around the UK, accessible just briefly each day along beguiling paths. Across the series, five writers journey across a favourite causeway to islands of refuge, pilgrimage, magic and glamour. Wheels spin wildly and Ben peers anxiously through mud-sprayed windscreen as he tries to drive to Sunderland. There is no real boundary between land and sea, the...
Feb 24, 2023•14 min
Claire McGowan enters the freezing waters off Burgh Island, connected at low tide to the mainland by a short sandy causeway. There are 43 tidal islands around the UK, accessible just briefly each day along beguiling and perilous paths. Across the series, five writers walk their favourite causeway to islands of refuge, pilgrimage, magic and glamour. Claire grew up with the mythology of the giant Finn McCool flinging rocks at a rival in Scotland and building the Giant’s Causeway. Arriving at Burgh...
Feb 22, 2023•13 min
There are 43 tidal islands around the UK, accessible just briefly each day, along beguiling and perilous paths. As the tide retreats, five writers walk their favourite causeway to islands of refuge, pilgrimage, magic and glamour. Today, Evie Wyld boards the ferry at Lymington pier and retraces a path well-travelled with her family during school holidays - across the Freshwater Causeway on the Isle of Wight. Her route takes her past ghost benches, a graveyard, World War Two pill boxes on a journe...
Feb 21, 2023•14 min
There are 43 tidal islands around the UK, accessible just briefly each day, along beguiling and perilous paths. As the tide retreats, five writers walk their favourite causeway to islands of refuge, pilgrimage, magic and glamour. Patrick Gale joins those seemingly walking on water as they cross to St Michael’s Mount in this first episode. Between kite surfers and dog walkers, he is suspended between two worlds as he follows the S shaped causeway, shaped by relentless tides and currents. He is jo...
Feb 20, 2023•14 min
Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. Without uncertainty, there is no freedom. How do artists learn how to use this freedom to act, to make something, to have original ideas? Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems...
Feb 13, 2023•13 min
Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How does an artist know when a piece is finished? Or more precisely, when they should stop work and launch it into the world? Margaret Heffernan is a writer and entrepreneur, author of the award-winning 'Uncharted: How to Map the Future'. Here, she takes inspiration from artists who embrace uncertainty. Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery
Feb 13, 2023•13 min
Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How do artists tolerate the fear that uncertainty creates? Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal of eliminating uncertainty, but is this really desirable? Mar...
Feb 13, 2023•13 min
Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How do artists begin a new project? The point is to be open to the world, and to have 'an eye that is always watching'. Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal ...
Feb 13, 2023•14 min
Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal of eliminating uncertainty, but is this really desirable? Margaret argues that an element of uncertainty is a necessary ...
Feb 13, 2023•14 min
Perhaps above all, the artistic quality we prize most is imagination. Psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler explores the enigmatic work of ceramicist Shinichi Sawada. Shinichi's sculptures look like small demons or monsters. The organic forms are covered with clay studs that resemble spikes, some forming mask-like facial figures, like totem poles. As an artist with autism, Shinichi is largely non-verbal, so he can't explain the meaning of his work, allowing the viewers' imagination to run rio...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
In this essay on untrained and self-taught artists, psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler focuses on devotion and the important role of faith and belief and how it manifests artistically. Now considered one of the most important folk artists of the 20th century, Minnie Evans was born in 1892 in a cabin in North Carolina, the great-granddaughter of a slave from Trinidad. She attributed much of her inspiration to religious visions she began having as a child. “God has sent me an angel that stan...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns completes his exploration of South African food, as he discusses the national dish, and what it says about the Rainbow Nation. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay has delved into its different cuisines for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experien...
Feb 09, 2023•13 min
Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuan...
Feb 09, 2023•13 min
Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuan...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuan...
Feb 09, 2023•13 min
Few artists can rival Mary Barnes for the sheer honesty of experience conveyed in paintings she created while in the grips of psychosis. Her 'IT' series of paintings are a brutal depiction of severe mental illness, and some of the best visual examples of the pathos and terror of the experience. In later life when her mental health recovered she began to exhibit her work and to give lectures on mental health, psychotherapy, and the importance of creativity in her recovery. For psychologist Profes...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuan...
Feb 09, 2023•13 min
Unconventionality is a quality celebrated in art, and no-one demonstrates it better than Madge Gill. Psychologist Prof Victoria Tischler explores this mesmerising artist's work. Her embroidered calicos, some 40 metres in length are full of elegant black lines filling every space of the fabric, in patterns that appear to form a winding staircase and chequerboard tiles, similar to those that would have been fashionable in the Victorian and Edwardian times in which she lived. The fact that Gill bec...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
Psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler celebrates 'outsider art.' Art created by the marginalised, the untrained, those outside the establishment. She begins with an essay on 'the Picasso of psychotic art' Adolf Wölfli. He called himself The Holy St Adolf the Second, master of algebra, military commander in chief, and chief music director, giant theatre director, captain of the almighty giant steamship and doctor of arts and sciences. Confined to the Waldu asylum in Switzerland for more than h...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min
As she travels the world and prepares to become a mother, the narrator of Olivia Wenzel’s novel reflects on her upbringing as a queer, Black woman in a white family, with her mother, a rebellious East German punk who was mostly absent, and her grandmother who was loyal to the socialist regime. Her father, an Angolan student, left shortly after she was born and her twin brother died when they were 17. For Queer History Month, New Generation Thinker Tom Smith looks at the ideas of queer family lif...
Feb 03, 2023•14 min
Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford. The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflects the mid-Victorian trend for medievalism and resurgence of High Church Anglicanism, combining gothic melodrama with sharply observed social realism, sprightly dialogue and wry humour. Although Charlotte M Yonge came to be associated mainly with domestic realism, in her long career (1823–1901) she ...
Feb 03, 2023•14 min
Urbanisation, migration and ‘folk language’ are explored in the 1984 novel by Latife Tekin. The story is a carnivalesque fusion of contrasts like its title – where ‘Berji’ conjures images of an innocent shepherdess and ‘Kristin’ of a sex worker. There’s blind old Güllü Baba, rumoured to cure the ills caused by a nearby factory’s chemical wastewater. There’s Fidan of Many Skills, rumoured to know all the ‘arts of the bed’. There’s the rumour of roads, jobs, and clean water coming to Flower Hill: ...
Feb 03, 2023•14 min
Poet, abolitionist, and activist for women’s rights, Frances EW Harper was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States, producing 80 poems, various articles, sketches, serialised books and short stories and a novel printed when she was aged 67. New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at her career, focusing on this 1892 novel Iola Leroy. It tells the story of a Black mixed race woman who survives the Civil War, experiences romances and has to navigate the post-eman...
Feb 03, 2023•13 min
Arrested by military intelligence, Philip Wylie (1902-1971) went on to become an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy. At least nine films have been made out of stories he published which ranged across topics including ecology, science fiction and the threat of nuclear holocaust. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon reads his short story The Paradise Crater. Producer: Luke Mulhall
Feb 03, 2023•14 min
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. Olivia's final essay is about the end of the tradition of religious orders. Ireland has fallen out of love with the Catholic Church. Hardly ...
Jan 06, 2023•14 min
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her fourth essay, about nuns and politics, Olivia describes the conservative Roman Catholic state Ireland was in the Sixties. Communism w...
Jan 05, 2023•13 min
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her third essay, about class in the Irish Catholic Church, she describes how girls from poor backgrounds, particularly young pregnant gir...
Jan 04, 2023•13 min
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her second essay, Olivia describes the education which the nuns gave her, which was first class. These were almost the only university-ed...
Jan 03, 2023•13 min
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 12-year-old view of nuns: their long black clothes, their heads encased in stiff linen, their obsessi...
Jan 02, 2023•14 min
Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth travels to the Arctic ice and tundra to look for the ways people and animals shape each other’s lives. In this episode, she journeys to the Yukon River, to see how the history of salmon connects to the present - and shows how even those of us living far away have a relationship with the fish of this great river. Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spends much of her time in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. Her...
Dec 19, 2022•13 min
