Jessica Andrews grew up in Sunderland and has written two novels - Saltwater and Milk Teeth. Jake Morris-Campbell still lives in his native South Shields and his poetry includes the collection Corrigenda for Costafine Town and various Radio 3 commissioned pieces. He is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. They talk to Ian McMillan, host of Radio 3's new writing programme The Verb, about how their sense of the North East of England has fed into their writing. Producer Torquil MacLeod You can find a...
Jul 22, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Small town life in Northern Ireland is the focus of this conversation about writing and place. Since his debut Divorcing Jack in 1994, Colin Bateman has written many novels, dramas and screenplays and most recently Thunder and Lightning: A Memoir of Life on the Tough Cul-de-Sacs of Bangor. Michelle Gallen’s novels Big Girl, Small Town and Factory Girls have appeared on literary prize lists and they focus on life in a border town. Shahidha Bari, who presents Radio 3's arts and ideas programme Fre...
Jul 17, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rula Lenska was one of the stars of this 1970s TV series about a fictional female band, playing the role of Nancy "Q" Cunard de Longchamps, alongside Julie Covington and Charlotte Cornwell. She joins Matthew Sweet along with Howard Schuman, who wrote the series, and Andy Mackay, saxophonist with Roxy Music, who co-wrote the songs with Howard. Also taking part are Chloë Moss who has written the book for a stage adaptation of the series that is opening at the Chichester Festival Theatre, and criti...
Jul 14, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The influence of World War Two on philosophical thinking is the focus of today's discussion as Chris Harding explores the years when the University of Oxford hosted one of the most distinctive and influential philosophy departments in the English speaking world. Thinkers like J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe, although very different in their own right, developed a style of philosophising that is sometimes called 'ordinary language philosophy': rejecting grand theory or metaphysic...
Jul 12, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do children develop language and experiment with sounds? What toys help them develop? And, how they explain their games? As the Young V&A, previously the Museum of Childhood, opens in East London, Anne McElvoy hosts a discussion looking at the history of play. Does our interest in children's play tells us more about them or, the adults who care for them? Dr Helen Charman, is the Director of the revamped Young V&A in East London Dr Yinka Olusoga is a Lecturer in Education at the Unive...
Jul 11, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joya Chatterji has written about the South Asian twentieth century in her new book called Shadows at Noon. Tripurdaman Singh has been researching Indian princely states. Novels by Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) are being republished. Her daughter Kim Oliver and literary scholar Alastair Niven discuss Nectar in a Sieve. A bestseller when it first came out in 1954, it's a story about a tenant farmer, his wife and the impact of a tannery built in a neighbouring village. Rana Mitter hosts. The books ...
Jul 06, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1897 women played American football in San Fransisco. Dr Katie Taylor, is a qualified coach who previously managed the Great Britain Men's Flag Football Team, supporting the team at three European Championships. She is a Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at Nottingham Trent University and has been researching the history of women playing the sport and the language used in newspaper to describe both women players and coaches working in the game. Stacey Pope is Associate Professor in the Departmen...
Jul 06, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Sacred Return of Lost Things is the theme of this year's Art Biennial in Liverpool. Catherine Fletcher talks to some of the artists showing work about how they have engaged with the city's history. Visual artist Melanie Manchot introduces her first full length feature film, STEPHEN, about a character recovering from gambling and alcohol addictions. Rudy Loewe describes their new large-scale installation The Reckoning, based around the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. And Charmaine Watkiss in...
Jul 04, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marrying someone based on a portrait was part of life in Renaissance Europe. An exhibition in Bath explores the politics of wedlock and painting - New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday has been to visit. Eleanor Chan has been studying the history of depicting musical notes on the page, whilst Sew What podcast host Isabella Rosner looks at needlework skills in Tudor England. John Gallagher hosts the conversation. Producer: Nick Holmes BBC Radio 3 is marking the anniversary of the Tudor compose...
Jul 04, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 160 volunteers recorded over 2,400 interviews with over 1,200 people on their lived experience of the NHS - as patients, staff and members of the public in an oral history project run by the University of Manchester. Professor Stephanie Snow discusses the way these help us understand how caring for children has changed in the NHS, what it felt like to get health care and not have to pay for it and other stories which interviews with policy makers in the archives didn't reveal. The Voices of Our ...
Jul 04, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast What can we learn from children's experiences in the Pandemic at home and at school? Can children express their experiences through drawing, and how might a simple curtain help create happy family homes? Lindsey McEwen is Professor of Environmental Management within the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research involved working with children in Bristol to understand their experiences and impact of the Pandemic on their sc...
Jul 03, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast From exercise on prescription to museum visits and debt advice. Christienna Fryar hears about social prescribing projects which are trying to link up the arts with other services to improve people’s health and tackle loneliness. These include wild swimming in the waterways of Nottinghamshire, the “Arts for the Blues” project based in the North west of England, a pilot programme in Scotland called “Art at the Start”, and a community hub at the Grange in Blackpool. Helen Chatterjee, Professor of H...
Jul 02, 2023•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast How a new material helps stroke patients recover and how mapping where infections and contamination happen helps staff training. New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson hears from two leading designers whose new research ideas have transformed the lives of stroke survivors and the elderly. Laura Salisbury is founder of the Wearable MedTech Lab at the Royal College of Art and CEO of KnitRegen and Professor Alastair Macdonald is Senior Researcher in the School of Design at The Glasgow School of Art...
Jul 01, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the first NHS hospital to be opened in 1948 by then Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, a prize winning poet and academic has been sitting in the restaurant which serves as the canteen, persuading hospital workers to share their stories and take time to involve themselves in writing. Dr Kim Moore is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her time as NHS75 writer in residence at Trafford General Hospital has led to an anthology being published Untold Stories of the...
Jun 30, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dystopias are a longstanding staple of film and literature, particularly science fiction, but what can we learn from them? Do they simply entrench despair or act as a prompt to improve the world? And what do The Two Ronnies have to do with all this? As a stage adaptation of Kay Dick's 1977 novel 'They: A Sequence of Unease' opens at the Manchester International Festival - a work that imagines a Britain that has been purged of culture - Matthew Sweet is joined by writer Una McCormack and New Gene...
Jun 30, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ibsen referred to Emperor and Galilean as his "major work". The play describes the life of Julian, who ruled the Roman empire from AD361-363. Julian attempted to abolish the recently established state religion of Christianity and replace it with the worship of the ancient, pagan gods. The play is brimming with action and ideas, but is rarely performed. Rana Mitter discusses Ibsen's play and the history and religious ideas behind it with theatre critic and writer, Mark Lawson; historian and autho...
Jun 28, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Second World War obsessed Luke Turner when he was growing up, before he founded the music website Quietus. Music has also been former teacher and now Add to Playlist host Jeffrey Boakye's passion and he's written a novel for teens called Kofi and the Rap Battle. Lisa Sugiura researches the online world that has drawn in so many. Chris Harding has been to see the new James Graham play at the National Theatre which explores the football team put together by Gareth Southgate. They come together...
Jun 26, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Skeptic Editor Michael Marshall talks to Matthew Sweet about how we judge actions and truth. They're joined by New Generation Thinkers Elsa Richardson, who is a historian of the emotions at the University of Strathclyde working on a popular history of the gut-brain connection and digestion more widely, and Brendan McGeever, who teaches on sociology, racism and anti-semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. Producer: Julian Siddle
Jun 23, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Maria Callas (1823-1977) and Adelina Patti (1843-1914) are two of the performers whose images are on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Diva. Professor Peggy Reynolds and Dr Ditlev Rindom have been to visit the exhibition which runs from opera, through films like Cleopatra, to pop performers such as Grace Jones, Lizzo and Cher. But what about performers from an earlier era ? Brianna Robertson-Kirkland shares her research, whilst Michael Twaits shares what the idea of Diva means to drag per...
Jun 21, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast An instant bestseller in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther was carried by Napoleon on his campaign in Egypt, it led to spin offs in fashion, porcelain and perfume and created Werther fever. A work of his Sturm und Drang years, Goethe's epistolary novel was published anonymously when he was aged 24. The story captures the intensity of unrequited love, frustrated ambition and mental suffering. It is also a novel that keys into the big philosophical arguments of its age and has given rise to a wid...
Jun 20, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the Kitchen (washing machine) 1977 is an art work by Helen Chadwick being displayed at the Hepworth Wakefield, whilst Carrie Mae Weems' images called Kitchen Table Series 1990 are coming to a Barbican show. Art critic Sarah Kent joins New Generation Thinker and archaeologist Marianne Hem Eriksen, film scholar Melanie Williams, whose latest book looks at Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, and journalist and writer Angela Hui, whose memoir is called Takeaway: Stories from a childhood behind th...
Jun 16, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Glenda Jackson (May 1936-June 2023) starred in many plays and films. One of those was Sunday Bloody Sunday where she plays part of a love triangle in John Schlesinger's follow up to his Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy. The plot written by Penelope Gilliat centres on an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Was the 1971 film ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re-watched it with guests including Glenda Jackson, playwright Mark Ravenhill, film historian Melanie W...
Jun 15, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast What exactly is a portrait? As the National Portrait Gallery re-opens and Sheffield Documentary Festival begins, Shahidha Bari talks to the gallery's Chief Curator Alison Smith, film-makers Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown about their film Dalton's Dream, photographer Johny Pitts, whose project Home is Not a Place moves to the Photographers’ Gallery in London and New Generation Thinker Ana Baeza Ruiz about an oral history project with 1970s feminist artists. Producer: Sofie Vilcins You can...
Jun 14, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Edinburgh GP Gavin Francis has been reading the writings of Thomas Browne (1605 -1682), who travelled to Padua and Leiden to qualify in medicine and then wrote on topics including religion, burial and examples of false understanding of science at the time. A Fortunate Woman - a depiction of a country doctor working now - takes inspiration from A Fortunate Man published in 1967 by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr. Author Polly Morland joins Gavin Francis and New Generation Thinker Matt Smit...
Jun 13, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast The father of capitalism or a sensitive moral philosopher? Adam Smith has been claimed as the defender of self-interest and advocate of free market economics, but his reputation has undergone a recent reappraisal. With his tercentenary in 2023, Anne McElvoy hears about the unexpected side of Adam Smith and his enduring presence in modern political economy. Glory Liu is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an I...
Jun 08, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is it ever okay to pass off someone else’s work as your own? What if it’s a computer programme faking it? And how are our perceptions of ownership and Identity influenced by the apparent power of digital technology? These are some of the big questions Chris Harding discusses with : Rebecca Kuang, author of a new novel, ‘Yellowface’, which is largely a story about plagiarism and publishing, but also touches on identity, social media and use of digital technology in perpetuating misinformation. Ne...
Jun 07, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Le Mépris in 1963 brought fame to Michel Piccoli. Jean-Luc Godard's new wave film was based on an Italian novel about a love triangle and power dynamics involving a playwright asked to work on a film script. Piccoli (1925-2020) went on to work with many other directors, including Buñuel, Chabrol, Varda, Rivette, Demy and Sautet in roles which run from a weak priest to a confused pope, with a host of rebels, cynics, lovers and losers mixed in. Matthew Sweet is joined by Geoff Andrew, Muriel Zagha...
Jun 06, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Pakistan to Bulgaria to swimming the waterways of Britain: Rana Mitter is joined by a panel of writers to look at our relationship with particular landscapes and the natural world. Kapka Kassabova’s latest book Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time details her stay in a remote valley by the River Mesa in Bulgaria and the knowledge of herbalism she finds there. Patrick Barham's latest book is about Roger Deakin, the environmentalist who co-founded Common Ground and was passionate about wi...
May 31, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast From dockworkers in Poland to meetings with European prime ministers and presidents and witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall - the latest book by Timothy Garton Ash is a memoir called Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. He is joined by the Turkish writer now in exile from her home country Ece Temelkuran, by journalist Ben Judah who has been interviewing citizens across different European countries and by Misha Glenny, who has written on the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe and present...
May 31, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Imperial War Museum in London is putting on display recently collected objects and new first-hand testimony describing life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles in its first show to look at this topic. Anne McElvoy explores what it means to explore this history in writing, music and museum displays. The author Louise Kennedy's novel Trespasses is a 1970s love story. Poet Maria McManus and composer Keith Acheson have collaborated on a piece called Ellipses which they describe as being abou...
May 26, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
