Arts & Ideas

The Alps have loomed large in the artistic imagination since the Romantic poets explored them in search of ‘the sublime’. Historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to writer Abbie Garrington and climber Dan Richards. His book Climbing Days tells the life of his Great-Great Aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman climber, and reflects on the appeal of the mountains and how the landscape can be a force for creativity, in music and literature. Abbie Garrington, from Durham University, has a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a literary history of mountaineering.Producer: Zahid Warley

Inspired by Beethoven's penchant for musical jokes, Sahidha Bari is joined by writer Meg Rosoff for a selection of readings of comic fiction from Kingsley Amis to Paul Beatty. The reader is Carl Prekopp.

Ever since the ancient Greeks, writers have waxed lyrical about rural life, associating it with beauty, innocence and goodness. Will Abberley, BBC New Generation Thinker and senior lecturer in English at the University of Sussex is joined by writer Melissa Harrison & archaeologist and sheep farmer Francis Pryor to discuss the British countryside real and imagined.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Helen Macdonald, author of H Is For Hawk and Tim Birkhead, Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield and author of Bird Sense, share their experiences of observing birds closely and their pick of writing inspired by real and fictional birds. Professor Birkhead’s recent research has been into the adaptive significance of egg shape in birds and Helen Macdonald won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award for her writing about the year she spent training a goshawk. Presenter: Lucy PowellProducer: Jacqueline Smith

Lauren Elkin, author of 'Flaneuse' and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Seán Williams talk to Rana Mitter about the joys of a wandering life and the inspiration that walking brought to writers from the 18th century to the present day.Producer: Zahid Warley

Sarah Dillon and novelist Richard Beard on narrative voices in literature

Longus’s charming pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe about teenage love and pirates was written in the second century AD. Tim Whitmarsh, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, discusses his work, alongside that of other early Greek writers and Judith Mackrell, dance critic for The Guardian talks about how the text was used by Diaghilev to create the iconic ballet for the Ballet Russes. Presenter: Shahidha Bari.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Why We Need the Novel Now. Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson delivers a keynote lecture and talks to presenter Shahidha Bari and an audience at the Southbank Centre in London as part of the Man Booker 50 Festival. In the age of Twitter and no-platforming, Jacobson argues that the novel has never been more necessary. Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question and was shortlisted for J in 2014Producer: Zahid Warley

Helaine Blumenfeld is a sculptor who divides her time between her family in England and her work-family in Italy. As an exhibition featuring much new work opens in Ely Cathedral, she talks to Anne McElvoy about expressing her thoughts in marble, the importance of risk to the artist and why total immersion without distraction produces her best work. As the Liverpool Biennial gets under way Dale Harding, an Australian artist and descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of Central Queensland, explains his own education in the medium of wood and why his art is part of the making and story-telling traditions and brutal recent history of his cultural family. Back to the 17th century and Stella Tillyard tells Anne about the inspiration behind her new novel: the immense human effort (and human sacrifice) it took to reclaim land from the sea in East Anglia, Holland and the islands of what is now New York. And pirates...New Generation Thinker and Ottoman historian, Michael Talbot, looks to change their image. Helaine Blumenfeld 'Tree of Life' at Ely Cathedral 13 JULY - 26 OCTOBER 2018 Dale Harding See his work at Tate Liverpool as part of Liverpool Biennial 2018: Beautiful world, where are you? from 14 July – 28 October. Stella Tillyard 'The Great Level' is out now. Michael Talbot is a lecturer in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich . New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Presenter: Anne McElvoy Producer: Jacqueline Smith

At the height of summer, Matthew Sweet and guests turn their minds to tennis, beaches and walking. As Wimbledon continues, Benjamin Markovits and William Skidelsky consider the philosophy of tennis; New Generation Thinker Des Fitzgerald explores the geography of a little known beach in Cardiff city centre; Rachel Holmes goes on a walking tour of Eleanor Marx's Sydenham in south London. A Weekend in New York is by Benjamin Markovits Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession is by William Skidelsky Eleanor Marx: A Life is by Rachel Holmes The links between Japan and Wales, and the geography of a particular Welsh beach are explored by KIZUNA: Japan | Wales | Design opens at National Museum Cardiff runs until 9 September 2018. Des Fitzgerald is a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University who studies the history of medicine, science and neuroscience and city life. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Playwright Charlotte Jones, author Laurence Scott, New Generation Thinkers Lisa Mullen and Iain Smith join Matthew Sweet.Charlotte Jones discusses her new play set in a Quaker community during the Napoleonic Wars. Matthew Sweet visits Compton Verney Art Gallery with Lisa Mullen to see the exhibition, 'Marvellous Mechanical Museum' which re-imagines the spectacular automata exhibitions of the 18th century. Laurence Scott talks about the ideas in his book, 'Picnic Comma Lightning' which explores the way digital advances are changing the way we live and what we reveal about ourselves. And, from the Indian Superman to Batman in the Philippines, film historian and New Generation Thinker Iain Smith looks at the hidden history of unlicensed superhero films produced around the world.Iain Robert Smith is a Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College, London. Laurence Scott is a New Generation Thinker Lecturer in Writing at New York University in London and the author of 'Picnic Comma Lightning' which is to be broadcast as the Radio 4 Book of the Week from July 16-20th.The Marvellous Mechanical Museum is at Compton Verney until September 20th 2018.Charlotte Jones's drama The Meeting runs at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester from 13 July – 11 AugustNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer Fiona McLean

The Italian architect and engineer, Renzo Piano, talks to Philip Dodd about his career from the Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers) to the Shard in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 50 years of his work are being marked in an exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts from the 15th of September to the 20th of January 2019. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Nandini Das and John Gallagher look at words for strangers in Tudor and Stuart England and ideas about civility. Plus Shahidha Bari talks to Makena Onjerika the winner of the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing. And, as the NHS approaches its 70th anniversary, we discuss the relationship between care, institutions, and the concept of medicine with novelist and former nurse Christie Watson, and historian of the NHS Roberta Bivins. Nandini Das is working on the Tide Project http://www.tideproject.uk/ exploring travel and identity in England 1550 - 1700 She and John Gallagher are taking part in the Society for Renaissance Studies conference at Sheffield University this week. Christie Watson is the author of The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story. Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir 'Fun Home' on stage at the Young Vic in London reviewed by Jen Harvie from Queens Mary University of London, a novel inspired by Kathy Acker from Olivia Laing, Film historian and broadcaster Ian Christie on the 40th anniversary of Michael Cimino's film, 'The Deerhunter' and a new biography by Michèle Mendelssohn on Oscar Wilde's time in America. Mathew Sweet presents. Fun Home - which explores family, memory and sexuality, runs at the Young Vic in London from June 18th to September 1st 2018. Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre & Performance, at Queen Mary University of London Olivia Laing is the author of 'The Lonely City' and her new novel is called 'Crudo'. 'Making Oscar Wilde' by Michèle Mendelssohn is out now. 'The Deer Hunter' is in cinemas from July 4th.Producer: Fiona McLean

Can beauty be an ethical ideal? What did being handsome mean in C18 England? How do we look at images by Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman or a Renaissance nude and is that affected by changing attitudes towards the body now? Anne McElvoy talks to the painter, Chantal Joffe, the philosopher, Heather Widdows, the writer, performer and activist Penny Pepper and the New Generation Thinkers Catherine Fletcher and Sarah Goldsmith. Chantal Joffe's solo show - Personal Feeling is the Main thing - is at the Lowry in Manchester until 2nd September. The Tate Liverpool exhibition Life in Motion: Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman runs until September 23rd. The Italian Renaissance Nude by Jill Burke from the University of Edinburgh is out now from Yale University Press. Penny Pepper's book First in the World Somewhere, a memoir is published by Unbound New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Sarah Goldsmith is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leicester working on A History of the Eighteenth-Century Elite Male Body. Catherine Fletcher is Associate Professor at Swansea University who has published Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome and The Black Prince of Florence.Producer: Zahid Warley

Rana Mitter discusses food in history. James C Scott on the role of grain and coercion in the development of the first settled societies, and how the Victorians changed lunch, with New Generation Thinkers Elsa Richardson and Chris Kissane. Plus, following the death of American philosopher Stanley Cavell last week, Rana discusses his work and legacy with Stephen Mulhall and Alice Crary. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. James C Scott is Stirling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Elsa Richardson is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow who is researching the 19th-century history of vegetarianism. Chris Kissane is a Visiting Fellow in Economic History at the LSE who has written Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe.Producer: Luke Mulhall

170 years ago one woman launched the beginning of the modern women’s rights movement in America. New Generation Thinker Joanna Cohen of Queen Mary University of London looks back at her story and what lessons it has for politics now. In the small town of Seneca Falls in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote The Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto that took one of the nation’s most revered founding documents, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and turned its condemnation of British tyranny into a blistering attack on the tyranny of American men. But why did Stanton choose to rebrand her claim for rights with the power of sentiment?

The lawyer turned poet whose response to political upheaval has lessons for our time - explored by New Generation Thinker Seb Falk with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas The 14th century’s most eloquent pessimist, John Gower has forever been overshadowed by his funnier friend Chaucer. Yet his trilingual poetry is truly encyclopedic, mixing social commentary, romance and even science. Writing ‘somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore’, Gower's response to political upheaval was to ‘shoot my arrows at the world’. Whether you want to be cured of lovesickness or learn the secrets of alchemy, John Gower has something to tell you.

A radical community of women set up in 1760s rural England is explored in an essay from New Generation Thinker Lucy Powell, recorded with an audience at the 2018 York Festival of Ideas.Sarah Scott’s first novel, published in 1750, was a conventional French-style romance, the fitting literary expression of a younger daughter of the lesser gentry. One year later, she had scandalously fled her husband’s house, and pooled finances and set up home with her life-long partner, Lady Barbara Montagu. Her fourth novel, Millenium Hall, described in practical detail the communal existence of a group of women who had taken refuge in each other’s company and created an all-female utopia in rural England. On Lady Bab’s death, in 1765, Scott would attempt to create this radical community in actuality. Lucy Powell will explore the life, work, and far-reaching influence of this extraordinary writer.

The most famous imposter of the seventeenth century - Mary Carleton. John Gallagher, of the University of Leeds, argues that the story of the "German Princess" raises questions about what evidence we believe and the currency of shame. Her real name was thought to be Mary Moders and she became a media sensation in Restoration London, after her husband’s family, greedy for the riches they believed her to be concealing, accused her of bigamy and put her on trial for her life. Her life, and what remains to us of it, forces us to ask hard questions of the sources from her time. Whose word do we trust?

Sophie Coulombeau tells the story of John Trusler, an eccentric Anglican minister who was the quintessential 18th-century entrepreneur. He was a prolific author, an innovative publisher, a would-be inventor, and a ‘medical gentleman’ of dubious qualifications. Dismissed by many as a conman and scoundrel, today, few have heard of the man but his madcap schemes often succeeded, in different forms, a century or two later. In his efforts we can trace the ancestors of the thesaurus, the self-help book, Comic Sans, professional ghostwriting, the Society of Authors, and electrotherapy. New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau, from Cardiff University, argues that telling his story can help us to reinterpret and rehabilitate the very idea of 'failure'.

Our romantic attachment to the idea of wildwood, the impossibility of ever getting back to some primeval grove, and the possibilities opening up about the health and wellbeing of future forests, are debated by Rana Mitter with ecologist and conservationist, Keith Kirby, who knew and worked with Rackham, botanist Fraser Mitchell whose work with pollen is helping to uncover the deep history of trees and environmental archaeologist, Suzi Richer, who is assembling oral histories of woodcraftship and exploring different ways we have imagined the forest. Also celebrating the habitat where many good trees went to die, Donald Murray, author and poet, celebrates peat bogs, for themselves and their place in human cultures around the world. In midsummer week, Radio 3 enters one of the most potent sources of the human imagination. 'Into the Forest' explores the enchantment, escape and magical danger of the forest in summer, with slow radio moments featuring the sounds of the forest, allowing time out from today’s often frenetic world

Colin Grant, Hannah Lowe and Jay Bernard discuss writing about Windrush 70 years on with Shahidha Bari. Plus Alexandra Harris looks at trees in art as part of Radio 3's Into the Forest season of programmes and Jonathan Eato and Nduduzo Makhintini discuss their research into South African jazz -- one of the subjects in the British Academy Summer Showcase.Colin Grant has written books including Bageye at the Wheel, A Smell of Burning, I & I Natural Mystics and Negro with a Hat.Hannah Lowe's poems include Ormonde, a specially produced chapbook charting the voyage of the 1947 SS Ormonde from Jamaica to the UK through the lens of her Chinese-Jamaican immigrant father, a passenger on the boat. Jay Bernard was awarded the 2018 Ted Hughes award for new poetry for Surge: Side A, an exploration of the 1981 New Cross fire. More information about Windrush is at http://www.windrush70.com/ Alexandra Harris is the author of books including Weatherland, Virginia Woolf, Modernism on Sea and Romantic Moderns.You can hear a Landmark discussion about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway available on bbc.co.uk/FreeThinking and the The Royal Society of Literature is marking Dalloway Day at the British Library today.The British Academy Summer Showcase - a new free festival of ideas - runs June 22nd - 23rd at 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH . Opening times are 11am - 5pm with an evening opening on 22nd. And the South African Jazz Archive when it opens will be in Stellenbosch.Producer: Zahid Warley

Ursula Le Guin's idea of the forest is explored by philosopher and Green party politician Rupert Read and novelist Zen Cho. Plus Matthew Sweet talks to Ian Hislop about this year's winner of the Paul Foot Award for Investigative Journalism, and for Radio 3's 'Into the Forest' we ask whether, if a tree falls in the wood and nobody is around, it makes a sound.Usula Le Guin (1929 - 2018) published her science fiction novella The Word for World Is Forest in 1972.In midsummer week, Radio 3 enters one of the most potent sources of the human imagination. 'Into the Forest' explores the enchantment, escape and magical danger of the forest in summer, with slow radio moments featuring the sounds of the forest, allowing time out from today's often frenetic world.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Historian Fern Riddell and composer Debbie Wiseman on why the piano is essentially erotic while psychologist Frank Tallis and Tiffany Watt Smith explore obsessive love with presenter Matthew Sweet. Plus Grainne Sweeney curator of an exhibition which looks at the way inventors from the North East of England have shaped the world we live in today. Dr Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist and author of The Incurable Romantic: and Other Unsettling Revelations as well as a series of detective novels The Liebermann Papers and horror and supernatural fiction. Dr Fern Riddell is a New Generation Thinker and author of Death In Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion. Actress. Arsonist. Suffragette. Jane Campion's prize winning film The Piano is being re-released to mark 25 years since it was made. Debbie Wiseman's most recent recordings include her score for the film Edie, and Live at the Barbican. Dr Tiffany Watt Smith is a New Generation Thinker and author of The Book of Human Emotions The Great Exhibition of the North runs from 22 June—9 September 2018 in a variety of museums, galleries, music venues and public squares in Newcastle and Gateshead. It includes Which Way North at the Great North Museum: Hancock from Friday 22 June - Sunday 9 September 2018.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Commentator Douglas Murray, journalist Bari Weiss and writer Ed Husain join Philip Dodd to explore the 'Intellectual Dark Web'. Their YouTube videos and podcasts receive millions of views and downloads. They sell out theatres across the US. But these aren't rock stars or the latest pop sensation. They are a collection of public intellectuals, scientists, political columnists, and stand up-comedians who are at the front line of the raging 'culture wars'. As two of its leading figures, neuroscience Sam Harris and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, prepare for a UK tour, Philip Dodd finds out more about this popular movement. The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray is out now. The House of Islam: A Global History by Ed Husain is out now. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Mark Lilla could be called the conscience of liberal America. He talks to Anne McElvoy about life after identity politics. 2018 New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn discusses whether paying people for taking part in medical trials is different from other forms of "labour". Plus Owen Hatherley's latest book is called Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent. He discusses what makes a European city and who should take responsibility for shaping our urban environment whether its Hull or Thessaloniki with Deborah Saunt from DSDHA - who are working on new plans for the West End of London following the opening of Crossrail stations.Mark Lilla's new book, The Once and Future Liberal, is a ferocious analysis of the American left’s abdication as well as a call to arms. The time for evangelism - of speaking truth to power is over, he says, now it’s all about seizing power to defend truth. Gulzaar Barn lectures in philosophy at the University of Birmingham working on moral, political, and feminist philosophy. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of short columns reflecting their research on bbc.co.uk/FreeThinking Producer: Zahid Warley

Matthew Sweet meets with physician, anthropologist, author and Jimmy Carter's former 'drugs czar', Peter Bourne. Comparing his life to the title character in the film Forrest Gump, the trained psychiatrist and Vietnam veteran looks back on an eclectic career spanning six decades. He talks about his involvement in the civil rights movement, his close relationship with Jimmy Carter (and how he convinced him to run for president), serving as an Assistant Secretary-General at the UN, and his awkward encounter with Saddam Hussein. The author of a Fidel Castro biography, Bourne also caught the attention of the author Robert Ludlum. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

From people-watching with Aristotle in a London park, to meeting in a luxury hotel at midnight to discuss the fate of a continent, to using a lunchtime five-a-side game as the starting point for a meditation on the human condition, this programme treats 'philosophy' as a verb rather than a noun. Bernard-Henri Lévy is in London to perform a one-man play on Brexit. Simon Critchley's new book is What We Think About When We Think About Football, and Edith Hall's is Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. Shahidha Bari talks to each of them about bringing philosophy out of the academy. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Arundhati Roy, Meena Kandasamy and Preti Taneja share thoughts about translation. Plus Anne McElvoy will be joined by Professor Nichola McLelland and Vicky Gough of the British Councl to examine why, in UK schools and universities, the number of students learning a second language is collapsing - whilst the number of languages spoken in Britain is rising and translated fiction is becoming more available and popular. The Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy is giving the W G Sebald lecture at the British Library about translation. You can find a 45' conversation with her about her latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness on the Free Thinking website. Meena Kandasamy translates from Tamil and her first poetry collection Touch was translated into 5 languages. Her latest novel When I Hit You looks at domestic abuse. It is on the shortlist for the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction and you can find a collection of interviews with the 6 shortlisted writers at bbc.co.uk/Freethinking Preti Taneja is a New Generation Thinker whose first novel We That Are Young is a setting of King Lear in Delhi. It's been shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction. She is taking part in the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival at the British Library on Saturday June 9th. Producer: Zahid Warley

Iraq vet and novelist Kevin Powers, the careers picked by psychopaths, and American writer Gary Lachman join Matthew Sweet.Kevin Powers' prize winning novel The Yellow Birds explored the experience of soldiers and their lack of control. His new novel A Shout in the Ruins looks at the long shadows cast by the American Civil War and slavery.Gary Lachman discusses non-rational or pre-Enlightenment thinking in contemporary politics and culture as he publishes his latest book called Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. He is joined by Professor Christine Ferguson from Stirling University who researches the influence of the occult on popular culture and politics in the UK.Psychologist Kevin Dutton and broadcaster and psychotherapist Lucy Beresford discuss the idea that psychopaths are drawn to certain careers, including radio journalism. Kevin Dutton's books include The Wisdom of Psychopaths. Lucy Beresford is the host of LBC's Sex and Relationships phone-in show.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about Auden, Dostoevsky and tragedy. At Hay Festival he talks to poet Simon Armitage about the imprint of landscapes in Yorkshire, West Wales, and the Middle East, the use of dialect words and reinterpreting myths. Chaired by Rana Mitter. Books by Rowan Williams include Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and The Tragic Imagination. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Books by Simon Armitage include The Unaccompanied, Flit, Selected Poems, Walking Home, Travelling Songs, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Homer's Odyssey. He is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry.Producer: Fiona McLean.

The lure of conspiracy theories, the power of fiction to translate history and the public role of writer are debated as Shahidha Bari chairs a discussion recorded with the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas and the Turkish author Elif Shafak - recorded with an audience at the Hay Festival.Javier Cercas' latest novel is The Impostor and his essay about fiction is called The Blind Spot.Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel is called The Shape of the Ruins. Elif Shafak is the author of novels including The Architect's Apprentice, Honour and Three Daughters of Eve.Producer: Fiona McLean.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough meets the British artist Tacita Dean. ‘Tacita Dean: Landscape’ has just opened at the Royal Academy in London and features vast chalk mountains and cloudscapes and a film made in Cornwall, Yellowstone and Wyoming. And what does an artist do when she travels hundreds of miles to film a total eclipse of the sun… and finds there’s no film in the camera. Then focus on mountains and those who climb them. New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson reflects on an interplay between climbing and photography in the late nineteenth century, the age of Being Still. Plus John Tyndall who took his mountaineering and poetic meditations back to the lab and proved why the sky is blue and mountains are cooler at the top than at the bottom. With Tyndall's biographer, Roland Jackson and literary scholar Gregory Tate. Tacita Dean Landscape is at the Royal Academy until August 12th. Last chance to see Tacita Dean: Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, 15 March-28 May; Still Life is at the National Gallery, 15 March-28 MayRoland Jackson, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution THE ASCENT OF JOHN TYNDALL: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual is out now. Greg Tate lectures in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews and was chosen as a New Generation Thinker in 2013.Ben Anderson is a 2018 New Generation Thinker from Keele University who is writing a book Modern Natures: Mountain Leisure and Urban Culture in England and Germany, c. 1885-1918.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Presenter: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough Producer: Jacqueline Smith

This year's authors are:Robert Bickers for Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination Lindsey Fitzharris for The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine Tim Grady for A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War Miranda Kaufmann for Black Tudors: The Untold Story Peter Marshall for Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation Jan Rüger for Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea

From BBC Radio 3's archive, another opportunity to hear an interview with Philip Roth (1933 - 2018), author of books including Portnoy's Complaint & American Pastoral. Recorded in New York in 2008, Philip Roth talked to Philip Dodd about his life and work and about his 29th book Indignation. The Pulitzer Prize winning Roth has been called provocative, playful and angry and many of his themes remained consistent since he began writing in the late 1950’s. He and his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, cast an often satirical eye over post World War America, notably with a string of now classic late novels such as I Married a Communist, American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot against America.The novel Indignation is set in 1951, the second year of the Korean War, and tells the story of the son of a kosher butcher who escapes a crushing New Jersey Jewish environment to attend a conservative College in Ohio. It is a tale about work and careers, about sexual discovery, anti-Semitism, families and the bizarre nature of fate and memory. In this interview Philip Roth talks about the role of fiction in his life and about his own impact on America. He describes the attraction of mixing fiction with elements of autobiography and about the expectations people have of the writer. He talks about sex, the male body, the ageing process and about his enduring need to write. Presenter: Philip Dodd

Writers Sheila Heti, Jessie Greengrass and Jacqueline Rose compare notes on motherhood & presenter Anne McElvoy looks at depictions of Mrs Noah with New Generation Thinker Daisy Black.Jacqueline Rose has written Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. Her previous books include Women in Dark Times Sheila Heti's latest book is called Motherhood. Her previous books include How Should a Person Be? and Women in Clothes. Jessie Greengrass' novel, Sight, has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018.Daisy Black, Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton, is one of the ten academics selected as New Generation Thinkers for 2018 in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help academics turn their research into radio programmes.Producer: Fiona McLean

Self help, identity politics and the influence of postmodernists are on the agenda as Philip Dodd meets the YouTube star and Canadian clinical psychologist, Jordan B. Peterson. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson is out now. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

Shahidha Bari looks at British design pioneers Enid Marx, Edward Bawden and Charles Rennie Mackintosh with curators Alan Powers and James Russell and design historian Eleanor Herring. 2018 New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen visits The Future Starts Here at the V&A.Alan Powers is the author of a new book Enid Marx:The Pleasures of Pattern and is curating an exhibition at the House of Illustration in London Print, Pattern and Popular Art which runs from May 25th to September 23rd 2018James Russell has curated Edward Bawden which runs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from May 23rd to September 9th 2018 and he is the author of The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden. Eleanor Herring is interested in making, writing, teaching and talking about design with as broad an audience as possible. She is the author of Street Furniture Design: Contesting Modernism in Post-War Britain.The Future Starts Here runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until 4th November. Mackintosh 150 marks the anniversary of the birth of Glaswegian architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Exhibitions include Making the Glasgow Style at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum until August 14th. His Oak Room will go on display when the V&A Dundee opens in September. Plus a new Mackintosh interpretation centre opens at The Mackintosh House, a series of film screenings is at The Lighthouse and exhibitions at Glasgow School of Art and other venues.Lisa Mullen is the Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and one of the 2018 New Generation Thinkers in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The relationship between intellectuals, nations and spies debated by Agnes Poirier, Maria Dimitrova, and Jefferson Morley. Plus philosopher John Gray explores atheism and doubt with Matthew Sweet. Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray is out now. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Matthew Sweet discusses talking, speech and having a voice, with Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford; Rebecca Roache, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London; actress and impressionist Jessica Martin; and Maurice McLeod, social commentator, director of Media Diversified, and Labour councillor for Queenstown Battersea. Trevor Cox has written Now You're Talking: The Story of Human Conversation from Neanderthals to Artificial Intelligence. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Each generation creates its own myths and in Free Thinking, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to three writers whose novels and stories spring bright and fresh from a compost of classical legend and British folk stories. Madeline Miller, the American writer who re-created Achilles for the 21st century, now turns her attention to Circe, nymph, lowest-of-the-low goddess or witch, who possesses a unique sympathy for humanity. Zoe Gilbert's obsession with folk stories where strange things happen and no-one asks why has led her to create a new island replete with a population of selkies and hares, water bulls and human happiness and tragedy. Kirsty Logan's novel of The Gloaming, takes us to an island somewhere-sometime-never off the West Coast of Scotland where turning to stone and the mermaid life are all part and parcel of daily existence. Together they discuss the enduring nature of certain kinds of stories, why they still matter and so often enjoy a surge in popularity at times of social stress and confusion. Madeline Miller: Circe is out now Zoe Gilbert: Folk is out now Kirsty Logan: The Gloaming is out now Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Former army officer Dr Mike Martin on Why We Fight. Historian Priya Satia argues that guns were the drivers behind the industrial revolution. The mob as a political entity and the Massacre of St George's Fields of 10 May 1768 is considered in an opinion piece from 2018 New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel. We also look at night time - curator Anna Sparham selects some nocturnal views of the capital from a photography exhibition at the Museum of London, while Dr Gavin Francis explains how being up all night affects the human body and mind. Anne McElvoy presents. Mike Martin is a visiting research fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, having previously studied biology at Oxford. Between these experiences, he served as a British Army officer in Afghanistan. His book Why We Fight is out now.Priya Satia is a Prof. of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War & the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East. Her latest book Empire of Guns is out now.Dr Dafydd Mills Daniel, Lecturer in Theology, Jesus College at the Uni. of Oxford, is one of the ten academics selected as New Generation Thinkers for 2018 in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help academics turn their research into radio programmes.Anna Sparham is Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London. London Nights runs from 11th May to 11th November.Gavin Francis is a GP, and the author of True North and Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Costa Prize. His new book Shapeshifters: Medicine and Human Change is out now.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Pauline Dakin spent her childhood on the run. Sally Bayley grew up in a house where men were forbidden and a charismatic leader ruled. They compare notes with presenter Matthew Sweet. New Generation Thinker Iain Smith discusses his research into the history of a film known as the Turkish Star Wars. Plus Canadian poet Gary Geddes on his poem sequence The Terracotta Army. And the pioneering Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy and the birds eye view images which he created. Sarah Allen, co-curator of a new exhibition at Tate Modern discusses his impact.Girl with Dove: A Childhood Spent Graphically Reading by Sally Bayley is out now. Pauline Dakin's memoir is called Run, Hide, Repeat. Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) is the title of a 1982 Turkish science fantasy adventure film which is also described as Turkish Star Wars. Gary Geddes is the author of poetry collections including The Terracotta Army and War & Other Measures and his non-fiction books include Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care. He is talking at Birmingham, Liverpool and Oxford universities and University College London. China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors is an exhibition running at the World Museum Liverpool until October 28th 2018. Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art runs at Tate Modern until October 14th 2018. Producer: Fiona McLean

Anne Applebaum, Gregory Claeys, Jane Humprhies and Richard Seymour join Rana Mitter to assess the legacy of Marx 200 years after his birth. Do his ideas have currency and if so where is he an influence in the world? Academic Emile Chabal reports on researching Marxism in India and Brazil.Gregory Claeys is the author of Marx and Marxism Richard Seymour has written Corbyn - The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics Anne Applebaum's latest book is called Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine Jane Humphries' book is called Childhood and Child Labour Emile Chabal is writing a biography of Eric Hobsbawm and teaches at the University of Edinburgh.Producer: Zahid Warley

Jesmyn Ward - author of Sing, Unburied Sing talks to Christopher Harding about editing a collection of essays called The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race and about the depictions of family life and poverty and the influence of Greek drama on her prize winning novels. Sarah Churchwell traces the history of the use and meaning of the phrases 'the American Dream' and 'America First'. John Edgar Wideman explains what he was seeking to do by blurring fact and fiction in his new short story collection American Histories. Jesmyn Ward's novels include Salvage the Bones, Where the Line Bleeds and Sing, Unburied Sing - and a memoir called Men We Reaped. She has received a MacArthur Genius Grant and won two National Book Awards for Fiction. She has edited a collection of Essays called The Fire This Time which takes its inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time.Professor Sarah Churchwell is the author of books including Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby and Behold America: A History of America First and the American DreamJohn Edgar Wideman's work includes the novels The Cattle Killing and Philadelphia Fire and the memoir Brothers and Keepers. His new collection of short stories - American Histories - weaves real characters including Frederick Douglass and Jean-Michel Basquiat into imaginary narratives.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Tokyo used to be presented as the ultimate hyper-modern city. But after years of economic recession the Tokyo of today has another side. A site of alienation and loneliness, anxiety about conformity and identity, it is a place where self-professed 'geeks' (or 'otaku'), mostly single middle-aged men, congregate in districts like Akibahara to pursue fanatical interests outside mainstream society, including cult-like followings of teenage girl singers known as Tokyo Idols. Novelist Tomouki Hoshino, photographer Suzanne Mooney, writer/photographer Mariko Nagai and film-maker Kyoko Miyake look at life in the city for the Heisei generation. Presented by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough. Director Kyoko Miyake has made a film called Tokyo Idols which looks at the obsession of middle aged men with superstar teenage girls who make a living online Suzanne Mooney's photographs depict the urban landscapes of Tokyo. Novelist Tomouki Hoshino's latest book to be translated into English is called ME. It's about rootless millennials and suicide. Mariko Nagai is an author and photographer who has written for children and adults. Her books include Instructions for the Living and Irradiated Cities. The translator was Bethan Jones and the speakers were all in the UK to take part in events as part of Japan Now - a festival at the British Library in London, and in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich. Programmed by Modern Culture in partnership with the Japan Foundation and Sheffield University. Producer: Luke Mulhall

David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp join Rana Mitter. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rashōmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The Rashōmon Effect' has become a byword for the literary technique where the same event is presented via the different and incompatible testimonies from the characters involved. David Peace's new book 'Patient X' is a novelised response to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's last years and his death by suicide at the age of 35. Natasha Pulley is a novelist and Japanophile with a particular interest in Japanese literature of the 1920s, and in the unreliable narrator implied by use of the Rashōmon Effect. And Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Photographer Mika Ninagawa talks to Christopher Harding about the artificiality of her images of cherry blossoms. A plane crash in the mountains is explored in the new novel Seventeen from Hideo Yokoyama, translated by Louise Heal Kawai. And presenter Anne McElvoy is also joined by Eiko Honda from the University of Oxford and Professor Stephen Dodd from SOAS, the University of London for an exploration of the way nature has been depicted across the decades in Japanese writing and political thought. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama translated by Louise Heal Kawai is out in English now. Producer: Robyn Read

What do meatballs, The Square and Henning Mankell have in common? The answer is Sweden as you’ve no doubt guessed. As ABBA’s Cold War musical, Chess, is poised to return to the British stage Matthew Sweet considers what Sweden’s taught us – whether in films such as I am Curious Yellow or in the aisles at IKEA - and what the Swedes might have gained from their brushes with Britain. His guests include Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, the Swedish cultural attache, Pia Lundberg, Lars Blomgren, one of the people behind The Bridge, the social scientist, Tom Hoctor and Kieran Long - once of the V&A but now the director of the Swedish centre for Architecture and Design.Chess runs at English National Opera from 26 Apr - 02 Jun 2018 Producer: Zahid Warley