Arts & Ideas

New Generation Thinker Brendan McGeever traces the links between anti-Semitism now and pogroms in the former Soviet Union and the language used to describe this form of racism.Brendan McGeever lectures at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London. You can hear him discussing an exhibition at the Jewish Museum exploring racial stereotypes in a Free Thinking episode called Sebald, anti-Semitism, Carolyn Forché https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00050d2New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

Earlier periods of history have seen more people with scarring to their faces from duelling injuries and infectious diseases but what stopped this leading to a greater tolerance of facial difference? Historian Emily Cock considers the case of the Puritan William Prynne and looks at a range of strategies people used to improve their looks from eye patches to buying replacement teeth from the mouths of the poor, whose low-sugar diets kept their dentures better preserved than their aristocratic neighbours. In portraits and medical histories she finds examples of the elision between beauty and morality. With techniques such as ‘Metoposcopy’, which focused on interpreting the wrinkles on your forehead and the fact that enacting the law led to deliberate cut marks being made - this Essay reflects on the difficult terrain of judging by appearance.Emily Cock is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cardiff working on a project looking at Disfigurement in Britain and its Colonies 1600 – 1850.You can hear her discussing her research with Fay Alberti, who works on facial transplants, in a New Thinking podcast episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast called About Face https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p080p2bcNew Generation Thinkers is a 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: Alex Mansfield

New Generation Thinker Majed Akhter explores how large dam projects continue to form reservoirs of hope for a sustainable future. Despite their known drawbacks, our love affair with dams has not abated – across the world more than 3,500 dams are in various stages of construction. In Pakistan this has become entwined with nationalism, both inside the community and in the diaspora - but what are the dangers of this “dam fever” ? This Essay traces the history of river development in the region, from the early twentieth century “canal colonies” in Punjab, to Cold War mega-projects, to the contemporary drive to build large new dams. Previously an engineer and a resource economist, Majed Akhter now lectures in geography at King’s College London. you can hear him discussing the politics of rivers in a Free Thinking episode called Rivers and geopolitics https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051hbNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio.Producer: Alex Mansfield

From a way of addressing the loss of common land due to the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, to a means for the urban poor gainfully employed and away from drink, allotments have meant different things to different people. The Allotments Act of 1922 was an important step in defining the allotment as we know it today, and it's a fascinating window onto the social and economic tensions of the inter-war years. John Gallagher tells the story, with help from historian Dr Elsa Richardson and philosopher Dr Sophie Scott-Brown.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Robert Flaherty’s ground-breaking documentary film Nanook of the North came out in the same year as the BBC was founded. Continuing our series explores cultural events from 1922, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to film historian Roswitha Skare and journalist Luke Dormehl about why this study of life in the Arctic has proved to be both controversial and influential.Roswitha Skare is the author of Nanook of the North from 1922 to Today: The Famous Arctic Documentary and Its Afterlife.Luke Dormehl has written A Journey Through Documentary Film.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A new craze for body building and that distinctive figure of the 20th century, the hobbyist, are the topic of conversation as we continue our series of features looking at cultural life in 1922. John Gallagher considers what the expansion of free time in the 1920s meant for leisure and the things people did for fun. He is joined by historian Elsa Richardson and literary scholar Jon Day.Producer: Luke Mulhall

From health fads, to Virginia Woolf having a premonition of the microwave, New Generation Thinker John Gallagher is joined by food historians Annie Gray and Elsa RichardsonProducer: Luke Mulhall

Jade Halbert lectures in fashion, but has never done any sewing. She swaps pen and paper for needle and thread to create a dress from a Jean Muir pattern. In a diary charting her progress, she reflects on the skills of textile workers she has interviewed as part of a project charting the fashion trade in Glasgow and upon the banning of pins on a factory floor, the experiences of specialist sleeve setters and cutters, and whether it is ok to lick your chalk.Jade Halbert is a Lecturer, Fashion Business and Cultural Studies at the University of Huddersfield. You can find her investigation into fashion and the high street as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gvpn and taking part in a Free Thinking discussion called The Joy of Sewing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002mk2. She has also broadcast another Essay for Radio 3 looking at the fashion label Droopy & Browns https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014ysqNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Advances in robotics and virtual reality are giving us ever more 'realistic' ways of representing the world, but the quest for vivid visualisation is thousands of years old. This essay takes the guide to oratory and getting your message across written by the ancient Roman Quintilian and focuses in on a wall painting of The Judgment of Solomon in an Elizabethan house in the village of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. Often written off as stiff, formal and artificial with arguments that the Reformation fear of idolatry stifled Elizabethan art, New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday argues that story telling and conveying vivid detail was an important part of painting in this period as art was used to communicate messages to serve social, political and religious ends.Christina Faraday is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. You can hear her talking about more Tudor art in a Free Thinking discussion called The Tudor Mind and explaining her work on an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the painting of Nicholas Hilliard in a Free Thinking episode about the joy of miniatures https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002mk2New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio.Producer: Luke Mulhall

This Essay tells a story of political marches and everyday acts of radical care; of sledgehammers and bags of rice; of the struggles for justice waged by migrant domestic workers but it also charts the realisation of Ella Parry-Davies, that acknowledging publicly for the first time her own condition of epilepsy – or “coming out crip” – is part of the story of our blindness to inequalities in healthcare and living conditions faced by many migrant workers.Ella Parry-Davies has a post as Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory at King’s College London. She is working on an oral history project creating sound walks by interviewing migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. You can hear her discussing her research in a Free Thinking episode called Stanley Spencer, Domestic Servants, Surrogacy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000573qNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

There is fascinating evidence that 5,000 years ago, people living in Britain and Ireland had a deep and meaningful relationship with the underworld seen in the carved chalk, animal bones and human skeletons found at Cranborne Chase in Dorset in a large pit, at the base of which had been sunk a 7-metre-deep shaft. Other examples considered in this Essay include Carrowkeel in County Sligo, the passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in eastern Ireland and the Priddy Circles in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. If prehistoric people regarded the earth as a powerful, animate being that needed to be placated and honoured, perhaps there are lessons here for our own attitudes to the world beneath our feet.Susan Greaney is a New Generation Thinker who works for English Heritage at Stonehenge and who is studying for her PhD at Cardiff University.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can hear her journey to Japan to compare the Jomon civilisations with Stonehenge as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature and there is an exhibition opening at Stonehenge in September https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hgqxProducer: Torquil MacLeod

When Tom Smith sets out to research allegations of racism in Berlin’s club scene, he finds himself face to face with his own past in techno’s birthplace: Detroit. Visiting the music distributor Submerge, he considers the legacy of the pioneers Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the influence of Afro-futurism and the work done in Berlin to popularise techno by figures including Kemal Kurum and Claudia Wahjudi. But the vibrant culture which seeks to be inclusive has been accused of whiteness and the Essay ends with a consideration of the experiences of clubbers depicted in the poetry of Michael Hyperion Küppers.Tom Smith is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in German at the University of St Andrews. You can find another Essay from him called Masculinity Comrades in Arms recorded at the York Festival of Ideas 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00061m5 and a New Thinking podcast discussion Rubble Culture to techno in postwar Germany https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07srdmhNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

A nurse who survived the genocide in 1994 against the Tutsi in Rwanda has written a testimony which New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge has translated.In Rwanda, Yolande Mukagasana is a well-known writer, public figure and campaigner for remembrance of the genocide. She has authored three testimonies, a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators and two volumes of Rwandan stories. Her work has received numerous international prizes, including an Honorable Mention for the UNESCO Education for Peace Prize.Zoe Norridge, from King’s College London, argues there should be a place for Mukagasana on our shelves in UK, alongside works from the Holocaust and other genocides. Why? Because listening to survivor voices helps us to understand the human cost of mass violence.Producer: Luke Mulhall

The novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) brought to life a large comic heroine who bucked 19th-century conventions. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore's essay outlines the prolific writing career of Margaret Oliphant and laments the way she was used by fellow novelist Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the dangers of needing to write for money to keep yourself and your family afloat.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics who can turn their research into radio. You can find more conversations, features and Essays from the ten years of the scheme in a collection on the Free Thinking programme website of BBC Radio 3.

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme websiteProducer: Torquil MacLeod

In a series of features looking back at cultural milestones in 1922 – the year the BBC was founded – Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough finds out about the All England Lawn Tennis Club's move to a new home talking to David Berry, author of A People's History of Tennis, and Matt Harvey who was poet in residence at Wimbledon in 2010.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau argues that we should salute this woman who supported her family through her writing, who perfected sonnets about solitude before Wordsworth began writing his, and who explored the struggles of women and refugees in her fiction. Mother to 12 children, Charlotte Turner Smith wrote ten novels, three poetry collections and four children's books and translated French fiction. In 1788 her first novel, Emmeline, sold 1500 copies within months but by the time of her death in 1803 her popularity had declined and she had become destitute.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

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 – 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

A motorbike adorned with a zebu skull is one of the central images of Djibril Diop Mambéty's classic 1973 film, whose title translates as The Journey of the Hyena. Listed as one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound magazine poll, it mixes West African oral traditions with influences from the French New Wave and Soviet cinema. Mory and Anta are two young people growing up in a newly independent Senegal who fantasise about leaving Dakar for a new life in France, but how can they realise those dreams and do they really want to leave? Matthew Sweet is joined by New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani, Estrella Sendra Fernandez and Ashley Clark. Touki Bouki is being screened at the BFI London on July 27th as part of the Black Fantastic season of films drawing on science fiction, myth and Afrofuturism. The curator of that season Ekow Eshun joined Shahidha Bari in a recent Free Thinking episode which you can find on BBC Sounds and as the Arts and Ideas podcast.Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in English at City, University of London and has written on neocolonialism in Francophone West African cinema.Estrella Sendra Fernandez lectures in film and screen studies at SOAS, University of London. She directed the award-winning documentary film Témoignages de l’autre côté about migration in Senegal.Ashley Clark is curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. He is the author of the book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”Producer: Torquil MacLeodIn the Free Thinking archives you can find a series of programmes exploring silent film, star actors including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marlene Dietrich, Dirk Bogarde, and classics of cinema around the world including Kurosawa's Rashomon, Satyajit Ray's films, the films of Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin.

Glenda Jackson is the subject of a BFI season and in this film 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-watches it with guests including Glenda Jackson, playwright Mark Ravenhill, film historian Melanie Williams and BFI National Archive curator Simon McCallum. They discuss the different elements of the film, including the score, which features the trio Soave sia il vento from Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, the very precise decor and evocation of late 60s London and filming inside a Jewish synagogue. The Glenda Jackson season runs at the BFI across July with a screening of this film on July 24th.Producer: Fiona McLeanSunday Bloody Sunday (1971) still courtesy BFI Sunday Bloody Sunday is available on Blu-rayYou can find Matthew Sweet discussing other classics of British Cinema in the Free Thinking archives including:British New Wave Films of the 60s - Joely Richardson and Melanie Williams evaluate the impact and legacy of Woodfall Films, the company behind Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ysnl2An extended interview with Mike Leigh, recorded as he released his historical drama Peterloo, but also looks back at his film from 1984 Four Days in July https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000tqwEarly Cinema looks back at a pioneer of British film Robert Paul and at the work of Alice Guy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dy2bPhilip Dodd explores the novel and film of David Storey's This Sporting Life with social historian Juliet Gardiner, journalist Rod Liddle, writer Anthony Clavane and the author's daughter Kate Storey https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09j0rt6Samira Ahmed convenes a discussion about British Social Realism in Film https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pz16k

From the kit for athletes to interviews which tell us the impact of race times changing – Islam Issa hears about an oral history project in Scotland which aims to capture experiences of past Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Another project explores the commercial and business links between commonwealth countries and what attempts to build connections tell us about and sharing units of measurement, currencies and the impact of EEC membership. New Generation Thinker Islam Issa talks to two researchers: Christopher Cassidy is a researcher based at Stirling University working on the Commonwealth Games Archive in Scotland https://www.sportingheritage.org.uk/content/collection/university-stirling Dr Andrew Dilley at the University of Aberdeen is researching the Federation of Commonwealth Chambers of Commerce https://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/people/profiles/a.dilley#research https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail?SESSIONSEARCH&exp=refd%20CLC/B/082Dr Islam Issa teaches in the School of English at Birmingham City University and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. This conversation is part of the New Thinking series of Arts and Ideas podcasts made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find other discussions about archives across the UK and new research into archaeology, history, literature and language in a collection called New Research on the website for the Free Thinking programme on BBC Radio 3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn

"The beauty of speed. Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created the eternal, omnipresent speed." Part of the 1909 manifesto drawn up by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that declared the aims of the groundbreaking Futurist branch of modernism. Their rejection of the past included embracing the march of machinery, the power of youth and of violence so how do we view this now? Matthew Sweet is joined by Steven Connor, Selena Daly, Rosalind McKever, and Nathan Waddell.Producer: Luke MulhallImage: Futurist foodOriginally broadcast as part of the Modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC Sounds. There is a collection on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxhAnd across the Proms season, various interval features are focusing on cultural openings and events from 1922. You can find those available to download as Arts and Ideas podcasts.

Murals which aimed to synthesise the history and culture of Mexico, Japanese novels exploring urban alienation, an exhibition of Bauhaus paintings from Germany which inspired a generation of Indian artists.Presenter Rana Mitter is joined by Jade Munslow Ong, Christopher Harding, Maria Blanco, and Devika Singh.Amongst the Modernist writers and artists mentioned are: Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and poet Manuel Maples Arce Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and painter Wifredo Lam Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges Indian writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore, and artist Amrita Sher-Gil South African writers Olive Schreiner, Roy Campbell, Solomon Plaatje, Rolfes Dhlomo Japanese theorist Okakura Kakuzō, and writers Edogawa Ranpo, and Ryūnosuke AkutagawaProducer: Luke MulhallImage: the Indian polymath and modernist Rabindranath Tagore Image credit: Keystone France/Getty ImagesOriginally broadcast as part of the Modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC Sounds. There is a collection on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxhAnd across the Proms season, various interval features are focusing on cultural openings and events from 1922. You can find those available to download as Arts and Ideas podcasts.

How a disaster in the 1922 led to new thinking about record keeping. Ahead of the ICHORA conference Dr William Butler, Head of Military Records and Jenny Bunn, Head of Archives Research from The National Archives join Naomi Paxton to discuss some of the researchers across the UK who have helped catalogue our history and about a research project based on documents held by the royal hospital which tell us about pension negotiations and disability history.You can find more about the records held at the Royal Hospital Chelsea on the National Archives website https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14232 https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-research-and-academic-collaboration/research-events/ichora-2022/ https://archivaldiscourses.org/news/This podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find more conversations about New Research gathering into a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Paula McFarlane

The Daleks are back! As restorations of the two 1960s Dr Who films are rereleased in British cinemas, Matthew Sweet lifts the lid on the most memorable monsters of post-war British science fiction. Expert guests will have 2000 rels - that’s 45 earth minutes - to explore Dalek culture, politics and philosophy, and to explore how Terry Nation’s creations carry the weight of the second world war, the cold war and contemporary arguments about race and difference. Matthew is joined by Roberta Tovey, who played the Doctor's granddaughter Susan in the 1960s film adaptation of the Dalek stories; Nicholas Briggs, who uses a voice modulator to give us the voice of the Daleks; political journalist Stephen Bush; and by Jonn Elledge, whose blog A Misadventure In Space And Time charts his project of watching every available episode of Doctor Who in order, from 1963 to today. Plus, the writer, actor, director and producer Mark Gatiss.Doctor Who And The Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth are being given a 4K restoration and screenings in UK cinemas across the summer.Producer: Luke MulhallYou can find more discussions about key tv programmes, films, books and art in our playlist on the Free Thinking programme website called Landmarks which runs from 2001 Space Odyssey and Jaws to writing by Hannah Arendt, Simone De Beauvoir and John Wyndham

Tariq Ali picks Pather Panchali and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani describes Jalsaghar or The Music Room. Rana Mitter presents this programme which looks at what marked out the directing of Satyajit Ray. The BFI has a season of his films screening across July and August and is re-releasing The Big City. Rana's other guests are the programme of the BFI season and herself a film-maker, Sangeeta Datta, and Professor Chandak Sengoopta from Birkbeck, University of London.Sarah Jilani researches postcolonial film and literature at the University of Cambridge. She is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who use their research to make radio programmes.Professor Chandook Sengoopta is writing on the historical, cultural and ideological contexts that shaped the work and impact of the film-maker, writer, designer and composer Satyajit Ray.Sangeeta Datta is director of Baithak UK http://www.baithak.info/director-sangeeta-datta. You can find details of the season she has put together at BFI.org.uk Tariq Ali has written more than 2 dozen books on world history, culture and politics https://www.versobooks.com/authors/63-tariq-aliYou can find a collection of Radio 3 programmes exploring film on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/FJbG166KXBn9xzLKPfrwpc/all-about-film-on-radio-3Producer: Jayne Egerton

How does France look when viewed from different places and at different times? Graham Robb knows France well from his academic career and decades of travels and offers an alternative route through French history in his new book. Hannah Scott has looked at the role of low-brow music in forming an idea of ‘Britishness’ for the French at the height of cross-channel rivalry in the last century. Tash Aw has translated the latest work of biographical writing by Édouard Louis. Professor Ginette Vincendeau is currently co-editing a book on Paris in the cinema. They join Anne McElvoy to explore ideas of France and the French through it's history and culture.Graham Robb has published widely on French literature and history and was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His latest book is France: An Adventure HistoryHannah Scott is an academic track fellow at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow 1870-1904Ginette Vincendeau is a Professor in Film Studies at King's College, University of London. She is is currently co-editing a book on Paris in the cinema. She has recently published on ethnicity in contemporary French cinema and is researching popular French directors of the 1950s and 1960s.A Woman's Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis (author)and translated by Tash Aw is out now.Édouard Louis's earlier book Who Killed My Father has been adapted into a stage drama by Ivo Van Hove. You can see that at the Young Vic in London between 7th September and the 24th September and you can hear Édouard talking to Philip Dodd about street protest, gilets jaunes and his own upbringing in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0704m92Producer: Ruth Watts

Aethelflaed and Bertha are two of the figures discussed in the new history of women in the Middle Ages written by Janina Ramirez. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has taken the heroine who fights Tancredi the crusading knight and reframed the story set to the music composed by Monteverdi's Il Combattimento. Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist who has tracked the way a Viking ‘Carnelian’ bead travelled to England from 8th-century Baghdad, with all that it tells us about women and power.They join Shahidha Bari to discuss ideas about women as warriors and power brokers.Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez is published July 21st 2022Shobana Jeyasingh's new dance work Clorinda Agonistes premieres on July 13th and 14th at Grange Festival, Hampshire and then can be seen at Sadlers Wells Sept 9th and 10th, Snape Maltings October 8th, the Lowry Oct 18th and 19th, Oxford Playhouse 15th and 16th November.River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman is out now.Producer in Salford: Cecile WrightYou might be interested in another discussion about women fighting hearing from Maaza Mengiste, Christina Lamb, Julie Wheelwright https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g4bz available on the Free Thinking programme website and to download as an Arts & Ideas podcast our our discussion about Vikings https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015582and we have a whole collection called Women in the World https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

From Beyonce to Octavia Butler, from Chris Ofili to Jordan Peele, the speculative and the mythical have been used as powerful tools to shape Black art, film, music and writing. Ekow Eshun, who has curated a new exhibition on this theme at the Hayward Gallery, joins Shahidha Bari along with DJ/turntablist NikNak and New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike to discuss how this idea of the Black Fantastic relates to and in some ways challenges Afrofuturism.In the Black Fantastic runs at the Hayward Gallery, London until 18th September 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a book and by a season of films at the BFI, including Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1973 film Touki Bouki which you can hear being discussed by Matthew Sweet and guests in another edition of Free Thinking available on BBC Sounds.NikNak is touring the UK with Sankofa, her latest multi-media project and album, from 12th-18th July. Details can be found on the Sound UK website.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

How does money shape history and how do we write about it? Anne McElvoy discusses those questions with a finalist in the political writing category of the 2022 Orwell Prize. In Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, Kojo Koram traces the some of the economic problems faced across the world today with wealth inequality, with sovereign debt, austerity, and precarious employment and how they are bound up in decolonisation. She also talks to leading UK economist Richard Davies about how Covid has had an impact on our understanding of economics. And John Ramsden is concerned with restoring the forgotten place of economics in poetry from Coleridge's interest in cycles of boom and bust to Jonathan Swift's fascination with trade sanctions. Dhruti Shah is a journalist and the author of Bear Markets and Beyond: A bestiary of business terms.Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire.Richard Davies is the author of Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future Limits for the World’s Economies. A former adviser at the Bank of England and HM Treasury, he now runs the UK’s Economics Observatory.John Ramsden is a former career diplomat and ambassador. He is the author of The Poets’ Guide to EconomicsDhruti Shah is a journalist and the author of Bear Markets and Beyond: A bestiary of business terms.The Orwell Festival of Political Writing, held across Bloomsbury and online from 22nd June to 14th July, when the winners are announced: https://www.orwellfestival.co.uk/Producer: Ruth Watts

Whether it’s Jane Eyre transported to India, childrens masks used for political protests or film posters that trigger memories, there are endless fascinating stories nestled amongst archives that researchers are diligently bringing to the fore. Dr Naomi Paxton meets three researchers who work in archives that focus on Indian culture and history to find out more about some of the unexpected stories hiding amongst the books, prints and film paraphernalia. Dr Monia Acciaria is Associate professor in Film and Television History at DeMontfort University and Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival. You can explore the Creative Archives of Indian Cinema YouTube channel here https://youtube.com/channel/UCN-wV7Jl9YeR3pGzJaP7-mwDr Pragya Dhital is the curator of ‘Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print’. Her research focuses on paper crafts and communications in modern India. The exhibition ‘Crafting Subversion: DIY and Colonial Print’ is on until 3rd September 2022 at the SOAS Brunei Gallery https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/crafting-subversions/ Olivia Majumdar is project curator of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project at the British Library and specialises in novels in translation in Colonial India. Explore ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at the British Library online here https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books Olivia’s article on the Tarakeswar Affair is here https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/notes-on-a-scandalThis episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI.You can find more conversations about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Sofie Vilcins

Varney the Vampire was a blood soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a large volume when it was finally published in book form. In spite of his comfort with crosses, daylight and garlic, Varney's capacity to reflect on his actions made him an early model for Dracula. Matthew Sweet explores why a work, so often overlooked, was so important to the development of the vampire genre.Roger Luckhurst is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Gothic: an illustrated history and editor of The Cambridge companion to Dracula.Joan Passey is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Cornish Gothic and editor of Cornish Horrors. And, she is a 2022 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.Sam George is an Associate Professor at the University of Hertfordshire and is the convener of the Open Graves, Open Minds Gothic research project. Her books include: In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children and Open Graves, Open Minds, Representations of the Vampire from the Enlightenment to the Present Day.Producer: Ruth Watts

David Chalmers is credited with setting the terms for much of the work done in the philosophy of mind today when he posed the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how does matter, which is fundamentally inanimate, give rise to or interact with consciousness, which is qualitative and phenomenal - always a 'what it's like'? His most recent book, Reality +, is an investigation of the possibility that our entire experience could be an illusion.Iain McGilchrist is a literary scholar turned psychiatrist whose 2009 book The Master And His Emissary developed the 'two hemisphere' model of the brain and cognition according to which the left hemisphere is rational, precise, but limited, and the right hemisphere is intuitive, creative, and expansive. Starting with this model, McGilchrist went on to analyse nothing less than the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the interplay between these two aspects of human nature. His new book The Matter With Things goes even further, developing the hemisphere model into a means for explaining our basic relationship with reality - and suggesting ways it could be improved.David Chalmers and Iain McGilchrist expound, explain and defend their work to Christopher Harding.Produced by Luke Mulhall

For evolutionary scientists studying religion, it's more fruitful to examine what people do in religious contexts, rather than listen to what they say they believe. There's a new recognition that as well as looking at behaviour, people studying religion must take account of the religious experience of believers. But how do you do that? And what does doing it tell us? Rana Mitter is joined by an evolutionary psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian and a poet to discuss.Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist who’s written a book called Why Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures.Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist whose book is called Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth LivingAnna Della Subin has investigated people who have been declared divine in her book Accidental GodsPoet Kaveh Akbar is editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Geoff Dyer, Dame Sheila Hancock and Rachel Stott join Matthew Sweet to discuss the work and performance of writers, artists, athletes and musicians near the end of their careers.Old Rage by Sheila Hancock is out now. The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer is out now. Rachel Stott is a composer and plays viola with the Revolutionary Drawing Room, the Bach Players and Sopriola. Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The German Romantic author of horror and fantasy published stories which form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the ballet Coppélia and the Nutcracker. In the theatre he worked as a stagehand, decorator, playwright and manager and he wrote his own musical works. His opera Undine ended its run at the Berlin Theatre after a fire. During his lifetime he also saw Warsaw and Berlin occupied by Napoleon and during the Prussian war against France, he wrote an account of his visit to the battlefields and he became entangled in various legal disputes towards the end of his life. Anne McElvoy marks 200 years since his death gathering together literary and musical scholars to look at his legacy.Joanna Neilly is Associate Professor and Fellow and Tutor in German at the University of Oxford.Keith Chapin is senior lecturer in music at Cardiff University.Tom Smith is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He is Senior Lecturer and Head of German at the University of St Andrews.You can find details about performances of Offenbach's works on the website of the society http://offenbachsociety.org.uk/Producer: Tim Bano

Waiting is an inevitable part of life, whether it’s in the waiting room of a GP surgery or waiting for lockdown to end.As part of the Waiting Times project, Dr Michael Flexer, a publicly engaged research fellow at the University of Exeter, explores different concepts of waiting and suggests that some forms of waiting – for seeds to grow, for the curtain to rise in a theatre – can be positive. https://WhatAreYouWaitingFor.org.ukProfessor Victoria Tischler is from the European Centre for Environment & Human Health at the University of Exeter and co-investigator of the Pandemic and Beyond project. During lockdown her project Culture Box sent out packages to care home residents filled with activities: watercolour paints, seeds, guides to birdsong. She shares her thoughts on how these activities changed the recipients’ relationship to time. https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter.ac.uk/This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find a collection of episodes focused on New Research on the Free Thinking programme website on BBC Radio 3.Producer: Tim Bano

John Gallagher with an exploration of Sheffield's cultural history through new words, music and film.

Can a 40-hour film of a Massachusetts garden or a project documenting rice growing over 40 years help us to understand our planet better? Who makes and who watches such projects? Matthew Sweet is joined by film historian Becca Voelcker who has watched projects recorded in Japan, Colombia, Scotland and America; Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands charts the changes in the earth's ecologies through deep time; and by environmentalist Rupert Read, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and has been thinking about what an eco-spirituality would look like. Plus, artist James Bridle, whose book Ways of Being investigates how far beyond humanity we can extend concepts like 'person', 'intelligence', and 'solidarity'.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Understanding James Joyce's eye troubles gives you a different way of reading his book Ulysses. That's the contention of Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, who shares her research with presenter Shahidha Bari. Emma West has delved into the history of the Arts League of Service travelling theatre, who went about in a battered old van performing plays, songs, ballets and 'absurdities' to audiences from Braintree to Blantyre. And we look at the Royal Society of Literature's annual Dalloway Day discussion of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, first published in 1925, with Merve Emre.Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford, and editor of the annotated Mrs Dalloway. Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol and author of James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film. Emma West is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.Producer: Torquil MacLeodFind out more about <a href="https://rsliterature.org/dalloway-day/">Dalloway Day 2022</a> on the Royal Society of Literature website. The <a href="https://jamesjoyce.ie/bloomsday/">Bloomsday festival</a> runs from June 11th to 16th You can find a collection of programmes exploring ideas about modernism on the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh">Free Thinking website</a>

Damon Galgut's novel, The Promise, explores the decline of the white Afrikaner Swart family and their failed promise to their black domestic servant. The family resist giving her, her own house and her own land as South Africa emerges from the era of apartheid. Land also occupies Julia Blackburn in her new book Dreaming the Karoo, which explores traces of the indigenous /Xam people who were driven from their ancestral lands in the 1870s. And, New Generation Thinker Jade Munslow Ong has been looking at the evolution of the farm novel and the ways in which South African literature maps experiences of displacement. They join Anne McElvoy to explore the ways in which writing has charted the personal and political histories of modern South Africa.Damon Galgut is a is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise. Two of his previous novels were shortlisted in 2003 and 2010, The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room. He has written several plays.Julia Blackburn has written both fiction and non-fiction, including her memoir The Three of Us and the Orange Prize nominated novels The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions. Her latest book, Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam is published on 16th June 2022.Dr Jade Munslow Ong is a BBC Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker. lectures in English literature and environmental literature at the University of Salford, specializing in colonial and post-colonial writing and fin de siècle cultures. She has published Olive Schreiner and African Modernism.Producer: Ruth Watts

Bill Paterson is a founding member of the 7:84 company established by John McGrath, his wife Elizabeth and her brother to create radical, popular theatre. Fusing techniques popularised by Bertolt Brecht with Scottish performance traditions, their best-known play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) explored class struggle, the clearing of the Scottish highlands and the impact of drilling for oil. With energy in the news again, and the resurgence of political theatre on the British stage - Anne McElvoy looks at the writing of John McGrath with Bill Paterson, theatre critic Joyce McMillan and Joe Douglas, who directed a successful revival of the play for the National Theatre of Scotland, Dundee Theatre and Live Theatre which toured Scotland in 2019 and 2020.Producer: Tim BanoBBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme is travelling through Scotland this week. You can listen live or find Petroc's journeys on BBC Sounds.You can find a series of discussions about influential plays, films, books and art collected together as Landmarks on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44A blu-ray DVD of The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil is available.

Is that strong, inescapable image of 19th century city streets in our heads the right one? It's possible that there's a gap between the realities of street life in the Victorian city and how it has been thought of and portrayed in subsequent eras. Matthew Sweet is joined by historians Sarah Wise, Oskar Jensen, Lynda Nead and Fern Riddell to sift hard facts from picturesque imaginings.Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London by Oskar Jensen is out now. Sarah Wise is the author of several books including The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. Fern Riddell's books include The Victorian Guide to Sex: Desire & Deviance in the Nineteenth Century. Lynda Nead's writing on visual culture includes Victorian Babylon: people, streets and images in Nineteenth-Century London.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Witches, statues, God's body, the Ottomans, medieval church going and seventeenth century England as a "devil land" are the topics explored in this year's shortlisted books. Rana Mitter interviews the authors ahead of the announcement of the winning book on June 22nd.The six books are: The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson Going to Church in Medieval England by Nicholas Orme God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von TunzelmannProducer: Ruth Watts

Covert queer communities are examined as Naomi Paxton is joined by Dr Tom Hulme and Dr Ting Guo.Tom Hulme is senior lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast. As part of the research project Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation, Tom draws on under- or never-before used archives to reconstruct Northern Ireland's queer past from the late 19th century to the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FV008404%2F1Tin Guo is senior lecturer in Translation and Chinese Studies at the University of Exeter. Her project Translating for Change: Anglophone Queer Cinema and the Chinese LGBT+ Movement explores how Anglo queer cinema hs been translated by Chinese fans, especially queer fans, and how it has been received and used to further the Chinese LGBT+ movement. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FS00209X%2F1#This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI.You can find more episodes devoted to New Research in a playlist on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme website.Producer: Tim Bano

he film starring Michael Caine was adapted from a 1970 Ted Lewis novel set in an underworld of gangsters and teenage pornography. Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Pamela Hutchinson and John Gray talk with Matthew Sweet about the influence of the book and re-watch the film, which has just been restored in 4k and returns to UK cinemas this summer.Originally set in Scunthorpe, Lewis' novel Jack's Return Home was relocated to Newcastle/Gateshead for the film which Mike Hodges adapted and directed.Jack's Return Home (1970) was published in 1971 as Carter and later re-published as Get Carter after the film was made. Nick Triplow is the author of a biography Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir Get Carter is screening in early June at the BFI and then at selected regional cinemas. It is being released on UHD & Blu-ray on 25 July.Producer: Torquil MacLeodYou can find discussions about films and TV including Tarkovsky's Stalker, This Sporting Life, Man with a Movie Camera, Quatermass, and Jaws in a collection of Landmark programmes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

In Amia Srinivasan's book The Right To Sex she discusses some of the most hotly controversial topics of today: sex work, pornography, the nature of sexual liberation. What can and should a philosopher bring to these debates? Also, we explore one of the philosophical techniques informing Srinivasan's work: genealogy. First named by Friedrich Nietzsche (although arguably practiced by philosophers before him) and developed by Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams, amongst others, genealogy seeks to investigate concepts and institutions by looking at the contingent historical situations in which they arose and that have shaped them over time. Christopher Harding in conversation with Amia Srinivasan, Caterina Dutilh Vovaes and Christoph Schurinnga.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Smugglers, refugees, trade and melting ice and polar exploration are part of the conversation as Rana Mitter is joined in the BBC tent at the Hay Festival by Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books have drawn on his birthplace Zanzibar and the refugees arriving at the Kent coast; climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh, who worked at the British Antarctic Survey; and Joan Passey, author of Cornish Gothic, a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.Producer: Ruth WattsYou can find a series of Lunchtime concerts recorded with audiences at Hay being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and an episode of The Verb with Ian McMillan. The Free Thinking website has a collection of episodes exploring Green Thinking and the environment - and a programmes looking at the history of the sea with artist Hew Locke and three historians.

Images of Cyril and Methodios adorn libraries, universities, cathedrals and passport pages in Slavonic speaking countries from Bulgaria to Russia, North Macedonia to Ukraine. But the journeys undertaken as religious envoys by these inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet have led to competing claims and political disagreements. Mirela Ivanova's essay considers the complications of basing ideas about nationhood upon medieval history.Mirela Ivanova teaches at the University of Sheffield and was selected as a New Generation Thinker in 2021 on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which turns research into radio. You can hear her discussing Sofia's main museum in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wc3pProducer: Luke Mulhall

Sculptures like mouldy fruit, sea creatures that look like oil, blocks of ice carved from a melting glacier and transported to a gallery, reforesting a disused quarry: Vid Simoniti looks at different examples of environmental art and asks whether they create empathy with nature and inspire behaviour change or do we really need pictures of loft insulation and ground source heat pumps displayed on gallery walls?Vid Simoniti lectures at the University of Liverpool. He hosted a series of podcasts Art Against the World for the Liverpool Biennial 2021. He was selected as a New Generation Thinker in 2021 on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which turns research into radio. You can hear him taking part in this Free Thinking discussion about Who Needs Critics? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w5f3Producer: Luke Mulhall