The Essay

Decluttering is all the rage, as many of us are weighed down by stuff. Joanna Robertson lives in Paris, where apartments are small. So how do they go about getting rid of their clutter? Or do they? In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopaholics but to all of us. It's the seemingly inescapable curse of 21st century consumerism - however hard we try to resist. In this edition, Joanna finds out about Parisians' solutions for having too much stuff - and they aren't what you might think. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Why is it so hard to get rid of stuff? Why does it have such a hold on us, yet get us down? In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna Robertson took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopaholics but to all of us. It's the seemingly inescapable curse of 21st century consumerism - however hard we try to declutter and resist. In this edition, Joanna Robertson aims for a tidy home, and its reward, a tidy mind. Easier said than done - except on one occasion, when she managed quite a coup. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Why does stuff have such an emotional hold on us? Why can't we just let it go?In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna Robertson took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopaholics but to all of us. It's the seemingly inescapable curse of 21st century consumerism - however hard we try to declutter and resist. In this edition, Joanna Robertson relives some of her frequent house moves in Europe. Once, when relocating from Rome to Berlin, Joanna and her stuff got perilously stuck in the snowbound Alps, in almost the same spot as Hannibal and his elephants over two millennia earlier. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Robert Frost's poem 'Design'.DesignI found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Sylvia Plath's poem 'Cut'.Cut For Susan O'Neill RoeWhat a thrill - My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hingeOf skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush.Little pilgrim, The Indian's axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rollsStraight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my bottle Of pink fizz.A celebration, this is. Out of a gap A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one.Whose side are they on? 0 my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to killThe thin Papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze manThe stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka Darkens and tarnishes and whenThe balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silenceHow you jump - Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump.

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Elizabeth Bishop's 'Large Bad Picture'.Large Bad Picture Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or some northerly harbor of Labrador, before he became a schoolteacher a great-uncle painted a big picture.Receding for miles on either side into a flushed, still sky are overhanging pale blue cliffs hundreds of feet high,their bases fretted by little arches, the entrances to caves running in along the level of a bay masked by perfect waves.On the middle of that quiet floor sits a fleet of small black ships, square-rigged, sails furled, motionless, their spars like burnt match-sticks.And high above them, over the tall cliffs' semi-translucent ranks, are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds hanging in n's in banks.One can hear their crying, crying, the only sound there is except for occasional sighing as a large aquatic animal breathes.In the pink light the small red sun goes rolling, rolling, round and round and round at the same height in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling,while the ships consider it. Apparently they have reached their destination. It would be hard to say what brought them there, commerce or contemplation.

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Michael Donaghy 'The Hunter's Purse'.The Hunter's Purseis the last unshattered 78 by 'Patrolman Jack O'Ryan, violin', a Sligo fiddler in dry America.A legend, he played Manhattan's ceilidhs, fell asleep drunk one snowy Christmas on a Central Park bench and froze solid. They shipped his corpse home, like his records.This record's record is its lunar surface. I wouldn't risk my stylus to this gouge, or this crater left by a flick of ash -When Anne Quinn got hold of it back in Kilrush, she took her fiddle to her shoulder and cranked the new Horn of Plenty Victrola over and over and over, and scratched along until she had it right or until her father shouted'We'll have no more Of that tune In this house tonight'.She slipped out back and strapped the contraption to the parcel rack and rode her bike to a far field, by moonlight.It skips. The penny I used for ballast slips. O'Ryan's fiddle pops, and hiccoughs back to this, back to this, back to this: a napping snowman with a fiddlecase; a flask of bootleg under his belt; three stars; a gramophone on a pushbike; a cigarette's glow from a far field; over and over, three bars in common time.

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Seamus Heaney's 'The Underground' .The UndergroundThere we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reedOr some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off and fell in a trail Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttonsTo end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.from Station Island (Faber, 1984), copyright (c) Seamus Heaney 1984,.

Since August 1947 the events surrounding Partition have been a staple of art, music, drama and fiction. Writer and spiritual teacher John Siddique draws on his Indian and Irish roots as he reflects on what Partition means to him. He reflects on the 70-year cultural legacy, identifying patterns and drawing lessons from literature, film and poetry. As the British withdrew after 300 years the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. It prompted one of the greatest migrations in human history. Ten million people were displaced as Muslims trekked to West Pakistan and East Pakistan (modern day Bangladesh), while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. The resulting carnage saw massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. It is estimated that in excess of a million people died and 75,000 women were raped, many of whom were then disfigured or dismembered.John ​says he found suffering, but also beauty, in the short stories of Saadat Hassan Manto. And he ​recommends Deepa Mehta's film, Earth, based on the novel Ice Candy Man, ​for its unflinching and human portrayal of events.Produced by Matt Willis at 7digital.

A heartfelt meditation on the (in)visibilty of gay women. Writer and theatremaker Stella Duffy describes growing up lesbian in New Zealand in the 60s and 70s and considers what the 40 year expatriate 'marriage' of novelist, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, author of The Alice B Toklas Cookbook, means to her. Part of Gay Britannia, a season of programming marking the 50th anniversary of The Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised homosexual acts that took place in private between two men over the age of 21.Writer: Stella Duffy Reader: Stella Duffy Producer: Simon Richardson.

Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth and Thomas Paine were amongst the guests invited to the dinner table of publisher Joseph Johnson. Daisy Hay explores the pivotal role played in the early history of English Romanticism by a maker of books who was also a maker of dreams, who invited his workers to eat alongside leading thinkers of the day, and whose publication The Analytical Review set out significant new ideas. New Generation Thinker Daisy Hay is a Senior Lecturer in Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Archival Studies at the University of Exeter and has written about the tangled lives of the Young Romantics as well as Mr and Mrs Disraeli. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Festival of Ideas run by the University of York in 2017. You can rewatch and listen to events from this year's online Festival http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/ Producer: Jacqueline Smith.Image: Daisy Hay. Credit: Ian Martindale.

What does the press reporting of a story of high society scandal and assassination from the reign of Charles II tell us about fake news, political bias and the draw of a saucy headline. New Generation Thinker Thomas Charlton researches religious and political disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is currently based at Dr Williams's Library in London. His essay, recorded in front of an audience at the 2017 Festival of Ideas at the University of York, looks at a tale from 1682 and the way that the assassination of a very rich man in the heart of London highlighted tensions between the Court Party of Charles II and the Anti-Court Party of the Duke of Monmouth, his ambitious and illegitimate son. Charles might have been a Merry Monarch but he was also a very insecure one. The Crown throughout his reign was suspected of Catholic tendencies and the threat of revolution hung in the air. The Murder of Tom of the Ten Thousand nearly brought matters to a head ... and a colourful and thoroughly partisan media was there to publish every lurid detail. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio and applications are open now for 2021. Details are on the AHRC website. You can find events from this year's online York Festival of Ideas http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/Producer: Jacqueline Smith.Image: Thomas Charlton. Credit: Ian Martindale.

Jonathan Healey, of the University of Oxford, argues that the way people resisted unpopular governments changed dramatically from the 16th to the 21st centuries. As states grew in power, flight was no longer an option, so discontented people were forced to imagine revolution. Today, escape is once again possible, to safe online spaces which act like medieval forests, places which the government can't control. The nature of resistance is reverting to its Tudor state: socially conservative, constant, and small in scale. Recorded with an audience at the 2017 York Festival of Ideas New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. You can find information about how to apply for this year's scheme on the website https://ahrc.ukri.org/ Producer: Jacqueline Smith.Image: Jonathan Healey. Credit: Ian Martindale.

From the Persian poet Rumi through the Old Testament Israelites to the political protests of the suffragettes, New Generation Thinker Christopher Kissane, of the London School of Economics, explores the history of fasting. Eating and avoiding hunger are our most basic goals, yet for thousands of years people have deliberately denied themselves food as an act of faith or conscience. What is the history of fasting, and why do billions still fast today?Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas in 2017 New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Jacqueline Smith.Image: Christopher Kissane. Credit: Ian Martindale.

From Romantic notions of the natural nursing mother to Victorian fears of vampirism to modernist associations between breastfeeding and the working class, Corin Throsby, from the University of Cambridge, tracks the political and social implications of how we have chosen to feed our babies over the past 200 years. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas in 2017. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Jacqueline Smith.Image: Corin Throsby. Credit: Ian Martindale.

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the works of five Great War artists. Tonight, Santanu Das explores the poetic world of Bristol-born Isaac Rosenberg. Less familiar today than his contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Rosenberg described - as they did - the horror of war close-up: "The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched, / Their shut mouths made no moan..." wrote Rosenberg in his great poem of 100 years ago, Dead Man's Dump. "Earth has waited for them, / All the time of their growth / Fretting for their decay: / Now she has them at last!"In tonight's Essay, Santanu Das re-reads Rosenberg's 1917 poem, written a few months before his own death having just completed a night patrol - on April 1st 1918.Producer: Simon Elmes.

Before the First World War, Mata Hari's elaborate and provocative performances made her body a sensation. The artist, dancer and style icon graced La Scala, the Folies Bergère and the exclusive private salons of Europe. She was "the toast of Paris," in a skin coloured body stocking with bejewelled breast cups, enchanting, enthralling and scandalous. In this series looking at the impact of the First World War on artists, the writer Elif Şafak examines this notorious femme fatale's act. She explores the allure of the Oriental and attitudes to unfettered and independent women. Drawing parallels with Zulaikha, she unveils the legend of Mata Hari who, convicted for passing secrets to the enemy, faced her final performance before a firing squad on 15th October 1917. Producer: Sarah Bowen.

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the work of five Great War artists. Tonight, Joanna Bourke on Siegfried Sassoon and his celebrated protest against the conflict."I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." So wrote the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon in July 1917, in a letter to the Times newspaper. "I am a soldier," he went on, "convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest." The result was uproar - and Sassoon's subsequent confinement to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, suffering (the authorities concluded) from shell-shock. In tonight's Essay, Joanna Bourke re-reads Sassoon's letter of protest and examines what led up to his outspoken anti-war declaration, and what happened next.Producer: Simon Elmes.

Tarek Osman explores the words of Gertrude Bell, in this series looking at the impact of the First World War on great artists and thinkers. Gertrude Bell, explorer, archeologist, diplomat, linguist, writer and spy was no ordinary woman. The first woman ever to be awarded a first-class degree in modern history from Oxford, she went on to become a groundbreaking mountaineer and have a Swiss peak named after her. But these were mere asides.By 1914 she had immersed herself in the history and culture of the Levant, mastering Arabic, and forging real relationships across large swathes of the region. As the First World War raged across Europe and the Middle East, the British Empire realised it needed her knowledge and experience. And in 1917, as Oriental Secretary in the British Commission in Baghdad, she was crucial to them, visiting dignities, poring over intelligence and military plans. The only woman in that world of men, she devised British strategy, selecting its Arab partners and drawing lines in the sand which would become the borders of new states. As a young academic, Tarek tussled with the idea of Bell. She was symbolic of the way colonial powers had shaped his world and a voice that seemed so condescending. In this essay he explores his own conflicted relationship with her and how, as his understanding of the region grew, he developed a respect for a driven and courageous woman whose ideas and reflections remain so relevant today. Producer Sarah Bowen.

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the works of five diverse creative minds of the Great War, and the experiences that shaped them. In tonight's Essay, the writer and academic Heather Jones looks at French artist Marcel Duchamp's controversial 'readymade' that he entitled 'Fountain', but which was, in effect, simply a piece of common-or-garden, off-the-shelf sanitary-ware, a men's urinal. In what way, contemporary voices asked, was this art? Yet in 2004, critics named 'Fountain' as the most important art work of the twentieth century. But why? And what was the connection to the torment and terror of the First World War which still raged as Duchamp was creating it in 1917? Heather Jones explores the meaning and the wartime associations of Duchamp's now celebrated statement of artistic intent.Producer: Simon Elmes.

Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon are the odd couple of the Reformation, inseparable in the religious revolution they inaugurated, and yet in personality chalk and cheese - and there's no doubt that it's Luther who is the cheese: volatile, colourful, impassioned; ripening majestically but also suddenly going off, like one of those goats' cheeses in the middle of France that could easily double up as an explosive device. Luther has priority in terms of being older, and by force of personality. Melanchthon seems monochrome by comparison. It has been easy for history, outside of specialists, to forget him. But if Margaret Thatcher once said of her right-hand man William Whitelaw that "every Prime Minister needs a Willie", this is all the more the case with true revolutionaries. Revolutions seem to need an odd couple: Robespierre and Danton, or Marx and Engels. Melanchthon is hardly a household name these days but he is (if you like) a revolutionary's revolutionary. Intellectual, serious, endlessly patient, he kept clearing up the mess that Luther left around him. Professor Brian Cummings, from the University of York, tells his story.Producer: Rosie Dawson Part of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution.

Johann Walther was adopted out of poverty as a boy and could sing like a canary. Initially taking a series of courtly composer and cantor roles, he jumped at the chance to edit the people's first Protestant hymn book. It's a great untold story - the hymns of Luther and Walther began a rich musical tradition in Protestant Germany which changed the musical world. Without Luther and Walther we would not have the oratorios, cantatas and passions of Bach and the word-centred, 'Protestant' tradition of high-quality and complex music and hymnody we know today. Dr Stephen Rose from Royal Holloway University of London tells the story of Johann Walther, the man behind Luther's musical Reformation.Producer: Rosie DawsonPart of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution.

Dr Charlotte Woodford, fellow in German at Cambridge University, tells the story of the woman who won Martin Luther's heart. If ever there were a power behind the throne, none was stronger than Katharina von Bora. Known as 'The Lutherine', this former nun found her true vocation as Luther's 'Power-Frau,' arguing the finer points of Theology with him as well as raising their six children and providing hospitality for Luther's fellow-reformers in Wittenberg. Luther had told friends he didn't intend to take a wife, and when he eventually decided to marry Katharina he wrote to a friend that he did not feel 'passionate love' for her. But later he described her in the most glowing terms possible for a biblically-minded theologian, comparing his devotion to her with that which he felt for one of St Paul's epistles. 'The epistle to the Galatians is my dear epistle. I have put my confidence in it. It is my Katy von Bora'.Producer: Rosie DawsonPart of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution.

Thomas Muntzer was a fire and brimstone apocalyptic preacher and reformer who was more popular than Martin Luther in his day. As leader of 'The Peasants' War' in 1525 he is hailed as the forerunner of Communist revolutionaries. Though not a communist himself, he had no respect for the social hierarchy - neither princes, dukes, bishops nor civic dignitaries and this was based on his belief that every man was equal before God. It was the task of princes to wield the sword on the side of God - but with the people and not against the people. He initially saw Luther as a comrade-in-arms but he went on to write two major pamphlets against Luther in 1524 describing him as 'soft-living flesh', 'Dr Liar', 'the Wittenberg Pope' and worse. Luther denounced him as a devil and Thomas Muntzer ended up losing his head. Edinburgh writer Andy Drummond profiles the man that Luther later admitted had been his most dangerous opponent.Producer: Rosie DawsonPart of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution.

Martin Luther is a larger than life figure, a difficult hero who escapes any pigeon-holes you might try to stuff him into. Over the last five hundred years he has been made into a nationalist hero, the founder of the German language, the original pater familias of the pious parsonage, the man who ushered in the modern era. He was a complex character, an angry anti-Semite who made enemies easily; he was also brilliant, courageous, and revolutionary. In the first of five essays this week which look at the most influential figures who brought about the Reformation, Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, profiles the man who has caused her so much fascination and delight and frustration.Producer: Rosie DawsonPart of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring Martin Luther's Revolution.

Thoughts on writing fiction as you get older from the novelist Penelope Lively.

Andrew Martin toasts five 'social phenomena' that are still with us - just.The genesis of this is hazy. It seems the author lost his travel pass in Soho one day, aged 17. And soon felt there the allure of such places: those erotic emporia. Ruminating on this experience, Andrew looks at the history of such retail outlets and why they have almost entirely disappeared.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Writing back the years: thoughts on poetry after retirement by Douglas Dunn.

Writing age: thoughts on keeping going by Diana Hendry.

Writing as you get older: thoughts from Vicki Feaver inspired by a commission from the Scottish Poetry Library. What does it mean to be creatively active for long enough to have a late style? 'Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men', TS Eliot says, 'but rather of their folly'. Late Beethoven stared human extinction in the face and composed music of stark clarified beauty; late Rubens painted with a looser more sensuous brush stroke - was he remembering the flesh of his younger life or was his arthritis affecting his grip? Late style for writer might include a maturation of style, a relaxing into the wisdom of age and experience, but it might also mean struggling to hold onto your gifts, and writing through illness and through grief. A week of essays from three poets and two novelists. Producer: Tim Dee.

The novelist Paul Bailey discusses writing in his ninth decade.

Andrew Martin toasts five 'social phenomena' that are still with us - just.You buy your milk at the supermarket. But what about that noble clan of milkmen still out there? Still up at 3 am, wending their ways along the nation's streets in their floats. We meet some of the best of them.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Andrew Martin toasts five 'social phenomena' that are still with us - just.The author dislikes mobile phones. Because he hankers after the rituals and protocols of the old telephones. On a telephone you can be witty, louche, stylish. Try out the 700-series for instance, in a range of colours each suggesting a certain mood, quality.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Andrew Martin toasts five 'social phenomena' that are still with us - just.Starting in London's Hampstead Cemetery, the author pays homage to some amazing characters of the 'vent' world: Sailor Jim; Lord Charles; Shorty; Arthur Lager. All enjoyed varying degrees of success through the decades - just don't call them dummies.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Andrew Martin toasts five 'social phenomena' that are still with us - just.It starts amidst the elegance of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the author's sons potter about with model boats on the ornamental lake. This is charmingly anachronistic and will spark off searches for more ponds and model boats in the UK. Places such as Hampstead, Clapham, Southwold, where it's a small but enthusiastic pastime still.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Christopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of 'time' was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless 'clock time' of new factories and businesses and the 'leisure time' of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechanical.New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding contemplates the way these attempts at escape became useful fodder for Japan's militarist ideologues - working for the Emperor, his palace tucked away amongst the trees in central Tokyo, whose own sense of time stretched back into myth and from there into divinity.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall.

John Gallagher, New Generation Thinker, marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of what might be the greatest, but littlest-known, book of travels of early modern England. Fynes Moryson was a young fellow of a Cambridge college when he left on a journey to Jerusalem and back. His monumental book 'An Itinerary' is a colourful, funny and touching account of one man's curious journey, meeting bandits in northern Germany, disguising himself as a Catholic Italian in order to see Rome and burying his brother's body by the side of the road on his return.John Gallagher's Essay brings to life one of the great travel accounts of any period which includes detailed instructions to English travellers on how best to disguise themselves when travelling through Catholic Europe.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Fiona McLean.

New Generation Thinker Victoria Donovan from the University of St Andrews explores the dilemmas of post-war reconstruction in Soviet Russia and asks why the atheist Communist regime was prepared to spend millions on the restoration of religious architecture. On encountering the war-charred ruins of historic Novgorod in 1944, the Soviet historian Dmitry Likhachev mourned Russia's transformation into a 'graveyard without headstones'. Yet, just 20 years later, the town had risen from the ashes; even the onion-domed churches had been restored. How did this happen?Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall.

New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University, on the creation of modern India.How did a modernist style develop in India between the 1900s and the 1950s? Preti Taneja, who grew up in Letchworth Garden City, traces the way the Garden City Movement inspired the work of Edwin Lutyens in his reshaping of her parents' New Delhi. The first generation of post-Independence architects built on this legacy, drawing also from Le Corbusier, who designed India's first post-partition planned city, Chandigarh, with its famous 'open hand' sculpture; and from Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, to create some of the most iconic public buildings across India today. In art, something similar was happening: painter MF Hussain and a group of fellow radicals wanting to break away from Indian traditions and make an international statement. They formed The Progressive Artists Group in December 1947, just months after Partition.Preti Taneja's essay explores this cultural re-imagining of the new nation, when architects and artists tried to come to terms with India's political and aesthetic history, looking forward to a future they could design, build and express themselves: one that was meant to shape human behaviour for the better.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Fiona McLean.

Matthew Smith, a New Generation Thinker, goes deep into the American Psychiatric Association archives, where lies an unpublished historical manuscript entitled The Magic Years. Written during the early 1970s, it eulogised the giant strides of post-war American psychiatry made in this period of hope and promise when even the complete eradication of mental illness was thought possible. As a medical historian Matthew argues that, while psychiatrists today might dismiss The Magic Years - and the science behind it - as misguided or naïve, it actually has much to teach us.New Generation Thinker Matthew Smith is from the University of Strathclyde.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. Producer: Zahid Warley.

From 1941 to 1968 Catherine Fletcher's grandfather Donald Hudson was a missionary in India. Catherine tells his story during those turbulent years and reflects on the way British people with family history in India understand that past - in this the anniversary year of the end of colonial India.Originally from Yorkshire, Donald Hudson arrived in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, to find a city in chaos amid communal riots. He stayed for two years and then moved to one of the most significant British missionary institutions in India, the Baptist Missionary College at Serampore, outside Kolkata, where he was based through famine and then Partition in 1948.Catherine Fletcher is a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker from Swansea University.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who work with us to turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall.

New Generation Thinker Katherine Cooper looks at literary refugees in the Second World War and tells the untold story of the work done by British writers to save their European colleagues. She shows how HG Wells, Rebecca West and JB Priestley became intertwined with the lives of writers fleeing persecution on the continent. Katherine peeps into drawing rooms, visits the archives of PEN, scrutinises the correspondence and draws on the fiction of key literary figures to explore crucial allegiances formed in wartime London. Why did these British writers believe that by saving Europe's literary voices they were saving Europe itself?Katherine Cooper is Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year and then work with them to turn their research into radio.Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson with the story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram airbase, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks. For centuries, it was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1832, it was discovered by the unlikeliest person imaginable: a ragged British con-man called Charles Masson, on the run from a death sentence. Today, Alexander's lost civilization is lost again. And Masson? For his next trick, he accidentally started the most disastrous war of the nineteenth century.Edmund Richardson's Essay tells the story of the liar and the lost city, of how the unlikeliest people can change history.Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike from Manchester Metropolitan University considers images of war and ghosts of the past. News reports of the Biafran war (1967-1970), with their depictions of starving children, created images of Africa which have become imprinted. Biafra endured a campaign of heavy shelling, creating a constant stream of refugees out of fallen areas as territory was lost to Nigeria.Within Igbo culture specific rites and rituals need to be performed when a person dies. To die and be buried 'abroad', away from one's ancestral home or to not be buried properly, impedes the transition to the realm of the ancestors. Louisa Egbunike explores the legacy of the Biafran war and considers the image of those spirits unable to journey to the next realm, and left to roam the earth.Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Zahid Warley.

The ruined priory of Tynemouth nestles on a Northumbrian clifftop, staring out at the fog and foam of the North Sea. In the 14th century it was a proving ground - and occasional prison camp - for monks from the wealthy mother monastery of St Albans. But the monks here didn't just isolate themselves, pray and complain about the food (though they did do those things). They also studied astronomy. Writing treatises, computing tables and designing new instruments, they contemplated the nature of a divinely-wound clockwork universe.New Generation Thinker Seb Falk from the University of Cambridge brings to life a world where science and religion went hand-in-hand, where monks loved their gadgets, and where a wooden disc, a brass ring and some silk threads were all you needed to model the motions of the stars.Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Author and broadcaster Sarah Churchwell describes the spell that female stars of the 1930s and 40s have over her.From Joan Crawford, the 'working girl', to someone regarded as 'the quintessential Diva' – none other than Bette Davis. Apart from appearing in some great films, she had the eyes and the laugh, and could smoke like a dragon!Produced by Duncan Minshull.First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2017.

Five writers recall a night they spent somewhere out of the ordinary.Naomi Alderman signs up for a trip to the Arctic, but has to spend a lot of time in her bunk bed. When she feels better and ventures across the ice, small but vital revelations are at hand ...Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers recall a night they spent somewhere out of the ordinary.John Walsh lies in a hammock in the jungle in Guyana, with his new friend Helen close by. At two in the morning they set off to explore the undergrowth and soon encounter some other sleepers ...Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers recall a night they spent somewhere out of the ordinary.Philip Hoare was thrown off his bike and spent a night in a hospital observation ward. The bed is tiny, the sheets strap him firmly in. Then he takes a look at his fellow patients ...Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers recall a night they spent somewhere out of the ordinary.Rachel Cooke was on assignment in the wilds of Scotland, reporting on a deer hunt. Exhausted, after a peaty-coloured bath, bedtime approaches. Dreams ensue and also the rattling of her door-knob ...Producer Duncan Minshull.