The Essay

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Colm Toibin tells the story of Lady Gregory's fighter pilot son, whose death inspired one of Yeats' most famous poems, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'.Written and read by Colm Toibin Produced by Emma Harding.

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Elif Shafak contemplates a point of no return in the history of her native country, Turkey.Written and read by Elif Shafak Produced by Emma Hardinghttp://www.1418now.org.uk/.

"It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts", Michael PowellContinuing the Sound of Cinema season, film critic Peter Bradshaw looks at Powell and Pressburger's sensuous 1947 melodrama, 'Black Narcissus'.Set in a convent in an isolated Himalayan valley, in which tensions are running high, Black Narcissus was based on the 1939 novel of the same name by Rumer Godden. It stars Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron and Jean Simmons, and was described by Michael Powell described as the most erotic film he ever made.Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus'.Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.Producer: Justine Willett.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War through individual works of art10.The poet Ruth Padel reflects on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son Peter, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914.The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty, hunger and war in the 20th century.The death of her youngest son, Peter, in October 1914, prompted a prolonged period of deep depression, but by the end of that year she was turning her thoughts to creating a moument to Peter and his fallen comrades.She destroyed this first monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The final memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed in 1932 and placed in the cemetery where Peter lay.The poet Ruth Padel traces Kollwitz's long period of anguish and artistic growth.Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring.Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Of her 1917 collection, Rabindranath Tagore declared: "Your poems in The Broken Wing seem to be made of tears and fire, like the clouds of a July evening, glowing with the muffled power of sunset."The distinguished scholar of the First World War, Santanu Das, a reader in English at King's College, London, reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in their work.BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet, fresh from her experiences in Afghanistan and Syria, introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France, 'Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort'.Wharton, best known for 'The Age Of Innocence' and 'The House of Mirth', was granted unique access to the Western front and wrote one of the most evocative and undeservedly neglected accounts of life in France in World War One.In its pages, penned early in the war, are Wharton's painterly descriptions of the country's overnight transformation from peace to war, her deep love for France and its people, and her accounts of the destruction wrought upon the villages and towns in the path of the German invader.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship7.Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship PotemkinFor Russians of Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Soviet state emerged. Eisenstein seized the opportunity of serving in the Red Army in order to become a radical theatre director, which led him into film as part of the first generation of Soviet film-makers who would astonish the world in the late 1920s with films like The Battleship Potemkin and October. These films would shape the cultural and political landscape of the interwar years - championed by those who wanted to condemn the Great War as an imperialist struggle, and also foreshadowing the Second World War, as in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. The distinguished film historian Ian Christie untangles this complex story.Producer Beaty Rubens Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual work.6. Dr Heather Jones of the LSE reflects on Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu. Completed in 1916 and the work of a French soldier at the front, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions there. It proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working- class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent.Producer: Ben Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art, literature and scholarship5.Michal Shapira on Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a text written in Vienna in 1915, expressing his dismay as the war progressed.The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud shared the general moodBut, like his fellow-citizens, Freud expected a quick war. By February 1915, with two of his sons fighting and thousands of injured and traumatised soldiers returning from the front, Freud's feelings had changed.Dr Michal Shapira reflects on his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and considers how it prefigures some of his later, better-known works on war and the death-drive.Dr Michal Shapira is a senior lecturer of history and gender studies at Tel Aviv University Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art.Professor David Edgerton of King's College London reflects on the Memorandum on the Neglect of Science, a 1916 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment.In a letter to The Times that year, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously.They continued by observing that the entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the civil service, were weighted towards the Classics rather than sciences. Was this the first stirrings CP Snow's Two Cultures debate?David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History, at King's College London, finds out what was going on at the time and looks at how the First World War advanced British science.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art Cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson reflects on Otto Dix's Der Krieg, a harrowing cycle of prints of wartime experience.In 1924, six years after the end of hostiliies, the painter Otto Dix, who had been a machine-gunner in the German Army, produced his 51 Der Krieg prints. Gruesome, hallucinatory, and terribly frank, these postcards of conflict tell the soldier's ghastly tale.Cartoonist Martin Rowson, whose own work is similarly direct and uncompromising, tells Dix's story, exposing what the War did to the man and ponders why Der Krieg remains such a powerful statement.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the Frst World War in individual works of art2.Sarah LeFanu reflects on Rose Macaulay's 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and OthersRose Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, but her biographer, Sarah LeFanu, has long believed that one of her earlier novels, Non-Combatants and Others, is a work of striking originality. She also argues for its importance to our understanding of the impact of the First World War not only on soldiers at the front but on the entire nation.The books which have become the foundational texts of our perception and understanding of the war are all by men who had served as soldiers - Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves - but all were written more than a decade later, when their authors had had time to shape and mediate their experiences through a process of post-war reflections.The immediacy of Non-Combatants and Others - written and set in 1915 - is another reason for its claim to be regarded as a key text of the war.Sarah LeFanu brings the novel alive by interweaving a re-telling of its story with her reflections on how it sheds light on Macaulay's own changing attitude to the war, and her later commitment to the League of Nations Union and the Peace Pledge Union.Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art 1. BBC Correspondent Allan Little reflects on C.R.W.Nevinson's great 1917 painting, Paths of GloryC.R.W.Nevinson's painting, Paths of Glory, is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters which appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in the mud, against a backdrop of tangled barbed wire, somewhere on the Western Front.Unsuprisingly, it was censored at the time.Perhaps part of its shock value was in its title. In his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the 18th century poet, Thomas Gray, had declared "the Paths of Glory lead but to the grave", but in Nevinson's painting, the two fallen soldiers are far from the comfort even of a grave in an English country churchyard, and, indeed, from any decent burial at all.In his many years as a BBC Special Correspondent, Allan Little has witnessed some shocking scenes of war and has also reflected on the depiction of war in news footage and photography as well as in the works of contemporary war artists.He considers the continuing power of Nevinson's painting and the role of art both in recruiting soldiers and in denouncing war.Producer; Beaty Rubens.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Simon Calder recalls the small-scale delights of Holguin in Cuba. It' so different to the capital city, but worth the detour - if you can get there!Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Travel writer Michela Wrong sees beautiful Italianate buildings, and all things Futurist - in Africa. In Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to be precise.Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Vanora Bennett describes Makhachkala in Russia as 'beyond the mountains', yet these days it's on the brink of enormous change...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.The novelist Romesh Gunesekera can't wait to tell us about Kunming, which is so unlike any other modern Chinese city...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Novelist Nicholas Shakespeare once lived in Hobart, Tasmania, and reveals to us its convict and whaling past, and the story of a monkey...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival 2014, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Poet and musician Twm Morys explores the links between Wales's poetic heritage and Dylan Thomas's writing. Drawing on memories of living in Thomas's hometown of Swansea, he considers whether Thomas's writing is universally acknowledged to represent the cultural landscape that nurtured its creation.

Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Linking up from New York, writer, poet and activist Kevin Powell looks at Dylan Thomas's far-reaching influence on Black American writers, from his own introduction to Thomas's words in the new poetry and spoken-word scene happening in New York in the early 90s, to the new wave of Black American artists inspired through hip-hop, spoken word and America's oral tradition. Recorded in front of an audience at the Laugharne Live Festival.

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. The poet and writer Gwyneth Lewis, whose words are emblazoned over Wales Millennium Centre, takes a personal journey through the language of Dylan Thomas. She argues that to appreciate the work fully we must understand the poet's rigorous practice and detailed knowledge of poetic history and tradition.

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales, in 2014. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas.Andrew Davies reflects on the influence of Dylan Thomas on a child growing up in Wales in the 1950s, with aspirations to be a writer. A day trip to Rhossili beach and a Cornish pasty chimed with Davies's role model's account in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog", but was this the gateway to a future as a poet?

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Professor John Goodby is one of the world's most respected academic authorities on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Using poems such as the radiant "In the White Giant's Thigh", "And death shall have no dominion" and "A Refusal to Mourn" he explores how the boundaries which Dylan Thomas crossed in both life and art have made it difficult for critics to pigeon-hole his legacy.

In today's essay, historian Dan Cruikshank explores his passion for Georgian architecture through the work of the Scottish neoclassical architect and interior designer Robert Adam.Producer: Mohini Patel.

In today's essay shedding light on key figures of the Georgian era, the writer and cartoonist Martin Rowson discusses the satiric genius of William Hogarth and his lasting influence on the development of the political cartoon.Producer: Mohini Patel.

In today's essay shedding light on key figures of the Georgian era, historian Amanda Vickery explores the life of gentlewoman Elizabeth Parker Shackleton, member of the lesser gentry and mercantile elite of 18th-century Lancashire.Producer: Mohini Patel.

In today's essay shedding light on key figures of the Georgian era, actor and writer Ian Kelly explores the life and times of David Garrick - actor, playwright and one of the most influential theatre managers of his generation.Producer: Mohini Patel.

In the first essay of the week, shedding light on key figures of the Georgian era, biographer Claire Tomalin explores the life of Dora Jordan, the greatest comic actress of her day and renowned for being lover to the future king.The rest of the essays in this series are by the actor and writer Ian Kelly on actor, playwright, and theatre manager David Garrick; historian Amanda Vickery on Lancashire gentlewoman Elizabeth Parker Shackleton; writer and cartoonist Martin Rowson on Hogarth and historian Dan Cruikshank on architect Robert Adam.Producer: Mohini Patel.

dNovelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the symbolism of beds in literature, art and film, and asks what beds reveal about human nature. 'Beds are where we are most physical, most elemental, and where we experience the great highs and lows of life. Everything significant that happens to us tends to take place in bed'. Certainly many of history's greatest thinkers and writers are thought to have been inspired in bed; G.K. Chesterton wished he had a pencil long enough to write on the ceiling while lying down, Milton is said to have written Paradise Lost in bed, and Truman Capote started his day in bed with coffee, mint tea, sherry and martinis. Ian thinks the bed is where we are most ourselves 'the place where you cannot hide', and perhaps we try to avoid spending too much time there because we fear what it signifies - 'the never-ending lie-in to come'.

Novelist Ian Sansom delves into cupboards and cabinets to explore what they reveal about human nature. Le Corbusier didn't approve of the clutter cupboards encourage, wanting to free our lives of 'junk'; whereas artist Herbert Distel filled a cabinet with trinkets donated by Man Ray, Annette Messager, Andy Warhol, and John Cage - 'a roll-call of twentieth-century conceptualists, creatives, collagists and curators of the curious' in his Museum of Drawers. Rimbaud wrote about an old sideboard crammed with memories, and Duchamp fitted his life's work in a suitcase, but Ian wonders if the contents of our cupboards really do tell our life stories, complete with the all the hopes, dreams and broken promises suggested by unused pasta machines and unfinished jigsaws - or in the end does it all 'amount to nothing, just so much junk?'.

Are you sitting comfortably? Despite his bad posture, novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores our complex physical, mental and emotional relationship with the chair. Chairs can symbolise who we are, like Ian's comfy old overstuffed armchair, and in 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', the little bear asks 'Who's been sitting in my chair?' which Ian reads as "Who am I?" Van Gogh painted two empty chairs after his famous fall-out with Gauguin; Henry Thoreau, out in his cabin at Walden Pond, had just three chairs 'one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society'. Ian has 26 chairs in total, but not a 'named chair', which is the 'scholar's burnished throne'. Apart from beds, we share more intimacy with chairs than with any other piece of furniture, but often their symbolism is most powerful when empty, because Ian believes that empty chairs always imply people.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom steps into the history of wardrobes, to discover not only how and why we store clothes in large upright wooden boxes, but also why wardrobes feature so largely in fairy tales, memoirs and stories. From E. Nesbit's 'The Aunt and Anabel' to C.S Lewis's 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe', via Guy De Maupassant's tragic tale of a child in a wardrobe, Rimbaud's poem about a wardrobe with missing keys, and Roman Polanski's short film about two men who carry a wardrobe out of the sea; Ian explores the symbolism of wardrobes as a place where secrets are stored, imaginations inspired, consciences hidden, and our 'selves' reinvented.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...5. Philip Hoare is quickly at the water's edge in Sholing, well before the waking hour. Then meetings with many animals are recalled.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...4. Kirsty Gunn is in Sutherland, debating whether to ford the chilly River Brora on an afternoon hike.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...3. John Walsh reckons that 'below' it feels wintry; yet ascend near a village called Steep and spring beckons. But where is he?Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...2. Ross Raisin recalls the Yorkshire Wolds, getting greener all the time, and scene of some famous new paintings by David Hockney.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...1. Michele Roberts pounds the pavements of Poznan and is reminded of Persephone under scudding clouds.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired her: the remarkable twelfth-century abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen - perhaps the earliest actual "composer" in the history of Western music.

Radio 3 presenter Martin Handley celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired him: Malcolm Arnold, creator of symphonies of great emotional depth and complexity - as Martin discovered as a teenage violinist, playing Arnold's Second Symphony with the composer conducting.

Radio 3 presenter Lucie Skeaping celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired her: the Elizabethan Thomas Ravenscroft, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote songs that became incredibly popular - or, like Shakespeare, borrowed from the popular imagination and made it his own.

Radio 3 presenter Tom Service celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired him - Arnold Bax, whose music reflects his love of the remarkable landscape of northwest Scotland, where Tom spent his childhood summer holidays.

Radio 3 presenter Sarah Walker celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired her: 'English Experimentalist' John White - who, as well as being a dedicated opponent of "seriosity" in classical music, is the spitting image of Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson.This is the first of five editions of The Essay in which Radio 3 classical music presenters celebrate lesser-known composers whose 'secret admirers' they are. Coming up from Tuesday to Friday: Tom Service on Arnold Bax Lucie Skeaping on Thomas Ravenscroft Martin Handley on Malcolm Arnold Sara Mohr-Pietsch on Hildegard of Bingen.

A series of five essays from writers around the Commonwealth which start on Commonwealth Day 10th March and tackle the past, present and future of this unique international organisation.Tolu Ogunlesi, poet and author from Nigeria looks at whether young people in Lagos can relate to the Commonwealth.

A series of five essays from writers around the Commonwealth which start on Commonwealth Day 10th March and tackle the past, present and future of this unique international organisation.Farah Ghuznavi from Bangladesh has been Writer in Residence for Commonwealth Writers. She saw the Commonwealth as an irrelevance in her early life. Here she explains what changed her mind.

A series of five essays from writers around the Commonwealth which start on Commonwealth Day, 10th March, and tackle the past, present and future of this unique international organisation.Author Noah Richler writes from a Canadian perspective. The Queen still appears on the bank notes of Canada as she is the head of state. The role is largely ceremonial, so why the need for ties like the Commonwealth in such an advanced country?

A series of five essays from writers around the Commonwealth which start on Commonwealth Day, 10th March, and tackle the past, present and future of this unique international organisation.Fakir Aijazuddin, author and historian from Lahore, comments on Pakistan's chequered relationship with the Commonwealth. He reflects on his own dealings with what he describes as a typically British invention, the 'gentleman's club'.

The first of five Essays from writers around the Commonwealth which start on Commonwealth Day, 10th March, and scrutinise the destiny of this unique international body.Dr Sue Onslow of the School of Advanced Studies, University of London looks at the history of the Commonwealth and its web of committees and forums. She asks whether they have made a difference in world politics in the past and whether the organisation has a future.

The Islamic Golden Age (c. 750-1258 CE) rediscovered through portraits of key figures and events. In tonight's essay, award-winning writer Kamila Shamsie looks at the life of Lubna of Cordoba. She leaves traces in fragments of records: one says she was the royal library acquisitions expert, another suggests she was private secretary to al-Hakam II. What's not in doubt is that she had a fine and piercing intellect and moved in some of the most interesting circles of the day.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Radio 3 continues its twenty-part series looking at the five-hundred-year period, the Islamic Golden Age. We've heard about some of the great architects, philosophers, scientists and leaders of the period. In this evening's essay, Narguess Farzad explores the life and work of the Persian poet, Al-Rumi.Producer: Mohini Patel.

'Men grieved for him as they grieve for prophets. I have seen no other ruler for whose death the people mourned, for he was loved by good and bad, Muslim and unbeliever alike.' 'Abd al-Latif, 1193Historian Jonathan Phillips reassesses the influence of 12th-century hero Saladin - a man whose legacy has been admired and appropriated by an extraordinary range of people through the ages. In the past few years he's been the subject of a ballet in Damascus, a musical in Lebanon and he's seen in a children's cartoon (on al-Jazeera TV) where his morality and good character are used as an exemplar for young people to emulate.Given his role in defeating and removing Western invaders, his legacy has immense symbolism in the Middle East. Arab Nationalist leaders such as Nasser of Egypt, Saddam Hussein, and the Assad dynasty in Syria have all embraced his achievement. Yet he appeals to Islamists too: Osama bin Laden praised Saladin's wisdom and his use of the jihad to succeed in defeating the West; to the head of the CIA unit hunting bin Laden, his opponent's personal piety, generosity and sharing of hardships with his men meant 'he is an Islamic hero, as the faith's ideal type, and almost as a modern-day Saladin'.Jonathan questions why Saladin has maintained such an incredibly broad appeal down the centuries.Producer: Mohini Patel.