Arts & Ideas

By BBC Radio 4

What's Arts & Ideas about?

Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives – looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Broadcast as Free Thinking, Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari and Anne McElvoy.

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Arts & Ideas episodes:

04.19.2024
Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey
Classicist Mary Beard picks Tacitus as a figure who still has relevance if we're thinking about satire, power and celebrity. Shahidha Bari is joined by Mary, historian Helen Carr, who co-edited What is History Now? political sketch-writer from The Times...
04.12.2024
Change, scrabble and cultural christianity
"The times they are a changin" or are they? In politics people are talking about an appetite for change, or being a candidate for change but how radical can you be? With climate change, seasonal change and a change of...
04.05.2024
Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine
What do you owe the state and what does it provide for us? Writing during the English civil war, Thomas Hobbes came up with an outline for the social contract between individuals and the sovereign – on Free Thinking, Matthew...
03.29.2024
Unravelling plainness
Gold sequins, silk and vibrant colour threads might not be what you expect to find in a sampler stitched by a Quaker girl in the seventeenth century. New Generation Thinker Isabella Rosner has studied examples of embroidered nutmegs and decorated...
03.29.2024
Pranks
In 1910 Virginia Woolf and a group of friends caused a stir when they were welcomed on board the HMS Dreadnought, disguised as a delegation of Abyssinian royalty. At the 2017 Conservative Party conference, Theresa May was handed a P45...
03.28.2024
What does feminist art mean?
Who's Holding the Baby? was the title of an exhibition organised to highlight a lack of childcare provision in East London in the 1970s. Was this feminist art? Bobby Baker, Sonia Boyce, Rita Keegan and members of the photography collective...
03.28.2024
New Thinking: Light and Darkness
The impact of light bulbs on cities like New York and Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and the way modernist poets like Mina Loy and Lola Ridge depicted this, is at the heart of research being...
03.27.2024
Approaches to death
Viking burials, preserving archaeology in Uganda, the morgues of Paris and New York and the medieval attitude to dying are our topics as Chris Harding hears about new research from archaeologists Marianne Hem Eriksen and Pauline Harding, and historians Cat...
03.27.2024
New Thinking: East West artistic connections
The Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens produced around 1,500 artworks, and a new research project explores the Islamic themes in his art. Dr Adam Sammut discusses why the Ottoman Empire’s influence on Rubens has been at the periphery...
03.27.2024
Rock, Paper, Saints and Sinners
A 1660s board game made by a Jesuit missionary sent to the Mohawk Valley in North America is the subject of New Generation Thinker Gemma Tidman's essay. This race game, a little like Snakes and Ladders, depicts the path of...
03.27.2024
Writing Place
An ancient Sussex church - home to a medieval anchorite and the cottage where William Blake received the poetic spirit of Milton are two of the places explored in the new book from Alexandra Harris, as she returns to her...
03.26.2024
Arteries of tomorrow
The A13 runs from the City of London past Tilbury Docks and the site of the Dagenham Ford factory to Benfleet and the Wat Tyler Country Park. As he travels along it, talking to residents about their ideas of community...
03.22.2024
New Thinking: How water shapes our history and environment
Whilst water is the most important substance on earth, we take it for granted in our modern lives. As an archaeologist, Jay Ingate looks at water in the development of urban centres in early Roman Britain. Whilst...
03.22.2024
The Legacy of the Laundries
From 1922, between 10-30,000 women and girls are thought to have been incarcerated at the Magdalene laundries which operated in Ireland. New Generation Thinker Louise Brangan has been reading the testimonies of many of the girls who survived these institutions....
03.22.2024
Gas, oil and the Essex blues
Canvey Island: cradle of innovation for gas heating and home to music makers Dr Feelgood, who drew inspiration from the Mississippi Delta. New Generation Thinker Sam Johnson-Schlee is an author and geographer based at London South Bank University. His essay...
03.21.2024
Weird Viking Bodies
Looking at the way human and animal bodies were treated in death and used in rituals prompts New Generation Thinker and archaeologist Marianne Hem Eriksen, from the University of Leicester, to ask questions about the way humans, animals and spirit-worlds...
03.21.2024
From algorithms to oceans
Two years living at sea taught New Generation Thinker Kerry McInerney values which she wants to apply to the development of AI. Her Essay explores the "sustainable AI" movement and looks at visions of the future in novels including Waste...
03.20.2024
Germany’s Mary Wollstonecraft
Amalia Holst's defence of female education, published in 1802, was the first work by a woman in Germany to challenge the major philosophers of the age, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft writing in England, Holst failed...
03.20.2024
Scottish Kingship
In 2024, Scotland marks two big anniversaries: David I ascended the throne nine centuries ago and James I of Scotland began his reign 600 years ago. Both Kings played a role in shaping Scotland's ideas about its monarchy. How did...
03.19.2024
Free speech, censorship and modern China
Rana Mitter explores looks at the role of writing in propagating ideas and exposing political tensions. He hears how writers have given voice to personal and political ambitions, from Ding Ling to the teenagers of modern China. Yuan Yang discusses...
03.18.2024
Call Me Mother
Why do babies say "daddy" earlier and what might it mean when a baby does call for "mum" or "anne"? Dr Rebecca Woods, from Newcastle University, calls upon her training in linguistics and observations from her own home to trace...
03.15.2024
Edward Bond
When Saved was banned in 1965 by the Lord Chamberlain's office, the Royal Court theatre turned itself into a private club to allow performances of Edward Bond's drama to be staged. This may be the most famous incident in the...
03.13.2024
Sleep justice and sleeplessness
There's nothing like a good night's sleep, but Laurence Scott discovers that our ability to enjoy one may be related to other societal inequalities, giving rise to the idea of sleep justice. His guests, researchers Sally Cloke, Jonathan White, Alice...
03.12.2024
Images of Persia
The medieval poet Hafez and how his work speaks to today, the impact of digs undertaken by 19th-century feminist archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy and the novels she wrote looking back to a Persian past, the role of classical singing and the...
03.07.2024
Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation
Gene Hackman is a brilliant but troubled surveillance expert who gets drawn unwittingly into a conspiracy to murder. Released at the height of the Watergate scandal, Coppola's 1974 film about covert surveillance and wire-tapping reflected the mood of paranoia in...
03.06.2024
Muses and women's creativity
Iseult Gonne is the daughter of the Irish suffragette, actress and republican who became a muse for WB Yeats. Novelist Helen Cullen has been researching her troubled life. Rochelle Rowe's research looks at women of colour who modelled for artists...
03.05.2024
Sarah Maldoror, Storm Jameson, the Hague Congress
1,300 women met in The Hague in 1915 to discuss votes for women, human rights and the importance of peace. Jennifer Thomson shares her research into how this fed into the development of the women's movement and fed into organisations...
02.29.2024
The Dutch Connection
Adam Smyth loves books - as well as being a Professor of English Literature he runs an experimental printing press from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. Who better then to tell us about the quirky pioneers of print, the subject...
02.28.2024
Hitchhiking
Travelling in Woody Guthrie's footsteps inspired a history of hitchhiking written by Jonathan Purkis. He joins Matthew Sweet for a conversation which ranges across hitchhiking in the UK and in Eastern Europe, where Poland operated a kind of voucher system....
02.27.2024
New Thinking: Stitching Stories
Recycling Victorian clothes, the history of costume design, the messages conveyed in art made from textiles and the stories encoded in ancient embroidery are explored by Shahidha Bari and her guests Isabella Rosner, Rianna Norbert-David, Jade Halbert and Danielle Dove....
02.22.2024
Can - Future Days
Formed in 1968, the German group Can's founding members included Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay who had both studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Joined by jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit, guitarist Michael Karoli and Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki for the group's 'classic'...
02.20.2024
Myths, ships and history
Asked to picture a nineteenth-century ship, you might think of the HMS Victory or HMS Temeraire, symbolic of empire. Something epitomised by flag-waving and victory - Britannia rules the waves. In this edition of Free Thinking, Catherine Fletcher asks if...
02.15.2024
The Condom and V.D.
The first condoms were made of cloth and intended to be used after sex. Later they were replaced by hand stitched animal gut ones – designed to be washed and reused. We chart the bizzare, fraught and sexist history of...
02.14.2024
Chocolate
Chocolate is an indulgent luxury used to mark special points in the calendar like Valentine's Day, Easter and Christmas. But it's also everywhere, from breakfast cereals to protein shakes. Shahidha Bari unravels this paradox, tracing the meanings of chocolate from...
02.09.2024
Chocolate
An indulgent luxury used to mark special points in the calendar like Valentine's Day, Easter and Christmas, but it's also everywhere, from breakfast cereals to protein shakes. Shahidha Bari unravels this paradox, tracing the meanings of chocolate from ancient Central...
02.09.2024
The Greenwich Outrage
In February 1894, the French anarchist Martial Bourdin was killed in Greenwich Park when the bomb he was carrying exploded accidentally. The event provided Joseph Conrad with the inspiration for his novel The Secret Agent, and the resulting backlash against...
02.07.2024
Picnics
In 1989 the demilitarized zone between East and West was the venue for a gathering which was titled the Pan-European picnic. Matthew Longo's new book explores the Hungarian, East German and Russian politics which led to this happening and how...
02.05.2024
Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good
Bidisha, Peter Conradi and Lucy Bolton join Matthew Sweet to read the moral philosophy book published by Iris Murdoch in 1970. Murdoch, who died aged 79, 25 years ago on Feb 8th 1999, was a writer of novels and philosophy...
02.02.2024
On The Silver Globe
The "best sci-fi film" never made? That's what Andrzej Zulawski's project has been called. Shut down by the Polish government before production had finished in 1977, the film wasn't completed and released until 1987. It's a visually stunning and wildly...
01.31.2024
East West religious connections
The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East is the new book from New Generation Thinker and historian Christopher Harding. In Passions of the Soul, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams looks at the classics...
01.30.2024
Secrets, Lies & Irish History
The stories told and secrets kept in Ireland north and south are the focus of a pair of deeply personal new non fiction books - Missing Persons Or My Grandmother's Secrets from University of Cambridge Professor of English Literature Clair...
01.26.2024
Holocaust history
Historians continue to unearth documents, interpret new records accounts and reinterpret old ones in their light. In doing so they expand our understanding of unfolding antisemitism and the holocaust. Anne McElvoy speaks to Barbara Warnock the senior curator of the...
01.24.2024
The Kyoto School
In the first decades of the 20th century the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida sent students to Europe and America to see what they could discover about Western philosophy. Keiji Nishitani went to Freiburg to study under Martin Heidegger, and became...
01.23.2024
Heidegger & Antisemitism
Martin Heidegger is widely viewed as one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century. His 1927 book Being & Time took issue with the entire Western intellectual tradition since Aristotle and suggested a new beginning for philosophy, which...
01.19.2024
What is normal?
Neurodiversity, madness and disability are at the centre of the work being undertaken by three academics who join Matthew Sweet to look at the history of ideas about "normality". Dr Robert Chapman is Assistant Professor of Critical Neurodiversity Studies at...
01.17.2024
Shakespeare's Women
From Lady Macbeth to Portia, Viola and Rosalind - Shakespeare's female characters continue to hold the highest appeal for actors, but less is known about the women in his own life. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is embarking on a year...
01.16.2024
Dust, dirt and domesticity
What is the composition dirt and dust? Is there a better place to hang the washing? And how can I make my home more comfortable? These are all questions which preoccupy our guests. Jay Owens first became interested in the...
01.11.2024
Octavia Butler's Kindred
"A hermit in the middle of Los Angeles" is one way she described herself - born in 1947, Butler became a writer who wanted to "tell stories filled with facts. Make people touch and taste and know." Since her death...
01.10.2024
Essay writing
Montaigne's literary self portraits led to him popularising the Essay form in the mid 1500s. With online articles, long reads in newspapers and magazines and a number of publishing houses interested in promoting essays and reprinting authors, Rana Mitter and...
01.03.2024
Travel, pleasure and peril
Going on a trip ? get ready to get uncomfortable, pack grease to treat your sore bum, and laudanum for the inevitable travel sickness - and perhaps you might also be in need of an anti-strangulation collar to ward off...

What's Arts & Ideas about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Arts & Ideas episodes:

Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey

Change, scrabble and cultural christianity

Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine

Unravelling plainness

Pranks

What does feminist art mean?

New Thinking: Light and Darkness

Approaches to death

New Thinking: East West artistic connections

Rock, Paper, Saints and Sinners

Writing Place

Arteries of tomorrow

New Thinking: How water shapes our history and environment

The Legacy of the Laundries

Gas, oil and the Essex blues

Weird Viking Bodies

From algorithms to oceans

Germany’s Mary Wollstonecraft

Scottish Kingship

Free speech, censorship and modern China

Call Me Mother

Edward Bond

Sleep justice and sleeplessness

Images of Persia

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation

Muses and women's creativity

Sarah Maldoror, Storm Jameson, the Hague Congress

The Dutch Connection

Hitchhiking

New Thinking: Stitching Stories

Can - Future Days

Myths, ships and history

The Condom and V.D.

Chocolate

Chocolate

The Greenwich Outrage

Picnics

Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good

On The Silver Globe

East West religious connections

Secrets, Lies & Irish History

Holocaust history

The Kyoto School

Heidegger & Antisemitism

What is normal?

Shakespeare's Women

Dust, dirt and domesticity

Octavia Butler's Kindred

Essay writing

Travel, pleasure and peril