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 America, via the Aztecs and Maya, over the Atlantic to the Spanish court, the coffee houses and palaces of 17th century London, to the invention of mass-produced milk chocolate as we know it today in Switzerland in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's a story of pleasure, intoxication, conquest and industrialisation, all following from the specific culinary qualities of a bean.

Bee Wilson, food writer whose most recent book is The Secret Of Cooking: Recipes For An Easier Life In The Kitchen

Sean Williams, Radio 3 & AHRC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield

Caroline Dodds Pennock, Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield, whose most recent book is On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

Misha Ewen, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You can find other Free Thinking episodes exploring food, picnics, breakfast available on BBC Sounds and as the Arts & Ideas poodcast

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 anarchist groups in London eventually led to the first British immigration legislation - the 1905 Aliens Act. As a conference takes place exploring the incident and its legacy, Matthew Sweet is joined by historians Charlotte Jones, Ruth Kinna and Thomas Jones to discuss the bombing that was dubbed "the Greenwich Outrage".

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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 it contributed to the ending of the cold war. He joins historians of art and food in a conversation hosted by Anne McElvoy which ranges across picnics in ancient Greece, French impressionist painting, country house opera events like Glyndebourne and celebrating the arrival of the cherry blossom season.

Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Leiden and author of The Picnic

Monika Hinkel is an art historian based at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a lecturer in Film and Media at University College London

Pen Vogler is a food writer and the author of Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain

Producer: Ruth Watts

The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo is out now

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 books which explored the nature of good/evil, the role of the unconscious and of sex and love. In 1978 she won the Booker prize for her story The Sea, The Sea and in 1987 she was made a Dame.

The Iris Murdoch Research Centre is at the University of Chichester.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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 ambitious exploration of myth, religion and being human in an alien world. Zulawski (1940-2016) studied cinema in France and became known for art-house films working with actresses including Romy Schneider, Isabelle Adjani and Sophie Marceau. Matthew Sweet and his guests Daniel Bird, Sarah Dillon and David Hering, have been watching On the Silver Globe.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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 of Eastern Christian writing. At Compton Verney in Warwickshire, the artist Gayle Chong Kwan is preparing to unveil ‘shrines’ made up of newly cast bronze offerings, incorporating references to Chinese, Taoist and Buddhist cultures, as well as focusing on ideas around food, soil and the body. Rana Mitter hosts the conversation.

Producer: Julian Siddle

The Taotie runs at Compton Verney from 21 March 2024 – 31 March 2026

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 Wills and Dirty Linen by Martin Doyle who is Books Editor of the Irish Times. They're joined by the criminologist Dr Louise Brangan who researches the sociology of punishment, including work on Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and the poet Scott McKendry whose work deals with generational trauma and social decay in Belfast. John Gallagher hosts a discussion of how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others can shape society and history itself.

Professor Clair Will's books include Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain and The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment.

You can find other episodes exploring Irish history and writing on the Free Thinking programme website under past episodes and Arts & Ideas podcasts including programmes about Emigration and "bad Bridgets"; Ireland's Hidden Histories and Secret Stories; Edna O'Brien; Colm Tóibín; Anne Enright.

Radio 3 has a three part series tracing music and composers from the island over the past two hundred years - Irish Classical, hidden in plain sight. Find it on BBC Sounds.

Producer in Salford: Olive Clancy

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 Wiener Holocaust Library, the world's oldest holocaust research institution as it marks its 90th anniversary this year. Rachel Pistol explores the emerging stories of the Jewish men interned in Britain during the Second World War. We hear from Liza Weber about what we can learn from the Jewish art looted by the Nazis. And, Daniel Lee tells us about the lives of resisters Missak and Mélinée Manouchian whose courage will be honoured in Paris this month.

Dr Rachel Pistol is a digital historian and National Coordinator of European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. She is also the Historical Advisor for World Jewish Relief

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find previous episodes marking Holocaust Memorial Day with discussions about Nazis, Holocaust, Time and Memory with Richard J Evans, Jane Caplan, David Cesarani, Andre Singer and Eva Hoffman; Romani history, Portuguese Jewish experiences and a big academic literature research project in the 2023 episode hearing from Victoria Biggs, Richard Zimmler, Stuart Taberner and Daniel Lee; and episodes looking at Linda Grant and Jewish history; links between Judaism and Christianity, the writing of Betty Miller and Marghanita Laski; Jewish history, jokes and contemporary identity with Simon Schama and Devorah Baum.

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 one of the leading figures in the Kyoto School, a project of synthesis that tried to read the Japanese intellectual tradition through the lens of European philosophy and vice versa. These thinkers took ideas from Christian mysticism, German idealism and Phenomenology, and combined them with an interest in direct experience shaped by Japanese Zen and other forms of Buddhism. But it was work carried out in Japan in the 1930s, in a society becoming increasingly militaristic and tending towards fascism. Chris Harding discusses the Kyoto School and its legacy with James Heisig, Professor Emeritus at Nanzan University, Graham Parkes, Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Raquel Bouso, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and Takeshi Morisato, Lecturer in Non-Western Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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 has been widely influential in philosophy and beyond. But Heidegger was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, and there is considerable evidence that he held anti-Semitic views. What is the relationship between the Epochal work, and the opinions and actions of the man? Matthew Sweet discusses, with Maximilian de Gaynesford, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Peter Osborne, Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University, Daniel Herskowitz, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology at the University of Oxford, and Donatella Di Cesare, Professor of Philosophy at Sapienza Universita di Roma.

Producer: Luke Mulhall