What is going on inside Britain's families? From three-parent families and surrogacy, to stepfamilies - the fastest rising type of home in the UK - the days of the 'traditional' family are apparently over. The divorce rate in the UK stands at 42%, the highest in the EU, yet nearly 75% of us apparently consider ourselves to be happy with our lives at home. So what are the new rules of family life?

Joining Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy are:

Anne Fine - the first Children's Laureate and an acclaimed author of books for adults and children including Madame Doubtfire and Telling Liddy.

Tobias Jones - a novelist and communalist who opened his home as a sanctuary for people in a period of crisis and explores the results in his new book, A Place of Refuge: an Experiment in Communal Living.

Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Professor of Medical and Family Sociology, Centre for Population Health Sciences and founding co-director, Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh.

Dr Tom Shakespeare from the University of East Anglia researches disability studies, medical sociology and ethical aspects of genetics.

Recorded in front of an audience during the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Angela Carter's work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without equal and without rival'. The award winning author of novels including The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children and Nights at the Circus was a pioneer of English magic realism who re-imagined fairy tales and explored boundary breaking and rebelling against the confines of society. Her non- fiction book The Sadeian Woman explored the ideology of pornography.

Thirteen years after her early death, the novelists Joanna Kavenna and Natasha Pulley join Angela Carter's literary executor Susannah Clapp and her friend the cultural critic Christopher Frayling to discuss Carter's writing and influence with Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd. The readings are performed by Emily Woof.

Christopher Frayling is the author of Inside the Bloody Chamber: on Angela Carter, the Gothic, and other weird tales which draws on the letters he and Carter exchanged.

Joanna Kavenna is the author of five novels including Come to the Edge. In 2013 she was included in the Granta List of 20 best young writers.

Natasha Pulley is the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and a graduate of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia.

Susannah Clapp is the author of A Card from Angela Carter and Theatre Critic for The Observer.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival Sage Gateshead.

The 18th century was the age of politeness - and of bawdiness. Fine manners and fine art co-existed with earthy attitudes to sex and the body, even in the most elevated circles.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Danielle Thom answer questions about her research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Producer: Zahid Warley

The brutal treatment of Jews in Vichy France during the Second World War that culminated in their roundup and deportation is widely known. But is this the only way to consider Jewish life at this time? Focusing on the Jewish Scouting Movement.

Daniel Lee from the University of Sheffield reveals the possibility of coexistence between the Vichy regime and the Jews, exposing a world of Jewish creativity and expression that flourished just as the regime’s antisemitic measures intensified.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Daniel Lee discussing his research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Producer: Zahid Warley

From a breakfast drink to start the day to the treatment of bullet-wounds, beer has been a constant accompaniment to British life for centuries. Nowhere was this truer than in Imperial India where beer played a central role in colonial commerce, medicine and leisure.

Sam Goodman of the University of Bournemouth explores this colonial drinking culture and how many of its habits have lingered to the present day, noting that whilst the Empire might be long gone, British taste for beer has proved remarkably consistent.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

Recording in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Sam Goodman discuss his research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Science progresses by breaking the rules of the past. New observations need new theories to explain them. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity made sense of observations that Newton’s Laws of Motion could not. But how can we distinguish between the brilliant ideas that change our view of the world and those that are plain wrong? And does that make science too cautious to try out new ideas?

Joining Free Thinking presenter Rana Mitter are:

Professor Carlos Frenk, founding Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and winner of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2014

Jim al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific and TV documentaries. His books include Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Science, Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Machines and Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed

Dr Katy Price from Queen Mary, University of London, author of Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe

Dr Tom Shakespeare from the University of East Anglia, who co-founded the Café Scientifique network, which now has hundreds of affiliates in UK and worldwide.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The 1667 recipe book by Sir Kenelm Digby featured tea with eggs brought from China, sugared mallow-leaves that cured gonorrhea and ‘pan cotto' cooked by Roman Cardinals. Digby had journeyed far and wide to collect his dishes, feasting with pirate chieftains in Algiers and munching melons in the eastern Mediterranean.

Joe Moshenska of the University of Cambridge explores Kenelm Digby’s culinary travels, revealing startling contacts between Britain and the East, between alchemy and cookery, and between the past and the present.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Joe Moshenka discuss his research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and this year's general election led to a passionate debate about nationhood and nationalism. But not for the first time. Kylie Murray of the University of Oxford discusses the ways in which feelings surrounding Anglo-Scottish relations and visions of Scottish national identity reached a peak of imaginative, sometimes intemperate expression in 15th-century Scottish literature. Among the jewels - Abbot Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, the most re-published text in Scotland for the next two hundred years – and the inspiration behind one of Scotland’s greatest epic poems, Blind Harry’s The Wallace, where two hundred years after the Wars of Independence, the old hero is virtually re-invented as a second messiah.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Kylie Murray discussing her research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

In the hunger for new ideas, are we forgetting the hard-earned lessons of the past? Rana Mitter chairs a discussion recorded in front of an audience at this year's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead .

Thousands of soldiers fought in kilted regiments during the First World War. But what kind of cultural identity was adopted with the kilt? How far was it pervaded by a fatalistic sense of the Celt who ‘went forth to the war but … always fell’, or by the memory of the Highland Clearances?

Peter Mackay of the University of St Andrews explores poetry and first-hand accounts from the war to find out.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Peter Mackay discussing his research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.