Joya Chatterji has written about the South Asian twentieth century in her new book called Shadows at Noon. Tripurdaman Singh has been researching Indian princely states. Novels by Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) are being republished. Her daughter Kim Oliver and literary scholar Alastair Niven discuss Nectar in a Sieve. A bestseller when it first came out in 1954, it's a story about a tenant farmer, his wife and the impact of a tannery built in a neighbouring village. Rana Mitter hosts.

The books recommended by our guests are:

Producer: Julian Siddle

In 1897 women played American football in San Fransisco. Dr Katie Taylor, is a qualified coach who previously managed the Great Britain Men's Flag Football Team, supporting the team at three European Championships. She is a Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at Nottingham Trent University and has been researching the history of women playing the sport and the language used in newspaper to describe both women players and coaches working in the game.

Stacey Pope is Associate Professor in the Department of Sport and Exercise at Durham University. She is author of The Feminization of Sports Fandom and has recently published research looking at newspaper coverage of women’s football, the impact of the Lionesses and at continuing sexist attitudes amongst male fans to women playing football. She has also worked on an oral history project with women fans of Newcastle football club recording their experiences of attending games which you can find here https://womenfootballfans.org

And you can read more here https://canvas.vuelio.co.uk/5047/study-reveals-misogynistic-attitudes-towards-womens-sport/view

Christienna Fryar is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who studies sport, and Caribbean/British history

This Arts & Ideas podcast is part of the New Thinking series of episodes which focuses on new research from UK universities. It was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find a collection under New Research on Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme website

The Sacred Return of Lost Things is the theme of this year's Art Biennial in Liverpool. Catherine Fletcher talks to some of the artists showing work about how they have engaged with the city's history. Visual artist Melanie Manchot introduces her first full length feature film, STEPHEN, about a character recovering from gambling and alcohol addictions. Rudy Loewe describes their new large-scale installation The Reckoning, based around the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. And Charmaine Watkiss introduces a sacred space she has created in Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery & Museum, with life-size drawings and a sculpture representing unheard voices and stories that survived the Middle Passage.

New Generation Thinker Vid Simoniti gives his view and reports on an exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester called Economics the Blockbuster – It’s not Business as Usual which looks at disrupting ideas about value, ownership, trade and economy. Liverpool Biennial runs until 17th September 2023.

Economics the Blockbuster – It’s not Business as Usual is part of Manchester International Festival MIF23 and this show runs until October 22nd. You can hear about music featured in MIF in other Radio 3 broadcasts and on BBC Sounds and on the Free Thinking programme website there is a collection of discussions about art, architecture, photography and museums.

Marrying someone based on a portrait was part of life in Renaissance Europe. An exhibition in Bath explores the politics of wedlock and painting - New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday has been to visit. Eleanor Chan has been studying the history of depicting musical notes on the page, whilst Sew What podcast host Isabella Rosner looks at needlework skills in Tudor England. John Gallagher hosts the conversation.

Producer: Nick Holmes

BBC Radio 3 is marking the anniversary of the Tudor composer William Byrd with episodes of Composer of the Week, concerts including one during the Proms season at Londonderry and other discussions - all available on BBC Sounds.

You can also find Eleanor Chan's Essay about another Tudor composer - The discordant tale of Thomas Weelkes .

Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until October 1st 2023.

Christina Faraday's book Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England is out now from Yale University Press.

You might also be interested in other Free Thinking conversations about Tudor history, including:

The Tudor Mind with guests including Helen Hackett

Tudor Families with guests including Joanne Paul and Emma Whipday https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017dvc

What do you call a stranger with guests including Nandini Das and John Gallagher https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b89ssp

A collection of discussions about Shakespeare collected on the Free Thinking programme website

160 volunteers recorded over 2,400 interviews with over 1,200 people on their lived experience of the NHS - as patients, staff and members of the public in an oral history project run by the University of Manchester. Professor Stephanie Snow discusses the way these help us understand how caring for children has changed in the NHS, what it felt like to get health care and not have to pay for it and other stories which interviews with policy makers in the archives didn't reveal. The Voices of Our National Health service is held at the British Library and a book has been published Our Stories: 75 Years of the NHS from the People who Built it, Lived it and Love it

https://www.nhs70.org.uk/story/voices-our-national-health-service-nhs

Film maker Sara David talks about NHS Untold Film Stories and her documentary Khichdi which focuses on three Indian women, including the filmmaker’s mother, who trained together in India, became friends and came to work as nurses in the NHS in the 1990s

Dr Sarah Jilani is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London

This New Thinking conversation is part of a series marking NHS75 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. If you don’t want to miss an episode sign up for the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast from BBC Sounds.

What can we learn from children's experiences in the Pandemic at home and at school? Can children express their experiences through drawing, and how might a simple curtain help create happy family homes?

Lindsey McEwen is Professor of Environmental Management within the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research involved working with children in Bristol to understand their experiences and impact of the Pandemic on their school lives. As part of the research, she helped to create a children's book called "Learning to Live With Fog Monsters" which aims to understand and help children to cope with the impacts of invisible threats like pandemics or climate change. The book and more information on the project are available at https://www.vip-clear.org/the-primary-book/

Rosie Parnell is Professor of Architecture & Pedagogy at the University of Newcastle. Her research explored the impact on home design and sharing family spaces during the pandemic, and how families changed homes during the Covid lockdowns. As part of the research, she helped to create a "Home Hack Help Kit" to help families come up with solutions to issues around shared spaces in the home, which can be found here https://homehacktoolkit.co.uk/

Dr Daisy Fancourt is Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiolgy at University College London and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Producer: Sofie Vilcins

This New Thinking conversation is a part of a series of 5 episodes of the Arts and Ideas podcast marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS focusing on new research in UK universities which explores links between the arts and health. It is made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find out more on their website https://www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/

From exercise on prescription to museum visits and debt advice. Christienna Fryar hears about social prescribing projects which are trying to link up the arts with other services to improve people’s health and tackle loneliness. These include wild swimming in the waterways of Nottinghamshire, the “Arts for the Blues” project based in the North west of England, a pilot programme in Scotland called “Art at the Start”, and a community hub at the Grange in Blackpool.

Christienna Fryar is a historian of sport and the history of Britain and the Caribbean. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker

You can find more about the projects Helen is involved in https://culturehealthresearch.wordpress.com/health-disparities/

Producer: Jayne Egerton

This New Thinking conversation is part of a series marking NHS75 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. If you don’t want to miss an episode sign up for the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast from BBC Sounds.

How a new material helps stroke patients recover and how mapping where infections and contamination happen helps staff training.

New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson hears from two leading designers whose new research ideas have transformed the lives of stroke survivors and the elderly. Laura Salisbury is founder of the Wearable MedTech Lab at the Royal College of Art and CEO of KnitRegen and Professor Alastair Macdonald is Senior Researcher in the School of Design at The Glasgow School of Art.

They discuss the importance of collaborative design and testing usability. Laura tells us about her PowerBead design – a garment embedded with beads that aid in the rehabilitation of stroke survivors. Alastair discusses his work with the ageing population and how an app to register not just food provided but what patients have eaten has helped improve malnutrition in hospitals. Dr Elsa Richardson is a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH) and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker

This New Thinking conversation is part of a mini-series of Arts and Ideas podcasts made to mark the anniversary of the NHS 75 years ago. It was produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find out more

In the first NHS hospital to be opened in 1948 by then Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, a prize winning poet and academic has been sitting in the restaurant which serves as the canteen, persuading hospital workers to share their stories and take time to involve themselves in writing.

Kim Moore talks to Jade Munslow Ong alongside Kim Wiltshire, who works with the Lime Arts charity to roll out projects like this in healthcare settings and who has created a poetic collage about working in the NHS. Dr Kim Wiltshire is Programme Leader for the BA Creative Writing at Edge Hill university in Lancashire and she has collaborated with Lime Arts as an artist and project manager over 20 years https://www.limeart.org/

Kim Moore’s project Untold Stories of the NHS is a partnership with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), MFT’s arts for health organisation Lime Arts, Health Education England, and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature and includes a display at Trafford General, and an exhibition in the Manchester Poetry Library running over the Summer.

Dr Jade Munslow Ong teaches literature at the University of Salford and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker

Producer: Nancy Bennie

This New Thinking conversation is a part of a series of 5 episodes of the Arts and Ideas podcast marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS focusing on new research in UK universities which explores links between the arts and health. It is made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find out more on their website https://www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/

Dystopias are a longstanding staple of film and literature, particularly science fiction, but what can we learn from them? Do they simply entrench despair or act as a prompt to improve the world? And what do The Two Ronnies have to do with all this? As a stage adaptation of Kay Dick's 1977 novel 'They: A Sequence of Unease' opens at the Manchester International Festival - a work that imagines a Britain that has been purged of culture - Matthew Sweet is joined by writer Una McCormack and New Generation Thinkers Sarah Dillon and SJ Beard to trace the history of dystopias and what they tell us about the fears and preoccupations of successive generations.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight's adaptation of 'They: A Sequence of Unease' by Kay Dick is at John Rylands Library, Manchester 5th-9th July 2023.