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 Vernon and Alice Bennett, also provide insights into sleep disorders, including night terrors, and the tyranny of the alarm clock.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics and Deputy Head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics whose books include In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea and an article for the Journal of Political Philosophy Circadian Justice

In the Free Thinking archives and available as Arts & Ideas podcasts you can find other discussions relating to sleep hearing from Russell Foster, Sasha Handley, Diletta de Cristofaro, Kenneth Miller and Matt Berry

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 impact of the Mongol invasion are discussed by the academics Julia Hartley, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow; Michelle Assay, Principal investigator of the Marie Curie/UKRI project, “Women and Western Art Music in Iran” at King’s College London; Sussan Babaie, Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute and Ide Haghi, Lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages at the University of Glasgow. Chris Harding presents.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Julia Hartley's book Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France is out now.

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 the USA at the time. Matthew Sweet his guests, film historians Lucy Bolton and Phuong Le, writer Michael Goldfarb and writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell discuss the film and how our attitudes to being subjected to surveillance have changed in the fifty years since it was released.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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 including Jacob Epstein and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, tracing the histories of women like Fanny Eaton and Sunita Devi. Tabitha Barber is curating an exhibition of women's art opening at Tate Britain in May. Naomi Paxton hosts a conversation about muses, women making art and carving out a public name for themselves.

Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement runs at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 31 October

You can find a collection of episodes exploring Women in the World on the Free Thinking programme website

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 like the United Nations. Storm Jameson (1891-1986) was President of the English branch of PEN International during WWII and helped many writers flee war torn Europe. Katie Cooper has been reading her newly re-published autobiography Journey From the North. Sarah Maldoror ( 1929 −2020) is best known for her feature film Sambizanga which looked at the 1961–1974 war in Angola. New Generation Thinkers Alex Reza and Sarah Jilani discuss her film-making career. Shahidha Bari hosts.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find a collection of Free Thinking episodes exploring Women in the World from Julian of Norwich to Hilma Af Klint, women warriors to stepmothers, landladies and divas.

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 of his new publication The Book-Makers? In this programme he takes us to 1490s London to tell the story of Wynken de Worde, a Dutch immigrant who came to work at William Caxton's press, the very first printing enterprise in England. A canny businessman, de Worde set about making all things printed into Early Modern must-haves.

At the same time as books and printing took hold in England, a network of communications grew across Early Modern Europe. Dr Esther van Raamsdonk is an expert in Anglo-Dutch relations and the people, goods and ideas that moved back and forth across the North Sea at the time. We will learn how myriad changes they brought continue to shape our society and also about the many cheese-based jokes published about the low countries when relations soured.

And Dr Elise Watson researches books and early modern Catholicism. She has stories to tell about crafty Dutch Catholic lay sisters running bookshops, establishing schools and outselling the guilds in Amsterdam with their book stalls and door-to-door peddling. What sort of influence did they have on Early Modern England?

Producer in Salford: Olive Clancy

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. We look at the influence of film depictions from the Nevada desert depicted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the hippie vibe of Easy Rider to the horror of The Hitcher and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the female focus of Je Tu Il Elle by Chantal Akerman. Has the idea of hitchhiking now had its day? Joining Matthew to assess the idea of risk and our perception of thumbing a lift are Timandra Harkness, film critic Adam Scovell, plus Sally J Morgan, winner of the Portico prize for her book Toto Among the Murderers, based on her experience of being offered a lift by Fred and Rosemary West

Jonathan Purkis's book is called Driving with Strangers

Producer: Jessica Treen

We've a whole playlist of discussions exploring The Way We Live Now with topics ranging from Breakfast, to Gloves, Toys to Punk, Rationality and Tradition. Find them on the Free Thinking programme website and available to download as Arts and Ideas podcasts

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. They also look at exhibitions at the Barbican Gallery in London and the Museum of London in Docklands.

Isabella Rosner is the curator of the Royal School of Needlework and a New Generation Thinker. You can hear an Essay from her about Quaker needlework broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art runs at the Barbican Art Gallery in London from Tue 13 Feb—Sun 26 May 2024

Producer: Robyn Read

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' line-up that recorded Tago Mago (1971) and Ege Bamyasi (1972), their fourth album - Future Days - saw them exploring a more ambient, blissed-out sound, in contrast to their previous releases. Matthew Sweet is joined by musicians Jah Wobble and Gwenno, novelist Alan Warner and cultural historian Mererid Puw Davies to take a deep dive into the album and explore the blend of influences that made Can such a unique musical proposition.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

An expanded edition of Jah Wobble's autobiography Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer is out on 7th March.

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 we memorialise one aspect of our maritime past at the expense of others.

Remember in Great Expectations when Magwitch escapes from a prison ship anchored by the coast? Dickens was likely inspired by the reality of the 19th century "prison hulks", decommissioned warships moored on docks to house criminals. Dr Anna McKay of the University of Liverpool can tell us more about how the hulks, supposed to be a short term solution to a crisis, ended up being used for decades. Dr Lloyd Belton of the University of Glasgow studies the Kru - fiercely independent West African sailors who formed an alliance with the Royal Navy to rid the African coast of slavers. His research follows what happened these men, who saw themselves as servants of the Empire, when they settled in Liverpool between the wars. And Dr Oliver Finnegan from the National Archive at Kew will tell us about the enorrmous historical potential of the "Prize Papers", a collection of thousands of unopened letters, legal papers and other documents from ships captured by British privateers and the Royal navy between 1652 and 1815.

Presented by: Catherine Fletcher

BBC Radio 3's Words and Music episode about Antartica, the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his ship Endurance is available on BBC Sounds and you can find other episodes of Free Thinking exploring ships in history hearing from Sarah Caputo, Hew Locke and Jake Subryan Richards