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 her new book, Private Revolutions. Simon Ings talks about his latest book Engineers of Human Souls which examines four writers whose ideas shaped the careers of some of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators. And Jeffrey Howard analyses the ethics of negotiating free speech and censorship today.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang is out now

Simon Ings' book Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds looks at Maurice Barrès, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ding Ling and Maxim Gorky.

Jeffrey Howard is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Public Policy at UCL and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. You can find an Essay called Prison Break which he wrote for BBC Radio 3 asking if it is ever ok to escape from prison available on BBC Sounds. He was chosen as a New Generation Thinker in 2020 on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on radio.

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 the way children’s experiences shape their first words and the names they use for their parents.

Rebecca Woods is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put academic research on radio.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can hear more from Rebecca Woods in a Free Thinking discussion about childhood and play when Young V&A opened - it's available from the programme website and as an Arts & Ideas podcast

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 career of the playwright, who has died aged 89, but he was the author of over 50 plays, including several written for young people to perform, and others designed for broadcast on BBC Radio and he also worked on film scripts, wrote poems and long prefaces to his works. Joining Matthew Sweet to discuss his life and writing are the playwright Mark Ravenhill, actor Kenneth Cranham who starred in a 1969 production of Saved, Jen Harvie who is a Professor of Contemporary Drama at Queen Mary, London, Tony Coult, a writer and teacher of drama who has run Edward Bond's website for the past five years and written introductions to his play texts, and Claudette Bryanston, who commissioned The Children for a performance in a local Cambridge school with teenagers acting alongside adults.

Producer: Robyn Read

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