Free Thinking

Deborah Levy, Adam Phillips and Amia Srinivasan join Matthew Sweet at the British Library for a Royal Society of Literature debate.

Why do we read? Why do we write? What do we reveal when we do? A writer, a psychotherapist and a philosopher discuss what we reveal about ourselves through literature and the difference, if any, between non-fiction, novels and the psychotherapist’s couch.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Who's pulling your strings - from advertisers and peer pressure to political campaigns and self-deception - hidden persuaders are everywhere. Journalist Poppy Noor, historian Sarah Marks, psychologist and magician, Gustav Kuhn, the philosopher, Quassim Cassam and Robert Colvile from the Centre for Policy Studies join Matthew Sweet to track them down. We're all confident that we know our own minds -- but do we? And if we don't, why not?

Producer: Zahid Warley

Quassim Cassam is professor of philosophy at Warwick University. He is the author of Self Knowledge for Humans and his new book, Vices of the Mind will be published next year.

Gustav Kuhn teaches psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His book Experiencing the Impossible : The Science of Magic will be published next year.

Sarah Marks is a post-doctoral researcher at Birkbeck College in London where she is one of the team involved in the Hidden Persuaders project.

Poppy Noor is a journalist and contributes to The Guardian newspaper.

Robert Colvile is the director of the Centre for Policy Studies.

Geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, current director of the Francis Crick Institute, and Tristram Hunt, historian and now director of the V&A, debate the impact of robots, the winners and losers in funding, whether our education system has the balance right between STEM and Arts subjects and they reveal their own arts and science hits and misses. Recorded before an audience at Queen Mary University London, the presenter is Shahidha Bari.

Nearly 60 years on from C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' lecture in which the chemist and novelist argued that a great divide existed between art and science, this conversation considers the relationship between the two in 2018.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

As her award-winning debut play, Nine Night, comes to London's West End, Natasha Gordon tells Anne about the grieving ritual that binds in the Jamaican diaspora.

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Bessie Head's first novel, two of her titles, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) and Maru (1971), have just been republished. Head's influence and creativity are discussed by journalist Audrey Brown and literary scholar Louisa Uchum Egbunike.

Black Earth Rising, Hugo Blick's serial on the Rwandan Genocide and the fraught and fractured nature of justice, is one of the dramas of the year. Zoe Norridge explores the drama's reception within Rwandan cultural politics and Phil Clark discusses his research on the impact of the International Criminal Court on African politics.

The director of the 1971 film Get Carter, which starred Michael Caine, has now written his own crime novellas. Mike Hodges talks to Matthew Sweet. If Nordic Noir has reshaped an image of Sweden away from Abba into a society showing cracks - journalist Kajsa Norman has been tracking stories such as the cover-up of assaults on teenage girls at music festivals in 2015. She's called her book Sweden's Dark Soul: The Unravelling of a Utopia. Mike Hodges' trio of novellas is called Bait, Grist and Security.

You can hear another Free Thinking Discussion with Anders Sandberg, Pia Lundgren, Kieran Long & Lars Blomgren about What We Have Learned From Sweden here https://bbc.in/2Q1euTl

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

A long lost classic by William Melvin Kelley, who coined the term "woke" back in 1962 in a New York Times article, Esi Edugyan's Booker shortlisted novel, and new research on slavery with historians Christienna Fryar, Kevin Waite, and Andrea Livesey. Laurence Scott presents.

A Different Drummer was the debut novel of Kelley - first published when he was 24. Compared to William Faulkner and James Baldwin, it was forgotten until an article about it earlier this year. Kelley died aged 79 in 2017. His story imagines the day the black population of a Southern US town decide to get up and all go. Canadian writer Esi Edugyan has imagined a black slave becoming a scientist in her novel Washington Black.

You can hear more Free Thinking discussion on American culture and history here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jzmf6

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Should we worry about the world getting healthier? Thomas Bollyky thinks we should. Jane Stevens Crawshaw looks at cleanliness and disease in Renaissance cities & Penny Woolcock films Oxford and LA. Rana Mitter presents.

For the first time in recorded history, parasites, viruses, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death and disability in any region of the world but that doesn't mean our cities are healthier and more prosperous. Jane Steven Crawshaw from Oxford Brookes researches plague hospitals and quarantine.

Thomas Bollyky is director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book is called Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways.

Fantastic Cities - an exhibition of Penny Woolcock's work runs at Modern Art Oxford until March 2019.

The Story of Phi, curated by Jennifer Ingleheart, is at the Bodleian Library until 13th January 2019.

Hear more from Penny Woolcock discussing her career at the Free Thinking Festival https://bbc.in/2E31s0U

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Doris Kearns Goodwin on POTUS, crisis management and ambition - from Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt through FDR and LBJ to Donald Trump. Novelist Georgina Harding and Philip Woods compare notes on the impact of the war in Burma and depictions in fiction, war reporting and memoirs. New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike looks at the campaigning of Obi Egbuna the Nigerian-born novelist (1938- 2014), playwright and political activist who led the United Coloured People's Association. Anne McElvoy presents.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer prize winning historian whose latest book is called Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times.

Eric Kaufmann talks to Philip Dodd about white identity, immigration and populism. Plus Hungarian politics with cultural historian, Krisztina Robert, journalist, Matyas Sarkozi and Zsuzsa Szelenyi of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.

Eric Kaufmann's book is called Whiteshift: populism, immigration and the future of White majorities.

Krisztina Robert teaches at the University of Roehampton

Producer: Zahid Warley

Peter Frankopan brings his history of ties across Asia into the present while Maya Jasanoff, winner of the world's richest history prize, uses the novels of Joseph Conrad to show that the novelist was wrestling with the same problems and opportunities of globalisation we face today.

Maya Jasanoff, winner of The 2018 Cundill Prize, announced in Canada on November 15th. https://www.cundillprize.com/ for her book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World available now

Stalking The Image: Margaret Tait and Her Legacy at Glasgow Museum of Modern Art until May 5th 2019

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics who can turn their research into radio.