Free Thinking

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

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Free Thinking episodes

October 10, 2018 Drugs and Consciousness
Does LSD open the doors of perception or just mess with your head? Leo Butler tells Matthew Sweet about writing a play inspired by taking part in the world's first LSD medical trials since the 1960s. Philosophers Peg O'Connor and Barry Smith lock horns with neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt over whether drug-induced hallucinations allow access to a deeper reality.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
47 min
October 06, 2018 A Feminist Take on Medieval History
How does Chaucer write about rape and consent ? What links Kim Kardashian West & Margery Kempe - an English Christian mystic and mother of 14 children who wrote about her religious visions in the 1420s in what has been called the first autobiography in English. Alicia Spencer-Hall, Elizabeth Robertson and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about new research and what a feminist take brings to our understanding of the medieval period.
Made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council which funds research into the humanities and works with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.
41 min
October 04, 2018 The Frieze Debate: Museums in the 21st Century
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Museum directors from USA, Austria and Britain look at the challenges of displaying their collections for new audiences. Anne McElvoy's guests include Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA, Sabine Haag, Director, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum.
Recorded with an audience at the Royal Institution in London as one of the events for the 2018 Frieze London Art Fair.
Find our playlist of discussions about the Visual Arts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
45 min
October 03, 2018 Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, Spookiness and Fear.
Matthew Sweet talks to the author of The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry, about her re-imagining of the Melmoth story, first published in 1920 by the Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. His Melmoth the Wanderer was a critique of Catholicism following a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for living 150 years longer. Sarah Perry's version begins in Prague with a female scholar who feels she's being watched.
Plus, experts on the Gothic Roger Luckhurst and Helen Wheatley discuss the apparently perennial appeal of the Gothic in literature, cinema and on television.
And, Matthew talks to Richard Maclean Smith, whose podcast and book UNEXPLAINED report on the odd, mysterious and uncanny.
Melmoth by Sarah Perry is out now.
Professor Roger Luckhurst is the author of The Mummy's Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy, Helen Wheatley's publications include Gothic Television
Rosemary's Baby (1968) was directed by Roman Polanski from the novel by Ira Levin.
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film written, directed, photographed and edited by George A. Romero
Producer: Luke Mulhall
47 min
October 02, 2018 Gandhi's power, portable citizenship & Indian writing - China's missing film star
Gandhi's power, portable citizenship and Indian writing. Rana Mitter talks to Ramachandra Guha about his new biography of Gandhi, hears about "portable citizenship from Indrajit Roy and discusses Indian writing and literary tradition with Amit Chaudhuri and Sandeep Parmar. Rana also breaks off from the subcontinent briefly to explore the mysterious disappearance of China's biggest film star, Fan Bingbing with the historian, Julia Lovell.
Ramachandra Guha has written Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1915-1948
Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of essays is called The Origins of Dislike: A Geneaology of Writerly Discontent
New Generation Thinker Sandeep Parmar is a poet and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool whose books include Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman.
Dr Indrajit Roy lectures at the University of York and is the author of Politics of the Poor in Contemporary India
Julia Lovell is the author of The Opium War and will publish a global history of Maoism next year.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) and his An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003) have helped shaped ways of looking at Indian writing.
Producer: Zahid Warley
50 min
September 27, 2018 Loss, Grief and Anger
Lisa Appignanesi, prize-winning writer and Freudian scholar, with a personal memoir that explores public and private loss and anger. Presenter Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough also looks at a Festival of Canadian and North American writing meeting authors Heather O'Neill and Cherie Dimaline whose novels explore the meaning of family in dystopian visions of Canada, urban and rural. And, as the Oceania exhibition opens at the Royal Academy in London and a new Pacific Gallery opens at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Jo Walsh, artist and art producer, and cultural adviser, discusses the cultural protocols and disciplines which should be taken into account when mounting exhibitions of art from the Pacific nations and we look at the idea of cultural loss.
Lisa Appignanesi : Everyday madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love
Heather O'Neill is one of Canada's best known fiction writers. Also a poet and journalist, her latest novel is The Lonely Hearts Hotel.
Cherie Dimaline is a writer and editor from the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario. Dimaline's latest book is The Marrow Thieves. They are taking part in the inaugural Festival America in London this September.
Jo Walsh, (Māori / Pākehā) is a London-based artist and founding member of In*ter*is*land Collective and works with major institutions, including the British Library and National Maritime Museum.
Oceania at The Royal Academy, London, 29 September — 10 December 2018.
Sackler Gallery: Pacific Encounters, one of four new galleries at National Maritime Museum, now open.
45 min
September 26, 2018 Slavoj Žižek, Camille Paglia, Flemming Rose
Can causing offence be a good thing? Philip Dodd explores this question with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, the American author, Camille Paglia and the Danish journalist, Flemming Rose.
Camille Paglia is a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia whose Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson was rejected by seven publishers before it became a best-seller.
Flemming Rose was Culture Editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when in September 2005 it published a series of cartoons of Muhammad which caused controversy.
Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism by Slavoj Zizek is out now.
Provocations: Collected Essays by Camille Paglia will be available from October 9th.
Flemming Rose is the author of The Tyranny of Silence, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington DC.
Our playlist looking at Culture Wars and Discussions about Identity can be found here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt
52 min
September 25, 2018 The Goodies
Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie talk to Matthew Sweet about how humour changes and the targets of their TV comedy show which ran during the '70s and early '80s. A box set of the 67 half hour episodes is being released.
Producer: Harry Parker.
46 min
September 20, 2018 What Nietzsche teaches us
How Nietzsche might have responded to current debates, including Trump, 'post-truth', identity and Europe. Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about his new work on identity and biographer Sue Prideaux and philosophers Hugo Drochon and Katrina Mitcheson join Matthew Sweet to think about Nietzsche.
I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux is published on October 30th. Her books include Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Strindberg: A Life, which received the Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of books including As If, Idealization Ideals, Cosmpolitan: Ethics in a World of Strangers and his new book which draws on his thinking for BBC Radio 4's Reith Lectures is called The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.
You can find a playlist of discussions about Culture Wars and Identity here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt
Producer: Luke Mulhall.
47 min
September 19, 2018 What Camus and Claude Lévi-Strauss teach us
Rana Mitter talks to poet and writer Ben Okri and writer and journalist Agnes Poirier about the contemporary resonance of The Outsider by Albert Camus (1913-1960), and as a new biography of the anthropological giant, Claude Levi-Strauss by Emmanuelle Loyer comes out in English, he talks to anthropologist, Adam Kuper about travel, anthropology and how we classify. Rana is also joined by Peter Moore who has written a history of the ship Endeavour which carried James Cook on his first explorations of the southern ocean.
The Outsider (L’Étranger publ 1942) by Albert Camus adapted for the stage by Ben Okri runs at Print Room at the Coronet in London 14 Sep – 13 Oct 2018.
Agnes Poirier: The Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 is out now
Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World by Peter Moore is out now. Oceania runs at the Royal Academy in London from 29 September — 10 December 2018.
Adam Kuper, Visiting Professor of Anthropology, LSE and Boston University.
Emmanuelle Loyer is a historian at Sciences Po. Lévi-Strauss : A Biography, by Emmanuelle Loyer, was awarded the 2015 Prix Femina Essai and has now been translated into English by Ninon Vinsonneau & Jonathan Magidoff. Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009).
Look for BBC Ideas or use this link - https://bbc.in/2xitWPt - to see a short film about the thoughts of post war Paris Philosophers and Existentialism on our programme notes. It’s part of their playlist of what different Isms mean
46 min

About Free Thinking

From the publisher's feed

Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives - looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari…