Free Thinking

‘There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face today… that is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.’

Producer: Zahid Warley.

MAJOR JACKSON

Going to Meet the Man

As if one day, a grand gesture of the brain, an expired

"Going to Meet the Man" originally published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. in Holding Company,© Major Jackson, 2010

The Mighty Stream: Poems in Celebration of Martin Luther King edited by Carolyn Forché and Jackie Kay is published by Bloodaxe.

Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. signs the Degree Roll At Newcastle University after receiving an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree, Newcastle, England, November 14, 1967. Credit: Getty Images

Author Boris Akunin and broadcaster and writer Zinovy Zinik in conversation with Anne McElvoy, recorded with an audience at Pushkin House.

Pushkin House has commissioned a pavilion on Bloomsbury Square in London from the architect and artist Alexander Brodsky, titled '101st km - Further and Everywhere', as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. Anne visits this with Pushkin House Director Clem Cecil.

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in Georgia in 1956. An essayist, historian, playwright and translator, he is best known as the author of crime and historical fiction featuring the 19th-century detective Erast Fandorin.

Zinovy Zinik is a Russian-born British novelist, essayist and short story writer whose books include The Mushroom Picker. Having lost his Russian citizenship with his emigration from the USSR in 1975, Zinik settled down in Britain in 1976.

Part of Radio 3's Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

"The greatest documentary of all time"? Michael Nyman, Alexei Popogrebsky, Ian Christie and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Matthew Sweet to discuss Dziga Vertov's 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera, which was voted top of a poll conducted by Sight and Sound Magazine.

Vertov's film is a kind of cinematic symphony of urban life in the Soviet Union. It fizzes with ideas and is the embodiment of the notion that cinema can promote revolutionary consciousness. For some its an achievement to set along side the films of Eisenstein. Both could lay claim to being the greatest film maker of their time and their friendship ended in rivalry. Man with a Movie Camera counts amongst its admirers the novelist, Salman Rushdie and the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard.

Michael Nyman has composed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s and is now working on an opera about Vertov.

Part of Radio 3’s Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture

Producer: Zahid Warley

Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexeivich on the Soviet Woman's Stories of World War II and why they did not want them published; Stephen Kotkin with Volume II of his biograph of Joseph Stalin explores the bloody creation of a Soviet State capable of standing up to hostile global countries. Ran Mitter talks to them about their top down/bottom up histories of Soviet Culture and also hears from Juliane Fürst about Soviet hipsters and hippies who challenged the system in ways that required no words.

Svetlana Alexeivich's books include The Unwomanly Face of War, Boys in Zinc and Chernobyl Prayer.

Stalin, Vol 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941 by Steven Kotkin has just been published. Stalin, Vol 1: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 is now in paperback. Steven Kotkin is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Juliane Fürst, Reader in Modern History at Bristol, is the co-producer of the documentary Soviet hippies (dir. Terje Toomistu) and the author of Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism.

Part of Radio 3’s Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture

Comedian Janey Godley, historian John Gallagher, poet and journalist Bridget Minamore and author and science writer Dr Emma Byrne discuss with Matthew Sweet swearing on stage, in pain and protest and when new terms entered our language.

Swearing Is Good For You by Emma Byrne is out now.

Please note this programme may contain strong language.

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

David Hendy, Glyn Maxwell, Kate Kennedy and Lucy Walker with Philip Dodd and an audience at Aldeburgh in a discussion exploring Britten’s relationship with radio in Britain and in America, with his subjects as varied as mountaineering (with words from Christopher Isherwood), a dramatisation of Homer’s Odyssey and short stories by D.H. Lawrence (with a young W.H. Auden). But why was Britten so reluctant to accept a job at the BBC’s Music department in the 1930s?

David Hendy is a historian of the BBC and Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex.

Glyn Maxwell is a poet and librettist who has traced the journey of Auden and MacNeice to Iceland.

Kate Kennedy is a biographer and editor of the forthcoming ‘Literary Britten’

Lucy Walker is Director of Programmes and Learning at the Britten-Pears Foundation.

Recorded in front of an audience as part of the Britten on the Radio weekend at the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

What does Gulliver's Travels say to us now? Satirical cartoonist Martin Rowson and Daniel Cook from the University of Dundee assess the legacy of Swift's best-known work. And Monochrome exhibition co-curator Jennifer Sliwka and photographer Sarah Pickering discuss exhibits ranging from black and white art on glass, vellum, ceramic, silk, wood, and canvas from Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter to a room filled with yellow light by the artist Olafur Eliasson, who created the Sun installation at Tate Modern. And New Generation Thinker Will Abberley tells Anne about a new project to compile a comprehensive history of British nature writing.

Monochrome: Painting in Black and White runs at the National Gallery in London from October 30th until February 18th 2018.

Swift at 350: A Graphic Anthology is launched at Dundee on November 25th along with a series of events for families, Telling Tall Tales, Gulliver! A Fantastical Pantomime and an exhibition at the local library in Dundee. Find out more at www.beinghumanfestival.org.

Martin Rowson is taking part in a discussion about satire at the British Library on November 28th with Jonathan Coe, Rory Bremner, Judith Hawley, and Sathnam Sanghera.

Land Lines – Modern British Nature Writing 1789-2014 - Finding the UK's favourite nature book. Find out More at http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/favouritenaturebooks/

Alex Cox discusses surveillance, mind bending and the power of the individual versus the collective in the 1967 cult TV series The Prisoner. Plus Christopher Fowler, Clare Walker Gore and Lynda Nead look back at bestsellers from the past which deserve re-reading and the way movies and fiction of the 1950s reflected both the smog and fashions of post-war British culture.

Christopher Fowler's The Book of Forgotten Authors catalogues 99 writers whom he thinks should be better known.

The Prisoner first aired in Canada in 1967 and ran for 17 episodes. I am (not) a Number: Decoding The Prisoner by Alex Cox is published later this year.

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-war Britain by Professor Lynda Nead is published by London and New Haven: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Studies in British Art.

Clare Walker Gore is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Cambridge who has edited a critical edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s out-of-print novel A Noble Life, published by Victorian Secrets - an independent publisher which makes available scholarly editions of unjustly neglected Victorian novels.

Producer: Karl Bos

Yanis Varoufakis discusses economics and Marxist analysis with Philip Dodd and Ruth Lea. Plus the new play from Richard Bean and Clive Coleman - the team behind

Young Marx by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman opens Nicholas Hytner's new London base The Bridge Theatre running until December 31st.

Yanis Varoufakis' new book has just published Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Web guru Tim O'Reilly on algorithm regulation and the magical worlds of Harry Potter, Philip Pullman and Tove Jansson with guests Aisha Bushby, young adult author, and New Generation Thinkers Hetta Howes and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough.