Free Thinking

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

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Free Thinking episodes

June 08, 2016 Free Thinking - Peter Singer
Moral philosopher Peter Singer is in conversation with Philip Dodd. His essay Famine, Affluence and Morality was first printed in 1972 in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. It has now been republished with a foreword by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Peter Singer's book is called Famine, Affluence and Morality
Producer: Ruth Watts
45 min
June 07, 2016 Free Thinking - Sjón, Winifred Knights. Katie Roiphe. New Generation Thinker Sarah Jackson.
Icelandic writer Sjón talks to Matthew Sweet about fiction, poetry and making music with Björk. Curator Sacha Llewellyn explores the art of Winifred Knights, Katie Roiphe looks at writers dying and in the first of our commissioned columns from 2016 New Generation Thinkers - Sarah Jackson from Nottingham Trent University explores touch and frostbite.
Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón was named Best Icelandic Novel of 2015. The English translation which is out now is from Victoria Cribb.
Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is the first major retrospective of the award-winning Slade School artist which will display all her completed paintings for the first time since their creation, including the apocalyptic masterpiece The Deluge, 1920. It runs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from June 8th to September 18th 2016.
Katie Roiphe's new book The Violet Hour considers the deaths of six literary figures Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter.
Sarah Jackson from Nottingham Trent University is one of the 2016 New Generation Thinkers and a poet whose collection Pelt was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. Find out more from our website and hear them introducing their research in the programme which broadcast on May 31st - available as an arts and ideas podcast.
Producer: Fiona McLean.
45 min
June 02, 2016 Free Thinking - Bhupen Khakhar. The City State of London? Saskia Sassen, Jane Morris, David Anderson and Pat Kane.
Philip Dodd is joined by art historian Devika Singh to consider the art of Bhupen Khakhar and the subjects he explored including class difference; desire and homosexuality; and his personal battle with cancer.
Also, Saskia Sassen, Jane Morris, David Anderson and Pat Kane discuss the emergence of London as a global city and what the economic and cultural ramifications might be for the rest of the UK.
Bhupen Khakhar is on show at Tate Modern from June 1st to September 6th.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
46 min
June 01, 2016 Free Thinking: Hay Festival: Inheritance - Steve Jones, Lionel Shriver, Marlon James
Lionel Shriver, Marlon James and Steve Jones join Rana Mitter for a Free Thinking discussion about inheritance recorded at this week's Hay Festival. The discussion ranges from family relationships to the planet we are leaving for future generations, from money to morality, genius to ideas about goodness and evil.
Lionel Shriver's latest novel called The Mandibles depicts a family living in a near future America where the dollar has crashed and food is scarce. She is also the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Big Brother and A Perfectly Good Family.
The biologist and geneticist Steve Jones' latest book No Need For Geniuses looks at Paris at the time of the French Revolution, when it was the world capital of science.
Marlon James won the Booker Prize for his most recent novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. His other books include Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women.
44 min
May 31, 2016 Free Thinking - Hay Festival: New Generation Thinkers 2016
Find out who have been named as the 10 New Generation Thinkers for 2016 as they join Rana Mitter to share interesting facts from their research with the audience at this week's Hay Festival. Topics include the history of the hairdresser to the search for Alexander the Great's missing tomb; why Sigmund Freud detested the telephone to the complex relationship between the USSR and its historic churches.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. You can hear more from the New Generation Thinkers who will be appearing on Free Thinking throughout June and find out more from our website.
The New Generation Thinkers 2016:
Leah Broad, University of Oxford
Leah Broad’s research is on Nordic modernism, exploring the music written for the theatre at the turn of the 20th century, taking her to Finland and Scandinavia to search out scores which have not been heard since the early 1900s. As a journalist Leah won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015. She is the founder of The Oxford Culture Review
Katherine Cooper, University of Newcastle
Katherine Cooper is working on a project exploring the ways in which British writers including H.G.Wells, Graham Greene and Margaret Storm Jameson helped in the escape of fellow writers facing prosecution and imprisonment under fascist governments in the period between WW1 and WW2..
Victoria Donovan, University of St Andrews
Victoria Donovan’s is a historian of Russia whose research explores the complex and contradictory relationship between the Soviets and their religious heritage. Her new project is looking at the significance of patriotism in contemporary Putin’s Russia. She has worked on topics including Soviet and contemporary Russian cinema, socialist architecture and the connections between South Wales and the Eastern Ukraine.
Louisa Uchum Egbunike, Manchester Metropolitan University
Louisa Uchum Egbunike’s research centres on African literature in which she specialises in Igbo (Nigerian) fiction and culture. Her latest work explores the child’s voice in contemporary fiction on Biafra. She co-convenes an annual Igbo conference at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and is curating a ‘Remembering Biafra’ exhibition to open in 2018.
Seb Falk, University of Cambridge
Seb Falk is a medieval historian and historian of science whose research centres on the scientific instruments made and used by monks, scholars and nobles in the later Middle Ages. His research has led him to made wood and brass models of the instruments he studies. His new project will be an investigation of the sciences practised by medieval monks and nuns.
Sarah Jackson, Nottingham Trent University
Sarah Jackson’s current research explores the relationship between the telephone and literature from the work of Arthur Conan Doyle to that of Haruki Murakami. The project involves research at the BT Archives which hold the public records of the world’s oldest communications company. She is also a poet whose collection Pelt won the prestigious Seamus Heaney Prize in 2012.
Christopher Kissane, London School of Economics
Christopher Kissane is a historian working on the role of food in history exploring what we can learn about societies and cultures through studying their diets. His book, which will be published later this year, examines food’s relationship with major issues of early modern society including the Spanish Inquisition and witchcraft.
Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews
Anindya Raychaudhuri is working on the way nostalgia is used by diasporic communities to create imaginary and real homes. He has written about the Spanish Civil War and the India/Pakistan partition and the cultural legacies of these wars. He co-hosts a podcast show, State of the Theory, and explores the issues raised by his research in stand up comedy.
Edmund Richardson, University of Durham
Edmund Richardson is working on a book about the lost cities of Alexander the Great and the history of their discovery by adventurers and tricksters rather than scholars. His first book was on Victorian Britain and the ‘lowlife’ lived by magicians, con-men and deserters. His latest project is on Victorian ghost-hunters and their obsession with the ancient world which led Houdini to fight against the con-artists making a fortune from fake ‘spirits’.
Sean Williams, University of Sheffield
Sean Williams is currently writing a cultural history of the hairdresser from the 18th century to the present day exploring their role as ‘outsiders’ in society. As a lecturer at the University of Berne in Switzerland he taught German and Comparative Literature and wrote articles on flatulence in the 18th century and contemporary satires of Hitler.
Producer: Fiona McLean
44 min
May 26, 2016 Free Thinking - Tale of Genji. Algorithms.
Rana Mitter rereads The Tale of Genji. Sometimes called the world's first novel it was written in the early years of the 11th century and has been credited to the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. This year's Bradford Literature Festival is focusing on the modern translation from Dennis Washburn, Professor at Dartmouth College (USA).
Dennis Washburn joins Rana along with Jennifer Guest and Christopher Harding.
Also in this programme, Brian Christian, co-author of new book 'Algorithms to Live By' on how maths helps us make decisions, and clinical psychologist Rasjid Skinner on Islamic approaches to psychology.
Richard Bowring, Dennis Washburn, Juliet Winters Carpenter discuss The Tale of Genji at the Bradford Literature Festival on Saturday, 28th May 2016 | 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
Hadj Abdur Rasjid Skinner presents Islamic Approaches to Psychology at the Bradford Literature Festival on Saturday, 28th May 2016 | 10:30 am - 1:00 pm
Brian Christian is the author of Algorithms to Live By and of The Most Human Human.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
45 min
May 25, 2016 Free Thinking - Latin America: Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Claudia Pineiro, Eric Hobsbawm.
Prize winning Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Argentinian playwright, journalist and leading crime writer Claudia Pineiro join Philip Dodd for a programme exploring fiction and fact in Latin America. There's also journalist Alex Cuadros who chronicles his years covering the rise and fall of Brazil's plutocrats. And a consideration of Eric Hobsbawm's Viva La Revolucion from Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera from Birkbeck College in London.
Claudia Pineiro's most recent thriller is called Betty Boo, translated by Miranda France.
Vásquez won the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award, for The Sound of Things Falling and his most recent book to be translated by Anne McLean is Reputations.
Brazillionaires is by Alex Cuadros
40 years of writing about Latin America is brought together posthumously in Eric Hobsbawm's Viva La Revolucion
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of What If Latin America Ruled the World?
Producer: Ruth Watts
45 min
May 24, 2016 Free Thinking - Photographers Dorothy Bohm, Wolfgang Suschitzky, Neil Libbert. Carry On Films.
Matthew Sweet joins curator Katy Barron and three photographers, Wolfgang Suschitzky, Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert, all now over 75, to explore a show that offers an account of the twentieth century seen through their eyes. Still image then gives way to the moving image as Matthew considers what the much heralded new Carry On film may have to offer and what the original films tell us about the historical and social context from which they emerged. To ponder both the old and the new in Carry Ons he's joined by actress Jacki Piper, film historian Graham McCann and screenwriter David McGillivray. And author and former editor of the Catholic Herald Peter Stanford considers the role of relics as a bone fragment believed to come from St Thomas Becket travels from Hungary to be displayed at Canterbury.
Unseen London, Paris, New York 1930s-60s: Photographs by Wolfgang Suschitzky, Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert is at the Ben Uri Gallery in London from May 20th to August 27th.
Dorothy Bohm also has work on show at the Jewish Museum in London looking at Sixties London from 28 April - 29 August 2016
Between 1958 and 1992 there were 31 Carry On films made. Plans have been announced at Cannes to make a series of new films.
The fragment of bone is the centrepiece of a week-long pilgrimage in London and Kent.
Peter Stanford is the author of books about Judas, the Devil, Cardinal Hume, Catholics and Sex, Heaven, A Life of Christ.
Producer: Zahid Warley
45 min
May 19, 2016 Free Thinking - Beauty: Dame Fiona Reynolds. The Bowes Museum. David Willetts on The State.
Anne McElvoy talks to Dame Fiona Reynolds about a career spent defending the beauty of the British landscape, and considers an exhibition of English beauties at the Bowes Museum. She is also joined by former minister The Rt Hon David Willetts, media executive Charles Brand and Marc Stears head of the New Economics Foundation to discuss the role of the state in the 21st century, and ahead of Sunday's Drama on 3 she explores literary depictions of the city of Venice with David Barnes.
Dame Fiona Reynolds' book is called The Fight For Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future
English Rose Feminine Beauty from Van Dyck to Sargent runs at the Bowes Museum from 14 May - 25 September 2016 and if you're in Liverpool there's still a couple of weeks to catch the Walker Gallery show of Pre Raphaelite beauties Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion which runs until June 5th
David Willetts is the author of The Pinch.
David Barnes' book is called The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present.
Naomi Alderman's imagining of the story of Jessica from the Merchant of Venice is being broadcast on Sunday night on Radio 3 at 10pm and there's an introductory animation on the Radio 3 website and a link to Professor Jerry Broton's Sunday Feature investigating the Venice Ghetto.
Producer: Eliane Glaser
45 min
May 19, 2016 Free Thinking - Landmark: In Parenthesis, by David Jones
Recorded before an audience at the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff before the premiere of Iain Bell's opera inspired by the poem Philip Dodd presents a Landmark edition of Free Thinking devoted to David Jones' epic In Parenthesis. The discussion hears from the composer Iain Bell, the writer, Iain Sinclair, one of the librettists Emma Jenkins and Paul Hills, curator of a touring exhibition of Jones' pictures and the co-author with Ariane Bankes of the most recent book about the artist.
Iain Bell's In Parenthesis is at WNO in Carcdiff from 13th May -3 June, in Birmhingham on 10 June and then at the Royal Opera House in London from 29 June -1 July
It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on July 2nd.
David Jones's In Parenthesis is published by Faber
David Jones - Vision and Memory - is at the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham until 5 June. It was previously on show at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.
His art is also on show at the Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff in May and June.
46 min

About Free Thinking

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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…