Free Thinking

Actress Lisa Dwan and singer Susan Bullock discuss the role of memory in performance.

Its early readers included Queen Victoria and a young Oscar Wilde. 150 years after it became a publishing sensation the writer Lynne Truss and children's novelist Philip Ardagh discuss 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and its enduring appeal to readers, writers and film makers with Anne McElvoy.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music.

Poets Jo Shapcott and Sean O'Brien discuss Ezra Pound's poetry collection, 'Cathay'.

Oscar-winning composer Steven Price on the inspiration of Holst's Planets Suite.

Award-winning actor Henry Goodman and director and designer Antony McDonald discuss the enduring appeal of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof - one of the most successful in Broadway history - which tells the story of a Jewish community in 1905 Tsarist Russia. Rana Mitter presents.

Professor Karen Leeder and Professor Robert Vilain explore the great German Romantic poetry which inspired Beethoven throughout his life from Schiller's Ode to Joy to Goethe's Egmont and Treitschke's Fidelio.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music

Rana Mitter with Nicholas Kenyon and Leanne Langley

Anne McElvoy discusses heroic triumph and failure with a trio of eminent historians

Philip Dodd discusses Camelot: The Shining City and reviews the new Harper Lee

Anne McElvoy on French intellectual traditions & rom-com; prophecies of Thomas the Rhymer