Free Thinking

Orhan Pamuk talks to Philip Dodd about his writing career and his views of modern Turkey. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006, his novels include The Black Book, Snow, My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence - a book and a real building created by the author which earlier this year was awarded the European Museum of the Year award.

Orhan Pamuk talks, in an extended conversation with Philip Dodd, about his writing career and his views of modern Turkey.Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006 his novels include The Black Book from 1990, the magisterial Snow marinaded in politics and religion and set in a remote Turkish town and The Museum of Innocence a book and a real building created by the author. There’s also his nonfiction including the memoir Istanbul.

Mike Leigh discusses his film about Turner. Steve Connor and Matthew Sweet discuss an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge which brings together 180 paintings and models to explore the way mannequins have been used by artists - from a technical tool to a fetishised object. And New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton discusses Guy Fawkes traditions.

Anne McElvoy talks to celebrated Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose most recent novel MaddAddam completed her dystopian trilogy that began a decade ago with Oryx and Crake and continued six years later with The Year of the Flood. Originally broadcast on 17.09.2013.

How history can help to shape policy making? Rana Mitter is joined by The History Manifesto's co-author, David Armitage, Chris Skidmore MP and historian, and Lucy Delap, Director of Cambridge University and Kings College London’s History and Policy Unit. And one of Australia’s most prominent novelists Peter Carey is back with a new book ‘Amnesia’. He talks to Philip Dodd.

This Free Thinking is devoted to one of the landmarks of European literature -- Marcel Proust's gigantic novel, A la recherche du temps perdu which is perhaps best known in English as In Search of Lost Time. Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer prize winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has edited the latest translation of the book and from France, the writer, Marie Darrieussecq. The actor Peter Marinker tackles the difficult task of giving an English voice to Proust.

Jeremy Deller and Fiona McCarthy have each curated an exhibition looking at the art of William Morris. David Cromer's production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town was an off Broadway hit. Now the actor director is staging it in London. Ken Burns won an Emmy for his documentary about The American Civil War. Anne McElvoy has been watching his new series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and discusses it with historian Charlie Laderman and DD Guttenplan, who writes for The International Herald Tribune, The Nation and The New York Times.

Rana Mitter talks to three people who have been exploring their own relationship with the Jewish faith: writer and broadcaster David Baddiel, the Israeli historian Professor Shlomo Sand and the journalist Julie Burchill

Sherlock Holmes is investigated by Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet as the Museum of London opens an exhibition. Literary critic Alex Clark gives her verdict as the Man Booker Prize is announced. Also the relevance of Plato and Aristotle to contemporary life are debated by the American novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Armand Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London.

Anne McElvoy talks to Phyllida Lloyd about playing Shakespeare in a female prison in her new version of Henry IV. Tim Marlow, Karen Lang, and Daniel Johnson discuss reading history through the paintings of Kiefer and Polke ahead of next month's 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.