Free Thinking

Canadian filmmaker and originator of the body horror genre, David Cronenberg covers topics as wide ranging as consumption, cancer, and creativity as he talks about his debut novel and new film. Shami Chakrabarti discusses her work as a human rights campaigner, and the idea of anger as a motivating force. Plus Tim Minchin on turning Storm, a poem he performed in a live set, into a graphic novel.Presenter: Matthew Sweet.

Colm Toibin is one of Ireland's finest writers, whose books explore issues such as Catholicism, immigration and homosexuality. This month he has published Nora Webster - a novel set in Ireland in the late 1960s which features a cameo appearance from one of his characters in Brooklyn. In 2012 he published a re-imagining of the life of the Virgin Mary - The Testament of Mary. As booking opens this week for this year's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead, hear the conversation he recorded with Philip Dodd at the 2012 festival. First broadcast on 6th December 2012.

At a time when the special relationship between the UK and the US is under particular scrutiny, Anne McElvoy talks to the American Ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, about the politics of power and takes a look with Matt Wolf at sexual politics in Hollywood in the new Anglo-American production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, starring Lindsay Lohan and Richard Schiff.

Rana Mitter has a first-night review of Electra with Kristin Scott Thomas from Professor Edith Hall and Susannah Clapp; historian Andrew Roberts talks about his new biography of Napoleon and Katie Hill discusses the most extensive to date UK exhibition of Ai Weiwei's artworks just opening at Blenheim Palace.

Matthew Sweet examines our contradictory attitudes to China and it's culture with the film historian Sir Christopher Frayling and the Chinese ceramics expert Stacey Pierson, who has been to see the British Museum's new exhibition about Ming. Padraig Reidy who writes for Index on Censorship and Rob Gifford of the Economist discuss the merits of Tim Berners Lee's Magna Carta for the web. And novelist Neel Mukherjee talks about his Man Booker Prize nominated book The Lives of Others.

As the Schaubühne Berlin's production of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' opens at The Barbican, Anne McElvoy speaks to the play's director Thomas Ostermeier. American novelist Joseph O'Neill discusses his new book 'The Dog' and, continuing the series meeting this year's shortlisted authors for the Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith explains the connected stories which comprise her novel 'How to Be Both'.

Fukuyama and Howard Jacobson are interviewed by Philip Dodd.

Steven Pinker's research at Harvard is into language and cognition. His new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century explores the links between syntax and ideas. Will Self experiments with language and literary form. Will Self's new book Shark links an incident in World War II with an American resident in a therapeutic community in London overseen by psychiatrist Zack Busner. They join Matthew Sweet for a Free Thinking programme about language.

Scientist Susan Greenfield, painter Fiona Rae, poet Paul Farley and artist and TV presenter Matt Collings discuss abstract art past and present. The event recorded in front of an audience at the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern is chaired by Anne McElvoy.

Martin Amis talks to Philip Dodd about his reputation for courting controversy and his 14th novel The Zone of Interest. Recorded in front of an audience as part of the BBC Proms.