Free Thinking

Rudy's Rare Records stars Lenny Henry as the son who works alongside his father in a record shop. The Radio 4 comedy has been adapted for stage and is being performed with live music at Birmingham Rep and the Hackney Empire.

Peter Watkins' film Culloden is 50, and in front of an audience at the Edinburgh Festival, Matthew Sweet discusses its influence on portrayals of Scotland's Highland identity in book and film with Diana Gabaldon, author of the best-selling Outlander series, historian Tom Devine and media expert John Cook.

The poet Daljit Nagra and Radio 3 presenter Ian McMillan introduce the winning entries in this year's Proms Poetry Competition - and welcome some of the winners on stage to read them.

In 1914 the American poet Robert Frost published his collection 'North of Boston'. It was hailed as 'one of the most revolutionary books of modern times' by the English poet Edward Thomas. Matthew Hollis, who has written about the friendship between the two writers, is joined by Frost's biographer Jay Parini to discuss the poet.

Poets Andrew Motion and Kate Clanchy discuss the writing of Philip Larkin and his collection, 'Whitsun Weddings', which was first published 50 years ago in 1964.

Novelist Martin Amis discusses 'The Zone of Interest', his 14th novel, in which he revisits the Holocaust for the first time since his controversial book, 'Time's Arrow'.

From HG Wells and Margaret Atwood to Battlestar Galactica, science fiction texts and tv series have long used birth control as a metaphor for the limits on individual freedom. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon, from the University of St Andrews, looks at the roles for women which science fiction has imagined and asks is sci-fi sexist? Recorded on Saturday 26th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.

The audience at a rock concert adoring the star; a Pentecostalist congregation praising God; an athlete reaching the pitch of performance known as "the zone" - these can all be described as feelings of "ecstasy". Jules Evans, from Queen Mary, University of London, examines rationalist arguments about elation being a form of madness and asks whether it is beneficial or dangerous to feel ecstatic. Recorded on Saturday 26th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.