Free Thinking

Matthew Sweet talks to director Steve McQueen about his new film '12 Years A Slave' and assesses this year's Oscar nominations, among them Gravity starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, and The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo Di Caprio and directed by Martin Scorcese. Plus the poet Fred D'Aguiar, anthropologist Kit Davis and the historian Madge Dresser discuss slave narratives.

Samira Ahmed looks at the appeal of Lena Dunham's US TV series Girls with comedian Yasmeen Khan and TV producer John Yorke; talks to Peruvian born novelist Daniel Alarcón about migration from the countryside to the cities of Peru and across borders from Latin America to the USA. And Professors Conor Gearty, Iain McLean and Linda Colley debate what a new constitution might look like.

Sinead Morrissey is the winner of this year's T S Eliot Prize for her anthology Parallax. She performs her poems and talks to Anne McElvoy about her role as Belfast's first Poet Laureate. As a new wall is built between Bulgaria and Turkey to deter immigrants Anne explores the way governments use walls to control people's movements and the political and architectural impact of walls as both barriers and gateways. And as Radio 3's Drama on 3 is given over to a new adaptation of The Oresteia, Aeschylus' classic trilogy about murder, revenge and justice, playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz - whose new version of The Furies is the final episode, and classicist Edith Hall discuss the tragedies and their modern relevance.

As part of BBC Radio 3's Music on the Brink season Professor Roy Foster, the journalist and author Nick Cohen, Baroness Shirley Williams, Duncan Brack of the Liberal Democrat Party History Group and the author Bea Campbell join Philip Dodd to discuss a Landmark book which explores the collapse of Liberal values in Britain. And does 'The Strange Death of Liberal England' written by George Dangerfield in 1934 have a message for political debate and the wider culture now?

Joining Matthew Sweet for a Landmark discussion about Robert Musil's book, The Man Without Qualities,

As part of Radio 3's Music on the Brink, Free Thinking takes the cultural temperature of Paris, Berlin, London, St Petersburg and Vienna in the years leading up to the First World War. The novelist AS Byatt, the film expert Neil Brand and the cultural historians Alexandra Harris and Philipp Blom have chosen artworks and artefacts from the period and will use them to explore, with Anne McElvoy, the ideas and spirit of the European capital cities on the brink of World War 1.

Anne McElvoy discusses the state of Feminism in 2013. From women in the boardroom to Twitter trolls; from activism to male violence, via the intersection of class, race and gender and the limits of identity politics. Anne surveys the issues that have dominated Feminist debate in 2013, with Julie Bindel, Caroline Criado-Perez, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Sibylle Rupprecht and Zoe Stavri.

50 years ago this month director Yasujiro Ozu died after making 53 films. Tokyo Story follows an elderly couple who go to visit their busy grown up children and their widowed daughter-in-law. Rana Mitter presents a Landmark edition looking at this cinematic classic, hearing from actor Richard Wilson, Professor Naoko Shimazu and film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh.

Singer and song writer Neil Tennant in conversation with Philip Dodd. He discusses the influence of the North East on his career which began in publishing and magazines, the road to London which proved irresistable, and about life with musical partner Chris Lowe in Pet Shop Boys. The biggest selling British pop duo of all time with more than fifty million albums sold worldwide, last year Pet Shop Boys performed at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics and they have just returned from a tour which has taken them to 29 countries.

To pay tribute to the actor Peter O’Toole, Matthew Sweet is joined by director Roger Michell, film producer Kevin Loader, actresss Annabel Leventon and theatre critic Michael Billington. Behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin presents his theory on the importance of genetic inheritance for determining academic achievement. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding leads a tour of Japanese Christmas. New Generation Thinker Eleanor Barraclough and John Lennard, literature and fantasy scholar, explore dragons in myth and literature, from Beowulf to Smaug.