Free Thinking

An accidental invention which revolutionised plant collecting has inspired an artwork from Mat Collishaw, created in collaboration with video artists based in Ukraine, which is being premiered in a gallery at Kew Gardens. The nine minute video, accompanied by music by Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings, draws on the discovery in 1829 that a Wardian case could allow plants to grow under airtight glass. And the way art and music respond to environmental concerns is at the heart of this Free Thinking conversation hosted by Jade Munslow Ong. Jimmy López Bellido has written a symphony inspired by photographs of a changing landscape, Sarah Casey's drawings look at the impact of ice melting in glaciers and New Generation Thinker Vid Simoniti has written a book exploring the political ambitions of contemporary art in the early twenty-first century. He talks about the work of Alberta Whittle, Olafur Eliasson, El Anatsui, Maurice Mbikayi, Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim.

Producer in Salford: Nick Holmes

Petrichor, a new exhibition of work by Mat Collishaw runs from 20 October 2023- 7 April 2024 at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens.

Green Thinking is a collection of programmes exploring different aspects of art and history and the environment available via the Free Thinking programme website - all episodes are downloadable as the Arts & Ideas podcast and on BBC Sounds.

DH Lawrence described outcasts living by the Thames, Mina Loy made art from trash, calling her pieces “refusées", Wyndham Lewis moved from England to North America in search of fame and stability after having been spurned by the cultural establishment in Britain. In this conversation about new research, Jade Munslow Ong discusses the way widening the canon of writers traditionally labelled as “modernist” might allow a greater understanding of attitudes towards homelessness and poverty in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Dr Laura Ryan was a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Galway researching modernism and homelessness investigating the work of writers who were literally homeless, including D. H. Lawrence, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys and Tom Kromer, and also looking at depictions of homelessness in modernist texts by George Orwell, Mina Loy and Samuel Beckett. She now teaches at the University of Limerick.

Dr Nathan Waddell is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is writing new books about Wyndham Lewis and about George Orwell. He has also edited collections of essays on Lewis, who featured in books already published by Nathan called Modernist Nowheres and Moonlighting. Nathan is also editing The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. You can hear Nathan in a Free Thinking episode exploring futurism in a collection of discussions about modernism on the website of the Radio 3 Arts and Ideas programme

Dr Jade Munslow Ong is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Salford where she is working on a project entitled South African Modernism 1880-2020. You can hear about some of the authors featured in her Essay for Radio 3 called The South African Bloomsberries. She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio

This podcast is made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI. You can sign up for more episodes of the Arts and Ideas podcast wherever you find your podcasts or look at the collection of discussions focused on New Research available via the Free Thinking programme website.

I've been Thinking is the title of a memoir from philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. Philip Goff is a Professor at Durham University who's written Why ? The Purpose of the Universe. The Bishop Auckland Project is opening a new museum exploring faith and their curator Amina Wright joins them and podcaster and former director of Theos Liz Oldfield for a discussion about finding meaning. The presenter is Chris Harding.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You can find a collection of programmes exploring Philosophy and looking at Religious Belief on the Free Thinking programme website. All of them are available to download as Arts and Ideas podcasts and on BBC Sounds

Loss and belonging are explored in an installation at the Barbican Centre in London from Sierra Leonian poet and artist/filmmaker Julianknxx which hears choirs and musicians from cities across the world voice a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’. Momtaza Mehri has been Young People's Poet Laureate for London. A poem from her collection Bad Diaspora Poems is picked out in a selection for this year's National Poetry Day on October 5th, which has the theme of refuge. Matthew Sweet explores with them where we find refuge and hears from the academic Dr Jesús Sanjurjo about refugees from Spain who arrived in Somers Town in Camden in 1823 .

Producer: Julian Siddle

Chorus in Rememory of Flight by Julianknxx runs until 11 Feb 2024 at The Curve in the Barbican Centre London.

Tales of adventure and magic connect the Slavic lands: East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria). Matthew Sweet has been reading a new collection of Slavic myths. The authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak join academic Mirela Ivanova to talk about the way Slavic tales connect with stories from Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia and how they were used to bolster power in new Slavic nations.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak and illustrated by Joe McLaren is out now.

You might also be interested in a Free Thinking discussion of Albanian culture and history, and in a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Essay from Mirela Ivanova called Contesting an Alphabet about the competing claims over the invention of Cyrillic.

"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is the way Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in a state of nature in his 1651 book The Leviathan. The seventeenth century philosopher reasoned that what men needed was a "common power to keep them in awe". It was a conclusion that has not endeared him to the enlightenment and liberal thinkers of the centuries that followed. The philosopher John Gray thinks that Hobbes' bleak vision of the human condition might help us understand the recent disappointments of progressive politics and the failures of liberal democracies. Anne McElvoy talks to him about this theory and to journalist and author of Politics: A Survivors Guide, Rafael Behr and Teresa Bejan, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find other episodes exploring ideas about politics and history in the Free Thinking archives and available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts. They include -

From the forceps inventor Peter Chamberlen to letters written by Queen Victoria about giving birth saying ‘Dearest Albert hardly left me at all, & was the greatest support & comfort’: John Gallagher and his guests discuss childbirth and parenting. Dr Jessica Cox is the author of In Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Dr Laura Sellers is programmes curator at the medical history museum in Leeds The Thackray. We also hear from the dramatist Testament, whose play Daughter was nominated for the Prix Europa and Hannah Silva, whose book My Child The Algorithm is a memoir of queer parenting which started out as a radio play written using text generated by a machine-learning algorithm.

Testament's play Daughter is available on BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011545

Producer based in Salford: Nick Holmes

You can find a whole series of BBC programmes recorded at the 2023 Contains Strong Language Festival on the festival website and available on BBC Sounds. They include Radio 3's new writing programme The Verb, a Drama on 3, the music magazine programme Music Matters, Radio 4's discussion programme Start the Week and a special episode of Radio 3's The Early Music Show coming later this month.

Rejected by her usual publisher, Farewell Leicester Square is a novel by Betty Miller, written in 1935, exploring antisemitism, Jewishness and "marrying out". Marghanita Laski may now be best known for her contributions to broadcasting on programmes like The Brains Trust but was also a published author of many stories including The Victorian Chaise-Longue and Little Boy Lost. Both writers have now been republished by Persephone Books. Matthew Sweet's guests are the novelist Howard Jacobson, the academic Lisa Mullen and the author Lara Feigel. They explore the writers' lives and why they both abandoned writing fiction to focus on literary biographies. At the end of the discussion Howard Jacobson tells listeners “I very rarely hear people describing a novel that makes me want to read it - in fact if there is any listener out there who now does not want to read Marghanita Laski they are heartless.”

Producer: Fiona McLean

Betty Miller published 7 novels including Farewell Leicester Square and On the Side of the Angels (1945) and a biography of Robert Browning (1952).

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find a collection of episodes exploring prose, poetry and drama including previous discussions featuring Howard Jacobson, Lara Feigel and Lisa Mullen

Novelist Jonathan Coe joins book historians Roland Allen, Prof Lesley Smith and Dr Gill Partington and presenter Lisa Mullen. As Radio 3’s Late Junction devotes episodes this September to the cassette tape and the particular sound and way of recording and assembling music which that technology provided, we look at writing. At a time when there’s a lot of chat about AI and chatbots creating writing, what does it mean to write on a page of paper which is then printed and assembled into a book.

Producer: Ruth Watts

From Cold War triumphalism to wanting to secure the future of humanity, people have given many reasons for wanting to go into space. Christopher Harding is joined by an historian, a science fiction writer, a scientist and a visionary to unpick some of those reasons, and ask what they tell us about technology, society and utopia.

With Dr Ghina M. Halabi, Timothy Peacock, Una McCormack and Avi Loeb.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You can hear more from Timothy Peacock, who teaches at the University of Glagow, in an episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast called New Thinking: From life on Mars to space junk