Free Thinking

In Frank Skinner's A Comedian's Prayer Book the broadcaster presents a series of prayers which read like a stand-up routine exploring questions of belief. A practising Roman Catholic, Skinner's questions include the correct way of addressing God, what it means to be humble, and an unpicking of some of the metaphors used in the Bible.

Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, and his latest novel, Names of the Women, imagines the New Testament from the viewpoint of the women who became followers of Jesus Christ - from Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, to Lydia of Thyatira, who is regarded as the first documented convert to Christianity in Europe.

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel is called Transcendent Kingdom and it tells the story of a woman working in science who is negotiating her relationship both with her mother and with her beliefs and background.

Laurence Scott talks to these three authors about how they approached writing about faith in fiction and for a mass audience.

Producer: Emma Wallace

You can find a playlist exploring religious belief on the Free Thinking website, with speakers including Ziauddin Sardar, Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, Rabbi Sacks, Marilynne Robinson, and Rowan Williams. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mwxlp

Wartime saviour or the symbol of nostalgic imperialism ? David Reynolds, Priya Satia, Richard Toye and Allen Packwood join Anne McElvoy to look at the ways Churchill's story and legacy are being written now by both historians and in the press. How can we untangle the culture war that is raging over his reputation and what can we learn if we look at the research coming out of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge?

Richard Toye is Professor of History at the University of Exeter co-author of The Churchill Myths (2020) and author of Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (OUP, 2020)

Producer: Ruth Watts

As lockdowns have forced us to forgo the delights of the outside world, have we developed a taste for simple pleasures? Many have reported enjoying cooking and eating more than usual, or appreciating simple treats such as a walk in nature. Has the grey monotony of this period caused music to sound more vibrant, and colours to appear more vivid? And what is the science, philosophy and psychology behind the enjoyment of simple pleasures? Matthew Sweet asks taste and wine expert Barry Smith; colour expert Kassia St Clair; Lisa Appignanesi an author of books exploring psychology and memory; and historian of luxury Seán Williams to share their ideas about pleasure.

Kassia St Clair is the author of The Secret Lives of Colour and The Golden Thread.

You can find a whole playlist of programmes exploring different emotions from our Free Thinking Festival 2019 including 20 Words for Joy ... Feelings Around the World hearing from Thomas Dixon, Aatish Taseer and Veronica Strang; Does My Pet Love Me? Why We Need Weepies, and the Way we Used to Feel https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p036y2hb

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Irrational feelings of dread, fear, and hate in a subject whose threat is often exaggerated or "phobogenesis" - one of the psychological terms explored in Frantz Fanon's 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, which sets out the way black people have been affected by colonial subjugation. Matthew Sweet, Tariq Ali, New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza and Kehinde Andrews re-read Fanon's arguments and look at the influence of his thinking outlined in his books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Tariq Ali is a journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual whose books include The Islam Quintet; The Extreme Centre and The Dilemmas of Lenin.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The dangerous world of an explosives factory is the setting of Inez Holden’s 1944 novel There’s No Story There. A bohemian figure who went on to write film scripts for J Arthur Rank, to report on the Nuremberg Trials, and produce articles published in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon - Holden campaigned for workers’ rights and was close friend of George Orwell, and though she published ten books in her lifetime, she fell out of fashion - until now. New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen re-reads her writing and finds a refreshingly modern mind.

Lisa Mullen is the author of Mid-Century Gothic: The Uncanny Objects of Modernity in British Literature and Culture after the Second World War. She teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Drugs, sex, violence and thinking about death are at the core of the George Miles cycle of five novels. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester draws the links between the author Dennis Cooper and the radicalism of the Marquis de Sade. Now 68, Cooper's books have been praised for his non naturalistic writing and the texture of teenage thought that he captures in the series, which begins with Closer, and condemned for depravity. George Miles was his childhood friend and then lover, who ended up committing suicide.

Diarmuid Hester teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a 2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. He has published WRONG: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, and is now working on Nothing Ever Just Disappears: A New History of Queer Culture Through its Spaces

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Two years of staying inside her own home in Homs, whilst 60 per cent of her neighbourhood was turned into rubble hasn't deterred architect Marwa al-Sabouni. She talks to Anne McElvoy about rebuilding and hope. Adélie Chevée researches the use of media by the Syrian opposition, and Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an Egyptian-American translator, editor, and writer who spent 16 years working on a version of Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adonis, a poem which has been compared to TS Eliot's The Wasteland.

Marwa al-Sabouni published The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria in 2016 and you can hear her talking to Free Thinking about Syrian Buildings https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076b15v

Adonis was born into a farming family who couldn't afford the cost of a formal education but after reciting a poem to the president of Syria visiting his region, the teenager was supported by the president and enrolled in a French high school. He is now a leading Arabic poet based in Paris, who uses free verse, and a variety of forms to explore themes of migration and exile. His book Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, with translations by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Neubanks is a 200 page collection which has taken Kareem 16 years of work to bring to print.

Adélie Chevée is a political scientist and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She has studied the use of media by the Syrian opposition and is now looking at the impact of fake news in Middle Eastern societies.

You can find a playlist called Belonging, Home, Borders and National Identity on the Free Thinking website which includes conversations about Pakistan, Turkey, Hong Kong, France, India, Sweden and more https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mb66k

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From clues in paintings to colonial trade to letters sent between Australia and England; the links between a Durham based poet and India to the female singers and dancers from Latin America who were contemporaries of Picasso and Josephine Baker; the significance of the Cyrillic alphabet in building nations to why we should pay attention to brackets, commas and colons: African film and ideas about empire to depictions of Iran in nineteenth century French literature and art; how activism affects our view of art to law and the transatlantic slave trade: New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen talks to the ten academics whose ideas will become programmes for BBC Radio 3 as we introduce the 2021 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Julia Hartley, University of Warwick

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find a playlist featuring discussions, essays and features made by the hundred New Generation Thinkers over ten years of the scheme on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35

The rights of tribal people, the lives of ordinary workers and the depiction of female desire were amongst the themes explored by the writer Mahasweta Devi. Born in Dhaka in 1926, she attended the school established by Rabindranath Tagore and before her death in 2016 she had published over 100 novels and 20 collections of short stories. Sindhubala is one such story, which traces the tale of a woman made to become a healer of children and for New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Mahasweta's writing offers a way of using language to explore ideas about power, freedom and feminism.

Preti Taneja is the author of the novel We That Are Young. She teaches at Newcastle University and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Dinah Mulock Craik achieved fame and fortune as the author of the 1856 bestselling novel John Halifax, Gentleman. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore reads this rags-to-riches tale of an orphan boy who rises in the world through sheer hard work and sterling character and her essay looks at the way it encapsulates the most cherished values of its period – but, she argues, both it and the author are more subversive than they first appear. Though she was seen as an icon of the self-improving, respectable middle-classes, Craik had a colourful, often unconventional private life. She supported her husband through her writing and adopted a foundling, but was dogged by her father, who was a dissenting preacher put into debtor's prison more than once, whilst her novels explore disability, forbidden desire, familial dysfunction, and the dark side of her culture’s celebration of self-made success.

Clare Walker Gore is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio programmes. She teaches at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth Century Novel.

You can hear Clare talk about this research in the Free Thinking episode Depicting Disability

She contributed to Radio 3's Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf profiling the author Margaret Oliphant https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fws4

She has also written an Essay about a 19th-century tiger-hunting MP, who was born without hands and feet - Politician and Pioneer: Writing the Life of Arthur Kavanagh https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10g

Producer: Emma Wallace