Free Thinking

What is a writer's duty? Katie Cooper considers Storm Jameson's campaigning for refugees, her 1940 appeal To the Conscience of the World and why her fiction fell out of favour but is now seeing a revival of interest.

Born in Yorkshire in 1891, she wrote war novels and speculative fiction, collections of criticism - including an analysis of modern drama in Europe, the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and a host of novels set in European countries. During the Second World War years she was head of PEN, the association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote literature and intellectual co-operation.

Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. Her book, War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson, is published April 2020.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

Shahidha Bari looks at the legacy of Frank Ramsey who died in 1930 aged 27, but not before doing work that changed the course of philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics. Shahidha is joined by Cheryl Misak, who has recently published the first biography of Ramsey, and philosopher Steven Methven.

Cheryl Misak's biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is out now.

Emily Thomas' The Meaning of Travel is out now.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Hetta Howes learns how Sylvia Xueni Pan from Goldsmiths, University of London is using VR to do everything from training GPs not to overprescribe antibiotics to creating a groundbreaking Peaky Blinders game. While Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the RSC, is working with researchers and practitioners like Sylvia to create extraordinary virtual experiences for theatre audiences. They are among the many women playing key roles in the creative industries - the fastest growing sector in the UK - where university-based researchers are helping to turn new ideas into commercially viable products and ideas.

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Irish novelist Anne Enright talks to Laurence Scott about her new book Actress and being the inaugural Irish laureate, plus a discussion of gossip past and present with Emily Butterworth, Daisy Black and political journalist and writer Marie Le Conte.

Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering; The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road.

Emily Butterworth works on early modern literature and thought, with a particular interest in Montaigne and in deviant speech and language. Her book The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France, looks at forms of excessive speech – babble, gossip and rumour – and why they were considered so personally and politically dangerous in the sixteenth century.

Daisy Black researches medieval history at the University of Wolverhampton and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to put academic research on the radio. She writes about women in performance in The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe. Her book Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama is out this year.

Marie Le Conte is a political journalist who has worked for the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and BuzzFeed. Her book Haven't You Heard? Gossip, power, and how politics really works explores the potency of gossip in the Westminster bubble.

You can find Matthew Sweet and guests discussing What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3

Producer: Paula McGinley

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.

If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme website

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau argues that we should salute this woman who supported her family through her writing, who perfected sonnets about solitude before Wordsworth began writing his, and who explored the struggles of women and refugees in her fiction. Mother to 12 children, Charlotte Turner Smith wrote ten novels, three poetry collections and four children's books and translated French fiction. In 1788 her first novel, Emmeline, sold 1500 copies within months but by the time of her death in 1803 her popularity had declined and she had become destitute.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Robyn Read

The novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) brought to life a large comic heroine who bucked 19th-century conventions. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore's essay outlines the prolific writing career of Margaret Oliphant and laments the way she was used by fellow novelist Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the dangers of needing to write for money to keep yourself and your family afloat.

New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge describes translating the testimony of a nurse who survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

In Rwanda, Yolande Mukagasana is a well-known writer, public figure and campaigner for remembrance of the genocide. She has authored three testimonies, a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators and two volumes of Rwandan stories. Her work has received numerous international prizes, including an Honorable Mention for the UNESCO Education for Peace Prize.

Zoe Norridge, from King’s College London, argues there should be a place for Mukagasana on our shelves in UK, alongside works from the Holocaust and other genocides. Why? Because listening to survivor voices helps us to understand the human cost of mass violence.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Ricky Burdett, Liza Fior, Des Fitzgerald, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Edwin Heathcote discuss ideals made concrete in an event chaired by Anne McElvoy with an audience recorded as part of the LSE Shape the World Festival 2020.

Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at LSE and Director of LSE Cities.

You can find and download previous LSE Free Thinking debates on the programme website

A Free Thinking discussion recorded at RIBA with an architectural gang of 5 "The Brits Who Built Modern Britain" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03x1p4n

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Islam Issa hears from actor Adrian Lester and Professor Ewan Fernie about a project that will revive the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library. Founded with the help of George Dawson - a man who had a powerful vision of Birmingham as a progressive social and cultural centre in the mid 19th century - the library houses Britain's most important Shakespeare collection, comprising 43,000 volumes, including a copy of the First Folio 1623. Over three years, the Everything to Everybody project aims to share these cultural riches with the people of Birmingham in a wide range of imaginative ways.

More information available here: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod