Free Thinking

Have you ever been somewhere you shouldn't? In this essay, New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson creeps around, and explains how trespassers in the early-twentieth century helped create new attitudes to nature by stepping off the path.

Descriptions of late-nineteenth century trespass and rock-climbing show how different experiences of nature led to fights with landowners and gamekeepers for the rights of urban people. People going off-piste also led to efforts to expose environmental inequalities in the Alps, and calls for the protection of wilderness as a playground for hard men. At a time of ever increasing awareness of the environment, walk your thoughts around how our own, personal experience of nature defines what we come to value, and what we might fight to protect, alter or ‘improve’.

Ben Anderson lectures in twentieth century history at Keele University. The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead and - like all the Essays this week - a longer version including audience questions is available as an Arts& Ideas podcast.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

How much emotion should you show if you are a diplomat, a news reporter or a conciliation expert? Anne McElvoy chairs a Free Thinking Festival debate at Sage Gateshead with Gabriel Gatehouse, Gabrielle Rifkind and William J Burns.

In the world of international affairs, the overriding philosophy for global professionals has been one of restraint and rationality – whether you are negotiating, mediating or observing. So how is this traditional idea of “being diplomatic” and even-handed faring in a more emotional and expressive age?

Psychotherapist Gabrielle Rifkind works in conflict resolution in the Middle East. She directs The Oxford Process, a conflict prevention initiative specialising in managing radical disagreement. Her books include The Psychology of Political Extremism: What would Sigmund Freud have thought about Islamic State and The Fog of Peace: How to Prevent War.

William J Burns’ book The Back Channel - American Diplomacy in a Disordered World charts his career as an American diplomat for over 3 decades. involved in negotiations with President Putin and secret nuclear talks with Iran. He is now President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Gabriel Gatehouse is a BBC reporter whose work includes the Panorama programme Marine Le Pen: Who's Funding France's Far Right? (2017) and Our World A Tale of Two Swedens. His reporting has included investigations in East Africa, the Ukraine and Russia, Libya and Iraq and the BBC Radio 4 series The Puppet Master

Daisy Black looks at religious imagery, food, anti-semitism and product placement in medieval mystery plays. Eaten by characters, dotted around the stage as saliva-prompting props, or nibbled by audiences - a medieval religious drama is glutted with food but Christianity’s vision of God as spiritual nutrition could provoke horror and fear as well as hunger. We'll hear about some of the gristly, crunchy medieval episodes of culinary performance as the Essay investigates the relationship between faith and food. In one play, sacramental bread is attacked in a kitchen, drawing disturbing parallels between the eucharist and cannibalism.

Worrying is a natural part of growing-up. And yet the incidence of serious anxiety and depression is rapidly increasing. Psychologist Stephen Briers from TV's Teen Angels, student Ceyda Uzun and Durham University's head of counselling Caroline Dower join Anne McElvoy at the Free Thinking Festival to explore the possible causes and the influence of digital technology and social pressures. The discussion was recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead.

Caroline Dower is a psychotherapist and currently Head of the Counselling Service at Durham University. She has a special interest in the experience of psychological distress, and the experience of anxiety in young adults.

Ceyda Uzun is a student at Kings College London, currently in her final year studying English Literature. She is a former Into Film Reporter and Head Editor of The Strand Magazine who has written on topics including mental health, identity and youth culture.

Stephen Briers is a British clinical psychologist who took part in BBC Three's Little Angels and Teen Angels, working with Tanya Byron. He has presented the Channel 4 series, Make Me A Grownup, The 10 Demandments for Channel Five and appeared on GMTV. He has written a parenting book called Superpowers for Parents, Help your Child to Succeed in Life and contributes frequently to the Times Educational Supplement.

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Producer: Debbie Kilbride

From the story of Jonas Salk, who left the city of Pittsburgh for a medieval Italian town to create the space to think which led to the invention of the polio vaccine to the novelist JG Ballard depicting urban high rise living and the work of biologist EO Wilson who has explored the human biophilic urge to be in contact with natural living things - this talk looks at the links between our health and our environment.

Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist of science and medicine at Cardiff University and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio programmes.

Many legal systems have allowed the accused the defence of a “crime of passion”: attributing their act to a sudden explosion of feeling, rather than pre-meditated violence. Prosecutors, though, have argued that “passion” is simply another word for “insanity” or “malice”.

David Wilson was the youngest prison governor in England aged 29. He is Emeritus Professor of Criminology and founding Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University. He presented the CBS series Voice of a Serial Killer and, for BBC Radio 4, In The Criminologist’s Chair. His latest book is My Life with Murderers: Behind Bars with the World’s Most Violent Men.

Sophie Hannah is a poet and crime novelist who, with the blessing of the Christie estate, has written three new Poirot novels The Monogram Murders, Closed Casket and The Mystery of Three Quarters. Her latest publication is a self-help book entitled How to Hold a Grudge.

Michael Hughes’ most recent novel Country maps Homer’s Iliad onto 1990s Northern Ireland to describe both the black comedy and the brutality of The Troubles. His previous novel is The Countenance Divine. He teaches creative writing and also works as a professional actor.

The idea of ‘emotions’ did not exist until the nineteenth century but now they are the subject of study and Professor Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain.

Ranging from revolutionary feelings and the sentimental tales of Charles Dickens to the poetic rage of Audre Lorde, in his 2019 BBC Free Thinking Festival Lecture, Thomas Dixon paints a historical panorama of emotions and ends by asking what we can learn from our ancestors about the value of stoical restraint.

The writers of TV sitcoms The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet talk to Matthew Sweet. As a restoration of the film version of The Likely Lads is released, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais discuss depicting working lives in the 1960s, the pretensions and social changes of the '70s and how their characters might have voted over Brexit.

The Likely Lads film has been restored and made available on Blu-ray and 2 previously lost episodes of the TV series have been found.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

From politics to religion, gangster films to espionage, Philip Dodd considers acts of betrayal, with theologian, Elaine Storkey, columnist Peter Hitchens, author Jenny McCartney and historian Owen Matthews.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

A history of orphans in Britain, fears about post war brainwashing, childrens' letters to C19 newspapers and portraits on show at Compton Verney. Anne McElvoy presents.

New Generation Thinker and historian Emma Butcher is researching writing from children about the trauma of war. She visits Compton Verney. Jeremy Seabrook is researching the treatment of orphans from the 17th century onwards. Historian Sian Pooley reveals what children were writing to local papers about in the late 19th century and artist Emma Smith describes the post-war anxieties about children being brainwashed that inform her exhibition Wunderblock.

Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud runs at Compton Verney from March 16th to June 16th 2019.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod