November 14, 2025

Revenge and reconciliation

56 minutes

What function do ceremonies like Armistice Day perform? How do we balance desires for reconciliation with feelings about revenge? How we remember wars and what commemoration means is much less settled than we might think. And that throws up questions, in times when conflicts are spreading close to us in western Europe, of how wars end and how we balance our concern for justice and peace with darker impulses?

Joining presenter Anne McElvoy for BBC Radio 4's roundtable discussion about the ideas shaping our world are:

classicist Natalie Haynes whose most recent novel No End to this House re-imagines the story of Medea,

former solider Ashleigh Percival-Borley, who is now an academic and on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Duncan Wheeler, author of Following Franco and an academic studying contemporary Spain.

neuro-scientist Nicholas Wright who advises the Pentagon and has written Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain

and, Andy West, prison philosophy teacher and author of The Life Inside

Producer: Ruth Watts

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By BBC Radio 4

4.3

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