Some people don’t like the term Bollywood, feeling that it suggests that Indian cinema is just a kind of appendage of Hollywood. But it’s in wide circulation, sometimes taken to refer to modern Indian cinema in general, more specifically the output of...

This week’s theme is conservation – not environmental conservation, but the care of artefacts. In a recent programme we talked about creativity, but the work of creative artists and craftsmen is dependent on many others for its realization, dissemi...

Of our living neighbours on the planet – land animals, birds, and fish – fish are the ones that seem most aloof from us. Cold-blooded and elusive, they go about their watery existence, indifferent and invisible to us most of the time, until our lives i...

Opera in China has a history of many centuries, and many different forms. Some 350 different kinds of musical drama were identified in a survey in the 1950s. With its colourful costumes and make-up, its stylized and sometimes acrobatic movement, Chines...

This week we want to consider how events become information, and how information becomes news. Crucial to this process is the figure of the reporter, filing the copy for print or electronic media which remains our main source of knowledge about what’s ...

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was described by the novelist D. H. Lawrence as “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world”. Everyone knows the story of Captain Ahab and his obsessive pursuit of vengeance against the white whale; most rea...

By “art image” we mean the artefacts produced by painters, sculptors and other artists in the visual realm, but our subject today is not so much the images themselves, as the way we experience and think about them. When an exhibition of work by Claud...

Our topic this week is the author Eileen Chang – Zhang Ailing. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she was a novelist, short story writer, essayist and translator, and is now recognized as one of the most important of modern Chinese writers. She is associated es...

Human beings have long been fascinated by artificial intelligence. Science fiction could hardly exist without it. But machines that can solve problems by a process that simulates thinking belong to our modern age, and loom very large in any imagination...

Some time ago we did a programme on John Pope Hennessy, the most interesting of the nineteenth-century governors of the colony of Hong Kong. This week we are considering the governorship of one of the giants of the twentieth-century administration of H...