Creativity is the ability to invent, to bring something original into the world. For the ancients, human creativity was an imitation of and homage to the divine being who created heaven and earth. Today we can talk about creativity in all sorts of ...

This week we’re talking about one of the most powerful, and perhaps one of the most vulnerable of political ideas, the Rule of Law. This is the principle that the law is sovereign and everybody in a society, including the Government, should be equally...

Birds have been around a lot longer than humans, but we have a special relationship with these neighbours of ours. Their plumage and their song are among our first examples of beauty: they have inspired artists, poets, composers, and ordinary nature-lo...

The most famous poem of the twentieth century was published in 1922 in the first issue of a literary magazine of almost invisible circulation, edited by the author himself. In fewer than ten years, it had achieved an almost scriptural status for a gene...

Chamber music occupies a place between symphonic and solo music: originally music written to be performed in a room in someone’s home, chamber music has been likened to conversation, in which the different instruments respond to each other, and the ple...

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, could also be called an anti-philosopher. He was described by his teacher and friend Bertrand Russell as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as trad...

For this week’s programme, we’ll be telling ourselves ghost stories. Ji Xiaolan, who lived 1728-1805, was a Qing dynasty scholar and official, a writer and poet, and for a while a favourite of the Qianlong emperor. In the last decade of the 18th centu...

Our Big Idea this week is something that doesn’t exist yet – the future of Africa. The Latin writer Pliny the Elder is credited with saying “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi”: Out of Africa, forever something new. What does the future hold for Africa? We...

The Oxford English Dictionary says “transgender” entered the language as late as 1974, though we can assume the phenomenon it names is a lot older than that. It’s conventional to make a distinction between sex and gender. Your sex is a biological cate...

Dunhuang, in the modern Gansu province of China, was a frontier garrison town at an oasis on the southern Silk Road, where it intersected with the ancient road leading from India, via Lhasa, to Mongolia. In the past Dunhuang had great strategic and co...