Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa.

South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds.

For this second Essay, we find Lindsay walking up Table Mountain in Cape Town, and munching on biltong, what he calls "the most regal and masculine of all amuse-bouches". We'll hear, too, about the importance of the braai, and about the central place of meat in white South African cuisine. But as Lindsay chews this all over, he mulls an important question: for many years this cuisine was seen as the ‘Oppressors’ food’ – so should he still be reluctant to eat it?

Producer: Giles Edwards

Unconventionality is a quality celebrated in art, and no-one demonstrates it better than Madge Gill. Psychologist Prof Victoria Tischler explores this mesmerising artist's work.

Her embroidered calicos, some 40 metres in length are full of elegant black lines filling every space of the fabric, in patterns that appear to form a winding staircase and chequerboard tiles, similar to those that would have been fashionable in the Victorian and Edwardian times in which she lived.

The fact that Gill became an artist at all was unconventional enough. Born out of wedlock in the working class east end of London, she was sent to Canada aged nine as part of a child labour scheme. It was just one of the many tragedies and hardships to befall her in her life, yet her artistic output is testimony to her efforts not to be defined by them.

Psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler celebrates 'outsider art.' Art created by the marginalised, the untrained, those outside the establishment.

She begins with an essay on 'the Picasso of psychotic art' Adolf Wölfli. He called himself The Holy St Adolf the Second, master of algebra, military commander in chief, and chief music director, giant theatre director, captain of the almighty giant steamship and doctor of arts and sciences. Confined to the Waldu asylum in Switzerland for more than half his life, the Surrealist artist André Breton referred to Wölfli’s art as one of the three or four most important bodies of works of the twentieth century.

Wölfli's output was prodigious and it's this compulsion to create that Victoria wants to explore - was painting a release from his mental anguish or was the urge part of the torment?

As she travels the world and prepares to become a mother, the narrator of Olivia Wenzel’s novel reflects on her upbringing as a queer, Black woman in a white family, with her mother, a rebellious East German punk who was mostly absent, and her grandmother who was loyal to the socialist regime. Her father, an Angolan student, left shortly after she was born and her twin brother died when they were 17. For Queer History Month, New Generation Thinker Tom Smith looks at the ideas of queer family life explored in 1000 Serpentinen Angst, now available in an English translation by Dr Priscilla Layne as 1000 Coils of Fear.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford. The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflects the mid-Victorian trend for medievalism and resurgence of High Church Anglicanism, combining gothic melodrama with sharply observed social realism, sprightly dialogue and wry humour. Although Charlotte M Yonge came to be associated mainly with domestic realism, in her long career (1823–1901) she worked across a wide range of genres, writing biographies, histories, children's books, and novels from historical epics to long-running family sagas. In Yonge's bicentenary year, New Generation Thinker Clare Walker-Gore argues that now is the time to rediscover this brilliant and neglected woman writer.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Urbanisation, migration and ‘folk language’ are explored in the 1984 novel by Latife Tekin. The story is a carnivalesque fusion of contrasts like its title – where ‘Berji’ conjures images of an innocent shepherdess and ‘Kristin’ of a sex worker. There’s blind old Güllü Baba, rumoured to cure the ills caused by a nearby factory’s chemical wastewater. There’s Fidan of Many Skills, rumoured to know all the ‘arts of the bed’. There’s the rumour of roads, jobs, and clean water coming to Flower Hill: they never materialise. In his foreword to Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, John Berger crowns ‘rumour’ its ultimate storyteller. New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani looks at the way the inhabitants of Flower Hill make sense of their disorienting transition from village life to shantytown in the story from one of Turkey's most influential female authors writing today.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Poet, abolitionist, and activist for women’s rights, Frances EW Harper was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States, producing 80 poems, various articles, sketches, serialised books and short stories and a novel printed when she was aged 67. New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at her career, focusing on this 1892 novel Iola Leroy. It tells the story of a Black mixed race woman who survives the Civil War, experiences romances and has to navigate the post-emancipation world and it explores ideas about science, education, evolving forms of anti-Black racism, and women's social responsibilities.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Arrested by military intelligence, Philip Wylie (1902-1971) went on to become an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy. At least nine films have been made out of stories he published which ranged across topics including ecology, science fiction and the threat of nuclear holocaust. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon reads his short story The Paradise Crater.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.

Olivia's final essay is about the end of the tradition of religious orders. Ireland has fallen out of love with the Catholic Church. Hardly a month goes by without more revelations of harsh treatment of girls in institutions run by nuns and of sexual abuse of boys in institutions run by brothers and priests. Nuns have to deal with being despised in a country that used to see them as saints. ‘Before, we were on a pedestal we didn’t deserve’ one nun said to Olivia. ‘Neither do we deserve the gutter. But we took the pedestal, so now we have to take the gutter.’

Presenter Olivia O'Leary

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.

In her fourth essay, about nuns and politics, Olivia describes the conservative Roman Catholic state Ireland was in the Sixties. Communism was seen as the greatest enemy and hospitals and schools were run by Catholic nuns as a way of imposing church rule and keeping the state out of people’s lives. However, it was nuns who swung to the left when the second Vatican Council pushed for a more modern, liberal church, and missionaries coming back from South America preached that the church should be siding with the poor. Many nuns left their comfortable convents to live with the poor. They sat down in front of trucks coming to evict Travellers. They protested against President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit because of his support for right-wing regimes in Central and South America. They criticised governments and demanded social justice. They abandoned respectability and many of the more conservative priests and bishops thought they were making a show of themselves. They continued to make a show of themselves.

Presenter Olivia O'Leary