Arts & Ideas

Ian McEwan's new novel Lessons sets a relationship against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis and the fall of the wall in Berlin. Researcher and artist Michael Mulvihill, from the University of Newcastle, has been recording the sounds of radar interference and uncovering the archives held at RAF Fylingdales in Yorkshire which depict the replacement of the "golf balls" and the technology invo...

Karel Čapek's 1922 play The Makropulos Affair about a famous singer who has lived for over 300 years was adapted into an opera by the composer Leoš Janáček and premiered in 1926. George Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuselah, which premiered in 1922, also looks at human destiny and ideas about long life. As Welsh National Opera's new touring production of The Makropulos Affair opens in Cardiff, Ma...

A dig at Lindisfarne this September aims to find out more about the early Medieval monastery raided by Vikings. New Generation Thinker David Petts from Durham University shares his findings on Holy Island. Professor Michelle Brown has been looking closely at the text and illustrations in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the culture of producing books in Anglo Saxon England. And as the gospels produced...

Christopher Columbus spoke to lots of people: his family and kin in Genova, merchants in Venice, royalty in Madrid, the crew of his ship, not to mention the people he met on the other side of the Atlantic. Today, we would consider this a case of multilingualism. But is that how Columbus would have seen it? What language did he think he spoke himself? In the same period a pidgin language developed...

A motorbike adorned with a zebu skull is one of the central images of Djibril Diop Mambéty's classic 1973 film, whose title translates as The Journey of the Hyena. Listed as one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound magazine poll, it mixes West African oral traditions with influences from the French New Wave and Soviet cinema. Mory and Anta are two young people growing up in...

Glenda Jackson is the subject of a BFI season and in this film she plays part of a love triangle in John Schlesinger's follow up to his Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy. The plot written by Penelope Gilliat centres on an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Was the 1971 film ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re-watches it with guests including Glenda Jackson, p...

"The beauty of speed. Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created the eternal, omnipresent speed." Part of the 1909 manifesto drawn up by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that declared the aims of the groundbreaking Futurist branch of modernism. Their rejection of the past included embracing the march of machinery, the power of youth and of violenc...

Murals which aimed to synthesise the history and culture of Mexico, Japanese novels exploring urban alienation, an exhibition of Bauhaus paintings from Germany which inspired a generation of Indian artists. Presenter Rana Mitter is joined by Jade Munslow Ong, Christopher Harding, Maria Blanco, and Devika Singh. Amongst the Modernist writers and artists mentioned are: Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro...

The Daleks are back! As restorations of the two 1960s Dr Who films are rereleased in British cinemas, Matthew Sweet lifts the lid on the most memorable monsters of post-war British science fiction. Expert guests will have 2000 rels - that’s 45 earth minutes - to explore Dalek culture, politics and philosophy, and to explore how Terry Nation’s creations carry the weight of the second world war, the...

Tariq Ali picks Pather Panchali and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani describes Jalsaghar or The Music Room. Rana Mitter presents this programme which looks at what marked out the directing of Satyajit Ray. The BFI has a season of his films screening across July and August and is re-releasing The Big City. Rana's other guests are the programme of the BFI season and herself a film-maker, Sangeeta...

How does France look when viewed from different places and at different times? Graham Robb knows France well from his academic career and decades of travels and offers an alternative route through French history in his new book. Hannah Scott has looked at the role of low-brow music in forming an idea of ‘Britishness’ for the French at the height of cross-channel rivalry in the last century. Tash A...

Aethelflaed and Bertha are two of the figures discussed in the new history of women in the Middle Ages written by Janina Ramirez. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has taken the heroine who fights Tancredi the crusading knight and reframed the story set to the music composed by Monteverdi's Il Combattimento. Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist who has tracked the way a Viking ‘Carnelian’ bead travelled...

From Beyonce to Octavia Butler, from Chris Ofili to Jordan Peele, the speculative and the mythical have been used as powerful tools to shape Black art, film, music and writing. Ekow Eshun, who has curated a new exhibition on this theme at the Hayward Gallery, joins Shahidha Bari along with DJ/turntablist NikNak and New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike to discuss how this idea of the Black Fantas...

How does money shape history and how do we write about it? Anne McElvoy discusses those questions with a finalist in the political writing category of the 2022 Orwell Prize. In Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, Kojo Koram traces the some of the economic problems faced across the world today with wealth inequality, with sovereign debt, austerity, and precarious employment and ho...

Varney the Vampire was a blood soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a large volume when it was finally published in book form. In spite of his comfort with crosses, daylight and garlic, Varney's capacity to reflect on his actions made him an early model for Dracula. Ma...

David Chalmers is credited with setting the terms for much of the work done in the philosophy of mind today when he posed the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how does matter, which is fundamentally inanimate, give rise to or interact with consciousness, which is qualitative and phenomenal - always a 'what it's like'? His most recent book, Reality +, is an investigation of the possibility that our...

For evolutionary scientists studying religion, it's more fruitful to examine what people do in religious contexts, rather than listen to what they say they believe. There's a new recognition that as well as looking at behaviour, people studying religion must take account of the religious experience of believers. But how do you do that? And what does doing it tell us? Rana Mitter is joined by an ev...

Geoff Dyer, Dame Sheila Hancock and Rachel Stott join Matthew Sweet to discuss the work and performance of writers, artists, athletes and musicians near the end of their careers. Old Rage by Sheila Hancock is out now. The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer is out now. Rachel Stott is a composer and plays viola with the Revolutionary Drawing Room, the Bach Players and Sopriola. Producer: Torq...

The German Romantic author of horror and fantasy published stories which form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the ballet Coppélia and the Nutcracker. In the theatre he worked as a stagehand, decorator, playwright and manager and he wrote his own musical works. His opera Undine ended its run at the Berlin Theatre after a fire. During his lifetime he also saw Warsaw and...

John Gallagher with an exploration of Sheffield's cultural history through new words, music and film.

Can a 40-hour film of a Massachusetts garden or a project documenting rice growing over 40 years help us to understand our planet better? Who makes and who watches such projects? Matthew Sweet is joined by film historian Becca Voelcker who has watched projects recorded in Japan, Colombia, Scotland and America; Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands charts the changes in the earth's ecologies throu...

Understanding James Joyce's eye troubles gives you a different way of reading his book Ulysses. That's the contention of Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, who shares her research with presenter Shahidha Bari. Emma West has delved into the history of the Arts League of Service travelling theatre, who went about in a battered old van performing plays, songs, ballets and 'absurdities' to audiences from Braintree...

Damon Galgut's novel, The Promise, explores the decline of the white Afrikaner Swart family and their failed promise to their black domestic servant. The family resist giving her, her own house and her own land as South Africa emerges from the era of apartheid. Land also occupies Julia Blackburn in her new book Dreaming the Karoo, which explores traces of the indigenous /Xam people who were driven...

Bill Paterson is a founding member of the 7:84 company established by John McGrath, his wife Elizabeth and her brother to create radical, popular theatre. Fusing techniques popularised by Bertolt Brecht with Scottish performance traditions, their best-known play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) explored class struggle, the clearing of the Scottish highlands and the impact of...

Is that strong, inescapable image of 19th century city streets in our heads the right one? It's possible that there's a gap between the realities of street life in the Victorian city and how it has been thought of and portrayed in subsequent eras. Matthew Sweet is joined by historians Sarah Wise, Oskar Jensen, Lynda Nead and Fern Riddell to sift hard facts from picturesque imaginings. Vagabonds: L...