Arts & Ideas

Would he condemn Hitler? That's the question novelist Thomas Mann was continually asked, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 following novels such as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Colm Toibin's new novel The Magician details the differences of opinion between Mann and his brother, and the way his children were part of a bold and experimental younger generation of writers. A...

Historical novelist Philippa Gregory, historians Susan Doran and Nandini Das, and literary scholar and author Adam Roberts join Matthew Sweet at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry to discuss the enduring appeal of Tudor history and the role that historical fiction plays in shaping our view of history. Plus the connection between Sir Walter Scott and nearby Kenilworth Castle. Part of the BBC Contains S...

Rebellion and causing offence: Shahidha Bari looks at punk and finds that beyond the filth and the fury of the ‘70s music scene, it provided a new vocabulary for artists that’s shaped the cultural scene to the present day, with photographs of the British punk scene on show, a new documentary coming in the Autumn and the opening of a play this week drawing on the idea of punk. Shahidha's guests are...

Hannah Arendt tackled the big ideas behind possibly the most dangerous period of the twentieth century: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. These phenomena and the concepts of freedom and evil were all the more immediate to her, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in her writing which has often focused on mass propaganda, the difference...

"I have no relation or friend" - words spoken by Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. That story, alongside Georg Büchner's expressionist classic Woyzeck, has inspired the new production for English National Ballet put together by Akram Khan. He joins poet Hannah Lowe, who's been reflecting on her experiences of teaching London teenagers; Tash Aw, who explores his Chinese and Malay...

One definition of a glitch is a short-lived fault in a system operating otherwise as it should. Glitches in digital systems have been used by artists for at least a decade to produce work with a characteristic aesthetic, that invite reflection on the computer systems that play an ever bigger part in our lives. Matthew Sweet is joined by the artists and theorist of glitches Rosa Menkman and Antonio...

Descending into the nine circles of Hell is one of the key ideas set out in Dante's Inferno. Today's Free Thinking looks at the way his thinking and imagery have been taken up by other artists and writers. Rana Mitter's guests include the art historian Martin Kemp, the painter Emma Safe, the scholar and Dante website creator Deborah Parker and the New Generation Thinker Julia Hartley from Kings Co...

Catherine Pepinster, Kate Kennedy, Tim Stanley and New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel join Rana Mitter to look at the poet, theologian and now Saint John Henry. The programme explores Newman's conversion from the high church tradition of Anglicanism and the Oxford Movement to the Catholic faith looking at his thinking, his poetic writing and what his story tells us about Catholicism and th...

From Roman sandals to trainers and stilettos. Shahidha Bari looks at the shoe trade, with guests including Thomas Turner, who has written about sneakers in his book The Sports Shoe, A History From Field To Fashion; Tansy Hoskins,who examines global commerce in her book Footwork: What Your Shoes Are Doing To The World; Rebecca Shawcross, Shoe Curator at Northampton Museum & Art Gallery; and Rom...

Artists Sonia Boyce, Isaac Julien, Eddie Chambers and Harold Offeh talk to Anne McElvoy about their art and the influence of the British black arts movement - which began around the time of the First National Black Art Convention in 1982 organised by the Blk Art Group and held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Eddie Chambers has written Roots and Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Brita...

Tokyo used to be presented as the ultimate hyper-modern city. But after years of economic recession the Tokyo of today has another side. A site of alienation and loneliness, anxiety about conformity and identity, it is a place where self-professed 'geeks' (or 'otaku'), mostly single middle-aged men, congregate in districts like Akibahara to pursue fanatical interests outside mainstream society, in...

Who can you trust? That's the question posed in Rashōmon. In today's programme Rana Mitter's guests David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp look at both the book and the film. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rashōmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The...

A spinster dominated by her mother in Now Voyager (1942), a strong-willed Southern belle in Jezebel (1938) which won her an Academy award for best actress, a Broadway star in All About Eve (1950): just some of the 100 film roles played Bette Davis during a career which ran from the 1930s to the late 1980s. As the British Film Institute puts on a season of films throughout August, including a re-ma...

Music from Orkney thunderstorms, dog walks in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park that have inspired a set of tiles, essays about the seasons from a diverse collection of writers: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough's guests, composer Erland Cooper, writer Anita Roy, artist Alison Milner and Dr Pippa Marland, compare notes on the way they filter countryside experiences to create art, music and literature. Anita...

A "cubist" story - with a plot and timeline broken up and repetitive descriptions of objects, like a painting by Picasso, is one way in which the French nouveau romain of the 1960s has been described. Alain Robbe Grillet (1922 – 2008) was one of the main figures associated with this literary movement. He was also a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French and published...

Lisa Mullen is joined by Imani Jacqueline Brown of Forensic Architecture, whose exhibition for the Manchester International Festival explores the links between power and the air we breathe; journalist James Nestor, whose best selling book traces his search for medical answers to his sleeping and breathing problems; jazz saxophonist and MC Soweto Kinch; and New Generation Thinker Tiffany Watt Smith...

Lawrence's dad was a butty - a contractor who put together a team to mine coal for an agreed price. His 1913 novel Sons and Lovers drew on this heritage. Frances Wilson's new biography focuses on the decade following, when The Rainbow had been subject to an obscenity trial, he travelled to Cornwall and Mexico and then the discovery that he had tuberculosis. In a non-Covid year, this weekend would...

Lawrence's dad was a butty - a contractor who put together a team to mine coal for an agreed price. His 1913 novel Sons and Lovers drew on this heritage. Frances Wilson's new biography focuses on the decade following, when The Rainbow had been subject to an obscenity trial, he travelled to Cornwall and Mexico and then the discovery that he had tuberculosis. In a non-Covid year, this weekend would...

A horoscope from 1411, a portrait of a woman blowing bubble gum and a gold griffin-headed armlet: art collector Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, historian Ali Ansari and New Generation Thinker Julia Hartley join Rana Mitter to look at Epic Iran, an exhibition exploring 5,000 years of art, design and culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Author Annalee Newitz discusses the rise and fall of four 'lost'...

It’s sixty years since the house party at Cliveden where Christine Keeler encountered Minister of War, John Profumo and the Soviet Naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov. The events of that weekend, a heady mix of sex, politics and espionage have filled newspapers, books, films and TV dramas. But that weekend was just one in a long line of intrigue and scandal at Cliveden. In fiction and reality, a weekend...

The Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy was followed up by this drama about an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Director John Schlesinger, writer Penelope Gilliatt, actors Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch were all nominated for Academy Awards but it performed poorly at the box office. Was the film - released on July 1st 1971, ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re...

HIV's origins and colonial history have inspired the collection of poems by Kayo Chingonyi, which has been nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021. Paisley Rekdal is currently the Poet Laureate of Utah. Her latest collection of poems was inspired by Ovid. She's been thinking about where stories come from and what we mean by appropriation. Dr Nasser Hussain is interested in ‘lost’...

Bait depicted Cornish second-home owners in a tense relationship with local fishermen. The 2019 film's director Mark Jenkin is one of Laurence Scott's guests along with author Wyl Menmuir, and Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, where she is researching ideas about the sea as a monstrous space. Their conversation ranges from The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker via Wyl's novel The...

From the Great Exhibition of 1851 to Shanghai 2010, Owen Hatherley, Emily MacGregor and Paul Greenhalgh explore visions of the future offered by world's fairs and expos with Matthew Sweet. Emily MacGregor describes the row which blew up over music commissioned by William Grant Still for the 1939/40 New York World's Fair. Paul Greenhalgh tells us about world's fairs from London and Paris to Shangha...

Peace, prosperity and formica - that's one way of describing the vision on show at the Festival of Britain in 1951. But domesticity had a radical side and in this Free Thinking conversation, Shahidha Bari talks to researchers Sophie Scott-Brown and Rachele Dini and looks at the domestic appliances selected for display in the newly re-opened Museum of the Home, talking to Director Sonia Solicari ab...