Arts & Ideas

Was Marx wrong when he said that philosophers can only interpret the world in various ways, and contrasted that with actually changing it? Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, was once considered one of the more abstract areas of philosophy, far removed from the concerns of every-day life. Now, philosophers like Miranda Fricker have developed epistemological concepts that can help us recognis...

Malcolm Gladwell, Satyajit Ray's film Jalsaghar, Jessie Greengrass. Rana Mitter hosts.

Friendship, domestic violence, power dynamics in the home, and debates about the ethics of war - all topics we can find in the dramas of Shakespeare. Scholars Emma Smith, Patrick Gray, and Emma Whipday share insights from their research, with Lisa Mullen. Professor Emma Smith is the author of This is Shakespeare. She has presented the Radio 3 Documentary, First Folio Road Trip - https://www.bbc.co...

Shahida Bari reads I Tituba, the story of the West Indian slave accused in Salem.

16 April 1746, the Jacobite rising was quelled by the Duke of Cumberland's army at the Battle of Culloden. Marking this anniversary here's a chance to hear Matthew Sweet discussing portrayals of Scotland's Highlands in the Peter Watkins' film Culloden and in the Outlander series of books which have become a successful TV series. His guests in a conversation recorded at the Edinburgh Festival in 20...

Monsieur Hulot is a car designer who takes a chaotic journey to an auto-show in Amsterdam to show off his prototype in this comic film from 1971. It's the last of Jacques Tati's films to feature Hulot, whose name is said to be inspired in part by the French name for Charlie Chaplin's character in The Tramp - Charlot, and whom Rowan Atkinson has cited as an influence on his comic creation Mr Bean....

"A hermit in the middle of Los Angeles" is one way she described herself - born in 1947, Butler became a writer who wanted to "tell stories filled with facts. Make people touch and taste and know." Since her death in 2006, her writing has been widely taken up and praised for its foresight in suggesting developments such as big pharma and for its critique of American history. Shahidha Bari is joine...

Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a major text of French poststructuralist thought by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Made up of the two volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, it articulates a new way of doing both philosophy and psychoanalysis that insists on the concrete relevance and transformative potential of the disciplines for day-to-day life. Matthew Sweet is joined by Henry Somers-...

Blind, and with his hair cut and his strength shorn - in Milton's dramtic poem Samson has already been betrayed by Delilah. It goes on to explore ideas about violence , revenge and tragedy. Published on May 29th 1671 alongside Paradise Regained, Milton's notes show that he started thinking of ideas for this work 30 years earlier. In 1741 Handel finished writing his version - a three act oratorio c...

Blind, and with his hair cut and his strength shorn - in Milton's dramtic poem Samson has already been betrayed by Delilah. It goes on to explore ideas about violence, revenge and tragedy. Published on May 29th 1671 alongside Paradise Regained, Milton's notes show that he started thinking of ideas for this work 30 years earlier. In 1741 Handel finished writing his version - a three act oratorio ca...

Slavery and empire building shaped Liverpool's development. Can art works help give a new understanding of the city's history? In a discussion organised in partnership with the Liverpool Biennial, Anne McElvoy is joined by the Festival curator Manuela Moscoso, by the artist Xaviera Simmons, the historian Dr Diana Jeater and the composer Neo Muyanga. The Biennial runs from 20 March to 6 June 2021 w...

One Cold War spy has his story retold by journalist Simon Kuper, while the granddaughter of another - Charlotte Philby - writes novels that explore the human side and cost of espionage. Nigel Inkster, former MI6 director of operations and intelligence, looks at the role of spying in present day relations between China and the US, while journalist Margaret Coker explains how old school intelligence...

Hanif Abdurraqib, the American poet and essayist, has written a book in praise of black performance challenging stereotypes and recovering figures including the magician Ellen Armstrong who performed along the Atlantic seaboard in the 1900s, the dancer William Henry Lane described by Dickens and Merry Clayton, the gospel singer who performed on the Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter. He joins New G...

In Frank Skinner's A Comedian's Prayer Book the broadcaster presents a series of prayers which read like a stand-up routine exploring questions of belief. A practising Roman Catholic, Skinner's questions include the correct way of addressing God, what it means to be humble, and an unpicking of some of the metaphors used in the Bible. Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, a...

Wartime saviour or the symbol of nostalgic imperialism ? David Reynolds, Priya Satia, Richard Toye and Allen Packwood join Anne McElvoy to look at the ways Churchill's story and legacy are being written now by both historians and in the press. How can we untangle the culture war that is raging over his reputation and what can we learn if we look at the research coming out of the Churchill Archives...

As lockdowns have forced us to forgo the delights of the outside world, have we developed a taste for simple pleasures? Many have reported enjoying cooking and eating more than usual, or appreciating simple treats such as a walk in nature. Has the grey monotony of this period caused music to sound more vibrant, and colours to appear more vivid? And what is the science, philosophy and psychology be...

Irrational feelings of dread, fear, and hate in a subject whose threat is often exaggerated or "phobogenesis" - one of the psychological terms explored in Frantz Fanon's 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, which sets out the way black people have been affected by colonial subjugation. Matthew Sweet, Tariq Ali, New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza and Kehinde Andrews re-read Fanon's arguments and l...

Two years of staying inside her own home in Homs, whilst 60 per cent of her neighbourhood was turned into rubble hasn't deterred architect Marwa al-Sabouni. She talks to Anne McElvoy about rebuilding and hope. Adélie Chevée researches the use of media by the Syrian opposition, and Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an Egyptian-American translator, editor, and writer who spent 16 years working on a version o...

From clues in paintings to colonial trade to letters sent between Australia and England; the links between a Durham based poet and India to the female singers and dancers from Latin America who were contemporaries of Picasso and Josephine Baker; the significance of the Cyrillic alphabet in building nations to why we should pay attention to brackets, commas and colons: African film and ideas about...

Everyday lives from the past are often hard to reconstruct. As we prepare for the Census 2021, what stories can we tell from past censuses and the records held at Kew at the National Archives? John Gallagher is joined by four researchers whose work sheds light on women entrepreneurs, the health of residents in Brighton and Hastings, and the story of a house in a suburb of York - Tang Hall. Dr Carr...

Orientalism was his book, published in 1978, which outlined Said's view that imperialism and a romanticised version of Arab Culture clouded the way the East was depicted by Western scholars. In 1981 he published Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (revised in 1997). Timothy Brennan puts these books and other initiatives, such as the founding of...

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, by film critic Phuong Le and by Peter Salmon - author of a biography of Derrida - he's been invest...

Mars is the focus of current space exploration but how far back does this interest go? Dr Joshua Nall tells Seb Falk about the Mars globe held at the Whipple Science Museum in Cambridge. Hannah Smithson explains her research into the way we see colour and explains the different perceptions of that blue/black/gold/white dress. Timothy Peacock has been studying the fears about Skylab falling to eart...

From prejudice against accents to early attempts to create an artificial voice - Matthew Sweet is joined by the academics Sadie Ryan, Allison Koenecke and Lynda Clark. Sadie Ryan hosts a podcast Accentricity and is part of the Manchester Voices project team https://www.manchestervoices.org/project-team/ You can find a New Thinking podcast episode looking in more detail at that project https://www....

Paranoia, the collateral damage on his family and the investigations he makes into drugs used to treat such a breakdown: Horatio Clare talks to Laurence Scott about his Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing. Plus the poetry of Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971). Author of the much quoted lines Not Waving but Drowning; Stevie Smith suffered from depression and acute shyness. New G...