Arts & Ideas

The films Cuties and Rocks present a contemporary image of girlhood. What do they tell us about what it is to be a girl and to negotiate growing up? We hear from three researchers who look at: the influence of such films made by female directors; the role of aunties in giving advice about health and the body; and the portrayal of female friendship in boarding school novels by authors like Enid Bly...

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 marks 175 years since Newman's conversion from the high church tradition of Anglicanism and the Oxford Movement to the Catholic faith on 23 Feb 1846, with a conversation exploring his thinking and poetic writing. Cath...

Shahidha Bari is joined by Lisa Downing, Stuart Elden, and Stephen Shapiro to read volume 4 of Foucault's History of Sexuality, translated into English for the first time, which examines beliefs and practices among the early Christians in Medieval Europe. Although he had specified in his will that his works shouldn't be published after he died (in 1984), the rights holders of Foucault decided that...

Joanna Bourke is an historian whose previous work has looked at fear, pain, sexual violence and dismemberment. Her new book is a history and examination of bestiality and zoophilia, tracing our changing understandings from Leviticus, to modern psychiatry, the animal rights movement, and beyond. Anna Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World was an examination of human interactions with fun...

Overcoming long term illness, controlling her money and eloping to revolutionary Italy: Fiona Sampson's new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning focuses on her as someone interested in inventing herself - not as an ailing romantic heroine. Peggy Reynolds began her academic career studying Browning's long poem Aurora Leigh. She's been reading about motherhood in literature and psychology books a...

Turkey and 50s Prime Minister Menderes, Erdogan today, and how history is used for political power. Matthew Sweet is joined by Jeremy Seal, Ece Temelkuran, Michael Talbot & Nilay Ozlu. Before his execution in 1961, the Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes saw Turkey admitted to NATO, investment in agriculture, education and health care, but also conflict with the Greek community. On 17 Februa...

In Karachi Vice, journalist Samira Shackle tracks the lives of a Karachi ambulance driver, street school teacher and crime reporter amongst others - and uses their story to map a history of different political groupings across the city and the recent decades. New Generation Thinker Majed Akhter from Kings College, London researches water shortages and dam building. Ejaz Haider is a journalist base...

From minting coins to digital currencies, Anne McElvoy is joined by Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, British Museum coin curator Tom Hockenhull, historian of science Patricia Fara and political economist Ann Pettifor to explore the physical and virtual life of money as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Decimal Day in the UK. The discussion ranges from the symbolism of images we find stamped...

Matthew Sweet is joined by Xine Yao, Joe Cain, and Ruth Mace, who've been re-reading Charles Darwin's 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The book offered a radical reinterpretation of what it means to be human by situating us completely within the natural world as a product of natural selection. But it is also a book of its times, as reflected in the language Darwin us...

What we learn from the tattered costumes of actress Ellen Terry, the couture created by Alexander McQueen, and the everyday wardrobe of American women at the turn of the 20th century. V&A fashion curator Claire Wilcox has curated exhibitions on Frida Kahlo and Alexander McQueen, and has written a memoir, called Patch Work. She talks to Shahidha Bari about the pleasures and the challenges of co...

How easy is it to climb out of the working class in Britain? Have attitudes to social mobility changed at all? Matthew Sweet talks to Professor Selina Todd about her latest book, Snakes and Ladders, which explores the myths and realities of the past century. They're joined by an accents specialist, a policy thinker and journalist, and a data analyst. Professor Selina Todd is author of Snakes and L...

Patricia Lockwood and André Aciman share their sense of the way digital media, and the layers of history press in on our sense of the present moment as they talk about their new books with presenter Laurence Scott. Patricia Lockwood is a poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy. Her new novel No One is Talking About This considers the way a world saturated by social media memes, 24/7 news and doo...

From Bessie Head to Keats, Rachel Carson to Lorine Niedecker, Lisa Mullen and guests analyse links between literature and nature as an increasing number of university departments offer eco-criticism courses focusing on the way writers past and present have thought about the environment. Samuel Solnick specialises in environmental humanities at the University of Liverpool, and is particularly inter...

Mary Beard, Homi Bhabha and Seán Williams join Shahidha Bari to look at the etiquette of talks on zoom and the history of lectures. Lecturing someone can be a negative: you’re patronising or boring or telling them what to think. And yet, today we have TED talks, university staff are routinely recording lectures using video conferencing technology, and the history of thought is a history of persuas...

Discovering his family's Nazi links is what happened to historian Martin Puchner when he set out to explore the use of a secret language by Jewish people and other travellers in middle Europe. He joins author and language expert Michael Rosen for a conversation with Matthew Sweet about Yiddish, Rotwelsch, codes and graffiti. Plus as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day hearing about new research into th...

Lab meat and robot bees: how veganism and tech can solve the climate crisis. Anne McElvoy considers how food impacts on the environment with guests Anthony Warner, Cassandra Coburn, and Alasdair Cochrane. Plus Man Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan on his new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams – about a dying planet and a dying mother. Anthony Warner is author of Ending Hunger: The...

In his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argued that just societies should allow everyone to enjoy basic liberties while limiting inequality and improving the lives of the least well off. He argued that "the fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have". Anne McElvoy discusses how his case for a liberal egalitarianism has fared...

Eddie Glaude Jr and Nadia Owusu compare notes on the relevance of James Baldwin's writing to understanding Donald Trump's America. Michael Burleigh gives his take on populism. Eddie S Glaude Jr has just published Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Today. His previous books include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. He is the chair at the Dep...

Harlots - the TV series about 18th century female sex workers - and translating historical fact into onscreen drama. Shahidha Bari is joined by Hallie Rubenhold, Moira Buffini, and Laura Lammasniemi in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. Harlots depicts the stories of working women detailed in 1757 in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. Historian Hallie...

The devil's daughter features in a new novel from Jenni Fagan; Salena Godden's debut novel imagines Mrs Death. To discuss conjuring fear, they join Shahidha Bari alongside a pair of historians - Tabitha Stanmore, who researches magic from early modern royal courts to village life, and Daniel Ogden, who has looked at werewolf tales in ancient Greece and Rome. Jenni Fagan's latest novel is called Lu...

New research on female slave owners in Britain, women on Caribbean plantations, and the daughter of a prominent slave trader. Christienna Fryar talks to researchers Katie Donnington, Meleisa Ono-George, and Hannah Young. We hear about the daughter of Thomas Hibbert - one of the most prominent slave traders in Kingston, Jamaica - and the revelation that before she died she had intended to ask her m...

If, and, then are the 3 words which underpin Simon Baron-Cohen's exploration of how humans reason and develop solutions to problems in his latest book The Pattern Seekers. He joins author Michelle Gallen, film historian Andrew Roberts and Bonnie Evans whose research includes the history of childhood and developmental science in a discussion about how we understand autism presented by Matthew Sweet...

From spy to one of the first professional woman writers in Britain - Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer in the Restoration period. Claire Bowditch has spent years comparing different printed versions of her dramas to work out what were printer errors and how involved was Aphra Behn in the printing process. Annalisa Nicholson is researching a French salon in L...

From exile in Siberia to the novels which set a template - Rana Mitter and his guests Alex Christofi, Muireann Maguire, Claire Whiteheadand Viv Groskop look at the life and writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 27 January 1881). Crime and Punishment published in 1886 was the second novel following Dostoevsky's return from ten years of exile in Siberia. It examined ideas about rationalit...

Mildred Pierce, James M Cain's 1941 novel was turned into a noir film starring Joan Crawford which earnt her an Academy Award. Matthew Sweet and his guests crime writers Denise Mina & Laura Lippman + academics Sarah Churchwell & Lizzie Mackarel have been re-watching the film and comparing it with the novel as they consider how the social realism and depiction of suburban female life differ...