Arts & Ideas

Cinderella is opening in a new ballet production at the Royal Opera House and Mothering Sunday is coming up so Matthew Sweet is joined by New Generation Thinkers Sabina Dosani and Emma Whipday and Marina Warner for a conversation about good and bad mothering and how images are changing. Marina Warner's many books include From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers Frederick Asht...

A Persian epic depicted in The Yellow Book which Aubrey Beardsley was art editor for, Iranian figures on the French operatic stage and Rudyard Kipling's links with decadent ideas: Shahidha Bari is joined by Dr Julia Hartley, Dr Alexander Bubb and Professor Jennifer Yee to discuss new research into late nineteenth century art, literature and opera and what we mean by decadence. Was it really a-poli...

Debt is central to the modern economy and it has long been so. The idea of debt has long been loaded with as much morality as financial meaning. Anne McElvoy explores our ideas about debt, what it is and how it works. Decisions about borrowing or paying down debt are currently being faced the world over. They’re informed by political beliefs and a whole history of ideas behind that. So, how have o...

Iranian women using song to protest and whose voices do we pay attention to ? On International Women's Day, Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation with the authors of books called On Being Unreasonable and Who Gets Believed, an artist and a researcher looking at Iranian women using song. Michelle Assay is an academic specialising in music who was born in Iran and had to leave the country. Dina Nayeri...

Bullshit jobs, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, Debt: The First 5000 Years: the titles of some of David Graeber's books give a sense of his take on the world and his concerns. Matthew Sweet talks with archaeologist David Wengrow - co-author with Graeber of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and looks at Graeber's involvement with the Occupy movement and the influence of an...

The monk and poet Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-92) used his Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter to fuse art and writing in concrete poetry. Born in 1924 he worked in Army Intelligence in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore during the Second World war and in 1949 he joined the Benedictine Abbey of Prinknash, Gloucestershire. Matthew Sweet looks at his life and art with guests Nicola Simpson, Rey Conquer, Cha...

Muppets in Moscow is Natasha Lance Rogoff's account of launching a Russian version of the American tv series Sesame Street. If a single announcer supplies the dialogue dubbing when a foreign film is shown in Russia where do you find the technical skills you need? Should you feature exclusively ethnically Russian actors or include nationalities from former Soviet republics? What puppets from Russia...

How sewing machines wrecked sewing. Why people mistrusted tin cans. What the invention of stainless steel had to do with the military. New research into the impact of industrialisation on materials like tin, steel and sewing machines is shared by the academics Chris Corker from the University of York, Lindsay Middleton from the University of Glasgow, and Serena Dyer who teaches at De Montfort Univ...

Hungry Ghosts is the new novel set in colonial Trinidad by Kevin Jared Hosein. Colin Grant has written a memoir about his Jamaican family. A new art project, Windrush Portraits, is a collaboration between Mary Evans and Michael Elliott with communities in both Kingston, Jamaica, and Southampton, UK. Shahidha Bari looks at the way ghosts of history haunt these artworks. Producer: Robyn Read Hungry...

Haggling with Indian customs officials and presenting a mighty emperor with the distinctly unimpressive gifts of a cheap sword and a broken carriage are two particularly inauspicious moments that feature in the tale told by historian and New Generation Thinker Nandini Das in her new book about the four years Thomas Roe spent as James VI and I's ambassador to the Mughal Empire. Peter Frankopan has...

A new exhibition at the Ashmolean looks at the digs conducted by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete. At the National Theatre Janet McTeer stars as the Cretan princess Phaedra in a new play by Simon Stone. Classicist Natalie Haynes, curator Andrew Shapland and Minoan archaeologist Nicoletta Momigliano join Rana Mitter to explore what the artefacts found at Knossos can tell us about the world of t...

Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo (21 January 1954 – 18 February 2018) was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for his film Tilaï. Much of Ouédraogo's work deals with the tensions between rural and city life and tradition and modernity in his native Burkina Faso. Matthew Sweet is joined by Boukary Sawadogo who teaches cinema studies at City College of New York and New Gener...

Proust as an agony uncle, Romeo and Juliet rewritten as 21st century Welsh teenagers in a new drama by Gary Owen, the Lesbian coming of age novel by Rita Mae Brown that inspired the lead character in Willy Russell's Educating Rita to change her name and a new book inspired by the historical figures who collaborated on the first English medical textbook on homosexuality. Tom Crewe's novel The New L...

From Orwell and Shakespeare back to Greek myth, Aesop, and early Christianity: Matthew Sweet and guests look at a cultural history of the donkey. EO, a film out in UK cinemas this month, follows the life of a donkey born in a Polish circus. New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen is an expert on George Orwell and lecturer in film at the University of Cambridge Lucy Grig is Senior Lecturer in Roman Hist...

Playwright Zinnie Harris, author Isabelle Schuler and New Generation Thinker Emma Whipday and Michelle Assay have looked at the murdering husband and wife of Shakespeare's Scottish play. Chris Harding hosts a discussion about the Macbeth story from Kurosawa and Shostakovich to a novel called Lady MacBethad and a play called Macbeth an Undoing. Macbeth - an Undoing by Zinnie Harris runs at the Lyce...

Inner city life in Chicago's Bronzeville and the experiences of ordinary people inspired the first poetry collection published by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945 and she followed this with a sequence of poems Annie Allen and a novella Maud Martha depicting Black women entering adulthood. Chicago based poet Peter Kahn, editor of an anthology of modern poets responding to the writing of Brooks, and poets M...

The legend of Mélusine emerges in French literature of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in the texts of Jean d’Arras and Coudrette. A beautiful young woman, the progeny of the union between a king and a fairy, is condemned to spend every Saturday with her body below the waist transformed into the tail of serpent. She agrees to marry only on the condition that her husband should ne...

Russell T Davies has written a 3 part mini-series - Nolly - about Crossroads star Noele Gordon. He joins Matthew Sweet along with screenwriter Paula Milne who wrote for Crossroads and Coronation Street and devised Angels for the BBC, and writer Gail Renard, who was working at ATV during the Crossroads years, to explore the unique and sometimes undervalued place of the soap opera in TV drama. Nolly...

If the Tudors are the soap opera of English history, the restless years of the mid 17th century, often called the English Civil War, are more like a seminar in political and religious theory with an added component of armed violence. How did historians in the 20th century make sense of the period? And how are historians of today rising to the challenge? The Restless Republic: The People’s Republic...

Romani history and how mass murder is intertwined with a modern day pilgrimage site and the experiences of Portuguese Jewish communities are discussed by Matthew Sweet and his guests. Richard Zimler's talks about his latest book, The Incandescent Threads; Stuart Taberner reflects on the ways modern writers connect to the Holocaust; Victoria Biggs has been researching a pilgrimage site close to the...

Stone circles, Roman Britain, a fossil crocodile and the flood described in the Book of Genesis, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a fake monk's manuscript: these were all studied by William Stukeley, English antiquarian, physician and clergyman (1687-1765) who pioneered research into Stonehenge and Avebury. Rana Mitter brings together a panel of archaeologists, historians and writers to look at the wor...

Matthew Sweet marks the 30th anniversary of the death of this icon of film and fashion who was also an EGOT (winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award) and a noted humanitarian. Born in Belgium she supported the Resistance in World War II after moving to Holland, although her parents were Nazi sympathisers. Her films included My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, The Nun's St...

Over the last two hundred years, working class and women students, have found a place insides universities. Anne McElvoy hears about some of the stories behind the social expansion of higher education. Joanna Bourke's new book is a history of Birkbeck, the University of London college that began life as the London Mechanics’ Institution in 1823 and is now a leading centre of research in many areas...

Chaucer's widow and clothmaker is one of three characters given a longer confessional voice than other pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales and she uses her narrative to ask who has had the advantage in setting out the stories of women - "Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?" Shahidha Bari explores both the roots and the influence of Chaucer's creation and the different modern versions created by writer...

Asylum and psychiatric institutions, obsession and heroin, and imagining a new self are explored in the writing of Anna Kavan (1901-1968). With the republication of her novel Ice, her reputation is now on the rise. Matthew Sweet is joined by critic and author Chris Power, Carole Sweeney, who researches experimental fiction, Sally Marlow, who studies the psychology of addiction and is Radio 3’s res...