Arts & Ideas

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is creating an encyclopedia of online images of Africa to challenge the way it is seen, has curated Ghana's first art pavilion at the Venice Biennale, toured a mobile museum round the country to gather a grass roots history and published her first novel. The God Child by Nana Oforiatta Ayim is out now. Cultural Encyclopaedia is an online resource that includes an A-to-Z index a...

Historian William Dalrymple, Wasafiri editor Susheila Nasta and novelist Romesh Gunesekera join Rana Mitter for a conversation looking at the East India company, the socialist economic policies and language battles in Ceylon in the 1960s before it became Sri Lanka and the way writing from around the world has reflected changes of attitude to post colonial history. Sri Lankan-born British author Ro...

Author Priya Basil and curator Victoria Avery look at food, fasting and feeding guests. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is their host as the FitzWilliam Museum in Cambridge opens an exhibition and Priya Basil publishes reflections on hospitality which link the free meals offered to all which is part of Sikhism to food clubs in Germany which have welcomed refugees. Maia Elliott of the UK's Global Food...

Nam June Paik made art with TV sets and imagined an information superhighway before the internet was invented. John Giorno organised multi-media and dial-a-poem events. Poet and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jackson joins Matthew Sweet to look at the visions of the future conjured up by these artists who were both interested in the influence of mass media and Buddhism. She's joined by artist Haroon...

Should we take more breaks at during the working day? Claudia Hammond, Matthew Smith, Sarah Cook and Ayesha Nathoo discuss the art of rest and concentration with Anne McElvoy.

Economist Larry Summers, former President of Harvard lays out his view of a university and Philip Dodd debates with the OU's Josie Fraser, classicist Justin Stover and NESTA's Geoff Mulgan. Has new technology and globalisation signed the death knell for traditional courses in humanities subjects like English literature and philosophy ? You can find Philip talking to academic Camille Paglia here ht...

Rana Mitter talks to historians of China - Jung Chang and Julia Lovell. Jung Chang's latest book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister looks at the lives of the first Chinese girls to attend university in the USA. On their return to Shanghai one worked in business, one married a politician and one was involved in high society. Julia Lovell has been awarded one of the most significant history writi...

Writer Rebecca Mead, actor Fiona Shaw + academics Dafydd Mills Daniel, Philip Davis & Peggy Reynolds read George Eliot's 1860 novel portraying sibling relationships. Shahidha Bari hosts. George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819. Rebecca Mead is the author of The road to Middlemarch: my life with George Eliot. Dafydd Mills Daniel is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHR...

Investigating regeneration and gentrification, the Turner Contemporary, the 2019 Turner Prize exhibition, writer Maggie Gee on her novel Blood, & the town in literature. The seaside town of Margate has both struggled and thrived over the past two centuries – it thronged with holidaymakers from the Victorian era onwards but limped through the latter half of the 20th century and was one of the m...

New research looking at at reporting secret assassinations, countering propaganda & how we could update TV news bulletins, from the Being Human Festival, an annual event which involves public events put on by universities across the UK, presented by Shahidha Bari. Steve Poole teaches at the University of the West of England and is involved in a project - Romancing the Gibbet - that uses smartp...

Why do the legendary walls of a Bronze Age city in Asia still cast such a long shadow? Novelist and classics expert Natalie Haynes, Alev Scott author of Ottoman Odyssey, archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney and medievalist Hetta Howes join Rana Mitter to share new perspectives on the conflict immortalised in Homer's Iliad as the British Museum opens an exhibition dedicated to Troy. Troy: Myth and Real...

Naomi Paxton assembles a squad of researchers to talk about dating, relationships, and what how we fall in love says about us from the National Archives to London's gay bars. Dr Cordelia Beattie from the University of Edinburgh has unearthed two new manuscripts by the 17th-century woman Mrs Alice Thornton, which put her life, loves and relationship with God in a new light. Now they’re becoming a p...

"Man Up". "He's Safe" "No Homo" How do men talk and write about masculinity? Laurence Scott talks to authors Ben Lerner, Derek Owusu and JJ Bola about crying, competitiveness, anger - and the pressure to perform. Ben Lerner is the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and his latest novel is called The Topeka School. He holds a prize commonly called the "genius grant" as a MacArthur Fellow....

Matthew Sweet, performers Lucy McCormick and Gateau Chocolat, curator Florence Ostende, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and Gaylene Gould with an audience at London's Barbican Centre From 1919 when the Weimar constitution said all were equal and had the right to freedom of expression, through to the Mbari Writers and Artists club in Nigeria, to the UK today, clubs and cabarets have always been...

Who decides what’s worth saving and what is culturally significant to protect in wartimes and war zones? The panel, hosted by Anne McElvoy, are: Sir Peter Bazalgette - Chairman of ITV and former Chairman of Arts Council England Carrie Reichardt - International Artist and grassroots activist Zahed Tajeddin - Syrian-born Artist and Archaeologist Rebecca Newell - IWM’s Head of Art Recorded with an au...

Dr Who collaborators Mark Gatiss & Stephen Moffat, academics Una McCormack & Claire Langhamer and Matthew Kneale join Matthew Sweet to celebrate Nigel Kneale's groundbreaking 1953 BBC TV sci-fi serial The Quatermass Experiment, which spawned two late 1950s sequels and an ITV final run in autumn 1979. Producer Torquil MacLeod.

Shahidha Bari's guests include author Kirsty Logan and former League of Gentlemen writer and performer Jeremy Dyson, whose play Ghost Stories is back in the West End. Joining them is the film critic and author of a novella called Mothlight, Adam Scovell, poet Nisha Ramayya whose work States of the Body produced by Love speaks of goddesses who symbolise all the attributes of women and British Museu...

Where are we? How did we get here, and where are we going? Our relationship with the self-propelled small metal boxes in which we spend so much of our time is not as simple as it feels. Why did we learn to need them? How did they shape our cities, our typewriters and our bacon slicers? Should we now redesign our roads, streets and even our skies for AI driven cars? What do we learn by looking at s...

Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham join Matthew Sweet at the British Library in a discussion organised with the Royal Society of Literature. Making art from real events is as old to writing as the pen – older. But what happens when the events you are writing about are recent, or happening as you write? What are the writer’s duties to fact? How can writing bear witness to contemporary moments...

Rachel Reeves MP, Hull academic Jane Thomas and New Generation Thinker Katie Cooper discuss the novel South Riding and the writing and politics of Winifred Holtby with Matthew Sweet and an audience in Hull at the Contains Strong Language Festival. With readings by Rachel Dale. Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935) came from a farming family in Yorkshire, met Vera Brittain at Oxford Un...

Rana Mitter and guests look at the history of atheism and morality. Alec Ryrie's new book 'Unbelievers: an emotional history of doubt' argues that the rationality arguments for non-belief developed after congregations began to doubt the church. The Barber Institute in Birmingham begins a new exhibition into one of the more enigmatic sacred artists of c15 Antwerp, Jan de Beer. Sarah Wise has contri...

Should we really be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Cortés and European settlers in Mexico? Is this a "first encounter" - and how do you decipher history when there isn't anything written down? Claudia Rogers compares notes with Nandini Das. Nandini has been re-reading the accounts written by John Rolfe of his marriage to Pocahontas and looking at what we gain when we flip the...

How welcome are selfies in modern art galleries and museums? What kind of labelling should be on display and should more objects be repatriated? Laurence des Cars from the Musée d'Orsay, Kennie Ting from Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore and Philip Tinari from UCCA Beijing join Anne McElvoy and an audience at the Royal Institute of British Architects for this year's Frieze Free Thinking debate...

Matthew Sweet on Chaplin's 1941 film and rising populism today with guests including Francesca Santoro L'hoir who acted alongside Chaplin as a child plus Ece Temelkuran, Peter Pomerantsev and Frank Dikotter. Dutch Historian Frank Dikotter, who teaches in China, has published books on The Cultural Revolution, Mao's Famine and most recently How to Be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the Twenti...

From Sean the Sheep & Damien Hirst to a knitted bikini. Shahidha Bari with a woolly episode talks to writer and knitter Esther Rutter, shepherd Axel Linden, medievalist John Lee and cultural historian Alexandra Harris. Esther Rutter is the author of This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History. Shepherd Axel Linden farms in Ostergotland county in the south east of Sweden and...