Arts & Ideas

Tony Sewell and Mike Grenier discuss the challenges of education in the 21st century with Philip Dodd and an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival. Can idle curiosity, slow burning passion and a time for reflection be at the heart of our schools? Or does the increasingly rapid pace of technological change make that sort of teaching a luxury at best - or, at worst,...

The former Health Minister, now broadcaster and writer, Edwina Currie; the journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer; and the English teacher and columnist Lola Okolosie discuss the different times of our lives with Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy. Recent scientific research has found that women have the time of their lives at the age of 34. Later though, as they juggle parenthood and work th...

Sathnam Sanghera, Judy Wajcman, Griselda Togobo and Robert Colvile join Radio 3 presenter Matthew Sweet to look at the history of the workplace from factory floor to hot desk to the gig economy and debate whether the merging of workplace and home creates more stress. Bosses have always monitored and changed our working day, clocking staff in and out the factory, analyzing productivity through time...

Three leading historians, Bettany Hughes, Sir Richard J Evans and John Hall join Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd to consider tumultuous times and how we make sense of sweeping change from classical times, through empire building and the industrial revolution to the present day. True revolutions are rare game-changers in the slow unravelling of the human story. Others fizzle out like small show...

In our fast moving, busy world it is hard – if not impossible – to imagine what it would be like to be incarcerated on our own. Captured in Beirut while working as an envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite spent five years as a hostage mostly held in solitary confinement. The writer Erwin James served 20 years of a life sentence in prison before his release in 2004. They discuss the e...

Damon Hill, Tanni Grey-Thompson and former Colonel Lincoln Jopp consider whether the rush of adrenaline makes us think better? It brings us an increase in our strength, heightened senses, a lack of pain and a burst of energy. How is it connected to our expertise in handling crises and what is the aftermath? Joining Radio 3 presenter Rana Mitter and an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage...

George Saunders, Kirsty Logan, Jenn Asworth and Paul McVeigh discuss writing fiction short and long with presenter Matthew Sweet. Acclaimed American short story writer George Saunders talks about travelling in time to explore Abraham Lincoln’s life during the American Civil War when the President’s beloved young son died. These historical events have inspired Saunder’s first novel, Lincoln in the...

Harriet Harman, who has just written her autobiography A Woman’s Work, was first elected a Labour MP in 1982 and has served as the acting leader of her party twice in her career. She talks to Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd about championing women’s rights and sustaining a political career in a fast-changing political landscape. In his final year of office, President Obama talked about how dif...

Can the steady tortoise still beat the rapid hare in today’s world? Our panel, chaired by Free Thinking presenter Anne McElvoy, compare experiences of life in the fast lane with taking the slow route – in business, writing, leisure time. Pinky Lilani is an author, motivational speaker, food expert and women’s advocate, and nominated in the Woman’s Hour Power List. She was appointed a CBE in 2015 f...

“Take control of your sleep,” says Professor Russell Foster CBE, leading neuroscientist and this year’s opening lecturer on the festival theme of the Speed of Life. Sleeping consumes a third of our lifetimes, but Professor Foster believes our sleeping hours are still not properly appreciated. His research shows how our bodies, honed by three million years of evolution, follow a natural clock and n...

New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari talks to Rodney Graham about making music, and art from film, video and photographs. Graham Rigby and Sirkka Liisa Konttinen describe documenting the North East as the Side Gallery celebrates its 40th year of displaying and collecting work from the Amber Film and Photography Collective. Artist Lucy Wood talks about her project Distant Neighbours which highlight...

Edward Luce, Sarah Churchwell, Michael Goldfarb and Michael Prodger join Anne McElvoy. As Grant Wood's painting American Gothic is on show at the Royal Academy in London, while US pop art is displayed at the British Museum, Free Thinking explores the changing idea of The American Dream and America First and the way these ideas are represented in political rhetoric, art and fiction. Michael Prodger...

The Big Short, Liar's Poker and Flash Boys expose the culture of Wall Street trading works. The Blind Side, Coach and Moneyball explore the world of sport. For his latest book ‘The Undoing Project’, Michael Lewis looks at the friendship of two Nobel Prize-winning psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Matthew Sweet talks to Michael Lewis about his investigative methods and how this lates...

The work of scientist Margaret Cavendish, poet Lady Mary Wroth, and interior designer Charlotte Robinson are explored in a programme looking at why women are left out of some historical accounts. Tracy Chevalier's novels include stories inspired by fossil hunter Mary Anning, by early settlers of the American west, by women in the lives of painters including Vermeer and William Blake. Tracy Chevali...

Authors Sarah Dunant and Erica Benner, MP Gisela Stuart and historian Catherine Fletcher join Philip Dodd to explore the continuing relevance of Machiavelli's The Prince which was first circulated in 1513. Sarah Dunant's series of Renaissance novels include Blood and Beauty: the Borgias and In The Name of The Family: A Novel of Machiavelli and The Borgias. Erica Benner has written Be Like the Fox:...

Worlds within worlds - Matthew Sweet talks to filmmaker and author Neil Jordan about his new novel Carnivalesque, which features a hall of mirrors and stolen children. He makes a tour of Flat Time House in south London and speaks to the Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost and curator Gareth Bell-Jones about the house's creator, the pioneering British conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006...

Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, has now written a love story unfolding against today's refugee crisis. He joins Anne McElvoy to explore migration past and present. They're joined in the studio by New Generation Thinkers Preti Taneja and Sam Goodman who share their research and compare notes about Partition in film and fiction. Gurinder Chadha talks about her new film Viceroy'...

New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding meets novelist Yoko Tawada, filmmaker Momoko Ando, Elmer Luke editor of a new series of chapbooks and Japanologist Alex Kerr. Alex Kerr is the author of Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons. Yoko Tawada's books include Memoirs of a Polar Bear which has just been translated into English. The Keshiki Series edited by Elmer Luke includes writing by Yoko Tawada, Ao...

Philip Dodd considers the importance of 'play' in the way our city centres are designed, built, look and feel in the 21st century with architect Stephen Witherford, social anthropologist Clare Melhuish, urban planner Ben van Bruggen, and Jonathan Glancey author of 'What's So Great About the Eiffel Tower?'. Plus, Durham poet Gillian Allnutt discusses a life in words and receiving the Queen's Gold M...

Matthew Sweet talks to poet and writer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, environmental scientist, Jules Pretty and geologist, Andrew Scott, and historians Matthew Kelly and Philip Coupland about Soil and Culture and Survival Stories For some Soil is where they come from, for others it is an object of aesthetic beauty, for most of us it is the means by which we get what we need to live. Poet and writer Eliza...

MP Jess Phillips on life in the public eye. Plus Ned Kelly, Lady Macbeth, one once flesh and blood, the other imagined into being, yet both have done sterling work as ciphers to the human condition. Anne McElvoy talks to Rebecca Daniels, curator of an exhibition marking the centenary of Australia’s great myth-maker, the artist Sidney Nolan and to David Taylor, curator of an exhibition at the Royal...

Matthew Sweet visits Hull - the city where he grew up - and seeks out Basil Kirchin's sound world, Richard Bean's version of Hull during the Civil War and the re-opened Ferens Art Gallery where he used to spend Saturday mornings. You can hear more of Basil Kirchin's music for films in tonight's Late Junction which follows at 11pm and Radio3 is recording Mind on the Run featuring Goldfrapp's Will G...

Its 500 years since the German friar, Martin Luther, challenged the authority of the Pope and sparked the Reformation. The violent upheavals that followed have tended to obscure his character, his beliefs and his legacy. Nowadays when we think of him we usually conjure up the image of a jowly zealot. To uncover a truer likeness Anne McElvoy was joined at the London School of Economics by Luther's...

Dubbed the "godfather of British pop art", Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) is the subject of an exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery. Philip Dodd and his guests art historians Richard Cork and Judith Collins, philosopher Barry Smith and writer Iain Sinclair discuss Paolozzi's legacy. Plus an interview with American philosopher Professor Daniel Dennett Co-Director Center for Cognitive Studies at...

Neil Gaiman on his enduring attraction to the world of giants, gods and rainbow bridges of Norse myths and why he's produced his own version; plus research into the ugly side of Valentines from classical times to the 19th century with Annebella Pollen and Edmund Richardson, and, as the RSC prepares to bring Snow in Midsummer to the stage, the first of a planned series of Chinese classics, Frances...