Arts & Ideas

Margaret Atwood, Arnaldur Indriadason and MJ McGrath talk to Rana Mitter about crime fiction and cold settings as part of Radio 3's Northern Lights Season. It's 100 years since Freud published his seminal paper The Unconscious. Rana Mitter and guests New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari, psychotherapist Mark Vernon and Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan - author of It's All in Your Head - discuss the role noti...

Long Joanne Harris, the multi-million selling author of Chocolat, discusses her new novel, The Gospel of Loki, inspired by the Norse god of trickery, mischief and deception, a shape-shifter whose cultural manifestations range from 13th-century legends to Marvel comics and video games. She’s joined by Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough. They debate the enduring power of Nor...

Anne McElvoy discusses Mein Kampf coming out of copyright with Ben Barkow of the Wiener Library in London, Heinrich von Berenberg – a publisher based in Berlin and Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War and a professor of Modern European History at Oxford. Photographer Anna Fox and painter Chantal Joffe discuss an exhibition of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs at the Victoria and Albert Mu...

Philip Dodd and New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding review the newly translated novel from Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe; historian Naoko Shimazu and curator Mizuki Takahashi discuss the chequered history of the concept of Cool Japan; British Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam reviews the new exhibition Artist and Empire at Tate Britain. Artist Hew Locke and curator and art historian Sarah T...

Italian author Umberto Eco is in conversation with Matthew Sweet. Eco is the author of essays, novels, childrens' books and criticism including his best-selling story The Name of the Rose. His new novel Numero Zero explores the lure of conspiracy theories and the power of the media.

Do men and women have different attitudes to rule breaking? With changing ideas about gender, can we say that our minds are wired differently? Helen Fraser, head of the Girls' Day School Trust said recently that 'being the compliant girl is never going to get you anywhere'. What are the rules today for relationships and getting on in society? Is it time to throw out received ideas and challenge th...

Every day we read lurid headlines about alcohol abuse and the consequences of binge drinking for the young at home and abroad. But a deeper look reveals a complicated picture of alcohol use in Britain. Champagne is still linked with celebration, while pubs are closing up and down the country. University freshers' weeks are adjusting to reflect the increasing number of students who are teetotal - b...

"By 2029 computers will have emotional intelligence and be as convincing as people". Ray Kurzweil, Google's Director of Engineering, predicts this scenario – also explored in Channel 4's recent hit drama, Humans. So what are the skills needed for the 21st century workplace and do humans have them? According to Paul Mason, TV journalist and author of PostCapitalism, we face seismic change in part d...

Actress Juliet Stevenson - whose work on theatre, film and TV includes Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Village and the BAFTA award winning Truly Madly Deeply – comes to Sage. She’s joined on stage by Natalie Abrahami, who directed Stevenson in an acclaimed recent revival of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Young Vic in London. They ask: how easy is it to break rules in the theatre? The text of a p...

What is going on inside Britain's families? From three-parent families and surrogacy, to stepfamilies - the fastest rising type of home in the UK - the days of the 'traditional' family are apparently over. The divorce rate in the UK stands at 42%, the highest in the EU, yet nearly 75% of us apparently consider ourselves to be happy with our lives at home. So what are the new rules of family life?...

Angela Carter's work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without equal and without rival'. The award winning author of novels including The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children and Nights at the Circus was a pioneer of English magic realism who re-imagined fairy tales and explored boundary breaking and rebelling against the confines of society. Her non- fiction book The Sadeian Woman explored the ideolog...

The 18th century was the age of politeness - and of bawdiness. Fine manners and fine art co-existed with earthy attitudes to sex and the body, even in the most elevated circles. Curator and art historian Danielle Thom of the Victoria and Albert Museum explains why classical sculpture, the high point of 18th-century artistic taste, had a surprising influence on rude, lewd and erotic prints; and wha...

The brutal treatment of Jews in Vichy France during the Second World War that culminated in their roundup and deportation is widely known. But is this the only way to consider Jewish life at this time? Focusing on the Jewish Scouting Movement. Daniel Lee from the University of Sheffield reveals the possibility of coexistence between the Vichy regime and the Jews, exposing a world of Jewish creativ...

From a breakfast drink to start the day to the treatment of bullet-wounds, beer has been a constant accompaniment to British life for centuries. Nowhere was this truer than in Imperial India where beer played a central role in colonial commerce, medicine and leisure. Sam Goodman of the University of Bournemouth explores this colonial drinking culture and how many of its habits have lingered to the...

The 1667 recipe book by Sir Kenelm Digby featured tea with eggs brought from China, sugared mallow-leaves that cured gonorrhea and ‘pan cotto' cooked by Roman Cardinals. Digby had journeyed far and wide to collect his dishes, feasting with pirate chieftains in Algiers and munching melons in the eastern Mediterranean. Joe Moshenska of the University of Cambridge explores Kenelm Digby’s culinary tra...

Science progresses by breaking the rules of the past. New observations need new theories to explain them. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity made sense of observations that Newton’s Laws of Motion could not. But how can we distinguish between the brilliant ideas that change our view of the world and those that are plain wrong? And does that make science too cautious to try out new ideas? Joining Free...

The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and this year's general election led to a passionate debate about nationhood and nationalism. But not for the first time. Kylie Murray of the University of Oxford discusses the ways in which feelings surrounding Anglo-Scottish relations and visions of Scottish national identity reached a peak of imaginative, sometimes intemperate expression in 15th-century...

In the hunger for new ideas, are we forgetting the hard-earned lessons of the past? Rana Mitter chairs a discussion recorded in front of an audience at this year's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead . James Rebanks is the Cumbrian shepherd sharing his farming knowledge with thousands of followers on his twitter account @herdyshepherd1 His book A Shepherd’s Life has been reprinted several tim...

Thousands of soldiers fought in kilted regiments during the First World War. But what kind of cultural identity was adopted with the kilt? How far was it pervaded by a fatalistic sense of the Celt who ‘went forth to the war but … always fell’, or by the memory of the Highland Clearances? Peter Mackay of the University of St Andrews explores poetry and first-hand accounts from the war to find out....

For nearly 200 years, the name Cunard has evoked glamorous images of sleek cruise ships and transatlantic sea travel. Yet the legacy of the Cunard family's black sheep, the disinherited granddaughter Nancy Cunard, is less well-known. Sandeep Parmar of the University of Liverpool explores the tragic life of this scion of a wealthy family who became a revolutionary poet, publisher, modernist muse, a...

From TV talent contests such as The Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing to the pressures of school exams and job interviews – competition is at the heart of the way we live our lives. What can we learn from sports stars whose lives are geared to cultivating a healthy competitive instinct? Is the desire to be successful bringing out the best in us - or the worst? Constructively and co-...

Widows are exceptions to every rule”, Charles Dickens tells us in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837. Eighty years later, in 1917, a tune called “Widows are Wonderful” rings through the theatres and homes of a war-stricken Britain. “Widow! That great, vacant estate!” writes poet Sylvia Plath after the Second World War as the country grieves in silence. Nadine Muller of Liverpo...

'We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further'. Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" created waves when it was first published nearly 10 years ago. Rebutting religions of all kinds Dawkins became one of 'the New Atheists', a group of thinkers including Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. He first came to publ...

Are the rules of drama increasingly influencing the way the world is presented to us? TV news bulletins now employ chapter headings, dramatisations and music. Hollywood transforms real life stories into dramatized blockbusters at a dizzying rate. As it becomes harder to separate fact from fiction are we overvaluing the ‘real’? In this new multimedia environment, do we understand what the new rules...

For over 400 years it's been claimed that the first Medici Duke of Florence was mixed race, his mother a slave of African descent. Catherine Fletcher of Swansea University asks if this extraordinary story about the 16th-century Italian political dynasty could be true. Or do the tales of Alessandro de' Medici tell us more about the history of racism and anti-racism than about the man himself? The N...