The Essay

During his time as a producer on the BBC's landmark radio programme, Henry Swanzy was credited with showcasing some of the 20th century's biggest Caribbean literary voices. His collaborator Gladys Lindo, however, has been forgotten. Academic and writer Jen McDerra finds her hidden in the archives. Seventy-five years ago, the revolutionary Caribbean Voices strand was established on the Overseas Ser...

The poet, folklorist and performer ‘Miss Lou’ made waves on air on both sides of the Atlantic. Coming to study at Rada in London shortly after WWII, her dialect verse was picked up and celebrated on the BBC through radio programmes like Caribbean Voices. For writer Kei Miller, who lovingly recalls the magic her words worked on his mother, she is rightly seen as a hero back home in Jamaica. 75 year...

Arriving in Britain as part of the Windrush Generation, Andrew Salkey made vital contributions to the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme as a presenter, writer and reader of others work. But author of Rainbow Milk, Paul Mendez, knew little about him before coming across a striking image of man at the centre of the mid-20th century's black literary scene. Here he draws on that picture, following Salk...

Trailblazing Jamaican broadcaster Una Marson is rightly celebrated for being the BBC's first black producer and founding an innovative radio programme. But why has her own poetry been neglected? Author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, and herself no stranger to the airwaves, Sara Collins goes in search of Marson's voice. 75 years ago, the revolutionary Caribbean Voices strand was established...

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell. If you've listened to much pop music this century, you've almost certainly heard the voice of Alabama folk singer Vera Hall - though you might not know it. Brilliantly sampled by Moby in his single Natural Blues, Hall's extraord...

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell. If you're asked to think of a groundbreaking singer called McFerrin, it's likely that Bobby springs to mind. But this undisputed vocal genius is in fact following in the footsteps of his father, Robert McFerrin Snr: the first ev...

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell. Tonight we take an unexpected turn, moving away from the world of opera and world-renowned singers into more modest, but no less impactful, territory. Eric Bentley was a renowned theatre critic and writer, but he also performed...

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell. Soprano Leontyne Price was the first African American opera singer who attained true superstar status, becoming one of the most celebrated voices of all time. Peter relives his discovery of her peerless spinto soprano voice thro...

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell. ‘A voice like yours is heard only once in a hundred years’: so said conductor Arturo Toscanini to Marian Anderson, the African American contralto whose concert on Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 193...

Why are mountains linked with uplifting feelings? Noreen Masud's Essay conjures the vast skies of Norfolk and the fantasy of hope felt by Kazuo Ishiguro's characters in his novel Never Let Me Go, the idea of openness described by Graham Swift in his fenland novel Waterland and the feeling of freedom felt by poet Stevie Smith who declared: "I like … flatness. It lifts the weight from the nerves and...

Eight churches were set on fire, and a taste for occult rituals and satanic imagery spiralled into suicide and murder in the Norwegian Black metal scene of the 1990s. Lucy Weir looks at the lessons we can take from this dark story about the way we look at mental health and newspaper reporting. Producer: Emma Wallace Dr Lucy Weir is a specialist in dance and performance at the University of Edinbur...

Darragh McGee takes the long view of the risk-based games we have played throughout history. He explores the experiences of their losers and the moral censure that their losses have attracted; from the 18th-century gentry who learned to lose their fortune with good grace at the gaming tables of Bath to the twenty-first century smartphone user, facing an altogether more lonely ordeal. He considers...

The First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris 1956 staged debates about colonial history which are still playing out in the protests of the Gilets Noirs. New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza leafs through the pages of the journal Présence Africaine, and picks out a short story by Ousmane Sembène tracing the dreams of a young woman from Senegal. Her experiences are echoed in a new exper...

Gold fob seals, Sheffield silver, Mesolithic stone tools - these were some of the discoveries detailed in the 28 papers, books and pamphlets published by a soldier turned archaeologist who began looking at what you might find in the soil in the middle of a World War I battlefield. In her Essay, Seren Griffiths traces the way Francis Buckley used his training for military intelligence to shape the...

Chinatown, New York, in 1890 was described by photo-journalist Jacob Riis as "disappointing." He focused only on images of opium dens and gambling and complained about the people living there being "secretive". But could withholding your emotions be a deliberate tactic rather than a crass stereotype of inscrutability? Xine Yao has been reading short stories from the collection Mrs. Spring Fragranc...

Vivian Maier left over 150,000 negatives when she died in 2009. Her boxes and boxes of unprinted street photographs were stacked alongside shoulder-high piles of newspapers in her Chicago home. The artist Francis Bacon's studio has been painstakingly recreated in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin complete with paint-spattered furniture and over 7,000 items. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester's r...

The potato famine saw a Dublin barracks turned into place where starving people were given six minutes to eat their soup in silence. Tom Scott-Smith researches humanitarian relief and his Essay takes us from the father of the modern soup kitchen in 1790 Bavaria and the meaning of "to rumfordize" to Boston, America a hundred years later and a recipe developed by an MIT Professor, Ellen Swallow Rich...

Blousy chrysanthemums pattern the cotton dress, designed for wearing indoors, that a pregnant Sophie Oliver found herself owning. It helped her come to terms with motherhood. In this Essay, the New Generation Thinker reflects upon the daydreams of Jean Rhys, the way she tried to connect with her daughter Maryvonne through clothes and examples from her fiction where fashion allows dissatisfied fema...

Claude Mackay the Haarlem poet wrote about his experiences of an earthquake in Kingston in 1907. Twenty years earlier the city was putting itself back together following a devastating fire set off by a disgruntled employee. New Generation Thinker Christienna Fryar has been reading through diaries and archives and her Essay suggests that there are lessons we can take about the way societies rebuild...

The dangerous world of an explosives factory is the setting of Inez Holden’s 1944 novel There’s No Story There. A bohemian figure who went on to write film scripts for J Arthur Rank, to report on the Nuremberg Trials, and produce articles published in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon - Holden campaigned for workers’ rights and was close friend of George Orwell, and though she published ten books...

Drugs, sex, violence and thinking about death are at the core of the George Miles cycle of five novels. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester draws the links between the author Dennis Cooper and the radicalism of the Marquis de Sade. Now 68, Cooper's books have been praised for his non naturalistic writing and the texture of teenage thought that he captures in the series, which begins with Closer...

The rights of tribal people, the lives of ordinary workers and the depiction of female desire were amongst the themes explored by the writer Mahasweta Devi. Born in Dhaka in 1926, she attended the school established by Rabindranath Tagore and before her death in 2016 she had published over 100 novels and 20 collections of short stories. Sindhubala is one such story, which traces the tale of a woma...

Dinah Mulock Craik achieved fame and fortune as the author of the 1856 bestselling novel John Halifax, Gentleman. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore reads this rags-to-riches tale of an orphan boy who rises in the world through sheer hard work and sterling character and her essay looks at the way it encapsulates the most cherished values of its period – but, she argues, both it and the autho...

Edogawa Rampo's stories give us a Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding traces the way detective fiction chimed with the modernising of Japan, when the ability to reason and think problems through logically was celebrated, when cities were changing and other arts mourned a lost rural idyll. In The Black Lizard, the hero Akechi Kogorō plays a cat and mouse...

If there's a subject in which England has every right to claim knowledge through experience, it is the subject of rain. Poets, politicians, or labourers, we've lived a literally and metaphorically sheltered life if we haven't felt the chill of rain on our face. In her Rainsong Essay Dr Tess Somervell pulls together the many ways in which rain has been gathered and responded to in her native land,...