The Essay

What does wearing a suit say? New Generation Thinker Sarah Goldsmith's Essay introduces an audience at York Festival of Ideas to Beau Brummel and others who have understood the mixed messages of suits through time. England football coach Gareth Southgate's pitch-side waistcoats and 007's exquisite collection of Tom Ford suits all make one thing clear: sweatpants are out and the formal man's suit,...

Queerness might not be the most obvious association with soldiering, but New Generation Thinker Tom Smith's Essay argues that although the East German army had a reputation for unbending masculinity, it's surprising how central queerness was to the enterprise. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. Brutality along the Berlin Wall, monumental Soviet-style parades, rows of saluting...

Lockdown brought beards and the question of to shave or not to shave to the fore. New Generation Thinker Alun Withey looks at what made 18th-century men shave off centuries of manly growth. Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. You can hear audience questions from the event as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. To be clean-shaven was the mark of a C18 gentleman, bea...

Napoleon inspired much fiction and non-fiction. New Generation Thinker Emma Butcher looks at the publishing phenomenon that was the traumatised Napoleonic Redcoat - Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. The Napoleonic Wars, like all wars, had their celebrities. Chief among them, Wellington and Napoleon, whose petty rivalry and military bravado ensured their status as household...

Daniel Hahn considers language in the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, and how two meeting cultures communicate In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was writte...

Alys Conran reflects on the theme of isolation in Robinson Crusoe and the act of reading it as a novelist In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the...

Having enjoyed it as an eight-year-old boy, Alex Wheatle re-reads Robinson Crusoe and reflects on its themes of imperialism and slavery. In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was w...

Horatio Clare explores the castaway myth, looking at what happens to the soul and mind in the great spaces and on actual desert islands. In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was w...

Fiona Stafford explores ‘The Strange, Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, looking at what Crusoe the narrator was most surprised by, and the stranger aspects of the book In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still reson...

Poet and wild swimmer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett joins Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough for an inspirational dip in the chilly River Avon. Elizabeth-Jane's latest book, The Grassling, is a nature memoir about her father, his illness and her attempts to reconnect with the fields and rivers that sustained and moulded his family for generations. Her poetry collection Swims describes a series of wild swims ar...

Stand knee-deep in a river and consider the energy flow. Water presses against you, light reflects upon the surface. What else can you feel? Helen Czerski of University College London views the Thames with the eyes of a physicist. At low tide she takes Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough for a wade through the surprisingly clean waters separating Brentford from Kew Gardens. How would the river look if em...

For Feargal Sharkey the perfect cast is a lifelong obsession. It's the moment when man and river exist in perfect harmony. It's a passion he shares with generations of artists before him on the chalk streams of Hertfordshire. Dame Juliana Berners, Prioress of St Mary of Sopwell wrote one of the earliest books on the etiquette of hunting, hawking and fishing in the 14th century. Her work influenced...

On the banks of the River Medway, Nicola White is in search of artistic inspiration. Driftwood, perhaps? A Victorian poison bottle or a Roman pot? In the second of a series of Essays on British rivers Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough joins the mudlark artist as she combs through mud and shingle. The Medway rises in the South Downs and passes through sleepy Maidstone but it starts to get really interes...

Gaelic songs and stories burst with mythical water creatures, from seductive kelpies and selkies to woeful waterfall banshees. In the first of five Essays from the banks of British rivers, folk singer Julie Fowlis guides Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough through a watery Highland underworld. Producer: Alasdair Cross

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde, Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly...

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde, Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly...

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde, Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly...

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde, Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly...

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde, Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly...

You don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the d...

You are a liberal who opposes art being banned. But would a movie that calls for you to be killed change your view of censorship? This was the quandary facing Salman Rushdie when filmmakers in Pakistan produced a James Bond-style action thriller in which a trio of Islamist guerrillas are inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa to track down and kill the author of The Satanic Verses. In the year of...

Was George Orwell’s wife his forgotten collaborator on one of the most famous books in the world? Lisa Mullen takes a new look at Animal Farm from the perspective of the smart and resourceful Eileen Blair – and uncovers a hidden story about sex, fertility, and the politics of women’s work. Why are some contributions less equal than others? Lisa Mullen is Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at W...

Commercial surrogacy – the practice of paying another woman to carry a pregnancy to term – has been criticised for being exploitative, particularly when poorer women are recruited. Even if these women were paid more, and the exploitation element were reduced, would unease remain about “renting out” your body in this way? This essay from New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn will explore what, if any...

Have you ever been somewhere you shouldn't? In this essay, New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson creeps around, and explains how trespassers in the early-twentieth century helped create new attitudes to nature by stepping off the path. Descriptions of late-nineteenth century trespass and rock-climbing show how different experiences of nature led to fights with landowners and gamekeepers for the righ...

Daisy Black looks at religious imagery, food, anti-Semitism and product placement in medieval mystery plays. Eaten by characters, dotted around the stage as saliva-prompting props, or nibbled by audiences - a medieval religious drama is glutted with food but Christianity’s vision of God as spiritual nutrition could provoke horror and fear as well as hunger. We'll hear about some of the gristly, cr...