The Essay

Decluttering is all the rage, as many of us are weighed down by stuff. Joanna Robertson lives in Paris, where apartments are small. So how do they go about getting rid of their clutter? Or do they? In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopa...

Why is it so hard to get rid of stuff? Why does it have such a hold on us, yet get us down? In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna Robertson took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopaholics but to all of us. It's the seemingly inescapable curse of 21st century consumerism - howe...

Why does stuff have such an emotional hold on us? Why can't we just let it go? In a previous series for The Essay, Joanna Robertson took us to some of the international cities she's lived in and told us the Shopping News. Now, she takes on the consequences. Stuff Happens - not just to shopaholics but to all of us. It's the seemingly inescapable curse of 21st century consumerism - however hard we t...

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Robert Frost's poem 'Design'. Design I foun...

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Sylvia Plath's poem 'Cut'. Cut For Susa...

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Elizabeth Bishop's 'Large Bad Picture'....

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Michael Donaghy 'The Hunter's Purse'. T...

Don Paterson is an award-winning poet, editor and teacher, but for all his technical ability and the recognition that has been paid to his work Paterson is acutely aware of awe and sometimes envy when he looks at the work of other writers. Here he applies his wit and skills of technical analysis to discussing the five poems he wishes he had written. Tonight, Seamus Heaney's 'The Underground' . The...

Since August 1947 the events surrounding Partition have been a staple of art, music, drama and fiction. Writer and spiritual teacher John Siddique draws on his Indian and Irish roots as he reflects on what Partition means to him. He reflects on the 70-year cultural legacy, identifying patterns and drawing lessons from literature, film and poetry. As the British withdrew after 300 years the subcont...

A heartfelt meditation on the (in)visibilty of gay women. Writer and theatremaker Stella Duffy describes growing up lesbian in New Zealand in the 60s and 70s and considers what the 40 year expatriate 'marriage' of novelist, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, author of The Alice B Toklas Cookbook, means to her. Part of Gay Britannia, a season of programming marking the 50th anni...

Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth and Thomas Paine were amongst the guests invited to the dinner table of publisher Joseph Johnson. Daisy Hay explores the pivotal role played in the early history of English Romanticism by a maker of books who was also a maker of dreams, who invited his workers to eat alongside leading thinkers of the day, and whose publication The Analytical...

What does the press reporting of a story of high society scandal and assassination from the reign of Charles II tell us about fake news, political bias and the draw of a saucy headline. New Generation Thinker Thomas Charlton researches religious and political disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is currently based at Dr Williams's Library in London. His essay, recorded in front...

Jonathan Healey, of the University of Oxford, argues that the way people resisted unpopular governments changed dramatically from the 16th to the 21st centuries. As states grew in power, flight was no longer an option, so discontented people were forced to imagine revolution. Today, escape is once again possible, to safe online spaces which act like medieval forests, places which the government ca...

From the Persian poet Rumi through the Old Testament Israelites to the political protests of the suffragettes, New Generation Thinker Christopher Kissane, of the London School of Economics, explores the history of fasting. Eating and avoiding hunger are our most basic goals, yet for thousands of years people have deliberately denied themselves food as an act of faith or conscience. What is the his...

From Romantic notions of the natural nursing mother to Victorian fears of vampirism to modernist associations between breastfeeding and the working class, Corin Throsby, from the University of Cambridge, tracks the political and social implications of how we have chosen to feed our babies over the past 200 years. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas in 2017. New Generation Think...

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the works of five Great War artists. Tonight, Santanu Das explores the poetic world of Bristol-born Isaac Rosenberg. Less familiar today than his contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Rosenberg described - as they did - the horror of war close-up: "The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched, / The...

Before the First World War, Mata Hari's elaborate and provocative performances made her body a sensation. The artist, dancer and style icon graced La Scala, the Folies Bergère and the exclusive private salons of Europe. She was "the toast of Paris," in a skin coloured body stocking with bejewelled breast cups, enchanting, enthralling and scandalous. In this series looking at the impact of the Firs...

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the work of five Great War artists. Tonight, Joanna Bourke on Siegfried Sassoon and his celebrated protest against the conflict. "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." So wrote the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon i...

Tarek Osman explores the words of Gertrude Bell, in this series looking at the impact of the First World War on great artists and thinkers. Gertrude Bell, explorer, archeologist, diplomat, linguist, writer and spy was no ordinary woman. The first woman ever to be awarded a first-class degree in modern history from Oxford, she went on to become a groundbreaking mountaineer and have a Swiss peak nam...

Five writers explore the year 1917 through the works of five diverse creative minds of the Great War, and the experiences that shaped them. In tonight's Essay, the writer and academic Heather Jones looks at French artist Marcel Duchamp's controversial 'readymade' that he entitled 'Fountain', but which was, in effect, simply a piece of common-or-garden, off-the-shelf sanitary-ware, a men's urinal....

Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon are the odd couple of the Reformation, inseparable in the religious revolution they inaugurated, and yet in personality chalk and cheese - and there's no doubt that it's Luther who is the cheese: volatile, colourful, impassioned; ripening majestically but also suddenly going off, like one of those goats' cheeses in the middle of France that could easily double...

Johann Walther was adopted out of poverty as a boy and could sing like a canary. Initially taking a series of courtly composer and cantor roles, he jumped at the chance to edit the people's first Protestant hymn book. It's a great untold story - the hymns of Luther and Walther began a rich musical tradition in Protestant Germany which changed the musical world. Without Luther and Walther we would...

Dr Charlotte Woodford, fellow in German at Cambridge University, tells the story of the woman who won Martin Luther's heart. If ever there were a power behind the throne, none was stronger than Katharina von Bora. Known as 'The Lutherine', this former nun found her true vocation as Luther's 'Power-Frau,' arguing the finer points of Theology with him as well as raising their six children and provid...

Thomas Muntzer was a fire and brimstone apocalyptic preacher and reformer who was more popular than Martin Luther in his day. As leader of 'The Peasants' War' in 1525 he is hailed as the forerunner of Communist revolutionaries. Though not a communist himself, he had no respect for the social hierarchy - neither princes, dukes, bishops nor civic dignitaries and this was based on his belief that eve...

Martin Luther is a larger than life figure, a difficult hero who escapes any pigeon-holes you might try to stuff him into. Over the last five hundred years he has been made into a nationalist hero, the founder of the German language, the original pater familias of the pious parsonage, the man who ushered in the modern era. He was a complex character, an angry anti-Semite who made enemies easily; h...