The Essay

Acclaimed writer A L Kennedy muses on the hell that is other people, today looking at friends. As someone so unable to deal with other people that she works at home, making up imaginary friends, who even then don't always behave, A L Kennedy admits to not necessarily being the best person to dish out advice on relationships. However, in this series she wonders whether she's perhaps been a little h...

Acclaimed writer A L Kennedy muses on the hell that is other people, today looking at 'other generations'. As someone so unable to deal with other people that she works at home, making up imaginary friends, who even then don't always behave, A L Kennedy admits to not necessarily being the best person to dish out advice on relationships. However, in this series she wonders whether she's perhaps bee...

Acclaimed writer A L Kennedy muses on the hell that is other people, kicking off with strangers. In Jean Paul Sartre's Play 'No Exit' one character declares, 'L'Enfer - c'est les autres' - hell is other people, and A L Kennedy has found herself very much behind this idea. As someone so unable to deal with other people that she works at home, making up imaginary friends, who even then don't always...

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art: The series started with a white dress and ends with a pristine white suit ... Author and journalist John Walsh describes the transformative powers of a 'two-piece', worn in turn by a motley bunch of blokes in Los Angeles and celebrated in Ray Bradbury's story 'The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit'. Producer Duncan Minshull

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art: Justine Picardie, author and editor of Harper's Bazaar, considers a whole pile of dresses and jewellery worn by Nicole Diver in Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is The Night. And how Nicole's passion for clothes is mirrored by the author's wife, Zelda. Producer Duncan Minshull

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art: Author and critic Stephen Bayley on a pair of glasses sported brilliantly in the film 8 1/2 by Marcello Mastroianni. So classic and cool are the frames, that we desire them today. Producer Duncan Minshull

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art: Journalist Rachel Cooke remembers reading the best-seller Bonjour Tristesse as a teenager, in which a character's memorable slacks, or 'pedal pushers', said everything about French chic. Or so she thought.

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art: Art historian James Fox describes 'Symphony in White' No. 1, the painting by James Whistler that had everyone guessing about the wearer and the story behind her. Producer Duncan Minshull

Tom Service explores musical creativity and seismic shock in the twenty-first century. By the time the 20th century was 16 years old, music like Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Strauss's Salome, and Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces had sent shockwaves through the tectonic plates of musical and cultural convention. In ripping up the musical rule-book, these pieces were heard to threaten social...

Sarah Walker's chosen seismic moment in new music describes the notorious 1973 concert when Carnegie Hall played host to the radically minimalist Four Organs by Steve Reich. She also looks at how minimalism together with the idea of the composer-performer ensemble, changed the history of 20th century music. The story of new music is peppered with events that have altered the course of musical hist...

In his 1978 album Music for Airports Brian Eno created a new genre of music he named 'ambient music'. The album was designed to ease the tedium of waiting in airports, but ambient music, which Eno said was 'as ignorable as it is interesting', had an influence way beyond that. Ivan Hewett looks into the genesis and subsequent history of ambient music, and explains why Eno's description is not as se...

Sara Mohr-Pietsch's chosen seismic moment in new music looks to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She reflects on the accompanying rise in the popularity of Eastern European composers as a simplicity in musical language emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. The story of new music is peppered with events that have altered the course of musical history. For our New Year New Music season, we asked five Ra...

Robert Worby's selected seismic moment in new music is the first performance of John Cage's controversial 4'33" and its impact on performers and audiences ever since. The story of new music is peppered with events that have altered the course of musical history. For our New Year New Music season, we asked five Radio 3 presenters to each tell the story of one of these "seismic moments". From silenc...

Many people would not consider a ski-jump to be a work of art. But for anthropologist and novelist Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Oslo's Holmenkollen ski-jumping hill was the most important art work in Norway. "The Holmenkollen Hill, white, elegant and majestic, hovered above the city like a large bird about to take flight," says Eriksen. "It was a work of art enjoyed by tens, perhaps hundreds...

Writer and historian Ray Hudson considers how one drawing shows Alaskans caught between the fire and the sea: between the state's turbulent natural beauty and the race to exploit its wealth in raw materials. In Carolyn Reed's "Touching Fire", two women stand on the shores of a great sea, their faces lit by a pile of blazing logs. "This fire for me suggests the commercial exploitation that has hist...

The Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay considers the significance of a painting which symbolises much about her country, once famously described having "too much geography". The great achievement of Canadian painter David Milne, says Hay, was to take the impersonal vastness of the nation's landscape, and make it personal. Milne, who died in 1953, was a modernist painter who lived in a cabin in northe...

Artist and writer Hallgrimur Helgason asks what one Icelandic painting can say in a culture that is primarily verbal. The visual arts got off to a slow start in Iceland, he observes. "Our first ever exhibition of paintings opened in the year 1900. The history of Icelandic art reads like a short story." For a thousand years Icelandic culture had been dominated by the Sagas. When paintbrushes and oi...

Danish writer Mette Moestrup praises the way artist Pia Arke explored the difficult relationship between Denmark and Greenland, its former colony. Arke was the child of a Danish father and a Greenlandic mother. "My pictoral work deals almost exclusively with the silence that surrounds the bonds between Greenland and Denmark," she wrote. "I was myself born into that silence." One of Arke's projects...

Environmental journalist Jason Mark visits Alaska's remote northern rim, and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean at a barbecue with Inuits, he reflects on the impact of our lust for hydrocarbons. Whilst the ice melts beneath them, so the search goes on for oil in these northern parts. He tries to grasp what he sees as the bitter ironies of climate change, confirmed by his encounters with Inuit hunte...

Daniel Kalder conjures up the vast landscapes east of the Urals, where taiga becomes tundra. Siberia is more a state of mind than a place, given how the term encompasses not only the endless forests of the taiga but also that which lies beyond them, where the trees dwindle, diminish and finally give way to the tundra's ceaseless realms of permafrost. As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season Kal...

Geologist and climatologist Gina Moseley led a team of cavers into an unknown system of limestone caverns in northern Greenland in the summer of 2015. Her findings will keep her busy for a long time to come. She describes what it was like wriggling into these remote spaces, knowing they were the first people to have ever done so. This in a place where the rest of the world's population of 7.3 bill...

'Rock talk' is what the travel writer Sara Wheeler recalls of her time cooped up in cold, billowing tents with a horde of geologists well north of Hudson Bay up in Canada's Arctic. That and the unforgettable smell of drying socks. Visiting a geoscientific mapping project whilst researching the circumpolar Arctic had its highs, as well as its lows. Besides the socks was the extraordinary encounter...

As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season the award-winning poet John Burnside explores his fascination with the Sámi landscapes of Finnmark in northern Norway, reflecting on how they're shaped by ice as much as rock. Winner of both the 2011 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Forward Prize, John Burnside has returned time and again to find out more about the resilient culture of the Sámi people o...

With Scotland and all things Scottish very much in the air, acclaimed writer, comedian and now ex-pat, AL Kennedy, continues her reflections on what Scottishness means to her in this week's series of The Essay. Today: Scotland's many hidden identities. Written and performed by AL Kennedy Producer: Justine Willett.

With Scotland and all things Scottish very much in the air, acclaimed writer, comedian and now ex-pat, AL Kennedy, continues her reflections on what Scottishness means to her in this week's series of The Essay. Today: the language of Scotland. Written and performed by AL Kennedy Producer: Justine Willett.