The Essay

Tom Shakespeare challenges stereotypical ideas about creativity and disability, by celebrating five disabled artists, discussing how their impairments fuelled their genius and demonstrating the variety and achievement of disabled lives. Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri became visually impaired in childhood and went on to become the most famous poet in the Arab world, but is still barely known in Britain. He w...

One hundred years ago the First World War set the course for the modern world: for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with...

One hundred years ago the First World War set the course for the modern world: for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with...

One hundred years ago the First World War set the course for the modern world: for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with...

One hundred years ago the First World War set the course for the modern world: for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with...

Christian Carion, Heroism and the Christmas Truce Christian Carion, Heroism and the Christmas Truce One hundred years ago the First World War set the course for the modern world: for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part i...

Oscar-winning screen writer Frederic Raphael reads the final essay in his new series about living abroad across Europe, this time in Greece. It's the early 1960s, and the country is as yet undisturbed by mass tourism. As Raphael travels to a remote island, echoes of the classical world rub up against the realities of post civil war division, and a village life which has barely changed for centurie...

Part four sees the writer journey to early 1960s Italy, where he mixes ancient Roman history, with a very personal experience of some of the key players in the Italian film industry.

Oscar-winning screen writer Frederic Raphael continues his essay series about living abroad across Europe. In programme three Raphael gives an off-the-beaten-track perspective on Franco's Spain, during the late 1950s, where he lived in a small artistic community and witnessed the impact of grand politics on Spanish village life.

'Every man has two countries, his own and France' says Frederic Raphael, quoting Thomas Jefferson, as he begins part two of his essay series about living abroad across Europe. In this programme he explores his life as a young writer in the post-war Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre, and remembers his time living in the Cote d'Azur before it was a popular tourist destination.

Oscar-winning writer Frederic Raphael reads the first of his essay series about living abroad throughout Europe between the 1940s and 60s, beginning with the first foreign country he ever lived in: England. Uprooted from New York City as a young boy, the writer paints a child's-eye portrait of wartime Britain, with all its class conscious peculiarities, but seen through the eyes of a young America...

The last of five personal essays on the voice and radio. Broadcaster Fi Glover on how radio voices make the global local and the local global. Fi Glover has worked in almost every job that radio offers and is currently presenting the Listening Project on BBC Radio 4 - a programme in which her voice hardly appears whilst the voices of its contributors (ordinary people often at corners of their live...

The fourth of five personal essays on the voice and radio. BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Roger Phillips describes his job as the listening anchorman of the station's daily phone-in programme. What is is like to be the in the middle of a city as it talks to and of itself every day of the week? How does the city's voice manifest itself in the way it talks? Are there as many talkers in Newcastle or...

The third of five personal essays on the voice and radio. Former BBC journalist and now media professor David Hendy explores how, in the early years of radio, the voices coming through the airwaves were heard and regarded. Why did a heard voice carry more swaying power than written words, why did a radio voice carry - so experiments and test showed - even more potency? How did radio become a tool...

The second of five personal essays on the voice and radio. Journalist and broadcaster Olivia O'Leary describes her autobiography in radio from Irish nuns at her boarding school hunting down wicked wirelesses to thoughts on the speed of the Irish voice by comparison with the English. Olivia O'Leary has worked in radio for decades and is well known - as a voice - for her penetrating yet tactful inte...

The first of five essays on the voice and radio - all delivered by seasoned broadcasters and practitioners. Actor Samuel West explores the art of performance and declarative language. How should an actor speak? What is the best way to read poetry on the radio? How does radio drama get by without images? Are the pictures really better? Recorded in front of an audience at the British Academy in Lond...

Serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson celebrates the simple but powerful messages of the self-help classic, "The Magic of Thinking Big" by David J Schwartz." "His book is not great literature," he admits. "Indeed, it is popular psychology at its most obvious." However, Johnson defends its power as "basic but also profound" - and it has influenced his huge success with a series of household name busines...

Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman on how Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" legitimised her need to be a writer. She writes how the novel was "about the triumph of the human spirit". Reading it for the first in her early 20s it "blasted open a door which I thought was locked and barred to me. Actually it blasted open a door which I didn't appreciate even existed. A door that could lead to...

Actor/director Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicite describes how John Berger's "And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos" plays with ideas of connection, memory, narrative and mortality which are essential to his theatrical work. "Berger digs in the vulnerable earth of human experience, and joins the fragments he uncovers with an eye as sure as an astronomer, a gesture as gentle as a carpenter...

Singer Tracey Thorn describes how she as a rebellious teenager she seized on the feminist classic "The Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer. "It seemed brand new, and it spoke to me of things I'd long thought and felt without ever having words or names for," she says. She explains how the book was a deep influence on the lyrics she wrote for her band Everything but the Girl. But now she is herself a m...

Former Home Secretary Alan Johnson describes how "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens mirrored his poor and troubled childhood in West London. After the death of his mother, the discovery of this great novel gave him the hope to build a happy and secure adult life. "I was thirteen years old and had read lots of books but nothing like this complex saga; so moving, so emotionally intertwined. I lo...

Gabriele Ferrario of the Genizah Research Unit reveals the most secretive side of the Genizah collection: the manuscripts relating to alchemy and magic. The Cairo Genizah is a treasure trove of manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo that portrays over 800 years of community life. Rediscovered in the 19th century, this vast communal paper-bin contained hundreds upon thousands of scrap...

Daniel Davies of the Genizah Research Unit sheds light on three very different lives by reading the private documents of the legendary philosopher Maimonides, community leader Solomon ben Judah and Indian Ocean trader Abraham ben Yiju, They are all from the Genizah papers. The Cairo Genizah is a treasure trove of manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo that portrays over 800 years of...

Melonie Schmierer-Lee of the Genizah Research Unit reveals the fortunes of women in medieval Cairo by looking at marriage and divorce deeds, as well as some incredibly detailed pre-nuptial agreements. The Cairo Genizah is a treasure trove of manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo that portrays over 800 years of community life. Rediscovered in the 19th century, this vast communal pape...

Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit, shows how private letters between medieval merchants reveal an international trading network that united Jews, Muslims and Christians across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The Cairo Genizah is a treasure trove of manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo that portrays over 800 years of community life. Rediscovered in the 19th...