The Essay

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended. These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 No...

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended. These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 No...

"It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts", Michael Powell Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, film critic Peter Bradshaw looks at Powell and Pressburger's sensuous 1947 melodrama, 'Black Narcissus'. Set in a convent...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War through individual works of art 10.The poet Ruth Padel reflects on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son Peter, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914. The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty,...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship 9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring. Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Of her 191...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in their work. BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet, fresh from her experiences in Afghanistan and Syria, introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France, 'Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort'. Wharton, best known for 'The Age Of Innocence' and 'The House of Mirth', was granted unique access to the Western front and...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship 7.Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin For Russians of Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Sovi...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual work. 6. Dr Heather Jones of the LSE reflects on Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu. Completed in 1916 and the work of a French soldier at the front, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions there. It proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art, literature and scholarship 5.Michal Shapira on Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a text written in Vienna in 1915, expressing his dismay as the war progressed. The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna,...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art. Professor David Edgerton of King's College London reflects on the Memorandum on the Neglect of Science, a 1916 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment. In a letter to The Times that year, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science w...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art Cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson reflects on Otto Dix's Der Krieg, a harrowing cycle of prints of wartime experience. In 1924, six years after the end of hostiliies, the painter Otto Dix, who had been a machine-gunner in the German Army, produced his 51 Der Krieg prints. Gruesome, hallucinatory, and terri...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the Frst World War in individual works of art 2.Sarah LeFanu reflects on Rose Macaulay's 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and Others Rose Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, but her biographer, Sarah LeFanu, has long believed that one of her earlier novels, Non-Combatants and Others, is a work of striking originali...

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art 1. BBC Correspondent Allan Little reflects on C.R.W.Nevinson's great 1917 painting, Paths of Glory C.R.W.Nevinson's painting, Paths of Glory, is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters which appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in th...

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits. Simon Calder recalls the small-scale delights of Holguin in Cuba. It' so different to the capital city, but worth the d...

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits. Travel writer Michela Wrong sees beautiful Italianate buildings, and all things Futurist - in Africa. In Asmara, the ca...

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits. Vanora Bennett describes Makhachkala in Russia as 'beyond the mountains', yet these days it's on the brink of enormous...

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits. The novelist Romesh Gunesekera can't wait to tell us about Kunming, which is so unlike any other modern Chinese city......

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits. Novelist Nicholas Shakespeare once lived in Hobart, Tasmania, and reveals to us its convict and whaling past, and the st...

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival 2014, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Poet and musician Twm Morys explores the links between Wales's poetic heritage and Dylan Thomas's writing. Drawing on memories of living in Thomas's hometown of Swanse...

Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Linking up from New York, writer, poet and activist Kevin Powell looks at Dylan Thomas's far-reaching influence on Black American writers, from his own introduction to Thomas's words in the new poetry and spoken-word scene happening in New York in the early 90s...

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. The poet and writer Gwyneth Lewis, whose words are emblazoned over Wales Millennium Centre, takes a personal journey through the language of Dylan Thomas. She argues that t...

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales, in 2014. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Andrew Davies reflects on the influence of Dylan Thomas on a child growing up in Wales in the 1950s, with aspirations to be a writer. A day trip to Rhossili beach...

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Professor John Goodby is one of the world's most respected academic authorities on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Using poems such as the radiant "In the White Giant's Thigh",...

In today's essay, historian Dan Cruikshank explores his passion for Georgian architecture through the work of the Scottish neoclassical architect and interior designer Robert Adam. Producer: Mohini Patel.

In today's essay shedding light on key figures of the Georgian era, the writer and cartoonist Martin Rowson discusses the satiric genius of William Hogarth and his lasting influence on the development of the political cartoon. Producer: Mohini Patel.