Arts & Ideas

Dürer’s whale-chasing and images of rhinos, dogs, saints and himself come into focus, as Rana Mitter talks to Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale, curator Robert Wenley and historian Helen Cowie as exhibitions open at the National Gallery and the Barber Institute in Birmingham. And Philip Hoare explains the links between the Renaissance artist and the visions of Derek Jarman which are on...

A stunt track and farting game are said to be this year's must have toys but what can we learn from the toys children played with in Argentina during the Cold War and from Beatrix Potter's anger at the production of cuddly German Peter Rabbits? And why is the idea of toys coming to life both endearing and terrifying? Matthew Sweet is joined by Jordana Blejmar, Miranda Corcoran, Filippo Yacob and N...

Left unfinished at his death in 2011, the poet worked on his version of the Illiad for over 40 years. As a new audio book of Christopher Logue reading War Music is released, Shahidha Bari and her guests, the writers Marina Warner and Tariq Ali, and Logue's widow, the historian Rosemary Hill, examine the work. Rosemary Hill describes Logue as writing "poems to be read to jazz accompaniment, to be s...

The Fall of Ceaușescu in 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. How did the experience of living through that make its way into fiction? Georgina Harding published In Another Europe: A Journey To Romania in 1990 and followed that with a novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania of the 1950s. Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 and has published novels, poems and essays. In the novel N...

The dining room at Windsor Castle holds one of Grinling Gibbons's carvings, others are found at churches including St Paul's Cathedral and the sculptor developed a kind of signature including peapods in many of his works. As an exhibition at Compton Verney explores his career: Matthew Sweet is joined by the curator Hannah Phillip, the artist and film-maker Alison Jackson who is known for working w...

Vietnam, ecological worries and poverty and suffering inspired the lyrics in Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On. Written as a song cycle from the point of view of a war Vet returning home, it was inspired in part by the letters he was receiving from his brother from Vietnam and from his own questions following the 1965 Watts riots. The Nu Civilization Orchestra is performing their version of...

Kick-starting second-wave feminism with her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was a key member of the Parisian circle of Existentialists alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Her philosophical influences include Descartes and Bergson, phenomenology via Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the assessment of society put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Enge...

Deciphering Dickens's shorthand, how the National Health Service uses graphic art to convey messages, creating a comic strip from Greek myths: these are some of the events taking place at the annual Being Human Festival in which universities around the UK introduce their research in a series of public talks, walks, workshops and performances. Laurence Scott meets some of those taking part and disc...

Cold, civil, world, uprising, conflict, war on terror: Anne McElvoy and her guests Elif Shafak, Christina Lamb, Lincoln Jopp and Hilary Roberts explore the impact of the words we use to describe conflict. The Imperial War Museum has just revamped its "Second World War" galleries with changed dates and a wider focus and Cold War history is being rewritten in the light of current politics. So this y...

Modern theology often treats God as an abstract principle: a mover that doesn't move. But in the Bible, Abraham walks alongside him, Jacob (arguably) spends a night wrestling with him, Moses talks with him face to face, Ezekiel sees him sitting on a throne, and Amos sees him standing in his temple. Jesus is declared the son of God, and declares in turn that he has sat alongside God at his right ha...

Caesars with the wrong beard, faint laurels in the background of a scene from Hogarth's A Rake's Progress and the experiences of the guardian of empty tombs, part of a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates: Rana Mitter and his guests discuss the ghosts of history and depictions of power in art. Classicist Mary Beard has traced the collecting of images of Cae...

A concrete diving suited figure apparently swimming into the gallery floor is one of the sculptures created by Tania Kovats for her current exhibition. Margo Neale Ngawagurrawa has curated the Songlines exhibition of Aborginal art and the importance of their landscape. Huhana Smith works on the Te Waituhi a Nuku project which looks at Māori Coastal Ecosystems and Economies and climate change. Mich...

As the clocks go back, theoretical physicist Fay Dowker, philosopher Nikk Effingham and science fiction writer Una McCormack join Matthew Sweet get to grips with the weirdness of time travel. Fay Dowker is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. Una McCormack's latest book is The Autobiography of Mr Spock. Nikk Effingham is Reader of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham...

Photographing at nightfall, capturing the sense of light in classical music, the charged body of a black Jaguar in the Amazon: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough's guests poet Pascale Petit, photographer Jasper Goodall, literary expert Alexandra Harris and composer Sally Beamish discuss the way twilight has been reflected in their own work and that of writers and painters of the past. Pascale Petit's co...

Child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education are amongst the topics explored in over 20 books by the author Buchi Emecheta. Born in 1944 in an Ibusa village, she lost her father aged eight, travelled to London and made a career as a writer whilst bringing up five children on her own, working by day and studying at night for a degree. Shahidha Bari is joined in the s...

Gardening and George Orwell might not be the first pairing that comes to mind but he uses gardening metaphors in his writing and made many notes about the growth of vegetables and flowers he had planted. Rebecca Solnit discusses how this focus helps us understand his work and that of other writers interested in flowers. Shahidha Bari is also joined by Amy de la Haye, curator and author of 'Ravishi...

Do we value the right ideas? Two concepts come in for close scrutiny in this edition of Free Thinking: Rationality and Tradition. So, what are they, how has our understanding of them changed over time and why do we seem to place such little emphasis on each in our contemporary world? Presenter Anne McElvoy will listening to the arguments as Steven Pinker makes the case for rationality and Tim Stan...

Who complained about Olivier's Othello? Stephen Bourne has been mining the archives to find out who raised questions about Laurence Olivier's blacked up performance in 1964. It's one of the stories he tells in his new book, which also includes memories of meeting performers including Carmen Munroe, Corinne Skinner-Carter and Elisabeth Welch. Nadine Deller hosts a podcast linked to the National The...

Could the modern world be built on the back of our craving for an addictive substance? Matthew Sweet marshals historians Mimi Goodall and Dexnell Peters, and artist and theorist Ayesha Hameed, to see how far we can push the idea that our desire for sugar led to the development of new forms of agriculture, as well as slavery, empire and capitalism, indeed the initiation of a new era in the earth's...

A novel about Matisse, hand glazed ceramic panels, red ochre to Yves Klein blue, the story of female pioneers of colour theory: Laurence Scott is joined by the artist Lubna Chowdhary, author Michèle Roberts and art historians James Fox and Kelly Grovier to celebrate colour and find out more about the history of different colours and the way we look at them. Lubna Chowdhary's exhibition at Peer in...

The National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut were among the many arts institutions forced to close during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. How has this experience changed the running of these galleries and museums? Anne McElvoy talks to: Gabriele Finaldi - Director of the National Gallery in London, whi...

The theme of this year's National Poetry Day is choice. Shahidha Bari is joined by Marvin Thompson, winner of this year's Poetry Society National Poetry Competition, and poet and New Generation Thinker Jake Morris-Campbell to discuss the choices poets make in their work, and the choices audiences make in their reception of poetry too. But is choice an illusion? What does it mean to choose anyway?...

Racial injustice in USA; ghost towns in post-industrial Scotland; how maritime history looks from the viewpoint of Aboriginal Australians and Parsis, Mauritians and Malays; the roots of violence that has plagued postcolonial society. These are topics covered in the books shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Rana Mitter talks to the four authors who are:...

The Full English or Continental? What does our breakfast choice signify and how has it been represented in culture? 60 years on from the opening of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's - taken from Truman Capote's novella - Matthew Sweet and his guests consider a range of examples from monks and nuns breaking the fast, through films and TV series depicting the upper class English choices to the clubs p...

Archiving or hoarding - the mother in Ruth Ozeki's new novel The Book of Form and Emptiness is overwhelmed by the newspaper cuttings she is supposed to categorise for her job. In his new history of indexes, Dennis Duncan tells us about why people were criticised as "index rakers" in the Restoration, and the links between Cicero, the idea of alphabetical ordering and a former Bishop of Lincoln. Sax...