Arts & Ideas

As Mexico takes centre stage at London's Book Fair Matthew Sweet speaks to two of the country's award-winning writers - Valeria Luiselli and Francisco Goldman. Playwright Simon Stephens talks about transplanting Carmen into a modern urban idiom. And Christopher Doyle: No Glass Twice as Big as It Needs to Be - the cinematographer and film director has his first solo art show in Europe opening at Lo...

Rana Mitter discusses a new model for understanding the brain, with researcher and writer Norman Doidge. Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi talks about his latest film - Foreign Body - and a new touring festival of classic Polish cinema selected by Martin Scorsese. Activist Srdja Popovic is a proponent of non-violent protest and was a founder of the student movement Otpor! which helped to brin...

This evening Free Thinking is devoted to one of the pinnacles of Victorian England – Anthony Trollope’s massive novel The Way We Live Now. To examine the book and its social and historical context Philip is joined by Jerry White, Simon Heffer, Kathryn Hughes and Jonathan Myerson. .

With the publication of the widest survey of sexual behaviour since the Kinsey Report, Matthew Sweet picks apart the data with its author, David Spiegelhalter, and New Generation Thinker, Fern Riddell, author of The Victorian Guide to Sex. Nick Broomfield discusses his latest documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, about a serial killer in LA which exposes the deep divide still evident in America...

Patricia Duncker talks to Anne McElvoy about her new novel which imagines George Eliot's relationship with her German publishers, Max and Wolfgang Duncker. Adrienne Mayor discusses the strength of women with Professor Melvin Konner. As an exhibition featuring empty Sansovino frames opens at The National Gallery in London, Anne speaks to Head of Frames Peter Schade about their history and Dame Harr...

In this programme about private and public art, Philip Dodd talks to Nicholas Penny, the outgoing Director of the National Gallery and Budi Tek, global art collector and private museum owner.

As Ridley Scott's science fiction extravaganza, Blade Runner is re-released, Matthew Sweet is joined by the critics Roger Luckhurst and Sarah Churchwell, and by the philosopher Max de Gaynesford, to discuss its enduring significance. And Matthew talks to Eric Jarosinski, a writer who claims he found his creative voice on twitter under the name @NeinQuarterly, and to linguist and medievalist Kate W...

Philip Dodd continues his exploration of the culture wars by investigating the tension between cosmopolitanism and the nation state and how this is playing out in Europe. He speaks to Dr Ayça Çubukçu from the LSE, writer Agata Pyzik, Phillip Blond from think-tank ResPublica and Dr Andrew Dowling from the University of Cardiff.

Philip Dodd talks to one of the icons of what used to be called the counter-culture, Peggy Seeger. Her voice and career are emblematic of a life lived against the establishment grain.

In the first of three programmes exploring fractures and faultlines in contemporary society, Philip Dodd and guests discuss the tension between secularism and religion. With philosopher and atheist Daniel Dennett, sociologist of religion Linda Woodhead, and the writer and 'futurist' thinker Ziauddin Sardar.

Anne McElvoy hears from young people involved in the BBC's School Report Day. School children who have come to north-east England from other countries describe what home means. Writer Bidisha and sociologist David Ralph discuss how migrants and refugees construct a sense of home. Also, ahead of a new exhibition, British Museum curator Ian Jenkins and classicist Edith Hall discuss ideas of beauty i...

Does the discipline of Sociology still have a role to play in the 21st century? To examine where we are at with Sociology in 2015, Philip Dodd is joined by three leading practitioners, the LSE's Richard Sennett, Frank Furedi from the University of Kent, and Monika Krause at Goldsmiths, as well as the journalist and author, Peter Oborne.

Matthew Sweet talks to Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilisation and Lisa Appignanesi about how different cultures around the world and through time have dealt with what we might call madness, insanity or the loss of reason. Matthew Beaumont also presents his history of an ancient crime but one still on the statute books of Massachussetts - Night Walking. Alongside, Deborah Longworth with a...

Anne McElvoy looks at what we mean by the idea of fairness. She also talks to novelist Tom McCarthy who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel C. His new work Satin Island follows a man working for a consultancy trying to sum up our age - who wonders whether there is a logic which holds the world together.

An extended interview in which Philip Dodd is joined by novelist, screenwriter and dramatist Hanif Kureishi. He discusses subjects including immigration, sexuality and mortality.

Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar and Hans Ulrich Obrist explain the Extreme Present to Matthew Sweet. Their co-authored book The Age of Earthquakes builds on Marshall McLuhan's analysis of how technology influenced culture in the 1960s and is described as "a new history of how we are feeling in the world today when the future seems to be happening much faster than we ever thought." Also, Mathematici...

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talks to Anne McElvoy about his latest book – The Buried Giant. And as two separate productions of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, are performed on stage in London – the playwright Roy Williams and the Greek scholar and translator, Oliver Taplin assess the enduring appeal of the play.

Churchill famously commented that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' Rana Mitter and his guests David Runciman, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge; Duncan Kelly, Reader in Political Thought, University of Cambridge; Patricia Thornton, University Lecturer in the Politics of China, University of Oxford and...

John Gray talks to Matthew Sweet about why the Aztecs might have had a better understanding of freedom than we do and other human illusions about meaning and progress. Also we consider how artistic movements become successful as the National Gallery stages an exhibition devoted to Paul Durand-Ruel, the french art dealer who discovered the Impressionists. Matthew talks to National gallery curator C...

Rana Mitter talks to Tony Harrison, the winner of the biennial David Cohen prize - one of our most prestigious literary awards. Two other writers join Rana - Ru Freeman and Romesh Gunesekara. Both from Sri Lanka and both on the programme to discuss the role of the writer in a country recovering from civil war. Finally, as part of the BBC's Get Creative initiative, the mathematician, Marcus du Saut...

Philip Dodd looks at the value of the arts with the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the EU, biologist Anne Glover,and discusses the notion of belonging and social identity in Europe with Dutch author Tommy Wieringa, Hungarian film director Kornel Mondruczo and academics Eric Kaufmann and Vesna Popovski.

As this year's Paul Foot Awards are announced for campaigning and investigative journalism, Anne McElvoy reports from the ceremony and talks to this year's winner. Anne also talks to the Director of the London School of Economics, the sociologist Dr Craig Calhoun about the things that inspired him to take up a career in the social sciences. The artist Alinah Azadeh talks about her latest project,...

Matthew Sweet talks to the Israeli novelist David Grossman about his book Falling Out of Time which mixes poetry, drama and fiction to explore the emotion of grief and loss. His own son died in 2006. He is also the author of non fiction books including Death as a Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement. They discuss his fiction and the part he hopes it can play in the discourse about Israel...

Rana Mitter discusses Buddhism, in Western therapy and in Eastern politics with psychotherapist Mark Vernon, Rupert Gethin - Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and co-director of the Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol, Dr Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen expert in religion and politics in Contemporary Japan and Christopher Harding – Cul...

It's three hundred years since the death of Antoine Galland, a French orientalist and archaeologist, whose translation of The One Thousand and One Nights kick-started its adventures in the West via the works of English orientalists, Richard Burton, Edward Lane and John Payne. Philip Dodd asks a panel of experts on these hugely influential tales, plus story-tellers who continue to wrest new life ou...