Arts & Ideas

Matthew Sweet discusses protests like the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, 1985's Battle of the Beanfield and the acid house movement with guests Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, novelist Tony White, editor Paul Cronin and writer Tessa DeCarlo. The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White is available nowA Time To Stir: Columbia '68 edited by Paul Cronin is out nowProducer: Debbie Kilbride

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough explores the uncanny possibilities of the In Between with the neuroscientist Dean Burnett, award-winning poet Vahni Capildeo, artist Alexandra Carr, writer and walker of London and other wastelands, Iain Sinclair, and the philosopher, Emily Thomas. How do our brains and bodies react in the In Between spaces of the airport lounge or the station platform where we're waiting to move on but temporarily in stasis and why have so many artists, writers and poets used these places to explore the uncanny, the strange and ourselves?

Amit Chaudhuri, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Daniel Mendelsohn and Emily Wilson join Philip Dodd to explore translating, rewriting and using Homer's epic work to frame a memoir. Emily Wilson has published a new translation of The Odyssey Daniel Mendelsohn has written An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic Karen McCarthy Woolf wrote Nightshift as part of a BBC Radio 4's Odyssey Project which commissioned ten writers to create a contemporary response. Her most recent collection is called Seasonal Disturbances. Amit Chaudhuri has written a novel called Odysseus Abroad which draws on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Odyssey.

Diving from Tudor times through the Brooklyn Naval Yard in the Second World War to present day deep water sculpture parks and swimming with whales. Rana Mitter talks to prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan about the Sea as metaphor and how the research for her latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was the inspiration for its time-shifting, punky, award-laden predecessor, The Goon Squad. He hears from historian Miranda Kaufmann about the existence of a black population of skilled workers in Tudor England, one of whom dived salvage on the wreck of the Mary Rose after she sank laden with cannons on her way to wage war against the French. And he's joined by marine biologist, Alex Rogers, writer and whale lover Philip Hoare, and Jason de Caires Taylor, creator of the world's first underwater sculpture parks to discuss why decades after we first saw our blue and watery planet hanging in space, we still find it easier to ignore our oceans than explore them.

When Philip Astley and his trick riders performed in 1768 in a circle not a straight line in a field behind where Waterloo station is now, the idea of the circus ring was born. Matthew Sweet looks at the career of the impresario, his 42 foot diameter ring which is still the big top template and 250 years of circus with historian Vanessa Toulmin, performer Andrew Van Buren whose family have worked for 35 years to bring Astley's name to greater public attention, writer Naomi Frisby whose research focuses on women's bodies in relation to circuses and sideshows and Tom Rack, artistic director of NoFit State circusCircus250 is a celebration with events around the UK and Ireland. Producer Torquil MacLeod.

Philip Dodd is joined by Roger Scruton, Haroon Mirza, Kevin Davey and Kirsty Gunn to explore writing, modernism and experiment from T. S. Eliot onwards. Roger Scruton's books include 'How to be a Conservative' and 'England: An Elegy'. His most recent is 'Where We Are'. Kevin Davey's novel 'Playing Possum' was shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize - a prize for writing which embodies the spirit of invention Kirsty Gunn is the author of novels including 'The Big Music' and 'The Boy and the Sea'Haroon Miza has new work at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne from 20th January-8th April Producer: Debbie Kilbride Main Image: L-R: Kevin Davey, Haroon Mirza, Kirsty Gunn, Roger Scruton and presenter Philip Dodd.

No need to RSVP just turn up and tune in to Free Thinking's end of year salon. Matthew Sweet is our host and he's promising wit and wisdom as well as a host of guests: Jake Arnott, Malika Booker, Neil Brand, David Aaronovitch and Katherine Cooper. Malika Booker co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen in 2001 to create a nourishing and encouraging community of writers dedicated to the development of their writing. She is currently the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her first poetry collection was called Pepper Seed and she also writes dramas. Jake Arnott is the author of six novels including The Long Firm and The Fatal Tree. He took part in the tenth anniversary tour of the Polari LGBT literary salon. Dr Katherine Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is researching the PEN archive and gatherings involving authors including H.G. Wells, Graham Greene and Margaret Storm Jameson. She is a BBC Radio 3 and AHRC New Generation Thinker. Neil Brand is a composer, dramatist and author and regular silent film accompanist at the BFI National Film Theatre and at the Barbican in London. David Aaronovitch is a journalist, broadcaster and author of books including his memoir Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists; Producer: Zahid Warley

Are pets theraputic? Is it moral to domesticate animals? Anne McElvoy explores the history of our relationship with pets with John Bradshaw author of Cat Sense and Dog Sense, Philip Howell who has researched the role of the domestic dog in Victorian Britain, bioethicist and writer Jessica Pierce who questions whether we should keep pets at all and novelist Laura Purcell. John Bradshaw has written The Animals Among Us: The New Science of Anthrozoology; Cat Sense: The Feline Enigma Revealed and Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. He is director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol.Laura Purcell published the ghost story The Silent Companions earlier this year. The Animal's Agenca : Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff was published this year - her other books include Run Spot Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. Philip Howell is a Senior Lecturer at Fellow at Emmanuel College Cambridge who has published At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain.

Philip Dodd discusses the significance of David Storey's groundbreaking 1960 novel with social historian Juliet Gardiner, journalist Rod Liddle, writer Anthony Clavane and the author's daughter Kate Storey.

Catherine Fletcher talks to Professor Stephen Greenblatt about the Adam and Eve story in the Christian tradition; to Islam Issa about Islam's version which tells a rather more gender-equality story of the original first couple. Jennifer Evans and Sara Read reveal how the story impacted on mothers and would-be mothers over centuries through their reading of 16th and 17th century medical textbooks. Garlic was one interesting diagnostic of pregnancy while menstrual periods played their part in murder trials. Professor Stephen Greenblatt is the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam & Eve Islam Issa is a New Generation Thinker and author of Milton in the Arab-Muslim World.Jennifer Evans is a director of the Perceptions of Pregnancy research network, author of Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in early modern England and editor of Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century .Sara Read is author of Maids, Wives, Widows: Exploring Early Modern Women’s Lives, 1540-1740 ; Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing, 1540-1740 co-authored with Jennifer Evans. (2017)