Arts & Ideas

‘Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels’ said cartoonist Bob Thaves. Matthew Sweet is joined by Lucy Bolton, Pamela Hutchinson, David Benedict and Miles Eady to look at her life (1911-1995) and a film career that stretched far beyond the 10 movies she made with Astaire, including an Oscar winning performance in Kitty Foyle.Producer: Torquil MacLeodThe BFI season runs to the end of April Many of Ginger Rogers' RKO films are available to watch on iPlayer, including Primrose Path, Kitty Foyle, Vivacious Lady, Carefree and The Gay Divorcee. You can find a whole series of episodes of Free Thinking devoted to film stars including Asta Nielsen, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

An ancient Japanese Buddhist ritual which involves a red baby bib, a small statue and water, has been taken up by women wanting to have some way of marking a miscarriage and the life not lived. New Generation Thinker Sabina Dosani is a psychiatrist and writer doing research at the University of East Anglia. Her essay looks at the language we use for unborn children who die and at what we can learn about mourning rituals from the work of the nineteenth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, to modern services performed by Rabbis, in cathedrals and in peoples' back gardens.Producer: Ruth Watts

From the Pirates of Penzance and Captain Hook, to Ottoman corsairs, Henry Avery, Mary Read and Lady Killigrew: Anne McElvoy is joined by New Generation Thinkers Michael Talbot and Joan Passey, and by Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History, Royal Museums Greenwich, who is also one of the co-curators of Pirates at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.Producer: Harry ParkerPirates runs at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall from April to December and then moves in 2025 to Royal Museums GreenwichOther conversations in the Free Thinking archives available on the website include Ships and History with Hew Locke, Sara Caputo, Jake Subryan Richards and Tom Nancollas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001626t Seagoings with artists Katie Patterson, Charlotte Runcie and Julia Blackburn and Cutty Sark curator Hannah Stockton https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002868 Oceans and the Sea with Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh and literature scholar and New Generation Thinker Joan Passey at Hay Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017m2y

"Cancel culture" is used to describe debates which touch on freedom of expression today but what can we learn if we look back at events after the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen? Clare Siviter, who lectures on the French Revolution and theatre at the University of Bristol, takes us through the experiences of playwrights and authors, Marie-Joseph Chénier, Olympe de Gouges, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard and Destutt de Tracy, who wrote about how ideas spread.Producer: Torquil MacLeodYou can find a collection of essays, discussions and features which showcase the research of New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has worked with BBC Radio 3 on the scheme since 2012.

The trial of sisters begging on the streets of South London led to donations sent in by Victorian newspaper readers and an investigation by the Mendicity Society. New Generation Thinker Oskar Jensen, from Newcastle University, unearthed this story of the Avery girls in the archives and his essay explores the way attitudes to former slaves and to the reform of criminals affected the sisters' sentencing.Producer: Ruth Watts

Nicholas Spencer, Emily Qureshi-Hurst and Philip Ball join Christopher Harding for a conversation about the nature of reality – as science reveals it, as religion reveals it, and how the world might look if we treat science and religion not as competitors but as collaborators; a cosmic dynamic duo.Magesteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion by Nicholas Spencer is out now.Producer: Ruth Watts

An 8 year old who condemns his own mother to execution in 1582: New Generation Thinker Emma Whipday, who researches Renaissance literature at Newcastle University, has been reading witch trial records from Elizabethan and Jacobean England to explore how they depict single mothers. And she finds chilling echoes of their language in newspaper articles in our own times.Producer: Ruth Watts

Customs officers raided the London bookshop Gay’s the Word on April 10th 1984 and seized 144 titles. A campaign was mounted after the directors were charged with conspiracy to import indecent books. Dr Sarah Pyke tells Diarmuid Hester about an oral history project which aims to raise awareness of Operation Tiger and how it ties into wider work on a history of queer reading. Dr Ina Linge has been looking at the way LGBTQ+ people used autobiographical writing to critically engage with the science of sexology and how their writing was used by and critiqued the work of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and a book based on this research called Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing is coming out in 2023. Ina also hosts a sex and nature salon https://www.comedysalon.co.uk/ and along with other researchers at Exeter University held workshops for LGBTQ+ teenagers exploring climate activism https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/socialinequality/lgbtqplus/ https://ies.sas.ac.uk/people/sarah-pyke is taking part in an event at the Bodleian on June 8th Queer Bibliography: A Discussion Diarmuid Hester is at the University of Cambridge and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council https://www.diarmuidhester.com/ His book Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories is out in August 2023 You can hear him discussing Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle on an episode of Free Thinking called Stories of Love https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hxhk This New Thinking episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find more in a collection called New Research on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

What is that people hate about the Pre-Raphaelites? From the 19th century to the present day their detractors have been remarkably consistent in the language that they have used to the describe their visceral dislike of these artists and their works. Dinah Roe, Greg Tate and Lynda Nead join Matthew Sweet to examine what makes Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his gang such a polarising force in art history. They also delve into the powerful and sensual poetry of Christina Rossetti and Walter Pater's scandalous book about the Renaissance.The Rossettis runs at Tate Britain from April 6th to September 24th 2023 Dr Dinah Roe teaches at Oxford Brookes University and is currently editing the Collected Poems of Christina Rossetti. Dr Gregory Tate teaches at St Andrews University and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council Professor Lynda Nead teaches at Birkbeck University, LondonYou might also be interested in a Radio 3 Sunday feature presented by Lily Cole called Plot 5779: Unearthing Elizabeth Siddall https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009c67 And Radio 3 listeners wrote a new carol inspired by Christina Rosetti's poem Love Came Down at Christmas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/309PX0cDlP1wZpy4JkHTL1Y/radio-3-carol-competition-2021Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From lessons in civility learnt playing French board game to the value of babbling by babies in speech development, a history of central heating to the neglected industrial landscapes of the A13, Anti-Asian tropes in AI, Quaker needlework to Viking burial practices, 70’s women’s art collectives, the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries to the first philosophy book by a woman to be published in C17 century Germany: Chris Harding hears about the research topics of ten early career academics chosen as the 2023 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to promote academic research and turn it into radio broadcastsIncidentally you can also find on BBC Sounds the set of Essays by the 2022 New Generation Thinkers and there's a collection of other discussions and features from New Generation Thinkers across the years on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme websiteBut in this podcast Chris Harding talks to: Dr Marianne Hem Eriksen, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester is working on a project which asks what does it mean if a human body isn’t buried and the bones are broken apart and scattered? Dr Andrew Cooper, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick is researching "Germany’s Mary Wollstonecraft" - Amalia Holst Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz, Loughborough University is conducting an oral history project looking at women’s art collectives in 1970s Britain and Ireland Dr Gemma Tidman, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary, is working on her second book, Playing on Words: A History of French Literary Play, 1635–1789 Dr Rebecca Woods, a Senior Lecturer in Language and Cognition at Newcastle University, researches how play helps language learning and the value of multi-lingualism Dr Dan Taylor works at the Open University. His most recent book is Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom and he’s been an advisor on a BBC-Open University co-production Union, a four-part tv series due later this year presented by David Olusoga Dr Sam Johnson-Schlee, from London South Bank University has been researching a history of gas heating and he's published a kind of domestic spaces memoir titled Living Rooms Dr Kerry McInerney, a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge co-hosts the Good Robots podcast and looks at anti-Asian racism in AI Isabella Rosner, is a PhD student at King’s College London and presenter of the Sew What? podcast and her research looks at Quaker needlework Dr Louise Brangan, Chancellor's Fellow in Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow is researching the way Ireland is now coming to terms with the impact of the Magdalene Laundries and the treatment of women and babies.Producer: Ruth Watts