Arts & Ideas

A new craze for body building and that distinctive figure of the 20th century, the hobbyist, are the topic of conversation as we continue our series of features looking at cultural life in 1922. John Gallagher considers what the expansion of free time in the 1920s meant for leisure and the things people did for fun. He is joined by historian Elsa Richardson and literary scholar Jon Day.Producer: Luke MulhallFind more discussions about culture and the arts of the 1920s in a collection called Modernism on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

Created in a natural landscape feature, a conclave hillside, the Hollywood Bowl had already hosted religious services before its stage arrived. In 1922 the Los Angeles Philharmonic played its first season of open air concerts inaugurating a music venue. Lisa Mullen hears how the amphitheatre has hosted some of the greats of classical and popular music from Felix and Leonard Slatkin to Ella Fitzgerald. Michael Goldfarb and Mark Glancy discuss the emergence of a cultural landmark.Producer: Ruth Watts You can find a collection of programmes called Modernism on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking programme website which discuss other art and culture from the 1920s https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

Virginia Woolf has a premonition of the microwave, protein bars are launched and a cookbook offers a recipe for iguana soup: New Generation Thinker John Gallagher is joined by food historians Annie Gray and Elsa Richardson for a conversation about what we might have eaten in 1922Producer: Luke Mulhall You can find other discussions about art and culture from the 1920s in a collection called Modernism on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

Reader’s Digest magazine is celebrating its centenary this year. In the first of a series of features looking back at cultural milestones in 1922 – the year the BBC was founded – New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough finds out about the history of the Reader’s Digest talking to Professor Sarah Churchwell and Dr Victoria Bazin.Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can find a playlist about books, art and philosophy from 1922 in a collection called Modernism on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

Louise Jameson joins Matthew Sweet to recall the women who ran the digs she stayed in as a touring actor and the landladies that she's played (including a homicidal one!). Historian Gillian Williamson looks at how life in boarding houses in Georgian London has been portrayed both in contemporary accounts and in fiction, while Lillian Crawford encounters some memorable landladies in Ealing comedies and other post-war British films.Gillian Williamson is the author of Lodgers, Landlords, and Landladies in Georgian London.Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Are animals a human invention? What is a lama like? Do plants have sex? Was Amelia Earhart eaten by crabs? These are just some of the questions posed by Shahidha Bari and addressed by her guests Katherine Rundell, Dan Taylor, Helen Cowie and Stella Sandford, as they trace the history of human conceptualisations of animals and the natural world. From the Medieval tendency to draw moral lessons from animals, to Linnaeus' attempts to organise them into taxonomies, via Darwin's abolition of the distinction between humans and animals, to the sense of wonder at the natural world needed to orient us towards tackling ecological crises. Plus, the growing area of plant philosophy and how it overturns the history of western metaphysics.Producer: Luke Mulhall

The list of contributors joining Lisa Mullen: Henry Eliot, author of a book of bookish lists which details everything from the different deaths of Greek tragedians to the contents of Joan Didion's travel bag; Florence Hazrat, New Generation Thinker and historian of punctuation; Liam Young, author of a book about lists as a way of organising knowledge, from Ancient Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed; and Joanna Nolan, a researcher in sociolinguistics at SOAS who asks whether lists are ever private languages.Eliot's Book of Bookish Lists, List Cultures by Liam Cole Young and An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Punctuation Mark by Florence Hazrat and The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca: Fact and Fiction by Joanna Nolan are out now and you can hear Joanna talking about that research in a previous episode called What Language Did Columbus Speak? A Radio 3 Essay from Florence Hazrat called Pause for Thought exploring the way punctuation has developed over the centuries is available now on BBC Sounds The Free Thinking programme website has a collection of discussions exploring The Way We Live Now including episodes about breakfast, hitchhiking, immortality, writing about money, tattoos, mental health Producer: Luke Mulhall

Russell T. Davies is joined by his friend and author of Love from the Pink Palace, Jill Nalder, to discuss their importance in one another’s lives, the role of literature in their lives, and the TV series It’s a Sin with New Generation Thinker and psychiatrist Sabina Dosani and chair Matthew Sweet in a conversation recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From a Norwich workhouse to performing as "The American Voltigeur" - Pablo Fanque, or William Darby as he was born, was a star of 1830s circus in Britain. Nearly a hundred years later one of the names topping the bill was Lillian Leitzel. Kate Holmes is also an aerial performer and she shares her research into female aerialists with John Woolf, author of Black Victorians. Plus the presenter Shahidha Bari is also joined by New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton who compares researching early music hall and pantomime performers with the experience of taking part in a professional panto and by novelist Lianne Dillsworth whose novel Theatre of Marvels imagines a Black British actress who performs at Crillick's Theatre as the "Great Amazonia".Producer: Sofie VilcinsBlack Victorians: Hidden in History by John Woolf and Keshia N Abraham is out now. John Woolf has also published The Wonders: : Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age Naomi Paxton made a Sunday Feature for Radio 3 about suffragette theatre and Punch and Judy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008qdl She is now playing the baddie, Queen Rat in Dick Whittington at The Theatre Chipping Norton Lianne Dillsworth's Theatre of Marvels is out now.You can find more programmes on Free Thinking about Victorian life Oskar Jensen and Fern Riddell are amongst Matthew Sweet's guests in a conversation about Victorian Streets https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017v2s Kathryn Hughes talks Victorian Bodies and George Eliot https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088jl64 How the Victorians tried to make us sound the same looks at ideas about accents and reading https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fng4 Matthew Sweet looks at the career of impresario Philip Astley and 250 years of the circus https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09k8gyw How we talk about sex and female bodies, including Saartje Baartman https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f5n6Swing High short documentary film was directed by Jack Cummings, and was produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1932.

Why Hardy's spelling matters, how Lancashire reflected on the American Civil War through dialect poems printed in local newspapers, how education inspectors at Victorian schools policed pupils dropping the letter "h" : a quartet of academics: Greg Tate, Louise Creechan, Lynda Mugglestone and Simon Rennie join John Gallagher for the latest part of Free Thinking's series looking at the way we speak, accents and multilingualism. With recent research from the Sutton Trust showing prejudice against regional accents is still rife, this conversation looks at earlier examples of attempts to standardise English spelling and speaking and at where local dialects were celebrated.Producer: Luke MulhallThis New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRIOther episodes include: What Language did Columbus Speak? Lingua franca in 15th century travel and today’s refugee camps Dead Languages: John Gallagher says hello in Oscan, the daily language of ancient Pompeii and looks at the translation of hieroglyphics The Black Country: Matthew Sweet hears about the way the region has been depicted in writing which seeks to celebrate the local accent.