Arts & Ideas

From surrealism and science fiction to inspiration drawn from historic objects in stately homes and the painting of Francis Bacon: Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation with Will Harris, who has written long-form poems; new Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Max Porter and Chloe Aridjis, who have written poetic novels which play with form; and academic Xine Yao, who looks at speculative fiction.Max Porter is the author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and Lanny. He has also collaborated with the Indie folk band Tunng and has a book out in January called The Death of Francis Bacon. You can hear dramatizations of Lanny at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pqdc and Grief Is The Thing with Feathers on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000plzlChloe Aridjis is a London-based Mexican writer who has published the novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, and was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. She was co-curator of a Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool and writes for Frieze.They have been announced as Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature to mark the 200th anniversary of the RSL https://rsliterature.org/Will Harris is a writer of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020 and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021 for his collection RENDANG. He co-edited the spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan.Xine Yao is one of the 2020 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC to turn research into radio. She teaches at UCL on American Literature in English to 1900, with an interest in literatures in English from the Black and Asian diasporas, science fiction, the Gothic, and comics/graphic novels.You can find more conversations in the playlist Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website, which includes Max Porter discussing empathy, Christine Yao looking at science fiction and the experimental writing of the Oulipo group, and a whole series of conversations recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vhProducer: Emma Wallace

April 1916. By the Nile, the foremost poets of the Middle East are arguing about Shakespeare. In 2004, Egyptian singer Essam Karika released his urban song Oh Romeo.Reflecting on his travels and encounters around the Arab world, New Generation Thinker Islam Issa, from Birmingham City University, discusses how canonical English writers (Shakespeare and Milton) creep into the popular culture of the region today. Recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in 2018.Islam's Issa's book, Milton in the Arab-Muslim World, won the Milton Society of America's 'Outstanding First Book' award. His exhibition Stories of Sacrifice won the Muslim News Awards 'Excellence in Community Relations' prize.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. There are now 100 early career academics who have passed through the scheme.Producer: Fiona McLean.

From Tudor courts to plantations to the Arab Spring and modern political philosophy: a debate in partnership with Bristol Festival of Ideas hosted by Shahidha Bari.Jeffrey Howard is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College London. He writes and teaches about the moral obligations of democratic citizens and political leaders, focusing on the topics of counter-extremism, crime and punishment, and free speech. Joanne Paul, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at University of Sussex, has studied the advice given to monarchs and statesmen in the Tudor period, seeking to understand the inner workings of power in the court and the ways in which ordinary people could hope to make their own voices heard. Dina Rezk is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading teaching on intelligence, 20th Century Middle Eastern history, popular culture and terrorism/insurgency, reform and revolt. Christienna Fryar was Lecturer in the History of Slavery and Unfree Labour at the University of Liverpool and now leads the MA in Black British History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research looks at Britain's centuries-long imperial and especially post emancipation entanglements with the Caribbean.Shahidha Bari is the author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes and Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London. She is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the London School of Economics and was chosen as a New Generation Thinker in the first year of the scheme.You can find more Bristol Festival of Ideas events https://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/You can find more information about the New Generation Thinkers scheme on the website of the AHRC https://ahrc.ukri.org/ and a playlist of discussions, essays and short features showcasing the different research topics of New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn From beer to Vegetarian pioneers, dams in Pakistan to gangs in Glasgow, disabled characters in Dickens to remembering Partition, the Japanese Stonehenge to a Medici prince.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The colourful life of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh overturns everything we think we know about disabled people’s lives in the 19th century. Born without hands and feet, he was an adventurous traveller and a Member of Parliament, a tiger-hunting landowner whose attempts to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism were ultimately defeated, and whose amazing career has been largely forgotten. But how did his first biographer meet the challenge of writing his life?New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore of the University of Cambridge discusses the gaps in his published biography and what attitudes they reflect.The New Generation Thinkers scheme is ten years old in 2020. Jointly run by BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each year it offers ten academics at the start of their careers a chance to bring fascinating research to a wider public. This week we hear five essays from this last decade of stimulating ideas.This Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead in 2015.Producer: Zahid Warley

From pension schemes for police force dogs to political rights - can other animals be regarded as members of our democratic communities, with rights to political consideration, representation or even participation? New Generation Alasdair Cochrane, from the University of Sheffield, believes that the exclusion of non-humans from civic institutions cannot be justified, and explores recent attempts in court to re-imagine a political world that takes animals seriously.The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage Gateshead in 2014. The court case referred to in the Essay was ruled on by a court in New York in 2017 when it was judged that in the case of caged adult male chimps Tommy and Kiko that there is no precedent for apes being considered people.The New Generation Thinkers scheme is ten years old in 2020. Jointly run by BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each year it offers ten academics at the start of their careers a chance to bring fascinating research to a wider public. This week we hear five essays from this last decade of stimulating ideas.You can find a playlist of other Essays, Documentaries and Discussions featuring New Generation Thinkers from across the different years on the Free Thinking website.Producer: Jacqueline Smith

From sleeping space to work space? Matthew Sweet is joined by historian of emotions Tiffany Watt Smith, expert on the suffragettes and a history of sex Fern Riddell, author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World Laurence Scott and Tudor historian Joe Moshenska.Matthew Sweet's guests recording in their bedrooms are all New Generation Thinkers, which now has 100 early career academics on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.Fern Riddell's books include Death in Ten Minutes Kitty Marion: Activist, Arsonist, Suffragette; The Victorian Guide to Sex. She presents the history channel podcast Not What You Thought You Knew. Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune. She is Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.Laurence Scott has written Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and was a winner of the Jerwood Prize.Joe Moshenska is the author of A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby and Iconoclasm as Child’s Play. He teaches at the University of Oxford and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary about Milton's Paradise Lost.You can find more information about the New Generation Thinkers scheme on the website of the AHRC:https://ahrc.ukri.org/and a playlist of discussions, essays and short features showcasing the different research topics of New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking website:https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txnFrom beer to Vegetarian pioneers, dams in Pakistan to gangs in Glasgow, disabled characters in Dickens to remembering Partition, the Japanese Stonehenge to a Medici prince.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Corin Throsby looks at the extraordinary fan mail received by the poet Lord Byron. The New Generation Thinkers scheme is ten years old in 2020. Jointly run by BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each year it offers ten academics at the start of their careers a chance to bring fascinating research to a wider public. This week we hear five essays from this last decade of stimulating ideas.We think of fan mail as a recent phenomenon, but in the early 19th century the poet Byron received hundreds of letters from lovesick admirers. Cambridge academic Corin Throsby takes us on a journey into Byron's intimate fan mail and shows what those letters reveal about the creation of a celebrity culture that has continued into the present.This essay was recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival 2011 at Sage Gateshead. You can hear Corin Throsby presenting Radio 3's Sunday Feature series Literary Pursuits on Truman Capote https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gl43 and find another Essay from her recorded at the York Festival of Ideas A Romanticist Reflects on Breast Feeding https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wn2rmProducer: Craig Smith

Would you don a diving suit or take a drug in a quest to understand the life of someone else? "Following in the footsteps" is an obsession for biographers as they travel the world to bring their subjects to life, sometimes with dangerous consequences.Hull University Professor of Creative Writing Martin Goodman, biographer of the sorcerer Carlos Castaneda, the Indian mystic Mother Meera and the scientist John Scott Haldane, draws on visits to high peaks, the seabed, coal mines and monasteries to reveal the challenges of the biographer's art. This episode was recorded at Sage Gateshead at the Free Thinking Festival in 2012.The New Generation Thinkers scheme is 10 years old in 2020. Jointly run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each year it offers ten academics at the start of their careers a chance to bring fascinating research to a wider public. This week we hear five essays from this last decade of stimulating ideas. You can also find a playlist of Documentaries, Discussions and other Essays by New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking website and over the weekend of November 28th and 29th they will appear across a variety of Radio 3 music programmes.You can find Martin Goodman discussing his most recent novel J SS Bach in an episode of Free Thinking called Art and Refugees from Nazi Germany https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00027m6Producer: Adrian Washbourne

Democracy, Hong Kong and USA Free ThinkingHong Kong has seen elections postponed, pro-democracy protesters arrested and a sweeping new national security law imposed by Beijing this year outlawing sedition and subversion. Rana Mitter asks whether Hong Kong can retain its unique identity and how the city's culture can help us make sense of these turbulent times. And, is there Trumpism without President Trump? Following the fortunes of the Republican Party in the US elections, we consider where the ideas associated with the 45th president sit in the history of conservative political thought.Tammy Ho is Associate Professor of English at HK Baptist University, and a specialist on Hong Kong identity in literatureZuraidah Ibrahim is deputy executive editor of the South China Morning Post, the main English-language newspaper in the city, and she is the co-author of Rebel City: Hong Kong’s Year of Water and FireJeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of Chinese history at the University of California and the author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, based on meetings with many of the Hong Kong protestorsColleen Graffy is Professor of International Law at Pepperdine University's Caruso School of Law. She served in the George W Bush administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomacyHenry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre and a regular columnist for the Washington Post, as well as the conservative journal National Review. His recent book is The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar ConservatismProducer Ruth Watts

Teaching writing - mentors Helen Mort and Blake Morrison compare notes. Plus as Georges Perec's memoir I Remember is published in English for the first time, we look at the rules of writing proposed by the Oulipo group which was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Georges Perec (1936 – 1982) came up with a "story-making machine" and created a novel in which the letter 'e' never appears. Queneau's Exercices de Style recounts a bus journey ninety-nine times. Shahidha Bari talks to Adam Scovell and Lauren Elkin about Oulipo. Helen Mort's books include poetry collections Division Street and No Map Could Show Them and a debut novel Black Car Burning and she is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University https://www.helenmort.com/ Blake Morrison's books include poetry collections Dark Glasses and Pendle Witches, And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the JR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. He is Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. http://www.blakemorrison.net/ Their conversation is part of the series Critical Friends organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://rsliterature.org/ You can find more writerly conversations in the Free Thinking playlist Prose and Poetry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh Adam Scovell is the author of novellas including How Pale the Winter Has Made Us and Mothlight Lauren Elkin is the author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London George Perec's I Remember translated into English by David Bellos and Philip Terry has just been published by Editions Gallic. Producer: Ruth Watts