Arts & Ideas

Shahidha Bari looks at the legacy of Frank Ramsey who died in 1930 aged 27, but not before doing work that changed the course of philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics. Shahidha is joined by Cheryl Misak, who has recently published the first biography of Ramsey, and philosopher Steven Methven. Plus, philosopher Emily Thomas on the role travel has played in the development of philosophy.Cheryl Misak's biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is out now.Emily Thomas' The Meaning of Travel is out now.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Hetta Howes learns how Sylvia Xueni Pan from Goldsmiths, University of London is using VR to do everything from training GPs not to overprescribe antibiotics to creating a groundbreaking Peaky Blinders game. While Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the RSC, is working with researchers and practitioners like Sylvia to create extraordinary virtual experiences for theatre audiences. They are among the many women playing key roles in the creative industries - the fastest growing sector in the UK - where university-based researchers are helping to turn new ideas into commercially viable products and ideas.This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. Further podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking website under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Irish novelist Anne Enright talks to Laurence Scott about her new book Actress and being the inaugural Irish laureate, plus a discussion of gossip past and present with Emily Butterworth, Daisy Black and political journalist and writer Marie Le Conte.Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering; The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road.Emily Butterworth works on early modern literature and thought, with a particular interest in Montaigne and in deviant speech and language. Her book The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France, looks at forms of excessive speech – babble, gossip and rumour – and why they were considered so personally and politically dangerous in the sixteenth century.Daisy Black researches medieval history at the University of Wolverhampton and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to put academic research on the radio. She writes about women in performance in The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe. Her book Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama is out this year.Marie Le Conte is a political journalist who has worked for the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and BuzzFeed. Her book Haven't You Heard? Gossip, power, and how politics really works explores the potency of gossip in the Westminster bubble.You can find Matthew Sweet and guests discussing What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3Producer: Paula McGinley

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme websiteProducer: Torquil MacLeod

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau argues that we should salute this woman who supported her family through her writing, who perfected sonnets about solitude before Wordsworth began writing his, and who explored the struggles of women and refugees in her fiction. Mother to 12 children, Charlotte Turner Smith wrote ten novels, three poetry collections and four children's books and translated French fiction. In 1788 her first novel, Emmeline, sold 1500 copies within months but by the time of her death in 1803 her popularity had declined and she had become destitute.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

The novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) brought to life a large comic heroine who bucked 19th-century conventions. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore's essay outlines the prolific writing career of Margaret Oliphant and laments the way she was used by fellow novelist Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the dangers of needing to write for money to keep yourself and your family afloat.

New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge describes translating the testimony of a nurse who survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. In Rwanda, Yolande Mukagasana is a well-known writer, public figure and campaigner for remembrance of the genocide. She has authored three testimonies, a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators and two volumes of Rwandan stories. Her work has received numerous international prizes, including an Honorable Mention for the UNESCO Education for Peace Prize. Zoe Norridge, from King’s College London, argues there should be a place for Mukagasana on our shelves in UK, alongside works from the Holocaust and other genocides. Why? Because listening to survivor voices helps us to understand the human cost of mass violence. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Ricky Burdett, Liza Fior, Des Fitzgerald, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Edwin Heathcote discuss ideals made concrete in an event chaired by Anne McElvoy with an audience recorded as part of the LSE Shape the World Festival 2020.Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at LSE and Director of LSE Cities. Liza Fior is an award-winning architect and designer; founding partner of muf architecture/art. Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist at Cardiff University and AHRC\BBC New Generation Thinker who works on cities and mental health. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist exploring the human values that shape design, science, technology, and nature. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy examines the human impulse to "better" the world. Edwin Heathcote is architecture and design critic for the Financial Times.You can find and download previous LSE Free Thinking debates on the programme website How Big Should the State Be ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09sqw6p Authority in the Era of Populism - What makes a good leader? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002rwv Breaking Free: Martin Luther's Revolution https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nf02y Utopianism in Politics From Thomas More to the present day https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07054cy A Free Thinking discussion recorded at RIBA with an architectural gang of 5 "The Brits Who Built Modern Britain" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03x1p4n Cities and Safety https://www.bbc.com/programmes/b06rwvrc Cities and Resilience https://www.bbc.com/programmes/b04yb7kd Producer: Eliane Glaser

Islam Issa hears from actor Adrian Lester and Professor Ewan Fernie about a project that will revive the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library. Founded with the help of George Dawson - a man who had a powerful vision of Birmingham as a progressive social and cultural centre in the mid 19th century - the library houses Britain's most important Shakespeare collection, comprising 43,000 volumes, including a copy of the First Folio 1623. Over three years, the Everything to Everybody project aims to share these cultural riches with the people of Birmingham in a wide range of imaginative ways.More information available here: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. Further podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking website under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Hiromi Ito, Tomoko Sawada, and Yukiko Motoya, look at women's roles in Japanese culture today plus the Japanese view of English-language literature with translator Motoyuki Shibata. Philip Dodd presents. Bethan Jones acted as the translator.Japan Now 2020 is a series of events taking place in Sheffield, Norwich and London organised by Modern Culture culminating in a day of events at the British Library on Saturday February 22nd.Hiromi Itō is one of the most prominent women writers in Japan who looks at sexuality motherhood and the body in her work which is translated by Jeffrey Angles. Yukiko Motoya’s first book in English, Picnic In The Storm, is a collection of short stories which include salary men being swept skywards by their umbrellas, to a married couple morphing into one another’s bodies. It was the winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize. It is translated by Asa Yoneda Tomoko Sawada is a photographer and performance artist whose work explores gender roles and cultural stereotypes from a strongly feminist perspective. Translator Motoyuki Shibata, has introduced writers like Paul Auster, Richard Powers, Edward Gorey and Steven Millhauser to Japanese readers.You can find more programmes in the playlist Free Thinking explores Japanese culture https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0657spqProducer: Luke Mulhall