Arts & Ideas

Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham join Matthew Sweet at the British Library in a discussion organised with the Royal Society of Literature.Making art from real events is as old to writing as the pen – older. But what happens when the events you are writing about are recent, or happening as you write? What are the writer’s duties to fact? How can writing bear witness to contemporary moments of social upheaval or human disasters? In writing the ‘now’, where does non-fiction stop and fictive creation begin? In this discussion, three writers, across forms, consider how to write real events.Ali Smith has published three novels in a four-novel seasonal cycle, Autumn, Winter and Spring, exploring time, society and art in the context of Brexit Britain. Jay Bernard’s collection, Surge, explores the significance of events ranging from the New Cross Fire in 1981 to the 2017 Grenfell disaster. James Graham’s play The Vote took place in the last 90 minutes before polls closed in the 2015 General Election, and was broadcast live on Channel 4 on election night. His 2019 drama for Channel 4, Brexit: The Uncivil War, explored the very recent history of the Brexit referendum.Producer: Zahid Warley.

Rachel Reeves MP, Hull academic Jane Thomas and New Generation Thinker Katie Cooper discuss the novel South Riding and the writing and politics of Winifred Holtby with Matthew Sweet and an audience in Hull at the Contains Strong Language Festival. With readings by Rachel Dale.Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935) came from a farming family in Yorkshire, met Vera Brittain at Oxford University and shared a house in London as they began their careers as writers. Brittain went on to publish Testament of Youth. Holtby made her name with journalism for newspapers including the Manchester Guardian and the feminist magazine Time and Tide and published 14 books including the first critical study of Virginia Woolf. When her doctor gave her only two more years to live, she devoted herself to writing her novel South Riding which was published the year after she died aged 37.Rachel Reeves is Labour MP for Leeds and the author of books including Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics Jane Thomas is Professor of Victorian and early 20th century literature at Hull University. Dr Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker working on a project exploring writers' organisations and free expression.Contains Strong Language is the BBC's national poetry and spoken word festival which took place in Hull for the first time 3 years ago as part of the City of Culture celebrations.Producer Fiona McLean

Rana Mitter and guests look at the history of atheism and morality. Alec Ryrie's new book 'Unbelievers: an emotional history of doubt' argues that the rationality arguments for non-belief developed after congregations began to doubt the church. The Barber Institute in Birmingham begins a new exhibition into one of the more enigmatic sacred artists of c15 Antwerp, Jan de Beer. Sarah Wise has contributed a chapter on Morality to a new imprint of Charles' Booth's notorious London Poverty Maps. Jenny Kilbride lived and worked in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, Sussex where her father had moved as a weaver to work in an Arts and Crafts community in the 1920s. A new Exhibition in the Ditchling Art and Craft Museum explores the legacy of the group - their faith, social creed, and wares.Charles Booth's Poverty Maps have been republished and a project at LSE allows you to search them https://booth.lse.ac.uk/ Sarah Wise is the author of The Italian Boy, the Blackest Streets, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England The Barber Institute in Birmingham is showing Truly Bright and Memorable: Jan de Beer's Renaissance Masterpieces from October 25th to January 19th. Alec Ryrie is a Professor at Durham University whose books include Protestants: the Faith that Made the Modern World, the Age of Reformation and his most recent Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Jenny Kilbride still weaves, and Disruption, Devotion + Distributism is at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft until April 2020.You can find a collection of programmes Free Thinking on religious belief on the programme website. All are available as Arts & Ideas downloads https://bbc.in/2N2g3fk Producer: Alex Mansfield.

Should we really be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Cortés and European settlers in Mexico? Is this a "first encounter" - and how do you decipher history when there isn't anything written down? Claudia Rogers compares notes with Nandini Das. Nandini has been re-reading the accounts written by John Rolfe of his marriage to Pocahontas and looking at what we gain when we flip the narrative and see from the point of view of indigenous people. Hosted by New Generation Thinker John Gallagher from the University of Leeds. Professor Nandini Das is Project Director for Tide: http://www.tideproject.uk/ Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England c1550- 1700 is an ERC funded project. Claudia Rogers currently teaches at the University of Leeds, where she completed her PhD, and continues her connection with the University of Sheffield as an Honorary Research Fellow. You can view the Lienzo de Tlaxcala online http://www.mesolore.org/cultures/synopsis/3/Nahua 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. New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme to showcase academic research in radio and podcasts. You can find more information on the Arts and Humanities Research Council website https://ahrc.ukri.orgProducer: Luke Mulhall

How welcome are selfies in modern art galleries and museums? What kind of labelling should be on display and should more objects be repatriated? Laurence des Cars from the Musée d'Orsay, Kennie Ting from Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore and Philip Tinari from UCCA Beijing join Anne McElvoy and an audience at the Royal Institute of British Architects for this year's Frieze Free Thinking debate about the issues facing museum directors. The Frieze Art Fair ran in London October 3-6 and returns to Los Angeles Feb 2020 and New York May 2020.Laurence des Cars became Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2014. From 2007 to 2014, she was the French operator responsible for the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.Philip Tinari is Director and CEO of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. During his tenure, UCCA has mounted more than seventy exhibitions. From 2009 to 2012 he founded and edited LEAP, the first internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art in ChinaKennie Ting is the Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum and the Peranakan Museum, and concurrently Group Director, Museums at the National Heritage Board (NHB) Singapore. He has changed the focus from a geographical to a thematic, cross-cultural way of looking at art. He is the author of The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in South East Asia and Singapore 1819 – A Living Legacy.You can hear Michael Govan, Sabine Haag and Hartwig Fischer in The Frieze Debate: Museums in the 21st Century https://bbc.in/2O5LF6V and this year's in depth conversation with Michael Govan is also available as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast https://bbc.in/2mST8tn and in the visual arts playlist on the Free Thinking website.

Matthew Sweet on Chaplin's 1941 film and rising populism today with guests including Francesca Santoro L'hoir who acted alongside Chaplin as a child plus Ece Temelkuran, Peter Pomerantsev and Frank Dikotter.Dutch Historian Frank Dikotter, who teaches in China, has published books on The Cultural Revolution, Mao's Famine and most recently How to Be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century which looks at Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Ceausescu, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Kim Il Sung and Mengistu Haile MariamThe Turkish journalist, novelist and poet Ece Temelkuran is the author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to DictatorshipPeter Pomerantsev's books include Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. You can hear Peter taking part in our Free Thinking discussion about George Orwell's novel 1984 if you look up the collection of Landmarks of Culture on the Free Thinking website or use this link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nrlProducer: Torquil MacLeod

From Sean the Sheep & Damien Hirst to a knitted bikini. Shahidha Bari with a woolly episode talks to writer and knitter Esther Rutter, shepherd Axel Linden, medievalist John Lee and cultural historian Alexandra Harris.Esther Rutter is the author of This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History. Shepherd Axel Linden farms in Ostergotland county in the south east of Sweden and has written On Sheep - Diary of a Swedish Shepherd. Professor Alexandra Harris considers sheep in art and literature including works by Andy Goldsworthy, Damien Hirst and Holman Hunt. John Lee is the author of a book about cloth making in the late Middle Ages called The Medieval Clothier.Producer: Paula McGinley

Anne McElvoy talks prehistory with archaeologist Mike Pitts and artist Renee So plus critic Alex Clark gives her take on this year's Booker Prize winners - Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, and director Tinuke Craig discusses putting Gorky on stage in a new version written by Mike Bartlett.Ancient and Modern by Renee So is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill until 12th January Digging up Britain: Ten discoveries, a million years of history by Mike Pitts is available now Vassa by Gorky in a new version by Mike Bartlett runs at the Almeida Theatre in London until November 23rd.You can hear Booker prize winner Bernadine Evaristo talking about her depiction of 12 characters aged 12 to 93 in Girl, Woman, Other on the Free Thinking we broadcast back in May when the novel was published https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004s6n . You can find it in the Free Thinking Prose and Poetry playlist on the programme website.Also in the New Thinking archive, which focuses on new research from UK universities, an episode called Neolithic Revelations: A lack of Neolithic dental floss proves to be a boon for archaeologists. Penny Bickle and Jim Leary share some surprising findings.

As the British Museum opens an exhibition on orientalism Inspired by the East, Matthew Sweet's guests include Ziauddin Sardar, editor of Critical Muslim, artist Inci Eviner, and historian Tom Holland, whose new book explores the Making of the Western Mind. Plus cultural critic Fatima Bhutto argues that the days of US inspired culture dominating the world are over and art forms from the global south such as Bollywood films, K-Pop and Turkish telenovelas are taking over.Fatima Bhutto's book is called New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-PopCritical Muslim is a quarterly publication of ideas and issues showcasing thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a changing, interconnected world.Tom Holland's books include Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom and latest Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (U.S. edition subtitled 'How the Christian Revolution Remade the World')Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art runs at the British Museum in London from 10 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 and features contemporary art work by Inci Eviner.

Caryl Churchill's C21st Bluebeard, the fragility of a glass girl and other myths reworked in 4 new short dramas. Jen Harvie discusses the storytelling on stage of one of Britain's leading dramatists. Hetta Howes looks back at American author Rachel Ingalls who died earlier this year aged 78. Her novel Mrs Caliban depicts a lonely housewife who befriends a sea monster.The German born US based artist Kiki Smith has produced sculptures, tapestries and artworks looking at pain and bodily decay and real and imaginary creatures in bronze, glass, gold and ink for her first solo UK exhibition in a public institution in 20 years. Gerald Scarfe has just published Long Drawn Out Trip: My Life moving from his early days at Punch and Private Eye to his designs for Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Disney’s Hercules. He's also putting together an illustrated coffee table book Scarfe: Sixty Years Of Being Rude which will be published in November. Glass, Kill, Bluebeard, Imp 4 short dramas by Caryl Churchill, directed by James MacDonald run at London's Royal Court Theatre from September 18th - October 12th. Kiki Smith: I Am A Wanderer runs at Modern Art Oxford from September 28th to January 19th 2020. Hetta Howes is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which puts academic research onto the radio. She presents our podcast New Thinking which showcases new research. You can find past episodes on topics ranging from the philosophy of pregnancy to the links between dentistry and archaeology by signing up for the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast or looking on the Free Thinking website collection New Research.Producer Zahid Warley