Arts & Ideas

The art of Cindy Sherman; art critic Laura Cumming on finding out the history behind the days her mother disappeared as a child on a Lincolnshire beach, New Generation Thinker Susan Greaney on local history museums. Naomi Paxton presents and joining her to talk about Cindy Sherman are Laura Cumming, the actor Adjoa Andoh, photographer Juno Calypso and New Generation Thinker Joe Moshenska from the University of Oxford. Laura Cumming's memoir is called On Chapel Sands and it is being read as the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qftk Cindy Sherman runs at the National Portrait Gallery in London from Thu, 27 Jun 2019 – Sun, 15 Sep 2019. The retrospective will explore the development of Sherman’s work from the mid-1970s to the present day, and will feature around 150 works from international public and private collections,Susan Greaney works part-time for English Heritage and researches at Cardiff University. She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. You can find more about Juno Calypso here https://www.junocalypso.com/ In our archives you can hear Laura Cumming and Joe Moshenska on Velasquez https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03dx7tw Novelist Nicola Upson on imagining the life of artist Stanley Spencer https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000573q Scrumbly Koldewyn and the politics of fashion and drag https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09zcjch Producer: Fiona McLean

Jane Goodall is giving a talk at the British Academy on the work of the Jane Goodall Foundation with chimpanzees, protecting the environment with local communities and improving health and education for girls in rural Africa. Elif Shafak's latest novel is called 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World and looks at the death of a sex worker and the last moments of her life. Elif Shafak has been vocal in her concerns about freedom of speech in modern day Turkey.Producer: Luke Mulhall

New Generation Thinker Alistair Fraser on the fates and fortunes of Glaswegian tough guys. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. To hear audience questions download the Essay as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. The image of the hard man runs like an electric current through Glasgow's history. Unafraid, unabashed, with outlaw swagger, he stalks the pages of countless crime novels and TV dramas. The unpredictable tough guy, schooled in both fist and knife, a symbol of the city's industrial past. But what does being a hard man mean in the Glasgow of today, now call-centre capital of Europe? And what lessons can be drawn from his changing fates and fortunes to understand masculinity and violence elsewhere?Alistair Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has spent the last fifteen years studying youth gangs and street culture around the world, and is author of two academic books, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City (2015, Oxford University Press), and Gangs & Crime: Critical Alternatives (2017, Sage). He makes regular contributions to public debate on gangs and youth violence, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4 on Thinking Allowed, More or Less, and Free Thinking.Alistair Fraser in a Free Thinking Festival debate about gangs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w7qqg Alistair Fraser looks at Doing Nothing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v66bh Audience questions of this Essay are found here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvk3/episodes/downloads Producer; Jacqueline Smith

New Generation Thinker Sarah Goldsmith's Essay introduces an audience at York Festival of Ideasto Beau Brummel and others who have understood the mixed messages of suits through time. England football coach Gareth Southgate's pitch-side waistcoats and 007's exquisite collection of Tom Ford suits all make one thing clear: sweatpants are out and the formal man's suit, along with its tailor, has triumphantly returned. From the colourful flamboyances of the eighteenth century to the dandy dictates of Beau Brummell and into the inky black 'Great Renunciation' of the nineteenth century, join Sarah Goldsmith for a whirlwind tour of the origins of the most ubiquitous, enduring item of male sartorial fashion and the 'second skin' of the male body, the three-piece suit.Sarah Goldsmith is a historian of masculinity, the body and travel. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, an AHRC/BBC 2018 New Generation Thinker and a life-long rugby fan. Her first book, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour, is being published in 2019.Sarah Goldsmith on the C18 craze for weightlifting https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00040wg Sarah Golsmith discusses the body past and present on Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7my7k Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Philip Dodd is in conversation with the American author James Ellroy, whose books include LA Confidential and his latest, This Storm, part of his ongoing project to write a novelistic history of the USA from 1941 to 1972. As he tells Philip Dodd, in a conversation that ranges from Calvinism to Chandler, Count Basie to late Beethoven: "As my literary sensibility becomes more patriotic, more conservatism, more religious, more sentimental, more fraternal, I find an era to write about where I can look back and live it and so This Storm is very much about alliance and friendship and belief and ideology in the early days of World War II and my good guys - who are always the cops ... and these folks are always going to one of two places, to carouse, to booze, to plot, to talk of sandbagging unfriendly politicians and to flirt and conduct their adulterous love affairs."Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Anne McElvoy, former Colonel Lincoln Jopp MC & novelist Benjamin Markovits on the new TV Catch-22. Jade Halbert on recycling fashion. Poet Fred D'Aguiar on winning the Cholmondeley Prize and Wu Mali on socially engaged art.Producer: Zahid Warley

New Generation Thinker Tom Smith's Essay argues that the East German army had a reputation for unbending masculinity so it's surprising how central queerness was to the enterprise. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. Brutality along the Berlin Wall, monumental Soviet-style parades, rows of saluting soldiers: these are the familiar images of the East German military. Army training promoted toughness, endurance and self-control and forced its soldiers into itchy, shapeless uniforms. Delve deeper, though, and you find countless examples of the army’s fascination with homosexuality. Even more unexpectedly, gay and bisexual soldiers found ways of expressing desires and intimacy. LGBT people have long faced discrimination and violence in arenas aimed at the promotion of traditional masculinity, but look closely and we discover that queerness has not always been as marginalised as we’d think. What can East Germany teach us about masculinity in the twenty-first century?Tom Smith is Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews researching gender and sexuality in German culture and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker on the scheme which selects 10 academics each year to turn their research into radio. He has published on sexuality and masculinity in literature, film and television since the 1960s. His book on masculinity in the East German army is out in 2020. His current project explores the emotional worlds of Berlin’s music scene today.Meet the 2019 New Generation Thinkers including Tom Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004dsvProducer: Jacqueline Smith

Eimear McBride is the author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians Professor Finn Fordham from Royal Holloway, University of London is the author of Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: I do I undo I redo: and he edited Finnegans Wake for Oxford World Classics Eleanor Lybeck is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker teaches at the University of Oxford and is the author of All on Show: The Circus in Irish Literature and Culture. Derek Pyle is the director of Waywords & Meansigns, an experimental project that sets Finnegans Wake to music With additional Producer: Luke Mulhall

New Generation Thinker Emma Butcher on the first soldier memoirs to talk about pain, terror and trauma. The Napoleonic Wars, like all wars, had their celebrities. Chief among them, Wellington and Napoleon, whose petty rivalry and military bravado ensured their status as household names long after Waterloo. But these wars also saw the rise of a new genre of personal and emotional war literature which took the public by storm. The writers were foot soldiers rather than officers, infantrymen like George Gleig and John Malcolm. Both fought in some of the most decisive battles on the Continent but it is their written accounts of their daily lives, of the true nature of war, its personal costs and the terrors endured, which ensured their best-selling status. This is the story of the rise and rise of the military memoir, with foot soldier as hero, and the way his war stories were lapped up with horrified glee by the armchair readers back home, transforming the image of soldiering for good. Emma Butcher is a Leverhulme Early Career Researcher at the University of Leicester and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to select academics who can turn their research into radio. She is currently writing her second book, Children in the Age of Modern War, has written for the BBC History Magazine and made Radio 3 programmes on the Brontës, child soldiers, and children in art.Emma Butcher on Kids with Guns https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09vz5lp Emma Butcher on Branwell Bronte https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05770my Producer: Jacqueline Smith

New Generation Thinker Alun Withey on what made 18th-century men shave off centuries of manly growth. Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. You can hear audience questions from the event as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast.To be clean-shaven was the mark of a C18 gentleman, beard-wearing marked out the rough rustic. For the first time, men were beginning to shave themselves instead of visiting the barber, and a whole new market emerged to cater for rising demand in all sorts of shaving products - soaps, pastes and powders. But the way these were promoted suggests there was confusion over exactly what the ideal man should be. On the one hand, razor makers appealed to masculine characteristics like hardness, control and temper in their advertisements whilst perfumers and other manufacturers of shaving soaps, stressed softness, ease and luxury. So enter the world of Georgian personal grooming to discover the 18th century's inner man.Alun Withey lectures in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter and is a Wellcome Research Fellow and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has edited an essay collection on the history of facial hair (Palgrave), curated a photographic exhibition of Victorian beards in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London and has written for BBC History Magazine and History Today. He blogs at dralun.wordpress.comAlun Withey on C16 medical history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p022kyp1 Alun Withey visits Bamburgh Castle https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p036l4q0 Alun Withey's article about the C19th attitude towards beards https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/31SKHd61RYxJBryrQ4NfmWJ/nine-reasons-victorians-thought-men-were-better-with-beards Producer: Jacqueline Smith.