Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

John Maynard Keynes Mar 22, 2022

Show notes

JM Keynes and his theory, Keynesianism, is central to the financial history of twentieth century. However, he is also central to its cultural history. Keynes was not only an economist, but a man equally concerned with aesthetics and ethics; as interested in the ballet as he was with the stock market crash. Anne McElvoy talks to Robert Hudson about the musical drama has written about the political trading behind the Treaty of Versailles from Keynes's perspective. How does looking again at Keynes life and work offer us a different view of the man and his times?

Zachary D. Carter is a Writer in Residence with the Omidyar Network's Reimagining Capitalism initiative and the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

Robert Hudson is the co-author of Hall of Mirrors a musical based on JM Keynes's experiences at the Paris Peace Conference. His other work includes Magnitsky the Musical.

Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor History at Columbia University and he serves as Director of the European Institute. His books include: Shutdown: how COVID-19 shook the world's economy; Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World; and, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931.

Emma West is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham and her current research project, Revolutionary Red Tape, examines how public servants and official committees helped to produce and popularise modern British culture.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Vikings Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, used to be the date given for the beginning of the Viking age but research by Neil Price shows that it began centuries before. He traces the impact of an economy geared to maritime war and the central role of slavery in Viking life and trade. Judith Jesch is Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and Dr Kevan Manwaring is an author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Arts University Bournemouth. New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough presents.

The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price is out in paperback in April Vikings Valhalla is available now on Netflix New Generation Thinker Eleanor Barraclough researches this history and has written Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. You can find her presenting the Radio 3 Sunday feature on runes, and the supernatural north https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnwp

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Image: A reconstruction of the Viking life at Murton Park Dark Age Village (part of Yorkshire Museum of Farming).

Words and Music - Radio 3's weekly curation of prose, poems and music choices also looks at Vikings. You can hear it on Sunday at 5.30pm and then on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35f

The Stasi poetry circle, Nazi schools and German culture Mar 16, 2022

Show notes

In 1982, the East German security force was deeply concerned with subversive literature and decided to train soldiers and border guards to write lyrical verse. Decades earlier in 1933, a group of elite boarding schools modelled along the lines of English public schools were founded on Hitler's birthday. A new play explores the disappearance of English schoolboys in the Black Forest in 1936. Why did the authoritarian regimes of 20th-century Germany concern themselves so heavily with cultural output and influence? Anne McElvoy discusses some of the curious initiatives of Nazi Germany and the DDR and responses to them.

Pamela Carter is the author of The Misfortune of the English runs at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London from 25 April to 28 May 2022

Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR and a translation of Durs Grünbein's Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City

Philip Oltermann is Berlin Bureau Chief for The Guardian and the author of The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War

Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham. Her second book is The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

Producer: Ruth Watts

Blackmail & Shame Mar 10, 2022

Show notes

An artist murdered in his studio - the blackmailer thinks he knows who removed vital clues. This plot from Charles Bennett premiered in London's West End in 1928 and was subsequently turned into an early sound film by Alfred Hitchcock. Now playwright Mark Ravenhill has written a new version. He joins Matthew Sweet to discuss blackmail and our changing ideas about shame. New Generation Thinker and medieval historian Hetta Howes looks at ideas of shame in the middle ages, with critic and literary scholar Kaye Mitchell tracing those ideas today. Plus criminologist Paul Bleakley, who's researched the history of blackmail.

Blackmail, a new version written by Mark Ravenhill and directed by Anthony Banks, runs at Mercury Theatre, Colchester in Essex from March 4th - 19th

Producer: Luke Mulhall

New Thinking: Women’s history Mar 09, 2022

Show notes

Sex strikes suggested by Suffragettes, a theatre company devoted to exploring the experiences of women in the UK prison system and the campaign to make women's rights at the heart of human rights and its links with socialist Eastern Europe: Naomi Paxton finds out about new research into women's history.

Her guests are:

Tania Shew specialises in the history of feminist thought. She's currently a Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research working on sex strikes and birth strikes as tactics in the British and American women’s suffrage movements, 1890-1920.

Dr Celia Donert is Associate Professor in Central European History at the University of Cambridge. She is writing a book exploring How Women's Rights became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017.

Caoimhe Mcavinchey is Professor of Socially Engaged and Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University London. She has been working on a project Clean Break: Women, Theatre Organisation and the Criminal Justice System

Chloë Moss is a playwright who has worked with Clean Break on a number of projects.

You can see a film of Chloë's drama Sweatbox on the website https://www.cleanbreak.org.uk/

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research council – part of UKRI.

Presenter: Naomi Paxton Producer: Paula McFarlane

New Thinking: Women’s history Mar 08, 2022

Show notes

Her guests are:

You can see a film of Chloë's drama Sweatbox on the website https://www.cleanbreak.org.uk/

Presenter: Naomi Paxton Producer: Paula McFarlane

Sisters Mar 06, 2022

Show notes

The Unthank sisters, writers Lucy Holland and Oyinkan Braithwaite and historian and feminist activist Sally Alexander join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about what it means to be a sister on International Women's Day 2022. You could make a family from recent novels depicting sisterhood from Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister the Serial Killer, to Daisy Johnson's Sisters and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half but literary sisterhood goes back via Jane Austen and the Brontës to Chekhov, King Lear's daughters, Cinderella and Greek myths about the seven sisters who formed the Pleiades, or Antigone and Ismene. And if you're looking at feminist history the idea of the sisterhood has been a cornerstone of political action. Is it right that sisters will have a particular bond and sound if they perform music together? All of this and more in tonight's Free Thinking conversation. The Unthank sisters will be on tour with their latest album Sorrows Away visiting a range of venues from Norwich, Poole, Northampton, Middlesborough, Belfast, Edinburgh, Dublin and a range of places in between starting on March 13th in Lincoln Lucy Holland has written Sistersong set in Anglo-Saxon Britannia. She also presents Breaking the Glass Slipper, a podcast celebrating women in genre. You can hear a reading of Oyinkan's novel My Sister the Serial Killer by Weruche Opia on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p08q6q19 Sally Alexander, Professor Emerita at Goldsmiths, is founding editor of the History Workshop Journal and is working on a history of psycho-analysis.

Producer: Kevin Core

You might also be interested in the most recent episode of Radio 3's Words and Music on Sisters, with its curated playlist of readings and music of all kinds ranging from Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Brit Bennet and Arifa Akbar to Fanny Mendelssohn, Errollyn Wallen, Hildegard of Bingen and the Labeque Sisters performing Ravel. And tomorrow's programme explores new research into women's history. And there's a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website called Women in the World https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

The Generation Gap Mar 03, 2022

Show notes

Before Them, We is a photographic project by Ruth Sutoyé and also the title of an anthology of poems in which a group of poets of African descent reflect upon the lives of their grandparents and elders and the inter-generational relationships in the families they went on to establish. Ruth and co-editor and poet Jacob Sam-La Rose talk to Matthew Sweet alongside Booker prize winning author Howard Jacobson - the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants - who has just published a memoir exploring his early life in a working-class family in 1940s Manchester where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce before becoming a writer.

Mother's Boy by Howard Jacobson is out now You can find photographs from Before Them, We on https://www.ruthsutoye.com/ and the poetry anthology is published by Flipped Eye.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Barbican, art and writing in 50s Britain Mar 02, 2022

Show notes

Leading artists, writers, thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives.

Climate change, nature and art Mar 02, 2022

Show notes

Leading artists, writers, thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives.