Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

The Piano and Love Jun 14, 2018

Show notes

Historian Fern Riddell and composer Debbie Wiseman on why the piano is essentially erotic while psychologist Frank Tallis and Tiffany Watt Smith explore obsessive love with presenter Matthew Sweet. Plus Grainne Sweeney curator of an exhibition which looks at the way inventors from the North East of England have shaped the world we live in today.

Dr Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist and author of The Incurable Romantic: and Other Unsettling Revelations as well as a series of detective novels The Liebermann Papers and horror and supernatural fiction. Dr Fern Riddell is a New Generation Thinker and author of Death In Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion. Actress. Arsonist. Suffragette. Jane Campion's prize winning film The Piano is being re-released to mark 25 years since it was made. Debbie Wiseman's most recent recordings include her score for the film Edie, and Live at the Barbican. Dr Tiffany Watt Smith is a New Generation Thinker and author of The Book of Human Emotions

The Great Exhibition of the North runs from 22 June—9 September 2018 in a variety of museums, galleries, music venues and public squares in Newcastle and Gateshead. It includes Which Way North at the Great North Museum: Hancock from Friday 22 June - Sunday 9 September 2018.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Inside the 'Intellectual Dark Web' Jun 13, 2018

Show notes

Commentator Douglas Murray, journalist Bari Weiss and writer Ed Husain join Philip Dodd to explore the 'Intellectual Dark Web'.

Their YouTube videos and podcasts receive millions of views and downloads. They sell out theatres across the US. But these aren't rock stars or the latest pop sensation. They are a collection of public intellectuals, scientists, political columnists, and stand up-comedians who are at the front line of the raging 'culture wars'. As two of its leading figures, neuroscience Sam Harris and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, prepare for a UK tour, Philip Dodd finds out more about this popular movement.

The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray is out now.

The House of Islam: A Global History by Ed Husain is out now.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Mark Lilla. Owen Hatherley. Gulzaar Barn. Jun 12, 2018

Show notes

Mark Lilla could be called the conscience of liberal America. He talks to Anne McElvoy about life after identity politics. 2018 New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn discusses whether paying people for taking part in medical trials is different from other forms of "labour". Plus Owen Hatherley's latest book is called Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent. He discusses what makes a European city and who should take responsibility for shaping our urban environment whether its Hull or Thessaloniki with Deborah Saunt from DSDHA - who are working on new plans for the West End of London following the opening of Crossrail stations.

Mark Lilla's new book, The Once and Future Liberal, is a ferocious analysis of the American left’s abdication as well as a call to arms. The time for evangelism - of speaking truth to power is over, he says, now it’s all about seizing power to defend truth.

Gulzaar Barn lectures in philosophy at the University of Birmingham working on moral, political, and feminist philosophy.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of short columns reflecting their research on bbc.co.uk/FreeThinking

Producer: Zahid Warley

The Man Who Convinced Jimmy Carter to Run for President Jun 07, 2018

Show notes

Matthew Sweet meets with physician, anthropologist, author and Jimmy Carter's former 'drugs czar', Peter Bourne.

Comparing his life to the title character in the film Forrest Gump, the trained psychiatrist and Vietnam veteran looks back on an eclectic career spanning six decades. He talks about his involvement in the civil rights movement, his close relationship with Jimmy Carter (and how he convinced him to run for president), serving as an Assistant Secretary-General at the UN, and his awkward encounter with Saddam Hussein. The author of a Fidel Castro biography, Bourne also caught the attention of the author Robert Ludlum.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Edith Hall and Simon Critchley Jun 07, 2018

Show notes

From people-watching with Aristotle in a London park, to meeting in a luxury hotel at midnight to discuss the fate of a continent, to using a lunchtime five-a-side game as the starting point for a meditation on the human condition, this programme treats 'philosophy' as a verb rather than a noun. Bernard-Henri Lévy is in London to perform a one-man play on Brexit. Simon Critchley's new book is What We Think About When We Think About Football, and Edith Hall's is Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life.

Shahidha Bari talks to each of them about bringing philosophy out of the academy.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The rise of translation and the death of foreign language learning Jun 06, 2018

Show notes

Arundhati Roy, Meena Kandasamy and Preti Taneja share thoughts about translation. Plus Anne McElvoy will be joined by Professor Nichola McLelland and Vicky Gough of the British Councl to examine why, in UK schools and universities, the number of students learning a second language is collapsing - whilst the number of languages spoken in Britain is rising and translated fiction is becoming more available and popular.

The Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy is giving the W G Sebald lecture at the British Library about translation. You can find a 45' conversation with her about her latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness on the Free Thinking website. Meena Kandasamy translates from Tamil and her first poetry collection Touch was translated into 5 languages. Her latest novel When I Hit You looks at domestic abuse. It is on the shortlist for the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction and you can find a collection of interviews with the 6 shortlisted writers at bbc.co.uk/Freethinking Preti Taneja is a New Generation Thinker whose first novel We That Are Young is a setting of King Lear in Delhi. It's been shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction. She is taking part in the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival at the British Library on Saturday June 9th.

Producer: Zahid Warley

American slavery, the occult and modern politics, jobs for psychopaths. Jun 01, 2018

Show notes

Iraq vet and novelist Kevin Powers, the careers picked by psychopaths, and American writer Gary Lachman join Matthew Sweet.

Kevin Powers' prize winning novel The Yellow Birds explored the experience of soldiers and their lack of control. His new novel A Shout in the Ruins looks at the long shadows cast by the American Civil War and slavery.

Gary Lachman discusses non-rational or pre-Enlightenment thinking in contemporary politics and culture as he publishes his latest book called Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. He is joined by Professor Christine Ferguson from Stirling University who researches the influence of the occult on popular culture and politics in the UK.

Psychologist Kevin Dutton and broadcaster and psychotherapist Lucy Beresford discuss the idea that psychopaths are drawn to certain careers, including radio journalism.

Kevin Dutton's books include The Wisdom of Psychopaths. Lucy Beresford is the host of LBC's Sex and Relationships phone-in show.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Rowan Williams and Simon Armitage May 30, 2018

Show notes

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about Auden, Dostoevsky and tragedy. At Hay Festival he talks to poet Simon Armitage about the imprint of landscapes in Yorkshire, West Wales, and the Middle East, the use of dialect words and reinterpreting myths. Chaired by Rana Mitter.

Books by Rowan Williams include Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and The Tragic Imagination. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Books by Simon Armitage include The Unaccompanied, Flit, Selected Poems, Walking Home, Travelling Songs, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Homer's Odyssey. He is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Elif Shafak, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Javier Cercas May 29, 2018

Show notes

The lure of conspiracy theories, the power of fiction to translate history and the public role of writer are debated as Shahidha Bari chairs a discussion recorded with the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas and the Turkish author Elif Shafak - recorded with an audience at the Hay Festival.

Javier Cercas' latest novel is The Impostor and his essay about fiction is called The Blind Spot.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel is called The Shape of the Ruins.

Elif Shafak is the author of novels including The Architect's Apprentice, Honour and Three Daughters of Eve.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Tacita Dean; Mountains, John Tyndall May 24, 2018

Show notes

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough meets the British artist Tacita Dean. ‘Tacita Dean: Landscape’ has just opened at the Royal Academy in London and features vast chalk mountains and cloudscapes and a film made in Cornwall, Yellowstone and Wyoming. And what does an artist do when she travels hundreds of miles to film a total eclipse of the sun… and finds there’s no film in the camera. Then focus on mountains and those who climb them. New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson reflects on an interplay between climbing and photography in the late nineteenth century, the age of Being Still. Plus John Tyndall who took his mountaineering and poetic meditations back to the lab and proved why the sky is blue and mountains are cooler at the top than at the bottom. With Tyndall's biographer, Roland Jackson and literary scholar Gregory Tate.

Tacita Dean Landscape is at the Royal Academy until August 12th. Last chance to see Tacita Dean: Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, 15 March-28 May; Still Life is at the National Gallery, 15 March-28 May

Roland Jackson, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution THE ASCENT OF JOHN TYNDALL: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual is out now. Greg Tate lectures in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews and was chosen as a New Generation Thinker in 2013.

Ben Anderson is a 2018 New Generation Thinker from Keele University who is writing a book Modern Natures: Mountain Leisure and Urban Culture in England and Germany, c. 1885-1918.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Presenter: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough Producer: Jacqueline Smith

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