The Essay

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Colm Toibin tells the story of Lady Gregory's fighter pilot son, whose death inspired one of Yeats' most famous poems, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'.Written and read by Colm Toibin Produced by Emma Harding.

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Elif Shafak contemplates a point of no return in the history of her native country, Turkey.Written and read by Elif Shafak Produced by Emma Hardinghttp://www.1418now.org.uk/.

"It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts", Michael PowellContinuing the Sound of Cinema season, film critic Peter Bradshaw looks at Powell and Pressburger's sensuous 1947 melodrama, 'Black Narcissus'.Set in a convent in an isolated Himalayan valley, in which tensions are running high, Black Narcissus was based on the 1939 novel of the same name by Rumer Godden. It stars Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron and Jean Simmons, and was described by Michael Powell described as the most erotic film he ever made.Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus'.Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.Producer: Justine Willett.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War through individual works of art10.The poet Ruth Padel reflects on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son Peter, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914.The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty, hunger and war in the 20th century.The death of her youngest son, Peter, in October 1914, prompted a prolonged period of deep depression, but by the end of that year she was turning her thoughts to creating a moument to Peter and his fallen comrades.She destroyed this first monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The final memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed in 1932 and placed in the cemetery where Peter lay.The poet Ruth Padel traces Kollwitz's long period of anguish and artistic growth.Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring.Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Of her 1917 collection, Rabindranath Tagore declared: "Your poems in The Broken Wing seem to be made of tears and fire, like the clouds of a July evening, glowing with the muffled power of sunset."The distinguished scholar of the First World War, Santanu Das, a reader in English at King's College, London, reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in their work.BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet, fresh from her experiences in Afghanistan and Syria, introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France, 'Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort'.Wharton, best known for 'The Age Of Innocence' and 'The House of Mirth', was granted unique access to the Western front and wrote one of the most evocative and undeservedly neglected accounts of life in France in World War One.In its pages, penned early in the war, are Wharton's painterly descriptions of the country's overnight transformation from peace to war, her deep love for France and its people, and her accounts of the destruction wrought upon the villages and towns in the path of the German invader.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship7.Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship PotemkinFor Russians of Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Soviet state emerged. Eisenstein seized the opportunity of serving in the Red Army in order to become a radical theatre director, which led him into film as part of the first generation of Soviet film-makers who would astonish the world in the late 1920s with films like The Battleship Potemkin and October. These films would shape the cultural and political landscape of the interwar years - championed by those who wanted to condemn the Great War as an imperialist struggle, and also foreshadowing the Second World War, as in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. The distinguished film historian Ian Christie untangles this complex story.Producer Beaty Rubens Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual work.6. Dr Heather Jones of the LSE reflects on Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu. Completed in 1916 and the work of a French soldier at the front, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions there. It proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working- class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent.Producer: Ben Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art, literature and scholarship5.Michal Shapira on Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a text written in Vienna in 1915, expressing his dismay as the war progressed.The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud shared the general moodBut, like his fellow-citizens, Freud expected a quick war. By February 1915, with two of his sons fighting and thousands of injured and traumatised soldiers returning from the front, Freud's feelings had changed.Dr Michal Shapira reflects on his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and considers how it prefigures some of his later, better-known works on war and the death-drive.Dr Michal Shapira is a senior lecturer of history and gender studies at Tel Aviv University Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art.Professor David Edgerton of King's College London reflects on the Memorandum on the Neglect of Science, a 1916 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment.In a letter to The Times that year, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously.They continued by observing that the entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the civil service, were weighted towards the Classics rather than sciences. Was this the first stirrings CP Snow's Two Cultures debate?David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History, at King's College London, finds out what was going on at the time and looks at how the First World War advanced British science.Producer: Benedict Warren.