The Essay

There is fascinating evidence that 5,000 years ago, people living in Britain and Ireland had a deep and meaningful relationship with the underworld seen in the carved chalk, animal bones and human skeletons found at Cranborne Chase in Dorset in a large pit, at the base of which had been sunk a 7-metre-deep shaft. Other examples considered in this Essay include Carrowkeel in County Sligo, the passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in eastern Ireland and the Priddy Circles in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. If prehistoric people regarded the earth as a powerful, animate being that needed to be placated and honoured, perhaps there are lessons here for our own attitudes to the world beneath our feet. Susan Greaney is a New Generation Thinker who works for English Heritage at Stonehenge and who is studying for her PhD at Cardiff University.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can hear her journey to Japan to compare the Jomon civilisations with Stonehenge as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature and there is an exhibition open at Stonehenge about the comparison https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hgqxProducer: Torquil MacLeod

Advances in robotics and virtual reality are giving us ever more 'realistic' ways of representing the world, but the quest for vivid visualisation is thousands of years old. This essay takes the guide to oratory and getting your message across written by the ancient Roman Quintilian and focuses in on a wall painting of The Judgment of Solomon in an Elizabethan house in the village of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. Often written off as stiff, formal and artificial with arguments that the Reformation fear of idolatry stifled Elizabethan art, New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday argues that story telling and conveying vivid detail was an important part of painting in this period as art was used to communicate messages to serve social, political and religious ends.Christina Faraday is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. You can hear her discussing the history of fairgrounds at the end of a Free Thinking episode called Kindness https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j9cd and her work on an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the painting of Nicholas Hilliard in a Free Thinking episode about the joy of miniatures https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002mk2New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall

This Essay tells a story of political marches and everyday acts of radical care; of sledgehammers and bags of rice; of the struggles for justice waged by migrant domestic workers but it also charts the realisation of Ella Parry-Davies, that acknowledging publicly for the first time her own condition of epilepsy – or “coming out crip” – is part of the story of our blindness to inequalities in healthcare and living conditions faced by many migrant workers. Ella Parry-Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London working on an oral history project creating sound walks by interviewing migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. You can hear her discussing her research in a Free Thinking episode called Stanley Spencer, Domestic Servants, Surrogacy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000573qNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Robyn Read

When Tom Smith sets out to research allegations of racism in Berlin’s club scene, he finds himself face to face with his own past in techno’s birthplace: Detroit. Visiting the music distributor Submerge, he considers the legacy of the pioneers Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the influence of Afro-futurism and the work done in Berlin to popularise techno by figures including Kemal Kurum and Claudia Wahjudi. But the vibrant culture which seeks to be inclusive has been accused of whiteness and the Essay ends with a consideration of the experiences of clubbers depicted in the poetry of Michael Hyperion Küppers. Tom Smith is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in German at the University of St Andrews. You can find another Essay from him called Masculinity Comrades in Arms recorded at the York Festival of Ideas 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00061m5 and a New Thinking podcast discussion Rubble Culture to techno in postwar Germany https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07srdmh New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio. Producer: Robyn Read

Poet Kenneth Steven finds inspiration in Scotland's west coast islands. Each memoir concludes with a poem written about the island he has visited.5. The Holy Island: a personal reflection on an uninhabited island of spiritual peace.

Poet Kenneth Steven finds inspiration in Scotland's west coast islands. Each memoir concludes with a poem written about the island he has visited.4. Barra: Gaelic songs and dances at the southern end of the Outer Hebrides.

Poet Kenneth Steven finds inspiration in Scotland's west coast islands. Each memoir concludes with a poem written about the island he has visited.3. Staffa: the carved pillars and grottos that brought visitors from all over the world.

Poet Kenneth Steven finds inspiration in Scotland's west coast islands. Each memoir concludes with a poem written about the island he has visited.2. Jura: two majestic mountains and a whirlpool, where George Orwell found inspiration for 1984.

Poet Kenneth Steven finds inspiration in Scotland's west coast islands. Each memoir concludes with a poem written about the island he has visited.1. Mingulay: in the Outer Hebrides, an island comparable in its wild beauty and isolation to St Kilda.

Diaries are one of our oldest literary traditions, conjuring questions of private confessions and public display. In this series of essays we explore five diarists of the past through the lens of the present. In these extraordinary times, when the shift between the domestic and the out-of-reach wider world is ever more pronounced, Radio 3 has commissioned five Essays on the theme of diaries – five new diaries written during the unprecedented period of recent weeks, reflecting on the present moment and reaching out to another historical literary diarist for aid and inspiration.5. Ian Sansom: Mince on Toast with Christopher Isherwood Ian Sansom reflects on the supreme sociability of Christopher Isherwood through the extreme unsociability of social isolation.