The Essay

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates why Cravan is known as the father of performance art.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt from Cravan's Weird Seance courtesy of Daniel Oliver

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates Cravan's work as a notorious art critic.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt from Cravan's Weird Seance courtesy of Daniel Oliver

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates how Cravan's career as a boxer influenced his art.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt from Cravan's Weird Seance courtesy of Daniel Oliver

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada, surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century. Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico. In this episode Ross comes to terms with Cravan's brazenly offensive poetry.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy Warmsley

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.When she first encountered Jane Eyre in the classroom, Philippa Gregory was looking for a love story - between Jane Eyre and the brooding Mr Rochester. Years later, she reads the book very differently. Join Philippa as she explores the nuances within Charlotte Brontë's classic and writes an original scene, a new ending, for the book. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends. Award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak first glimpsed Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on a bookshelf at school. It was only years later that she managed to get her hands on a copy. The experience stirred her soul. The romance was raw, wrong and real. But the book's ending came as a surprise. For this Boxing Day edition, Elif imagines what would happen if Anna were able to meet her creator, Tolstoy himself, after the novel's final page. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.For the six-year-old AL Kennedy, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows provided firelight calm and comfort. She still has her childhood copy, bound up in green cloth with gold lettering, the only hardback she possessed at that age. This Christmas Day, she imagines what might have happened to Mole, Rat and Badger years after the Battle of Toad Hall. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Literature A Level. She loathed the book. But a few years ago, she gave Woolf another go, reading Mrs Dalloway. As a writer who experiments with language and form, she marvelled at the inventiveness, how Woolf's characters float in and out of the prose. In this Christmas Eve edition of Open Endings, Bernardine reveals her admiration for Woolf's work and imagines a different end for Clarissa Dalloway's extravagant party. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.In the first essay of the series, the crime writer Ian Rankin picks William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like many students, Ian first encountered the novel at school but certain scenes and moments have stayed with him for the past 40 years. In this essay, Ian explores his relationship with the work as a teenager of the 1970s and imagines what might have happened to two of the shipwrecked boys, Ralph and Jack, once they reach adulthood.Producer: Camellia Sinclair

In April 1881, a young African man named John Ocansey set sail from the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) for Liverpool in order to try and discover what had happened to goods that his father had dispatched to a Liverpudlian agent. The Africans had not received the two and a half thousand pounds they were owed in exchange for the goods, and rather than sit at home and accept the fact that they had most likely been swindled, young John Ocansey had decided to journey to the world-famous port of Liverpool and claim the money that rightfully belonged to his father. Trading between Africa and Liverpool had been established for over two centuries, and was based on the slave trade in which it was understood that Africans had no rights. Even after the abolition of the trade such attitudes persisted, but Ocansey was determined that he would not be treated as a slave.Producer Neil McCarthy