The Essay

Stand knee-deep in a river and consider the energy flow. Water presses against you, light reflects upon the surface. What else can you feel? Helen Czerski of University College London views the Thames with the eyes of a physicist. At low tide she takes Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough for a wade through the surprisingly clean waters separating Brentford from Kew Gardens. How would the river look if embankments were removed and channels breached? Why do islands form and persist? Where does each drop of Thames water come from? Why can the river flow east and west at the same time?You may never view the Thames in quite the same way again.Producer: Alasdair Cross

For Feargal Sharkey the perfect cast is a lifelong obsession. It's the moment when man and river exist in perfect harmony. It's a passion he shares with generations of artists before him on the chalk streams of Hertfordshire. Dame Juliana Berners, Prioress of St Mary of Sopwell wrote one of the earliest books on the etiquette of hunting, hawking and fishing in the 14th century. Her work influenced Izaak Walton who opens The Compleat Angler with a vivid description of a walk from Tottenham to the waters that Feargal fishes today.Growing up in Derry with the mountains and trout-rich rivers of Donegal on his doorstep, Feargal fished from childhood, but when the punk fame of The Undertones reached its peak he found himself in north London with only the Grand Union Canal for company. Discovering the chalk streams on the edge of the city brought fishing back into his life and since then he's dedicated himself to the preservation of these waters. England contains most of the world's chalk streams, perfect habitat for trout, waterfowl, otter and water vole, but abstraction for drinking water and pollution from farming and industry has pushed many of these rivers to the edge of destruction. Feargal shares his determination to save the chalk streams with Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and instructs her in the Zen art of fly fishing.Producer: Alasdair Cross

On the banks of the River Medway, Nicola White is in search of artistic inspiration. Driftwood, perhaps? A Victorian poison bottle or a Roman pot? In the second of a series of Essays on British rivers Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough joins the mudlark artist as she combs through mud and shingle.The Medway rises in the South Downs and passes through sleepy Maidstone but it starts to get really interesting as it broadens out into mudflats, industry and islands. It's here that Kentish history, from the 43AD Roman invasion of Britain through the peaks and troughs of the Royal Navy's Chatham Dockyards to the preparations for Nazi invasion, can be read from the shore.Nicola collects the stories she finds there- military dog-tags, messages in bottles- and turns them into art inspired by the naïve abstraction of 20th-century St. Ives.Producer: Alasdair Cross

Gaelic songs and stories burst with mythical water creatures, from seductive kelpies and selkies to woeful waterfall banshees. In the first of five Essays from the banks of British rivers, folk singer Julie Fowlis guides Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough through a watery Highland underworld.Producer: Alasdair Cross

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde,Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly frank and direct answers...'Dear Dante,Did you really meant all that stuff about people being thrown into boiling pitch and tar..?'In his on-going epistolary quest, Ian attempts to find out everything we wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Why did Mary Shelley start so young? How did William Trevor keep going for so long? And what exactly is the significance of Marianne Moore's tricorn hat?Producer: Conor Garrett

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde,Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly frank and direct answers...'Dear Dante,Did you really meant all that stuff about people being thrown into boiling pitch and tar..?'In his on-going epistolary quest, Ian attempts to find out everything we wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Why did Mary Shelley start so young? How did William Trevor keep going for so long? And what exactly is the significance of Marianne Moore's tricorn hat?Producer: Conor Garrett

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde,Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly frank and direct answers...'Dear Dante,Did you really meant all that stuff about people being thrown into boiling pitch and tar..?'In his on-going epistolary quest, Ian attempts to find out everything we wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Why did Mary Shelley start so young? How did William Trevor keep going for so long? And what exactly is the significance of Marianne Moore's tricorn hat?Producer: Conor Garrett

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde,Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly frank and direct answers...'Dear Dante,Did you really meant all that stuff about people being thrown into boiling pitch and tar..?'In his on-going epistolary quest, Ian attempts to find out everything we wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Why did Mary Shelley start so young? How did William Trevor keep going for so long? And what exactly is the significance of Marianne Moore's tricorn hat?Producer: Conor Garrett

'Dear Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wilde,Do you mind if I just call you Oscar? It's just you always seemed so approachable yet ultimately unknowable...a bit like the Queen.' Continuing his series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom finds he's in the gutter, looking at the stars again. As his dispatches to some of the world's great writers resume, Ian is increasingly shocked by their unexpectedly frank and direct answers...'Dear Dante,Did you really meant all that stuff about people being thrown into boiling pitch and tar..?'In his on-going epistolary quest, Ian attempts to find out everything we wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Why did Mary Shelley start so young? How did William Trevor keep going for so long? And what exactly is the significance of Marianne Moore's tricorn hat?Producer: Conor Garrett

You don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the drivers of liberty and equality make the modern conception of human rights more religious, and less liberal, than both secular proponents and conservative critics have supposed. Dafydd Mills Daniel lectures on theology and ethics at the University of Oxford, and researches the history and development of theories of conscience.The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead and - like all the New Generation Thinker Essays - you can hear a longer version with audience questions as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. You can also see Dafydd in a National Geographic TV show talking about the last Sin Eater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvW7pxOrssU New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Jacqueline Smith