The Essay

There are currently wars in two of Jordan's neighbouring countries. The kingdom has a long history of absorbing trouble from its orders and has its origins in the settlement after World War One. Lina Attel is Director General of the King Hussein Foundation, National Centre for Culture and Arts. In this essay, recorded with partners the British Council at the Haya Cultural Centre, Amman, she explains how Jordan's strong cultural identity has sustained it through the turbulent century since the First World War. She says it is a knowledge of the stories of its cultural heroes that will keep the country together as it faces further threats.

David Frum is a Washington-based political advisor and an editor of the Atlantic Magazine. He is also the former Special Advisor and speech writer to President George W Bush, and was working at the White House when America was attacked by terrorists on September 11th 2001. In this essay, recorded with BBC Partners the British Council at the United States Library of Congress, he explains how World War One came to shape US Foreign Policy through the twentieth century and still has a strong effect on how American engages with the world today.

Celebrated playwright and theatre director Wesley Enoch is a proud Noonuccal Nuugi man. During his career he has directed many plays by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Building up to the First World War centenary, Wesley developed the Black Diggers project about the experience of indigenous soldiers in World War One with the playwright Tom Wright. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with the British Council and the BBC World Service. Wesley Enoch's essay, Stories that Bind, is delivered at the ABC headquarters in Sydney. In it he explores the powerful legend of Anzac in Australia and how that can leave out an important part of the story.Producer, Charlie Taylor.

The poet and translator Sasha Dugdale explores the impact of the First War on the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Her focus is on the collection, White Flock, published in 1917, but written during the war. In many poems, Akhmatova mentions the war directly, and in others, echoes of loss and war sound, refracted through peculiarly Russian folk imagery. Sasha focuses on a two-part poem called 'July 1914'. In the first stanza, the turf has been burning for four weeks and the dry summer smells of smoke and fumes. The birds aren't singing and the aspen isn't moving. A one-legged wanderer comes to the house with terrible prophecies and predicts that 'soon there won't be room for all the fresh graves'. In the second part, the juniper's sweet smell rises from the burning wood and the widow's cry sounds. Instead of water and the rain they have prayed for, a warm red wetness floods the trampled fields. Sasha's powerful Essay includes a new translation of the poem and a poignant account of how some of its motifs are now reappearing in contemporary writing about the war in Ukraine.

The long-running series in which scholars, writers and critics explore the impact of the First World War on individual artists through a single work of art. 4.The distinguished art critic, Richard Cork, discusses Pablo Picasso's designs for the Ballets Russes production, Parade, which premiered in Paris in 1917, with music by Erik Satie and a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau. Picasso's sets and costumes for Parade are now considered key works, representative of the tumultuous era in which they were produced. At the onset of war, Picasso had left France and moved to Rome, where the Ballets Russes rehearsed. He soon met the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and married her in 1918, so these were years of personal change as well as artistic. Although the ballet took time to gain critical response, its originality was recognised by some at the time. Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote the programme notes for Parade, described Picasso's designs as "a kind of surrealism" (une sorte de surréalisme) three years before Surrealism developed as an art movement in Paris, partly as a response to the war. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Virginia Woolf spent the First World War on the Home front mainly in London. It was an anxious time; she lost several cousins in the conflict, and her brother-in-law Cecil Woolf died at the Front; in 1915 she suffered a mental breakdown.For Woolf the war had changed everything, and her three novels written soon after it - Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) - display a marked shift in style. 'There had to be new forms for our new sensations', she wrote in a 1916 essay, and in 1923 went further: "We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale - the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages - has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present."In 1925, Woolf's brilliant novel Mrs Dalloway would amaze readers with its literary techniques and its counterpointing of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway and war veteran Septimus Warren-Smith. Here was a work of fiction in which the principal characters never meet, where the Victorian staples of plot and family relationships are eclipsed by a new emphasis on what the characters think rather than what they do or say.For Dame Gillian Beer this thronging novel with its cast of war profiteers, war casualties, and passers-by ultimately has a positive message. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf draws the reader and the novel's characters together: "Whether known or unknown to each other, in a shared humanity," she says, "her work draws us all alongside, across time.".

How great artists and thinkers responded to the horrors of the First World War in individual works of art.2.Stand-Up comedian Arthur Smith presents a suitably Dada-esque account of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto.Arthur Smith has long been fascinated by the Dada movement, which began one hundred years ago in 1915. His interest was re-ignited by a recent visit to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Tzara - a French writer and performance artist of Romanian-Jewish descent - first came to prominence. This visit led him to reflect both on the seriousness of the dadists' project - as a protest against the meaningless horrors of the First World War - and on their use of comedy to express their ideas.Juxtaposing the Dada Manifesto with his thoughts on that most conventional of War poets, Rupert Brooke, Arthur Smith's comic and thought-provoking Essay is a document of which Tristan Tzara himself - had he been a radio broadcaster - would have been proud.Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Further Essays in the major Radio Three series exploring how great artists and thinkers responded to World War One in individual works of art. 1.Rabindranath Tagore: Santanu Das explores the great Indian thinker's Nobel lectures Afer Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, he became one of the most feted literary figure of the war years. He was read at home but also in the trenches, by the likes of Wilfred Owen. With his long white beard, flowing Indian clothes and intense gaze, Tagore came across as some sort of Oriental prophet, speaking for peace at a time of war. In 1916, he gave a series of lectures in Japan and the United States on 'Nationalism'. In them he noted: 'In this frightful war, the West has stood face to face with her own creation'. For him, the War was neither a sudden eruption nor a case of Europe sleepwalking into conflict but, rather, the shattering logical climax of unchecked Western nationalism and imperialism: 'suddenly, with all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the Furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into the dust. It is the fifth act of the tragedy of the unreal.'Santanu Das, Reader in English at King's College, London, tells the story of a largely fogotten writer and thnker. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

To mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a series of essays about Napoleon Bonaparte and his relationship with a a group of writers. In this edition, Kirsteen McCue on singing and interpreting the history behind the 'Ettrick Shepherd' James Hogg's Scottish Napoleonic songs.

To mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a series of essays about Napoleon Bonaparte. When the writer Adam Nicolson was a teenager he lived with his father who was writing about Napoleon and 1812. What was it like?