Arts & Ideas

The appearance of the aurora borealis has entranced and intrigued people from cultures across the world, inspiring art, music and stories, including tonight's Proms world premiere of Iain Bell's Aurora. But what creates it? Why is it green? Physicists Melanie Windridge, author of Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights, and Nathan Case of Aurorawatch UK discuss the science that lies behind the Northern Lights. BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas.

W H Auden called his longest poem, The Age of Anxiety a baroque eclogue - a description which hints at its rich complexity. Its account of a meeting between four strangers in a New York bar inspired Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony and was much admired by T S Eliot. The writers Glyn Maxwell and Polly Clark explore some of the intricacies of the poem with Matthew Sweet and explain how Auden has influenced their poetry and prose.Producer: Zahid Warley

Novelist Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard and Stone Cradle, talks to writer Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places, about their shared Romany heritage and the culture of the wider Romany diaspora. Presenter: Sophie Coulombeau

Fairy tales are not just familiar stories told to children but are also a means of conveying dark truths about morality and behaviour to adults. There are similarities between stories shared in different cultures . Composer Kerry Andrew has published her first novel Swansong and she performs many traditional songs. She talks to writer Katherine Langrish, author of Seven Miles of Steel Thistles and a “Troll Trilogy” about the cultural legacy of fairy tales and the lessons we can learn from them in a Proms Plus event recorded at Beit Hall, Imperial College London before an audience and chaired by Rana Mitter.

Novelist Will Self, shark expert Gareth Fraser and film expert Ian Hunter join Matthew Sweet for a discussion about sharks, whales and the impact of the book and film Jaws. Jaws started out as a novel which reads as a sociological study of a small American coastal resort full of rather unlikeable characters. It ended up as an iconic film whose heroes engage in a fight to the death with a Great White Man-Eating Machine. Matthew Sweet discusses how the shark came to fill the space once held by the whale, why big teeth still fill our nightmares and whether all publicity is good publicity for the denizens of the oceans with writer Will Self, whose novel 'Shark' was inspired by the film, and Gareth Fraser, who now studies the dental configurations of sharks all because he once sat in a dark cinema, as did life-long Jaws fan, the film expert Ian Hunter. The artist Fiona Tan, whose exhibition was partly inspired by 'Jonah the Giant Whale', a preserved whale exhibited inside a lorry which toured across Europe from the 1950s to the mid-1970s will also appear out of the deep. Presenter: Matthew Sweet Guest: Gareth Fraser, Dept of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield Guest: Ian Hunter, School of Media and Communication, De Montford University Guest: Will Self's latest novel is called 'Shark' Guest: Fiona Tan's exhibition at BALTIC called Depot and draws on Newcastle's history as a whaling port. It run from 10 Jul to 01 Nov 2015. Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Christopher Harding talked to the philosopher Mark Vernon and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes about figures from the past and present who have searched for a sense of transcendence and experienced ecstatic states.

Historians Laura Rowe and Saul David discuss the controversy surrounding the 1915 German torpedo attack that sank the RMS Lusitania, killing 1198 passengers and crew. Presented by Anindya Raychaudhuri.

The Bible has provided much fruitful inspiration to poets, novelists and composers over the past two thousand years. BBC New Generation Thinker Dr Joe Moshenska teaches Milton at the University of Cambridge. He discusses ideas of doom, chaos and Biblical themes with the novelist Salley Vickers, whose novel Mr Golightly’s Holiday features God as protagonist. They look at the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah, Job, Cassandra and Tiresias and discuss whether creation is impossible without chaos with Nandini Das, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and an audience at Imperial College in London.

A series of classical tales, from the Iliad to the Inferno have been recast by modern poets. Sean O’Brien has written a version of Dante’s Inferno, and, for the stage, Aristophanes’ The Birds; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sandeep Parmar’s poetry includes Eidolon, the classical rewrite Helen of Troy in America, and she is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Catherine Fletcher invites them to reflect on how to find the right words and images when translating a classic work into a modern idiom and what it means to work on something which is well known as two Proms present new work inspired by Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

Poets Gillian Clarke and Peter Mackay discuss the rich seam of folklore that has influenced their work and the danger of losing our connection to these tales. Gillian is a former National Poet of Wales and winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. Peter is a New Generation Thinker, originally from Lewis, and an expert in Scots and Irish poetry.