Arts & Ideas

Novelists John Lanchester and Diana Evans, both chroniclers of contemporary London, discuss the many and diverse communities and villages that make up the UK capital, exploring the differences between north and south, east and west, the suburbs and the inner city. John Lanchester’s novel Capital, set in London prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis, was dramatised for BBC Television in 2015, while Diana Evans’ most recent novel Ordinary People offers a portrait of contemporary London and modern relationships, framed by Barack Obama’s election victory and the death of Michael Jackson.

The Alps have loomed large in the artistic imagination since the Romantic poets explored them in search of ‘the sublime’. Historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to writer Abbie Garrington and climber Dan Richards. His book Climbing Days tells the life of his Great-Great Aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman climber, and reflects on the appeal of the mountains and how the landscape can be a force for creativity, in music and literature. Abbie Garrington, from Durham University, has a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a literary history of mountaineering.Producer: Zahid Warley

Inspired by Beethoven's penchant for musical jokes, Sahidha Bari is joined by writer Meg Rosoff for a selection of readings of comic fiction from Kingsley Amis to Paul Beatty. The reader is Carl Prekopp.

Ever since the ancient Greeks, writers have waxed lyrical about rural life, associating it with beauty, innocence and goodness. Will Abberley, BBC New Generation Thinker and senior lecturer in English at the University of Sussex is joined by writer Melissa Harrison & archaeologist and sheep farmer Francis Pryor to discuss the British countryside real and imagined.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Helen Macdonald, author of H Is For Hawk and Tim Birkhead, Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield and author of Bird Sense, share their experiences of observing birds closely and their pick of writing inspired by real and fictional birds. Professor Birkhead’s recent research has been into the adaptive significance of egg shape in birds and Helen Macdonald won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award for her writing about the year she spent training a goshawk. Presenter: Lucy PowellProducer: Jacqueline Smith

Lauren Elkin, author of 'Flaneuse' and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Seán Williams talk to Rana Mitter about the joys of a wandering life and the inspiration that walking brought to writers from the 18th century to the present day.Producer: Zahid Warley

Sarah Dillon and novelist Richard Beard on narrative voices in literature

Longus’s charming pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe about teenage love and pirates was written in the second century AD. Tim Whitmarsh, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, discusses his work, alongside that of other early Greek writers and Judith Mackrell, dance critic for The Guardian talks about how the text was used by Diaghilev to create the iconic ballet for the Ballet Russes. Presenter: Shahidha Bari.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Why We Need the Novel Now. Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson delivers a keynote lecture and talks to presenter Shahidha Bari and an audience at the Southbank Centre in London as part of the Man Booker 50 Festival. In the age of Twitter and no-platforming, Jacobson argues that the novel has never been more necessary. Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question and was shortlisted for J in 2014Producer: Zahid Warley

Helaine Blumenfeld is a sculptor who divides her time between her family in England and her work-family in Italy. As an exhibition featuring much new work opens in Ely Cathedral, she talks to Anne McElvoy about expressing her thoughts in marble, the importance of risk to the artist and why total immersion without distraction produces her best work. As the Liverpool Biennial gets under way Dale Harding, an Australian artist and descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of Central Queensland, explains his own education in the medium of wood and why his art is part of the making and story-telling traditions and brutal recent history of his cultural family. Back to the 17th century and Stella Tillyard tells Anne about the inspiration behind her new novel: the immense human effort (and human sacrifice) it took to reclaim land from the sea in East Anglia, Holland and the islands of what is now New York. And pirates...New Generation Thinker and Ottoman historian, Michael Talbot, looks to change their image. Helaine Blumenfeld 'Tree of Life' at Ely Cathedral 13 JULY - 26 OCTOBER 2018 Dale Harding See his work at Tate Liverpool as part of Liverpool Biennial 2018: Beautiful world, where are you? from 14 July – 28 October. Stella Tillyard 'The Great Level' is out now. Michael Talbot is a lecturer in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich . New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Presenter: Anne McElvoy Producer: Jacqueline Smith