Arts & Ideas

No need to RSVP just turn up and tune in to Free Thinking's end of year salon. Matthew Sweet is our host and he's promising wit and wisdom as well as a host of guests: Jake Arnott, Malika Booker, Neil Brand, David Aaronovitch and Katherine Cooper. Malika Booker co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen in 2001 to create a nourishing and encouraging community of writers dedicated to the development of their writing. She is currently the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her first poetry collection was called Pepper Seed and she also writes dramas. Jake Arnott is the author of six novels including The Long Firm and The Fatal Tree. He took part in the tenth anniversary tour of the Polari LGBT literary salon. Dr Katherine Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is researching the PEN archive and gatherings involving authors including H.G. Wells, Graham Greene and Margaret Storm Jameson. She is a BBC Radio 3 and AHRC New Generation Thinker. Neil Brand is a composer, dramatist and author and regular silent film accompanist at the BFI National Film Theatre and at the Barbican in London. David Aaronovitch is a journalist, broadcaster and author of books including his memoir Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists; Producer: Zahid Warley

Are pets theraputic? Is it moral to domesticate animals? Anne McElvoy explores the history of our relationship with pets with John Bradshaw author of Cat Sense and Dog Sense, Philip Howell who has researched the role of the domestic dog in Victorian Britain, bioethicist and writer Jessica Pierce who questions whether we should keep pets at all and novelist Laura Purcell. John Bradshaw has written The Animals Among Us: The New Science of Anthrozoology; Cat Sense: The Feline Enigma Revealed and Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. He is director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol.Laura Purcell published the ghost story The Silent Companions earlier this year. The Animal's Agenca : Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff was published this year - her other books include Run Spot Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. Philip Howell is a Senior Lecturer at Fellow at Emmanuel College Cambridge who has published At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain.

Philip Dodd discusses the significance of David Storey's groundbreaking 1960 novel with social historian Juliet Gardiner, journalist Rod Liddle, writer Anthony Clavane and the author's daughter Kate Storey.

Catherine Fletcher talks to Professor Stephen Greenblatt about the Adam and Eve story in the Christian tradition; to Islam Issa about Islam's version which tells a rather more gender-equality story of the original first couple. Jennifer Evans and Sara Read reveal how the story impacted on mothers and would-be mothers over centuries through their reading of 16th and 17th century medical textbooks. Garlic was one interesting diagnostic of pregnancy while menstrual periods played their part in murder trials. Professor Stephen Greenblatt is the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam & Eve Islam Issa is a New Generation Thinker and author of Milton in the Arab-Muslim World.Jennifer Evans is a director of the Perceptions of Pregnancy research network, author of Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in early modern England and editor of Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century .Sara Read is author of Maids, Wives, Widows: Exploring Early Modern Women’s Lives, 1540-1740 ; Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing, 1540-1740 co-authored with Jennifer Evans. (2017)

Matthew Sweet debates the merits of bad films with critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and Tim Robey as The Disaster Artist, James Franco's film inspired by cult classic The Room opens in UK cinemas. Plus the power of underground protest, of art and of the mind as we hear from psychologist Tali Sharot, from Jonathan Lerner on his time in the Weathermen, an organisation dedicated to the violent overthrowing of the United States government during the Vietnam era and from Lubaina Himid winner of this year's Turner Prize.Jonathan Lerner's book on his early years is 'Swords in the Kingdom: Reflections of an American Revolutionary' is published now. Tali Sharot is associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London and author of The Influential Mind - What the Brain Reveals About Our Power To Change Others. The Disaster Artist, produced and directed by James Franco, is inspired by the making of Tommy Wiseau's 2003 cult film The Room which became a cult classic. Producer: Fiona McLean

Masha Gessen has traced the lives of 4 Russians born as the Soviet Union crumbled. Daniel Beer won the Cundill History Prize for his history of punishment in Tsarist times. Mary Dejevsky writes and reports on Russian politics now. Philip Dodd presents. Masha Gessen's book is called The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Daniel Beer's prize winning book is The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars

Matthew Sweet discusses the Vietnam War with the film maker Ken Burns who has spent the last decade making a monumental documentary about America's ill fated war in South East Asia. The award winninng poet, Sasha Dugdale, reads from her latest collection, Joy; and Kate Flint traces the history of flash photography from its origins in the nineteenth century to Weegee and Gordon Parks in the twentieth and Hiroshi Sugimoto and Martin Parr todayThe Vietnam War - a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is released by PBS as a 10 disc DVD set.Joy by Sasha Dugdale is published by Carcanet .Flash! Photography, writing and Surprising Illumination by Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California is out now. Producer: Zahid Warley .

New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik talks to Shahidha Bari about city living. Plus artist Lucinda Rogers on depicting changes to a London market, a new report into prosperity and New Generation Thinker Alastair Fraser from the University of Glasgow shares his research . At the Stranger's Gate by Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is a memoir recalling 1980s New York and the early years of his marriage. Lucinda Rogers: On Gentrification Drawings from Ridley Road Market is on display at the House of Illustration in London until March 25th 2018. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

The Rt Hon Lord David Willetts talks to Philip Dodd about universities. The UK Minister for Universities and Science from 2010 to 2014, his new book considers both the history and the global role they now play. Plus a discussion about scandal old and new - is it a driving force for social change or once the outrage has passed does everything revert to the status quo. Historian and New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton, journalist Michael White and biographer Frances Wilson, author of lives of Thomas De Quincey and royal courtesan Harriette Wilson look at scandals past and present.

Philip Dodd looks at 2000 years of Arab Christians, at the modern rise of Pentecostalism and a novel depicting a man who decides to build a new church. Laura Premack from Lancaster University researches pentecostalism in Brazil, Nigeria and the USA. Neil Griffiths is author of a novel called As a God Might Be. Aurélie Clemente-Ruiz is Director of Exhibitions Department at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris where Eastern Christians: 2000 Years of History is on until January 14th 2018. It then tours to the MuBA Eugene Leroy, Fine Arts Museum of Tourcoing from 22nd February to 12 June 2018.