Arts & Ideas

Public pools, the "steamie" and the Turkish bath; debates about hygiene and the role and revival of these public spaces are explored by Matthew Sweet and guests as Scottish theatres host a 30th anniversary tour of Tony Roper's play depicting 1950s Glasgow women washing their clothes in a public washhouse. Joining Matthew will be Chris Renwick, author of 'Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State', and Claire Launchbury, who has studied women's use of public baths in Middle Eastern cities. We'll also be introduced to the joy of the shmeiss at London's Porchester Spa with columnist and steam-rooms enthusiast Matthew Norman. Following the announcement today of the death of Peter Hall, we'll hear an extract from an interview he recorded with Philip Dodd for Night Waves in 2011, and David Warner remembers being directed by Peter Hall in a landmark production of Hamlet in 1965. The full recording of Peter Hall's interview with Philip Dodd is available on the Free Thinking website.The Steamie tours to Kirckaldy, Aberdeen, Dundee, Ayr, Inverness, Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh between September 6th and November 11th. It features Libby McArthur, Mary McCusker, Steven McNicoll, Carmen Pieraccini and Fiona Wood.Producer: Luke Mulhall

The Booker Prize winning novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, talks to Anne McElvoy about the art of fiction and his new book, The Sparsholt Affair Producer: Zahid Warley

Anne McElvoy is joined by historians Helen Rappaport and Victor Sebestyen to consider the figure of Lenin, as the Proms marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.Victor Sebestyen, author of Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate PortraitAnd Helen Rappaport, author of Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd 1917

Professor Kathleen Burk, University College London, reflects on Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address with BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Joanna Cohen. Event hosted by Rana Mitter.

Matthew Sweet talks to the classicist, writer and stand- up comedian, Natalie Haynes, about the glory that was Rome -with readings by the actor, Peter Marinker,from Virgil, Sulpicia, Gibbon and Dickens.Producer: Zahid Warley

Michelangelo and Coleridge, Dickens and the Impressionists, all left work that they or others deemed unfinished, interrupted or incomplete. In front of a BBC R3 Proms audience at Imperial Collge in London, the poet and broadcaster, Ian McMillan is joined by the writer Meg Rosoff who completed the novel ‘Beck’ for her friend, the late Mal Peet, and art historian and curator, Karen Serres from the Courtauld Gallery to talk about what is meant by unfinished art and literature and why it disturbs, provokes and inspires.

Ian McMillan and a pre-Proms audience at Imperial College London have the smoky essence of Djinn conjured for them by literary scholar and New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari and novelist Elif Shafak whose books are full of djinn. Shafak reads from her novel The Bastard of Istanbul and reflects on her grandmothers' very different versions of personal genie while Shahidha explores the idea that djinn and their abilities to fly and build huge castles in one night are part of the human drive to technological advance.

Nick Littlehales, sports sleep coach and chair of the British Sleep Council, talks with novelist A. L. Kennedy about sleep and insomnia. The event is hosted by Rana Mitter.

A pre-Prom audience at Imperial College in London listens in as Shaidha Bari talks to Assyriologist Irving Finkel about cuneiform; how the script survived, what it tells us about life in the cities of Ur, Ninevah and Babylon and the way some of the most memorable stories ever told travelled from culture to culture. On the fare demonic puns, a four thousand year old joke, why the Ark might have been round and just how painful life was for Sumerian school chidren.

Kevin LeGendre and Claire Martin discuss Ella Fitzgerald