Arts & Ideas

The film starring Michael Caine was adapted from a 1970 Ted Lewis novel set in an underworld of gangsters and teenage pornography. Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Pamela Hutchinson and John Gray talk with Matthew Sweet about the influence of the book and film.Originally set in Scunthorpe, Lewis' novel Jack's Return Home was relocated to Newcastle/Gateshead for the film which Mike Hodges adapted and directed. A series of events marking what would have been Ted Lewis's 80th birthday are taking place at Scunthorpe, Newcastle, Barton-upon-Humber and Hull.Jack's Return Home (1970) was published in 1971 as Carter and later re-published as Get Carter after the film was made. Nick Triplow is the author of a biography Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit NoirProducer: Torquil MacLeod

From the influential part played by Sikh queens, through the ties of marriage and religion which helped shape the Western world, back to the links between Neanderthals and early man: Rana Mitter talks to Priya Atwal, Joseph Henrich, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes about family ties, power networks, and history.Priya Atwal has published Royal and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire. Dr Atwal is a Teaching Fellow in Modern South Asian History at King's College London. Joseph Henrich is a Professor in the department of Human and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the author of The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an Honorary Fellow at University of Liverpool and Université de Bordeaux. She is the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art and is one of the founders of https://trowelblazers.com/You might be interested in other Free Thinking conversations with Rutger Bregman author of Human Kind https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08d77hx Penny Spikins speaking about Neanderthal history at the 2019 Free Thinking Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003zp2 Tom Holland on his history of the impact of Christianity on Western thinking in a programme called East Meets West https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00093d1Producer: Robyn Read

From fancy dress parties using native American head-dresses to the continuing significance of Wampum belts made of shells - how do particular objects help us tell the story of the colonisation of America and what is the legacy of the ideas brought by Puritan settlers who left English port cities like Plymouth and Southampton 400 years ago? Eleanor Barraclough talks to 3 academics whose research helps us answer these questions - Sarah Churchwell, Kathryn Gray and Lauren Working - and we hear contributions from the Wampanoag Advisory Committee who have worked with curators at The Box museum in Plymouth on a touring exhibition.Professor Sarah Churchwell's books include Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream. She is Director of the Being Human Festival which puts on public events focusing on research taking place at universities across the UK. This year's festival (Nov 12th - 22nd) includes Mayflower related events. https://beinghumanfestival.org/us/Dr Kathryn Gray from the University of Plymouth has consulted on exhibitions commissioned for https://www.mayflower400uk.org/ Wampum: Stories from the Shells of Native America is on tour to SeaCity Museum, Southampton (to 18 October 2020), Guildhall Art Gallery, London (8 January to 14 February 2021) and The Box Plymouth (15 May to 19 July 2021)
. Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy runs at The Box Plymouth 29 September 2020 to 18 September 2021Lauren Working is the author of The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis and works as a researcher on the TIDE project which explores Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England c1550 - 1700. http://www.tideproject.uk/ This episode of Free Thinking is put together in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI as one of a series of discussions focusing on new academic research also available to download as New Thinking episodes on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast feed. You can find the whole collection here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90You might also be interested in this conversation with Nandini Das and Claudia Rogers on their research into First Encounters: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kpgpProducer: Robyn Read

Susanna Clarke, Adam Scovell, Lucy Arnold and Anton Bakker are Matthew Sweet's guests. Susanna Clarke talks about the inspiration behind the follow up to her best-selling first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Piranesi is the springboard for a discussion about haunted spaces and mind-bending architecture in film, fiction and art from MC Escher to Christopher Nolan's Inception, Shirley Jackson to Mervyn Peake. The print maker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was born 300 years ago on Oct 4th 1720, became known for his etchings of Rome and images of imagined prisons.Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity is an exhibition planned by the British Museum now due to open early in 2021. Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi is out now. Adam Scovell writes on film for Sight and Sound and is the author of books including Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange and two novellas: Mothlight and How Pale the Winter Has Made Us. Dr Lucy Arnold researches contemporary literature at the University of Worcester and is the author of Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades. Anton Bakker's virtual exhibition Alternative Perspective at the National Museum of Mathematics in NYC can be visited via the MoMath website.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The BBC Radiophonic workshop was founded in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram. This group of experimental composers, sound engineers and musical innovators provided music for programmes including The Body in Question, Horizon, Quatermass, Newsround, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chronicle and Delia Derbyshire's iconic Doctor Who Theme before being shut down by Director General John Birt in 1998. Tying into the 2020 celebration of classic Prom concerts, this episode of Free Thinking is being rebroadcastIt was recorded in 2014, as the Workshop prepared to release an album, and tour the UK, Matthew Sweet brought together Radiophonic Workshop members Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, Peter Howell, and Mark Ayres to reflect on the days and nights they spent in the workshop, coaxing ageing machines into otherworldly life, and pioneering electronic music. Also in the programme, producer and former drummer with The Prodigy Kieron Pepper, Oscar winning Gravity composer Steven Price, Vile Electrodes, and Matt Hodson, on the influence the Radiophonic Workshop had on them.Producer: Laura Thomas

Classicists Edith Hall and Barry Cunliffe explore the importance of the sea in the classical world in a discussion hosted by Rana Mitter. Pat Barker and Giles Fraser look at Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and the depiction of faith in those novels with presenter Ian McMillan.The Ancient Greeks often preferred to take sea journeys rather than risk encounters with brigands and travelling through mountain passes inland and colonised all round the Black Sea and Mediterranean. In the writings of Xenophon and Homer, Greek heroes show skills at navigating and fighting on sea and the sea shore is a place people go to think. Sir Barry Cunliffe is Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford and the author of books including Facing the Ocean - the Atlantic and its peoples; Europe Between the Oceans; By Steppe, Desert and Ocean - the Birth of Eurasia. Edith Hall is Professor in the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College, London. Her books include Introducing The Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind; Aristotle's Way - How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Mind; A People's History of Classics. You can find her discussing her campaign for schools across the UK to teach classics in a Free Thinking discussion called Rethinking the Curriculum https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08hq0htPat Barker is the author of novels including her Regeneration Trilogy, Life Class, The Silence of the Girls and Noonday. Giles Fraser is an English Anglican priest, journalist and broadcaster.

Novelist Ben Okri, playwright Oladipo Agboluaje and academic Louisa Egbunike join Matthew Sweet to look at the influential writing of Nigerian playwright and author Wole Soyinka - and specifically at his play 1975 Death and the King's Horseman. In 1986 he became the first African author to be given the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has worked teaching at many universities in the USA, and began playwriting after studying at University College Ibadan, and then at Leeds University and working as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre.You can find a playlist of discussions devoted to Landmarks of Culture on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44 A BBC TV documentary about the African novel presented by David Olusoga is screening in August.Extract from Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka features Danny Sapani as Elesin. Produced by Pauline Harris for the BBC. First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13th July 2014Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has written a philosophical take on the current pandemic and what it tells us about society. He talks with Stella Sandford, Director of the Society for European Philosophy in the UK and author of How to Read Beauvoir, whose own research looks at sex, race and feminism, and with Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard-Henri Lévy is out now. You can find a philosophy playlist on the Free Thinking programme website featuring discussions including panpsychism, Boethius, Isaiah Berlin, the quartet of C20th British women philosophers https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx You can also find Prof Homi K Bhabha giving a lecture on memory and migration recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005gt9 Producer: Ruth Watts

Anne Applebaum's new book The Twilight of Democracy has the subtitle The failure of democracy and the parting of friends. She talks to Anne McElvoy about what happened when she tried to connect up with past friends whose politics are now different to her own. The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Will Abberley tells us about her view of fashion and why women should not seek to stand out because a focus on their appearance was counterproductive to them gaining more public power. Gilman conjured a female utopia in her 1915 book Herland. And 2020 New Generation Thinker Sophie Oliver from the University of Liverpool writes us a postcard about the actress Ingrid Bergman and the way she and her would-be biographer Bessie Breuer tried to carve out a different public image for a female star in a novel Breuer published in 1957 called The Actress.Will Abberley's book is called Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture You might be interested in the Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf which looked at Yolande Mukagasana, Storm Jameson, Margaret Oliphant, Lady Mary Wroth and Charlotte Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwff and this Essay about another feminist utopia in the writing of Sarah Scott https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7hrw4You can find previous Free Thinking conversations with Anne Applebaum to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts on Marxism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0x6m0 and Russian Nationalism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b094f9p0Producer: Ruth Watts

Subversion in art and writing and a project to re-imagine Dada. Curator Jade French, artist Jade Montserrat, writer Lottie Whalen and 2020 New Generation Thinker Noreen Masud are in conversation with Shahidha Bari.You can find more about today's guests and their research at https://jademontserrat.com/ https://www.jadefrench.co.uk/research http://www.takedadaseriously.com/ http://lucywritersplatform.com/author/lottie-whalen/ https://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/staff/?id=17758New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to use their research to make radio.In the Free Thinking archives you can find a playlist featuring artist interviews and discussions https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl Radio 3 broadcast a ten part series looking at the life of Arthur Cravan called The Escape Artist https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djhyProducer: Robyn Read