Arts & Ideas

Anne McElvoy looks at leadership lessons from past US presidents, the parallels between the betting industry and fears over gambling in 1945 and now and she asks who are the key economic thinkers. Her guests are Callum Williams, senior economics writer at The Economist, 2020 New Generation Thinker Darragh McGee from the University of Bath and ahead of July 4th and Independence Day in the USA she revisits her interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin about her book called Leadership in Turbulent Times.Callum Williams' book The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives is out now.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The screenwriter and novelist talks to Matthew Sweet about teaching creative writing to children in lockdown, attending mass on zoom, the changing meaning of community and the importance of family and he looks back to the image of Britain he created with Danny Boyle for the opening of the London 2012 Olympics.Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the author of books including Millions, Framed, Runaway Robot and a sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, He has worked on screenplays including The Two Popes, collaborations with Michael Winterbottom on films including 24 Hour Party People and scripts for Coronation Street and Doctor Who.You can find Matthew Sweet talking to the author Sarah Perry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dmn6l and the actor Robin Askwith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08fgxjp about their careers and this current moment in the Free Thinking archives.And Frank Cottrell-Boyce giving the 2016 Proms Lecture on the importance of the arts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p041vxwhProducer: Karl Bos

New Generation Thinker Majed Akhter explores how large dam projects continue to form reservoirs of hope for a sustainable future. Despite their known drawbacks, our love affair with dams has not abated – across the world more than 3,500 dams are in various stages of construction. In Pakistan this has become entwined with nationalism, both inside the community and in the diaspora - but what are the dangers of this “dam fever” ? This Essay traces the history of river development in the region, from the early twentieth century “canal colonies” in Punjab, to Cold War mega-projects, to the contemporary drive to build large new dams. Previously an engineer and a resource economist, Majed Akhter now lectures in geography at King’s College London. you can hear him discussing the politics of rivers in a Free Thinking episode called Rivers and geopolitics https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051hbNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio.Producer: Alex Mansfield

Jade Halbert lectures in fashion but has never done any sewing. She swaps pen and paper for needle and thread to create a dress from a Jean Muir pattern. In a diary charting her progress, she reflects on the skills of textile workers she has interviewed as part of a project charting the fashion trade in Glasgow and upon the banning of pins on a factory floor, the experiences of specialist sleeve setters and cutters, and whether it is ok to lick your chalk. Jade Halbert is a Lecturer, Fashion Business and Cultural Studies at the University of Huddersfield. You can find her investigation into fashion and the high street as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gvpnNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

There is fascinating evidence that 5,000 years ago, people living in Britain and Ireland had a deep and meaningful relationship with the underworld seen in the carved chalk, animal bones and human skeletons found at Cranborne Chase in Dorset in a large pit, at the base of which had been sunk a 7-metre-deep shaft. Other examples considered in this Essay include Carrowkeel in County Sligo, the passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in eastern Ireland and the Priddy Circles in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. If prehistoric people regarded the earth as a powerful, animate being that needed to be placated and honoured, perhaps there are lessons here for our own attitudes to the world beneath our feet.Susan Greaney is a New Generation Thinker who works for English Heritage at Stonehenge and who is studying for her PHD at Cardiff University. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can hear her journey to Japan to compare the Jomon civilisations with Stonehenge as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hgqxProducer: Torquil MacLeod

When Tom Smith sets out to research allegations of racism in Berlin’s club scene, he finds himself face to face with his own past in techno’s birthplace: Detroit. Visiting the music distributor Submerge, he considers the legacy of the pioneers Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the influence of Afro-futurism and the work done in Berlin to popularise techno by figures including Kemal Kurum and Claudia Wahjudi. But the vibrant culture which seeks to be inclusive has been accused of whiteness and the Essay ends with a consideration of the experiences of clubbers depicted in the poetry of Michael Hyperion Küppers.Tom Smith is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in German at the University of St Andrews.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

Advances in robotics and virtual reality are giving us ever more 'realistic' ways of representing the world, but the quest for vivid visualisation is thousands of years old. This essay takes the guide to oratory and getting your message across written by the ancient Roman Quintilian and focuses in on a wall painting of The Judgment of Solomon in an Elizabethan house in the village of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. Often written off as stiff, formal and artificial with arguments that the Reformation fear of idolatry stifled Elizabethan art, New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday argues that story telling and conveying vivid detail was an important part of painting in this period as art was used to communicate messages to serve social, political and religious ends. Christina Faraday is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find more programmes involving New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn and a series of podcasts hosted by them under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Luke Mulhall

This Essay tells a story of political marches and everyday acts of radical care; of sledgehammers and bags of rice; of the struggles for justice waged by migrant domestic workers but it also charts the realisation of Ella Parry-Davies, that acknowledging publicly for the first time her own condition of epilepsy – or “coming out crip” – is part of the story of our blindness to inequalities in healthcare and living conditions faced by many migrant workers.Ella Parry-Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London working on an oral history project creating sound walks by interviewing migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year who can turn their research into radio. You can find playlists of programmes involving New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txnProducer: Robyn Read

Crime writer Ian Rankin talks with Tahmima Anam in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the Bradford Literature Festival. Plus New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at the depiction of East Asian figures in science fiction films and writing. Shahidha Bari presents.Ian Rankin's latest Inspector Rebus novel A Song For the Dark Times comes out in October. His cat-and-mouse espionage thriller Westwind was republished last September. Tahmima Anam's first novel debut novel, A Golden Age, was inspired by her grandparents' experiences of war in Bangladesh. It was followed in 2011 by The Good Muslim and the final book in the Bangladesh trilogy The Bones of Grace.You can hear her discuss this in more detail in this Free Thinking conversation with Alain de Botton and AL Kennedy exploring writing about love https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078xlft Ian Rankin can be found in the Free Thinking archives discussing Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09qdpj5Bradford Literature Festival has a series of digital events running this year https://www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk/ You can find more conversations about literature including several past Free Thinking episodes on the Royal Literature Society website https://rsliterature.org/Xine Yao is one of the 2020 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects academics to turn their research into radio. The book mentioned in the discussion is called Severance by Ling Ma. You can find a longer discussion about Fu Manchu in this Free Thinking programme called Neel Mukherjee, Images of China https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04jjnlxProducer: Robyn Read Technical Producer: Craig Smith

Arundhati Roy, the Man Booker prize winning author and campaigner, is in conversation with Philip Dodd about a life in the public eye and the novel she published 20 years after The God of Small Things. She discusses the politics of Kashmir, the influence of architecture and why she chose a graveyard setting for her novel and how writing a transgender character Anjum, who is a Hijra, helped her tell the story. Her second novel is called The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.The virtual Women of the World Festival takes place June 27-28 2020 https://thewowfoundation.com/wow-global-24/ You can find a playlist of Free Thinking conversations called Women in the World https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwpProducer: Zahid Warley.