Arts & Ideas

Entertainment writer Caroline Frost, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and historian & podcast host Greg Jenner join Matthew Sweet as exhibitions about Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol open in London. Greg Jenner presents the BBC Sounds podcast You're Dead to Me and has just published a book called Dead Famous: An Unexpected history of celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things runs at the National Portrait Gallery from March 12th to June 7th. Andy Warhol runs at Tate Modern from March 12th to September 6th. Caroline Frost is a writer, broadcaster and entertainment journalist. Lisa Mullen is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC to put academic research on the radio. She's the author of a book called Mid-century Gothic: The Uncanny Objects of Modernity in British Literature and Culture After the Second World War Producer: Alex MansfieldYou might be interested in our collection of programmes The Way We Live Now on the Free Thinking website and available to download as BBC Arts & Ideas podcasts including discussions about narcissism, the emotions of now, advertising and how they manipulate our emotions and icons https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072637b?page=1

New Generation Thinker Catherine Fletcher and Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones join Rana Mitter to discuss how women's stories have shaped art and advertising from the baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi to the suffragettes promoting boot polish in 20th-century England. And against the backdrop of the Me Too movement, Rana hears how the best-selling novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 became a rallying cry for young women in south Korea.Catherine Fletcher's new book about the Italian Renaissance peels back the glittering art of the period to discover the political and military turmoil beneath while Jonathan Jones tells the story of Artemesia Gentileschi who channeled the trauma of her rape at 17 into a body of powerful and challenging work. Cho Nam-Joo's novel, translated by Jamie Chang, raises questions about misogyny and discrimination in today's Korea.Rana visits the Art of Advertising exhibition at the Bodleian Library with curator Julie-Ann Lambert and Selina Todd, professor of modern history at Oxford University, where he explores how female buying power and social mobility transformed the consumer market.Catherine Fletcher's book is called The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance. Jonathan Jones has written a biography called Artemisia Gentileschi (Lives of the Artists). An exhibition of her work runs at the National Gallery in London from 4th April to 26th July. The Art of Advertising runs at the Bodleian Library in Oxford until August 31st. Admission is free. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo is translated by Jamie Chang. Selina Todd's books include The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, and Tastes of Honey: the making of Shelagh Delaney and a cultural revolution.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put academic research on the radio. You can find a collection of programmes and podcasts on the Free Thinking programme website called New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Also in the archives you can download a Free Thinking Landmark on The Prince with Catherine Fletcher with Sarah Dunant, Gisela Stuart and Erica Benner debating Machiavelli's ideas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h0l9j and Breaking Free - Martin Luther’s Revolution is debated by Peter Stanford, Ulinka Rublack and Diarmaid MacCulloch hosted by Anne McElvoy at LSE https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nf02yProducer: Paula McGinley

Maaza Mengiste, Christina Lamb, Julie Wheelwright join Eleanor Barraclough to look at women's experience of fighting from Ethiopia's war with Mussolini to modern day Sudan back to Amazonians and British and French colonial troops in Canada. And academic Shawn Sobers discusses his research into the years Haile Selassie spent living in Bath after he escaped from a war-torn Ethiopia.Our Bodies, Their Battlefields by Christina Lamb looks at rape as a weapon in war. Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow King is set during Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. Julie Wheelwright's book is called Sisters in Arms: Female warriors from antiquity to the new millennium. It includes the discoveries she made whilst researching one of her ancestors. Shawn Sobers from the University of the West of England is a filmmaker and photographer whose work can be found at http://www.shawnsobers.com/Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Howard Jacobson, Bari Weiss, Hadley Freeman, and Jonathan Freedland join Matthew Sweet.

What is a writer's duty? Katie Cooper considers Storm Jameson's campaigning for refugees, her 1940 appeal To the Conscience of the World and why her fiction fell out of favour but is now seeing a revival of interest. Born in Yorkshire in 1891, she wrote war novels and speculative fiction, collections of criticism - including an analysis of modern drama in Europe, the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and a host of novels set in European countries. During the Second World War years she was head of PEN, the association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote literature and intellectual co-operation. Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. Her book, War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson, is published April 2020.Producer: Alex Mansfield

Shahidha Bari looks at the legacy of Frank Ramsey who died in 1930 aged 27, but not before doing work that changed the course of philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics. Shahidha is joined by Cheryl Misak, who has recently published the first biography of Ramsey, and philosopher Steven Methven. Plus, philosopher Emily Thomas on the role travel has played in the development of philosophy.Cheryl Misak's biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is out now.Emily Thomas' The Meaning of Travel is out now.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Hetta Howes learns how Sylvia Xueni Pan from Goldsmiths, University of London is using VR to do everything from training GPs not to overprescribe antibiotics to creating a groundbreaking Peaky Blinders game. While Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the RSC, is working with researchers and practitioners like Sylvia to create extraordinary virtual experiences for theatre audiences. They are among the many women playing key roles in the creative industries - the fastest growing sector in the UK - where university-based researchers are helping to turn new ideas into commercially viable products and ideas.This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. Further podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking website under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Irish novelist Anne Enright talks to Laurence Scott about her new book Actress and being the inaugural Irish laureate, plus a discussion of gossip past and present with Emily Butterworth, Daisy Black and political journalist and writer Marie Le Conte.Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering; The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road.Emily Butterworth works on early modern literature and thought, with a particular interest in Montaigne and in deviant speech and language. Her book The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France, looks at forms of excessive speech – babble, gossip and rumour – and why they were considered so personally and politically dangerous in the sixteenth century.Daisy Black researches medieval history at the University of Wolverhampton and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to put academic research on the radio. She writes about women in performance in The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe. Her book Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama is out this year.Marie Le Conte is a political journalist who has worked for the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and BuzzFeed. Her book Haven't You Heard? Gossip, power, and how politics really works explores the potency of gossip in the Westminster bubble.You can find Matthew Sweet and guests discussing What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3Producer: Paula McGinley

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme websiteProducer: Torquil MacLeod

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau argues that we should salute this woman who supported her family through her writing, who perfected sonnets about solitude before Wordsworth began writing his, and who explored the struggles of women and refugees in her fiction. Mother to 12 children, Charlotte Turner Smith wrote ten novels, three poetry collections and four children's books and translated French fiction. In 1788 her first novel, Emmeline, sold 1500 copies within months but by the time of her death in 1803 her popularity had declined and she had become destitute.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read