Arts & Ideas

Rana Mitter talks to historians of China - Jung Chang and Julia Lovell. Jung Chang's latest book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister looks at the lives of the first Chinese girls to attend university in the USA. On their return to Shanghai one worked in business, one married a politician and one was involved in high society. Julia Lovell has been awarded one of the most significant history writing prizes - the Cundill - for her latest book Maoism: A Global History. Cindy Yu is a China reporter and broadcast editor at the Spectator.Playwright Tom Morton-Smith discusses putting cold war tensions on stage in his new play Ravens: Spasky v Fischer which is inspired by the chess match that took place in Reykjavik, 1972. The play runs at the Hampstead Theatre in London until January 18th. The winner of the biennial David Cohen prize for Literature is announced. You can find our playlist of In Depth Interviews here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8 Film critic Agnes Poirer compares two crime caper films from 50 years ago The Italian Job featuring Michael Caine and Noel Coward and The Brain, which starred David Niven alongside Jean Paul Belmondo and comedian Bourvil. If you want more programmes exploring China include this discussion of Patriotism Beyond the West: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08583zz The Cultural Revolution https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079mcg9 Rana talks to the leading Chinese thinker Zhang Weiwei in Japanese History, Chinese Democracy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03q5gdy Jung Chang discusses her book on Empress Dowager Cixi https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01hy158 Producer: Harry Parker.

Shahidha Bari discusses the state of scholarship on George Eliot at her bicentenary with Ruth Livesey and Helen O'Neill, both at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Gail Marshall at the University of Reading. Ruth Livesey's AHRC funded research project on George Eliot is ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ https://georgeeliotprovincialism.home.blog/ Gail Marshall's blog on reading Middlemarch is here https://middlemarchin2019.wordpress.com/ A Free Thinking discussion of Mill on the Floss with writer Rebecca Mead, actor Fiona Shaw and academics Philip Davis, Dafydd Daniel and Peggy Reynolds is here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07vsc2hThis 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. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Writer Rebecca Mead, actor Fiona Shaw + academics Dafydd Mills Daniel, Philip Davis & Peggy Reynolds read George Eliot's 1860 novel portraying sibling relationships. Shahidha Bari hosts.George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819. Rebecca Mead is the author of The road to Middlemarch: my life with George Eliot. Dafydd Mills Daniel is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC to put academic research on the radio. Professor Peggy Reynolds teaches at Queen Mary University London and has edited anthologies of Victorian poets, the Sappho Companion and the Penguin edition of George Eliot's Adam Bede. Professor Philip Davis teaches at the University of Liverpool and is the author of The Transferred Life of George Eliot.Listen out for Radio 3's weekly curation of Words and Music which broadcasts each Sunday at 5.30pm and is available to listen here https://bbc.in/2E72xV0 A special episode also featuring Fiona Shaw as one of the readers hears extracts from Eliot's fiction, essays and journal set alongside the music she might have had on her playlist - composers including Clara Schumann, Liszt, whom Eliot met in 1854; and Tchaikovsky, who said his favourite writer was George Eliot.Producer: Fiona McLean

Investigating regeneration and gentrification, the Turner Contemporary, the 2019 Turner Prize exhibition, writer Maggie Gee on her novel Blood, & the town in literature.The seaside town of Margate has both struggled and thrived over the past two centuries – it thronged with holidaymakers from the Victorian era onwards but limped through the latter half of the 20th century and was one of the most deprived parts of the UK before the £17.5m Turner Contemporary opened in 2011. Many hoped that the new art gallery would spearhead change and eight years on there has clearly been growth – the town sometimes jokingly referred to as Shoreditch-on-Sea has been through a wave of gentrification, complete with the common trappings of independent cafés, vintage shops and yoga studios, frequented by an ever-growing artistic community bolstered by regular arrivals of Londoners fleeing the capital. Tourist numbers are up, with the Dreamland amusement park reopening and over 3.2m visitors to the Turner Contemporary reported since its launch. This narrative of a successful arts-led regeneration however ignores that fact that Margate remains in the top 1% of deprived communities in the country and in some wards around half of all children live in poverty. The painter JMW Turner once remarked of Margate that it had the ‘loveliest’ skies in Europe, but can they brighten prospects for the local community, as well as for the artists that flock there?As this year’s Turner Prize comes to Margate for the first time, Philip Dodd looks at whether the arts are a successful driver of regeneration, with Turner Contemporary Director Victoria Pomery and the social artist Dan Thompson, who has looked at people, place and change throughout his career.We reflect on the Turner Prize exhibition itself, and the work of shortlisted artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani. The exhibition runs at Turner Contemporary until January 12th and the winner is announced on December 3rd.The author Maggie Gee’s new novel Blood is set in Margate and the surrounding area of Thanet. A darkly comic crime thriller set in Brexit Britain East Kent where the political atmosphere bleeds into the action. Her imposing protagonist Monica is accused of murdering the tyrannical patriarch of her family – a situation complicated by the fact she’s armed with an axe ready to do just that, when she finds her father’s body. Maggie tells us about Blood and how the local area is a perfect canvas for the story.Margate is hosting several events as part of Being Human, the UK’s national festival of the humanities which runs from November 14th to the 23rd – you can find more information on their website https://beinghumanfestival.org/Literary historian Professor Carolyn Oulton is hosting a Murder Mystery trail in Margate for Being Human, amongst other things, and has been studying seaside towns in literature during the railway age. She gives us a view of Margate from the Victorian era – a bustling, promiscuous, populist place full of tourists – and the kind of stories set there. Crime and romance reads for the beach did particularly well for the holiday market, with works like Love in a Mist and Death in a Deckchair key tomes in the Margate canon.Producer: Karl Bos

New research looking at at reporting secret assassinations, countering propaganda & how we could update TV news bulletins, from the Being Human Festival, an annual event which involves public events put on by universities across the UK, presented by Shahidha Bari. Steve Poole teaches at the University of the West of England and is involved in a project - Romancing the Gibbet - that uses smartphone apps to evoke memories of C18th hangings hidden in the English landscape Dr Clare George is Miller Archivist at the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London. She is involved in recreating the Austrian political cabaret theatre that operated in London during WWII to counter Nazi propaganda. Andrew Calcutt teaches at the University of East London and is part of a project which asks what new ways can we tell the news, putting forward experimental formats and asking for audience responses to them. Luca Trenta teaches at Swansea University and is working on a project looking at Kings, Presidents, and Spies: Assassinations from Medieval times to the Present - asking what we are told and what is kept hidden from news reports.You can find out more at https://beinghumanfestival.org/You can find more insights from cutting edge academic studies in our New Research Collection on the Free Thinking programme website and available to download as the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast from BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Why do the legendary walls of a Bronze Age city in Asia still cast such a long shadow? Novelist and classics expert Natalie Haynes, Alev Scott author of Ottoman Odyssey, archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney and medievalist Hetta Howes join Rana Mitter to share new perspectives on the conflict immortalised in Homer's Iliad as the British Museum opens an exhibition dedicated to Troy.Troy: Myth and Reality runs at the British Museum in London from November 21st to 8th March 2020. Natalie Haynes is the author of novels which retell Greek myths including The Amber Fury, the Children of Jocasta and A Thousand Ships: This is the Woman's War. Hetta Howes teaches medieval literature at City University and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to put research on radio. Alev Scott is the author of Ottoman Odyssey and Turkish Awakening. Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leicester.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Hetta Howes is on the red carpet at this year's AHRC Research in Film Awards at the British Film Institute on London's South Bank, where she talks to the winners: Laura Hammond of SOAS, Benjamin Dix of PositiveNegatives, and director Osbert Parker, who won Best Social Media Short for their film Life On The Move Shreepali Patel of StoryLab, Anglia Ruskin University, who won in theMental Health & Wellbeing category for The Golden Window Ed Owles of the University of Leeds and his producer Kasia Mika for Intranquilities, which won in the Best Doctoral or Early Career Film category. And Paul Basu whose film FACES/VOICES won the awards for Best Research Film. There are more details and links to the films at the RIFA website https://ahrc.ukri.org/innovation/research-in-film-awards/previous-winners/ 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. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Naomi Paxton assembles a squad of researchers to talk about dating, relationships, and what how we fall in love says about us from the National Archives to London's gay bars.Dr Cordelia Beattie from the University of Edinburgh has unearthed two new manuscripts by the 17th-century woman Mrs Alice Thornton, which put her life, loves and relationship with God in a new light. Now they’re becoming a play in collaboration with writer and performer Debbie Cannon.Dr João Florêncio is from the University of Exeter and his research on pornography, sex and dating in post-AIDS crisis gay culture is being transformed into a performance at The Glory in London.Another queer performance space, London's Royal Vauxhall Tavern, is the venue for a drag show based on research into LGBTQ+ personal ads from a 1920s magazine done by Victoria Iglikowski-Broad as part of her work at the National Archives.Professor Lucy Bland of Anglia Ruskin University has created Being Mixed Race: Stories of Britain’s Black GI Babies, an exhibition in partnership with the Black Cultural Archives, which features photography and oral histories from the children, now in their 70s.Dr Erin Maglaque of the University of Sheffield explores the meanings of dreams in the Renaissance, and the strange erotic dreamscapes of a 1499 book written by a Dominican Friar.A list of all the events at universities across the UK for the 2019 Being Human Festival can be found at their website: https://beinghumanfestival.org/The festival runs from Nov 14th – 23rd but if you like hearing new ideas you can find our New Research playlist on the Free Thinking website, from death cafes to ghosts in Portsmouth to the London Transport lost luggage office: https://bbc.in/2n5dakTProducer: Caitlin Benedict

"Man Up". "He's Safe" "No Homo" How do men talk and write about masculinity? Laurence Scott talks to authors Ben Lerner, Derek Owusu and JJ Bola about crying, competitiveness, anger - and the pressure to perform.Ben Lerner is the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and his latest novel is called The Topeka School. He holds a prize commonly called the "genius grant" as a MacArthur Fellow. Derek Owusu's latest novel is called That Reminds Me. He has also presented the podcast Mostly Lit and edited Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space a collection of Essays which includes an Essay by JJ Bola. JJ Bola has also written a novel No Place to Call Home, a poetry collection Refuge, and non-fiction book on masculinity, Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined.You can find more Identity Discussions in a playlist on the Free Thinking website including Caryl Philips and Johny Pitts on Afropean identities https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005sjw Emma Frankland, June Sarpong on a panel asking Can There Be Multiple Versions of Me? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061zr74Producer: Robyn Read

Matthew Sweet, performers Lucy McCormick and Gateau Chocolat, curator Florence Ostende, New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen and Gaylene Gould with an audience at London's Barbican CentreFrom 1919 when the Weimar constitution said all were equal and had the right to freedom of expression, through to the Mbari Writers and Artists club in Nigeria, to the UK today, clubs and cabarets have always been spaces of creativity. The panel consider a series of moments in history to ask when and how club culture started to influence our wider society.Florence Ostende is the curator of Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art which runs at the Barbican Art Gallery until January 19th 2020 curated and organised by Barbican Centre, London, in collaboration with the Belvedere, Vienna.Le Gateau Chocolat and Lucy McCormick both performed in Effigies of Wickedness – a show from ENO and the Gate Theatre which was based on songs banned by the Nazis.Le Gateau Chocolat is a drag artist and contemporary opera performer who has performed internationally from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to the Beyreuth Festival opera house.Lucy McCormick's hit shows include Triple Threat and Post Popular. She’s been an Artist in Residence for the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’s DUCKIE nights, and a Research Fellow at Queen Mary University London.Gaylene Gould is a cultural director and curator who has spearheaded a series of projects involving film, writing and art for Tate, the V&A and h club.Dr Lisa Mullen teaches film and literature at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Mid Century Gothic. She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on the radio.Producer: Caitlin Benedict.