Arts & Ideas

Who decides what’s worth saving and what is culturally significant to protect in wartimes and war zones? The panel, hosted by Anne McElvoy, are:Sir Peter Bazalgette - Chairman of ITV and former Chairman of Arts Council England Carrie Reichardt - International Artist and grassroots activist Zahed Tajeddin - Syrian-born Artist and Archaeologist Rebecca Newell - IWM’s Head of ArtRecorded with an audience at the Imperial War Museum, London on Weds November 6th. What Remains, an exhibition with over 50 photographs, oral histories, objects and artworks, created in partnership with Historic England, explores why cultural heritage is attacked during war and the ways we save, protect and restore what is targeted. It runs until 5 Jan 2020. As does Art in Exile which puts on display for the first time documents revealing IWM’s plan for evacuating our art collection during the Second World War.The 2018 Imperial War Museum Free Thinking Lecture looked at how we remember war and asked Why are we silent when conflict is loud? Peter Hitchens; Rector Lucy Winkett; Neil Bartlett and Professor Steve Brown joined Anne McElvoy and an audience. https://bbc.in/2odyOUM and on our website you can find a collection of Free Thinking on War https://bbc.in/32EK0bI which includes discussions about Trees, Catch 22, a conversation between an ex marine and a Gulf war government advisor and analysis of writing by Wilfred Owen, Celine, David Jones, Robert Musil and John Buchan.Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Dr Who collaborators Mark Gatiss & Stephen Moffat, academics Una McCormack & Claire Langhamer and Matthew Kneale join Matthew Sweet to celebrate Nigel Kneale's groundbreaking 1953 BBC TV sci-fi serial The Quatermass Experiment, which spawned two late 1950s sequels and an ITV final run in autumn 1979.Producer Torquil MacLeod.

As the 30th anniversary of the Berlin wall falling is marked on November 9th we rummage for stories amid the rubble. What were school teachers in Berlin pre-occupied with when the checkpoints were overrun? What would happen to the dogs of British forces families if the Cold War kicked off? Why was the poet Stephen Spender tasked with the ‘de-Nazification’ of German universities? And how does any of this relate to a 90s techno club in an air raid shelter?Our host, New Generation Thinker Dr Tom Charlton, weaves together new research on different aspects of post-war and post-wall Germany.Professor Lara Feigel from Kings College London is the Principal Investigator of Beyond Enemy Lines – a project looking at British and American writers and filmmakers involved in the reconstruction of Germany, 1945-49. The project is supported by the European Research Council http://beyondenemylines.co.uk/Dr Grace Huxford from the University of Bristol is leading an oral history project on British military communities in Germany (1945-2000), exploring the experiences of service personnel, families and support workers living in bases. In 2019-20, Grace is leading the project as an AHRC Leadership Fellow (early career) https://britishbasesingermany.blog/Dr Tom Smith from the University of St Andrews is currently exploring experiences of marginalisation in Germany’s techno scene. The first stage of the project is entitled Afrogermanic? Cultural Exchange and Racial Difference in the Aesthetic Products of the Early Techno Scenes in Detroit and Berlin. The first stage of the project has been funded by a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust. Tom is also a New Generation Thinker https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modlangs/people/german/smith/ 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.New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme to showcase academic research in radio and podcasts. You can find more information on the Arts and Humanities Research Council website https://ahrc.ukri.orgProducer: Karl Bos

Shahidha Bari's guests include author Kirsty Logan and former League of Gentlemen writer and performer Jeremy Dyson, whose play Ghost Stories is back in the West End. Joining them is the film critic and author of a novella called Mothlight, Adam Scovell, poet Nisha Ramayya whose work States of the Body produced by Love speaks of goddesses who symbolise all the attributes of women and British Museum curator and expert on ancient Mesopotamian medicine and magic Irving Finkel.

Where are we? How did we get here, and where are we going?Our relationship with the self-propelled small metal boxes in which we spend so much of our time is not as simple as it feels.Why did we learn to need them? How did they shape our cities, our typewriters and our bacon slicers? Should we now redesign our roads, streets and even our skies for AI driven cars? What do we learn by looking at suburban car parks? A discussion reflecting on speed, automobiles, AI and the 60th anniversary of the M1 motorway. Anne McElvoy presents. Brendan Cormier is curator of the forthcoming exhibition Cars: Accelerating the Modern World, which opens in November. Nicole Badstuber of the University of Westminster studies our commuting habit and the trends in journeying that modern life inflicts on all of us. Jack Stilgoe is a senior lecturer at UCL who studies governance and oversight of emerging technologies, looking in particular at driverless futures. Gareth E Rees is author of Car Park Life, a journal of empty spaces and discarded moment, described as "A Retail Park Heart of Darkness".M1 Symphony, a soundscape documentary telling the story of Britain’s first motorway, featuring a specially-commissioned composition from former BBC Proms Inspire composer Alex Woolf, performed by the BBC Philharmonic is available to hear if you search for BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature. On BBC.com/Ideas you can find a short film exploring the history of motorway service stations Producer: Alex Mansfield.

Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham join Matthew Sweet at the British Library in a discussion organised with the Royal Society of Literature.Making art from real events is as old to writing as the pen – older. But what happens when the events you are writing about are recent, or happening as you write? What are the writer’s duties to fact? How can writing bear witness to contemporary moments of social upheaval or human disasters? In writing the ‘now’, where does non-fiction stop and fictive creation begin? In this discussion, three writers, across forms, consider how to write real events.Ali Smith has published three novels in a four-novel seasonal cycle, Autumn, Winter and Spring, exploring time, society and art in the context of Brexit Britain. Jay Bernard’s collection, Surge, explores the significance of events ranging from the New Cross Fire in 1981 to the 2017 Grenfell disaster. James Graham’s play The Vote took place in the last 90 minutes before polls closed in the 2015 General Election, and was broadcast live on Channel 4 on election night. His 2019 drama for Channel 4, Brexit: The Uncivil War, explored the very recent history of the Brexit referendum.Producer: Zahid Warley.

Rachel Reeves MP, Hull academic Jane Thomas and New Generation Thinker Katie Cooper discuss the novel South Riding and the writing and politics of Winifred Holtby with Matthew Sweet and an audience in Hull at the Contains Strong Language Festival. With readings by Rachel Dale.Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935) came from a farming family in Yorkshire, met Vera Brittain at Oxford University and shared a house in London as they began their careers as writers. Brittain went on to publish Testament of Youth. Holtby made her name with journalism for newspapers including the Manchester Guardian and the feminist magazine Time and Tide and published 14 books including the first critical study of Virginia Woolf. When her doctor gave her only two more years to live, she devoted herself to writing her novel South Riding which was published the year after she died aged 37.Rachel Reeves is Labour MP for Leeds and the author of books including Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics Jane Thomas is Professor of Victorian and early 20th century literature at Hull University. Dr Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker working on a project exploring writers' organisations and free expression.Contains Strong Language is the BBC's national poetry and spoken word festival which took place in Hull for the first time 3 years ago as part of the City of Culture celebrations.Producer Fiona McLean

Rana Mitter and guests look at the history of atheism and morality. Alec Ryrie's new book 'Unbelievers: an emotional history of doubt' argues that the rationality arguments for non-belief developed after congregations began to doubt the church. The Barber Institute in Birmingham begins a new exhibition into one of the more enigmatic sacred artists of c15 Antwerp, Jan de Beer. Sarah Wise has contributed a chapter on Morality to a new imprint of Charles' Booth's notorious London Poverty Maps. Jenny Kilbride lived and worked in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, Sussex where her father had moved as a weaver to work in an Arts and Crafts community in the 1920s. A new Exhibition in the Ditchling Art and Craft Museum explores the legacy of the group - their faith, social creed, and wares.Charles Booth's Poverty Maps have been republished and a project at LSE allows you to search them https://booth.lse.ac.uk/ Sarah Wise is the author of The Italian Boy, the Blackest Streets, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England The Barber Institute in Birmingham is showing Truly Bright and Memorable: Jan de Beer's Renaissance Masterpieces from October 25th to January 19th. Alec Ryrie is a Professor at Durham University whose books include Protestants: the Faith that Made the Modern World, the Age of Reformation and his most recent Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Jenny Kilbride still weaves, and Disruption, Devotion + Distributism is at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft until April 2020.You can find a collection of programmes Free Thinking on religious belief on the programme website. All are available as Arts & Ideas downloads https://bbc.in/2N2g3fk Producer: Alex Mansfield.

Should we really be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Cortés and European settlers in Mexico? Is this a "first encounter" - and how do you decipher history when there isn't anything written down? Claudia Rogers compares notes with Nandini Das. Nandini has been re-reading the accounts written by John Rolfe of his marriage to Pocahontas and looking at what we gain when we flip the narrative and see from the point of view of indigenous people. Hosted by New Generation Thinker John Gallagher from the University of Leeds. Professor Nandini Das is Project Director for Tide: http://www.tideproject.uk/ Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England c1550- 1700 is an ERC funded project. Claudia Rogers currently teaches at the University of Leeds, where she completed her PhD, and continues her connection with the University of Sheffield as an Honorary Research Fellow. You can view the Lienzo de Tlaxcala online http://www.mesolore.org/cultures/synopsis/3/Nahua 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. New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme to showcase academic research in radio and podcasts. You can find more information on the Arts and Humanities Research Council website https://ahrc.ukri.orgProducer: Luke Mulhall

How welcome are selfies in modern art galleries and museums? What kind of labelling should be on display and should more objects be repatriated? Laurence des Cars from the Musée d'Orsay, Kennie Ting from Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore and Philip Tinari from UCCA Beijing join Anne McElvoy and an audience at the Royal Institute of British Architects for this year's Frieze Free Thinking debate about the issues facing museum directors. The Frieze Art Fair ran in London October 3-6 and returns to Los Angeles Feb 2020 and New York May 2020.Laurence des Cars became Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2014. From 2007 to 2014, she was the French operator responsible for the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.Philip Tinari is Director and CEO of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. During his tenure, UCCA has mounted more than seventy exhibitions. From 2009 to 2012 he founded and edited LEAP, the first internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art in ChinaKennie Ting is the Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum and the Peranakan Museum, and concurrently Group Director, Museums at the National Heritage Board (NHB) Singapore. He has changed the focus from a geographical to a thematic, cross-cultural way of looking at art. He is the author of The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in South East Asia and Singapore 1819 – A Living Legacy.You can hear Michael Govan, Sabine Haag and Hartwig Fischer in The Frieze Debate: Museums in the 21st Century https://bbc.in/2O5LF6V and this year's in depth conversation with Michael Govan is also available as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast https://bbc.in/2mST8tn and in the visual arts playlist on the Free Thinking website.