Arts & Ideas

The idea of ‘emotions’ did not exist until the nineteenth century but now they are the subject of study and Professor Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Ranging from revolutionary feelings and the sentimental tales of Charles Dickens to the poetic rage of Audre Lorde, in his 2019 BBC Free Thinking Festival Lecture, Thomas Dixon paints a historical panorama of emotions and ends by asking what we can learn from our ancestors about the value of stoical restraint.

The writers of TV sitcoms The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet talk to Matthew Sweet. As a restoration of the film version of The Likely Lads is released, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais discuss depicting working lives in the 1960s, the pretensions and social changes of the '70s and how their characters might have voted over Brexit. The Likely Lads film has been restored and made available on Blu-ray and 2 previously lost episodes of the TV series have been found. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

From politics to religion, gangster films to espionage, Philip Dodd considers acts of betrayal, with theologian, Elaine Storkey, columnist Peter Hitchens, author Jenny McCartney and historian Owen Matthews. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

A history of orphans in Britain, fears about post war brainwashing, childrens' letters to C19 newspapers and portraits on show at Compton Verney. Anne McElvoy presents. New Generation Thinker and historian Emma Butcher is researching writing from children about the trauma of war. She visits Compton Verney. Jeremy Seabrook is researching the treatment of orphans from the 17th century onwards. Historian Sian Pooley reveals what children were writing to local papers about in the late 19th century and artist Emma Smith describes the post-war anxieties about children being brainwashed that inform her exhibition Wunderblock. Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud runs at Compton Verney from March 16th to June 16th 2019. Emma Smith's exhibition Wunderblock is at the Freud Museum in London until 26th May Orphans: A History by Jeremy Seabrook is out now.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Authors Max Porter, Samantha Harvey and Alisdair Benjamin discuss empathy and the role it plays in writing and reading. How does it work? Is it the same in fiction and non-fiction? And how is it faring in a world where data sometimes seems to have replaced feeling. Chris Harding talks to all three about their latest books, Lanny, Let Me Not be Mad and the Western Wind in his search for answers.Let Me Not Be Mad by the neuropsychologist AK Benjamin is out now. Max Porter's second novel is called Lanny. His first, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, has now been turned into a stage production featuring Cillian Murphy which runs at the Barbican from 25 Mar—13 Apr 2019 Samantha Harvey's latest novel The Western Wind - set in a C15th Somerset village - is now out in paperback. Her previous books include The Wilderness - which depicts an architect suffering from Alzheimers who is attempting to order his memories. Producer: Zahid Warley

Valeria Luiselli talks to Laurence Scott about the desert border between Mexico and USA & capturing the sound, history and contemporary politics in her novel Lost Children Archive. The poet George Szirtes' first prose work brings his Hungarian mother superbly to life and works backwards through the years to explore the truth of being alive in the world. And Pulitzer-prize-winning short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri on her new anthology of stories from Italy, and why the Italian language releases a part of her unfulfilled by either her Bengali heritage or American upbringing. Jhumpa Lahiri has edited The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which is out now. Valeria Luiselli's novel Lost Children Archive is out now George Szirtes' memoir The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and Life of a Fighter is out now

Artist Hew Locke and historians Suzannah Lipscomb, Aanchal Malhotra & Anindya Raychaudhuri talk to Rana Mitter about using objects and archives to create new images of the past, from Guyana to India and Pakistan to women in C16th France.Suzannah Lipscomb's book The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc uses the evidence of 1,200 cases brought before the consistories – or moral courts – of the Huguenot church of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615 to summon up the lives of ordinary women. Hew Locke Here's The Thing - the most comprehensive show of his art in the UK runs at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham from March 8th to 2nd June 2019 and then tours to Kansas City and Maine. Aanchal Malhotra is the author of Remnants of Partition : 21 Objects from a Continent Divided. She is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory Anindya Raychaudhuri teaches at the University of St Andrews and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has published Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora. You can hear his Essay on Partitioned Memories for BBC Radio 3 here https://bbc.in/2SJjLew Producer: Luke Mulhall

Painter George Shaw, crime writer Dreda Say Mitchell and drama expert Katie Beswick join Matthew Sweet to look at depictions of estate living - from the writing of Andrea Dunbar to SLICK on Sheffield's Park Hill estate to the images of the Tile Hill estate in Coventry where George Shaw grew up, which he creates using Humbrol enamel - the kind of paint used for Airfix kits. Plus a view of the French banlieue from artist Kader Attia.George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field is at the Holburne Museum, Bath to 6th May 2019. Katie Beswick has just published Social Housing in Performance. Dreda Say Mitchell's latest book is called Spare Room. She also writes the Flesh and Blood Series set in London's gangland and the Gangland Girls series. Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion runs at the Hayward Gallery at London's SouthBank Centre to May 6th 2019.

Gazelle Twin (Elizabeth Bernholz), Julia Bardsley, Hannah Catherine Jones, Luke Turner & William Fowler join Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and an audience at Café OTO at the Late Junction Festival for a debate about trends within British culture. Gazelle Twin (Elizabeth Bernholz) is a British composer, producer and musician Julia Bardsley,is a performer and lecturer Hannah Catherine Jones is a multi-instrumentalist and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra Luke Turner is co-founder and editor of arts magazine The Quietus and author of a memoir Out of the Woods. William Fowler is Curator of Artists' Moving Image at the BFI National Archive. BFI's Derek Jarman's Blu-ray box set available 18th March 2019. https://bit.ly/2VRl5hg You might also be interested in Enchantment Witches and Woodland https://bbc.in/2C2fQnK Encyclopedias and Knowledge - includes a discussion about Mark Fisher K Punk https://bbc.in/2UO8V8n Into the Eerie - an episode of Radio 3's Sunday Feature https://bbc.in/2EM26PF Charms - authors Zoe Gilbert, Madeline Miller and Kirsty Logan https://bbc.in/2FZfflG Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Lying about a sexual attack, resisting parental pressures to marry, using the law to fight for inheritance and divorce. Shahidha Bari talks to the fiction writers Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Layla AlAmmar about their new books which depict girls who feel they need to conceal truths about sexual encounters. Historian Jennifer Aston looks at examples of nineteenth century British women fighting for divorce. Jessica Malay researches the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676)The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar and Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen are out now. Jennifer Aston from the University of Northumbria is researching divorce and domestic violence in England and Wales, c.1857-1923. Jessica Malay from the University of Huddersfield is responsible for the first print edition of Lady Anne Clifford's Great Books of Record. She is also the author of a book on a 17th century woman who wrote of her troubled marriage, which includes harrowing experiences of domestic abuse who went through two court cases pursuing a separation from her husband. The book is the Case of Mistress Mary Hampson. Lakeland Arts is re-uniting a portrait of Lady Anne Clifford loaned by the National Portrait Gallery with an image of her mother Lady Margaret Russell at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Cumbria from 22 March - 22 June 2019. From our archives: New Research into the Women's Suffrage Movement https://bbc.in/2tLwvr2 Women's Voices in the Classical World https://bbc.in/2EMjC6y Neglected Women: Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Robinson https://bbc.in/2VwTh1D Rewriting C20th British Philosophy https://bbc.in/2ErYT9P Discrimination https://bbc.in/2pQKMko Deborah Frances White and Women Finding a Voice https://bbc.in/2NDf9Io Producer: Robyn Read