Arts & Ideas

Should we worry about the world getting healthier? Thomas Bollyky thinks we should. Jane Stevens Crawshaw looks at cleanliness and disease in Renaissance cities & Penny Woolcock films Oxford and LA. Rana Mitter presents. For the first time in recorded history, parasites, viruses, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death and disability in any region of the world but that doesn't mean our cities are healthier and more prosperous. Jane Steven Crawshaw from Oxford Brookes researches plague hospitals and quarantine. From cleaning up C15th Venice and Milan, Rana Mitter also considers C21st Oxford and Los Angeles in new films by Penny Woolcock which explore their different mythologies. Her recent projects have also included the different responses she and a gang member have walking down the same street and a range of views on personal gun use. Jennifer Ingleheart reveals the books deemed too racy for Oxford undergraduates that were hidden away in the Bodleian Library's Phi Collection.Thomas Bollyky is director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book is called Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways.Fantastic Cities - an exhibition of Penny Woolcock's work runs at Modern Art Oxford until March 2019.The Story of Phi, curated by Jennifer Ingleheart, is at the Bodleian Library until 13th January 2019.Hear more from Penny Woolcock discussing her career at the Free Thinking Festival https://bbc.in/2E31s0UProducer: Torquil MacLeod

Doris Kearns Goodwin on POTUS, crisis management and ambition - from Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt through FDR and LBJ to Donald Trump. Novelist Georgina Harding and Philip Woods compare notes on the impact of the war in Burma and depictions in fiction, war reporting and memoirs. New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike looks at the campaigning of Obi Egbuna the Nigerian-born novelist (1938- 2014), playwright and political activist who led the United Coloured People's Association. Anne McElvoy presents.Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer prize winning historian whose latest book is called Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times. Georgina Harding's latest novel is called Land of the Living. Philip Woods is the author of Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma.

Eric Kaufmann talks to Philip Dodd about white identity, immigration and populism. Plus Hungarian politics with cultural historian, Krisztina Robert, journalist, Matyas Sarkozi and Zsuzsa Szelenyi of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.Eric Kaufmann's book is called Whiteshift: populism, immigration and the future of White majorities. Krisztina Robert teaches at the University of RoehamptonProducer: Zahid Warley

Peter Frankopan brings his history of ties across Asia into the present while Maya Jasanoff, winner of the world's richest history prize, uses the novels of Joseph Conrad to show that the novelist was wrestling with the same problems and opportunities of globalisation we face today. Historian Peter Mandler also joins Rana Mitter to discuss new proposals for publishing historican research. As the centenary of the birth of Orkney film maker and poet Margaret Tait is celebrated nationally, New Generation Thinker, Elsa Richardson, discusses how Tait's medical training shaped her subsequent film work and writing while the curator Peter Todd concentrates on the influence of Orkney and why Tait's films still speak to us today. Maya Jasanoff, winner of The 2018 Cundill Prize, announced in Canada on November 15th. https://www.cundillprize.com/ for her book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World available now Peter Frankopan was one of this year's judges. His books include the best selling The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World and created an illustrated version for children. Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at University of CambridgeStalking The Image: Margaret Tait and Her Legacy at Glasgow Museum of Modern Art until May 5th 2019 Peter Todd, curator of Rhythm and Poetry The films of Margaret Tait at British Film Institute until Friday 30 Nov 2018 and The BFI will be releasing her only feature film 'Blue Black Permanent' on Blu-ray disc in Spring 2019. Elsa Richardson, New Generation Thinker, reseaches intersection between the medical and cultural history, University of StrathclydeNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics who can turn their research into radio.

A 3,000 year old Iranian ritual, archaeology on a council estate, and London's Greek Cypriot community: Matthew Sweet hops on the 29 bus route, puts on some VR glasses, and visits the hospital which was home to "the Elephant Man" as he talks to researchers showcasing their projects at the 2018 Being Human Festival. Petros Karatsareas and Athena Mandis guide Matthew through the moves made by the Greek Cypriot diaspora in London along the 29 bus route. Carenza Lewis and Ian Waites of the University of Lincoln explain why they've organised an archaeological dig on a 1960s council estate. Nadia Valman and Karen Crosby are organising a slide projection onto the walls of the Royal London Hospital Living Zoroastrianism is an exhibition on show at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS (until December 15th) in which Virtual Reality allows visitors to experience a 3,000 year old ritual from pre-Islamic Iran, stages by Almut Hintze and Anna Sowa You can find events around the UK in the Being Human Festival of research into the Humanities here https://beinghumanfestival.org/ Producer: Luke Mulhall

From death cafes to bronze age burials, C19th mourning rings to the way healthcare professionals cope when patients die. Eleanor Barraclough looks at research showcased in the Being Human Festival at UK universities. Laura O'Brien at Northumbria University is running a death cafe and looking at the way celebrities can "live on" after their death. New Generation Thinker Danielle Thom works at the Museum of London and has been researching the history behind some of the jewelry in their collection. Duncan Garrow from Reading University is leading a major research project into prehistoric grave goods. Medical historian Agnes Arnold-Forster has been asking surgeons and other health professionals about how they deal with death.The Being Human Festival organises free events based on research into the Humanities at universities around the UK. It runs from Nov 15th - 24th 2018 https://beinghumanfestival.org/ Producer: Torquil MacLeod

New Scots words to add to the The Dictionar o the Scots Leid and a quiz about words from medieval Ireland are 2 of the Being Human Festival projects explored by Shahidha Bari. Plus how researchers are using film to explore social history and a major new exhibition about the sculptor and painter Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993).The Being Human Festival showcases research into the Humanities at universities around the UK. It runs from Nov 15th - 24th 2018 https://beinghumanfestival.org/ Watch the winning films from the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018: https://bit.ly/2JYfgu2Elisabeth Frink: Humans and Other Animals is The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia until 24th of February. You can see more work by Frink at Beaux Arts Mayfair Gallery, London until 1st December and at Tate Britain until 4 February. You can hear New Generation Thinkers presenting the Radio 3 Sunday Feature here https://bbc.in/2B3o7HP A Mystery about Gilbert and Sullivan. Medieval Passions and Moderm Immersive Drama. https://bbc.in/2Fhp3wA Is it Wrong to have Children? Why Bin Laden did not like Shakespeare.Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Journalist Peter Hitchens; the Rector of St James’s Church Piccadilly Lucy Winkett; performer and director Neil Bartlett and Professor Steve Brown from the Open University join Anne McElvoy at the Imperial War Museum for their 2018 Remembrance Lecture. In 1919, the first national silence was observed to commemorate the end of the First World War. Organised silences were designed to remember the human impact of conflict, but do twenty-first century collective silences fulfil that purpose? This debate brings together a panel of speakers to discuss the role of organised silences and what it means to be silent about conflict in 2018. IWM’s annual remembrance lecture appears as part of Making a New World a free season of exhibitions, installations and immersive experiences taking place at IWM London and IWM North in 2018. Through art, photography, film, live music, dance and conversations, the season explores themes of remembrance and how the First World War has shaped today’s society, bringing together five major exhibitions – Lest We Forget? at IWM North and Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs, I Was There: Room of Voices, Mimesis: African Solider and Moments of Silence at IWM London. Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Shahidha Bari is joined by cultural historian Ana Carden-Coyne, literary scholar Santanu Das, and Julia Neville, co-ordinator of the Exeter First World War Hospitals Project, to discuss the 1914-1918 War. Their research turns the War into a mosaic of feeling and experience, a sensory dislocation and cultural melting pot. Dr Ana Carden-Coyne is Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War (CCHW) in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, and author of The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War, Santanu Das, Professor of English Literature, Kings College London. His book India, Empire and the First World War: Words, Objects, Images and Music Is out now Dr Julia Neville, is an Honorary Fellow in the History Department at Exeter University, and serves on the Council of the Devon History Society. She co-ordinates the Exeter War Hospitals Research Project. This podcast was made with the assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.

Better than Proust -- the man who made literature out of colloquial French -- the arch chronicler of human depravity --- some of the things that are said about Louis Ferdinand Céline, author of Journey to the End of the Night - one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature. His semi- autobiographical novel, first published in 1932, is a ferocious assault on the hypocrisy and idiocy of his time. It follows its anti hero Ferdinand Bardamu from the battlefields of the First World War to Africa and America before returning to Paris and a chilling confrontation with his demons. The book established Céline as a an original and dangerous voice amongst the generation of writers who emerged from the carnage of the Great War. The fluency of his prose, its tone and bristling attitude has won him many admirers among them Philip Roth and Joseph Heller. He's entered popular culture too -- being quoted by Jim Morrison in the Doors' song End of the Night. But as well as the praise there's been criticism - not least for the vicious anti-Semitism that surfaces in some of his later work. To explore the novel and the man Rana Mitter is joined by the writers, Marie Darrieussecq and Tibor Fischer, the literary historian, Andrew Hussey, and Céline's latest biographer, Damian Catani.Marie Darrieussecq is the author of novels including Pig Tales, Tom is Dead and her latest Our Life in the Forest Andrew Hussey is the author of The French Intifada : The Long War Between France and its Arabs Tibor Fischer is the author of the novels, How to Rule the World, Under the Frog and The Thought Gang. Damian Catani teaches at Birkbeck College in London and is writing a biography of Céline that will be published in 2020 by Reaktion Books. Producer: Zahid Warley