Arts & Ideas Podcast
Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives – looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Broadcast as Free Thinking, Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari and Anne McElvoy.
Episodes to download
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Free Thinking Essay: Beards and Whiskers
Fri 7 Nov 2014
Historian Alun Withey says beards can shed light on a whole range of things from to...
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Free Thinking Festival: Burning the Facts
Thu 6 Nov 2014
Which historical 'facts' should be burned on the fire? How do you comb ancient and for...
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Free Thinking Essay - Disraeli the Romantic
Thu 6 Nov 2014
Daisy Hay from Exeter University explores the way in which Disraeli invented the as a...
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Free Thinking Festival 2014: Right Thinking People
Wed 5 Nov 2014
David Willetts MP and the writer and philosopher Roger Scruton discuss the best way to...
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Free Thinking Festival: The Essay
Wed 5 Nov 2014
Sophie Coulombeau on the origins of the custom for women to take their husband's name.
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Free Thinking Essay: Scold The Front Page
Tue 4 Nov 2014
New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton on what 17th-century ideas about censorship share...
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Free Thinking Festival 2014: You Must See This
Tue 4 Nov 2014
Matthew Sweet explores the way digital media have transformed our cultural tastes with...
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Free Thinking Festival 2014: Knowing Your Enemy
Mon 3 Nov 2014
Anne McElvoy chairs a discussion about conciliation in an age of uprisings recorded in...
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Free Thinking Essay: The Human Copying Machine
Mon 3 Nov 2014
New Generation Thinker Tiffany Watt-Smith explores mirroring and a nineteenth-century...
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Free Thinking Festival - Karen Armstrong
Fri 31 Oct 2014
Karen Armstrong, one of the world's leading thinkers about religion, gives the Free in...
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Free Thinking - Akram Khan
Thu 30 Oct 2014
Choreographer Akram Khan talks to Anne McElvoy about curating a festival at the Lowry,...
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Free Thinking - Orhan Pamuk
Wed 29 Oct 2014
Orhan Pamuk talks, in an extended conversation with Philip Dodd, about his writing and...
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Free Thinking - Orhan Pamuk
Wed 29 Oct 2014
Orhan Pamuk talks to Philip Dodd about his writing career and his views of modern Turkey.
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Free Thinking - Mike Leigh
Tue 28 Oct 2014
Mike Leigh discusses his film about Turner. Steve Connor and Matthew Sweet discuss an...
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Free Thinking - Margaret Atwood
Thu 23 Oct 2014
Anne McElvoy talks to celebrated Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose most recent a...
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Free Thinking - Australian writer Peter Carey
Wed 22 Oct 2014
How history can help to shape policy making? Rana Mitter is joined by The History MP...
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Free Thinking - Marcel Proust
Tue 21 Oct 2014
This Free Thinking is devoted to one of the landmarks of European literature -- Marcel...
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Free Thinking - William Morris
Thu 16 Oct 2014
Jeremy Deller and Fiona McCarthy have each curated an exhibition looking at the art of...
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Free Thinking - The notion of Jewish identity
Wed 15 Oct 2014
Rana Mitter talks to three people who have been exploring their own relationship with...
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Free Thinking - Man Booker Prize
Tue 14 Oct 2014
Sherlock Holmes is investigated by Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet as the Museum of an...
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Free Thinking - Henry IV
Thu 9 Oct 2014
Anne McElvoy talks to Phyllida Lloyd about playing Shakespeare in a female prison in...
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Free Thinking - Tim Minchin, David Cronenberg
Wed 8 Oct 2014
Canadian filmmaker and originator of the body horror genre, David Cronenberg covers as...
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Free Thinking Festival - Colm Toibin
Tue 7 Oct 2014
Colm Toibin is one of Ireland's finest writers, whose books explore issues such as and...
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Free Thinking - Matthew Barzun
Thu 2 Oct 2014
At a time when the special relationship between the UK and the US is under particular...
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Free Thinking - Ai Weiwei at Blenheim
Wed 1 Oct 2014
Rana Mitter has a first-night review of Electra with Kristin Scott Thomas from Edith...
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Free Thinking - Neel Mukherjee
Tue 30 Sep 2014
Matthew Sweet examines our contradictory attitudes to China and it's culture with the...
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Free Thinking - Thomas Ostermeier
Thu 25 Sep 2014
As the Schaubühne Berlin's production of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' at...
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Free Thinking - Francis Fukuyama
Wed 24 Sep 2014
Fukuyama and Howard Jacobson are interviewed by Philip Dodd. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama...
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Free Thinking - Language
Tue 23 Sep 2014
Steven Pinker's research at Harvard is into language and cognition. His new book The...
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Free Thinking - Figuring Out Abstract Art
Thu 18 Sep 2014
Scientist Susan Greenfield, painter Fiona Rae, poet Paul Farley and artist and TV Matt...
