Lady Macbeth
Playwright Zinnie Harris, author Isabelle Schuler and New Generation Thinker Emma Whipday and Michelle Assay have looked at the murdering husband and wife of Shakespeare's Scottish play. Chris Harding...
8 Feb 202344min
Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills
Urbanisation, migration and ‘folk language’ are explored in the 1984 novel by Latife Tekin. The story is a carnivalesque fusion of contrasts like its title – where ‘Berji’ conjures images of an innoce...
8 Feb 202314min
Gwendolyn Brooks
Inner city life in Chicago's Bronzeville and the experiences of ordinary people inspired the first poetry collection published by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945 and she followed this with a sequence of poem...
7 Feb 202345min
The mermaid-like Mélusine
The legend of Mélusine emerges in French literature of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in the texts of Jean d’Arras and Coudrette. A beautiful young woman, the progeny of the union b...
3 Feb 202344min
Crossroads and TV soaps
Russell T Davies has written a 3 part mini-series - Nolly - about Crossroads star Noele Gordon. He joins Matthew Sweet along with screenwriter Paula Milne who wrote for Crossroads and Coronation Stree...
2 Feb 202344min
The English Civil War
If the Tudors are the soap opera of English history, the restless years of the mid 17th century, often called the English Civil War, are more like a seminar in political and religious theory with an a...
31 Jan 202345min
Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
Romani history and how mass murder is intertwined with a modern day pilgrimage site and the experiences of Portuguese Jewish communities are discussed by Matthew Sweet and his guests. Richard Zimler's...
26 Jan 202345min
William Stukeley
Stone circles, Roman Britain, a fossil crocodile and the flood described in the Book of Genesis, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a fake monk's manuscript: these were all studied by William Stukeley, Engli...
25 Jan 202344min
