Revenge and reconciliation
Free Thinking14 Nov 2025

Revenge and reconciliation

What function do ceremonies like Armistice Day perform? How do we balance desires for reconciliation with feelings about revenge? How we remember wars and what commemoration means is much less settled than we might think. And that throws up questions, in times when conflicts are spreading close to us in western Europe, of how wars end and how we balance our concern for justice and peace with darker impulses?

Joining presenter Anne McElvoy for BBC Radio 4's roundtable discussion about the ideas shaping our world are: classicist Natalie Haynes whose most recent novel No End to this House re-imagines the story of Medea, former solider Ashleigh Percival-Borley, who is now an academic and on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council Duncan Wheeler, author of Following Franco and an academic studying contemporary Spain. neuro-scientist Nicholas Wright who advises the Pentagon and has written Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain and, Andy West, prison philosophy teacher and author of The Life Inside

Producer: Ruth Watts

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Episoder(1526)

The Ethics of Knowledge

The Ethics of Knowledge

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledg...

10 Jul 56min

Trade and Traffic

Trade and Traffic

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material th...

3 Jul 56min

The Child's Eye View

The Child's Eye View

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI to living through war and the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherine...

26 Jun 56min

Eccentrics & Outsiders

Eccentrics & Outsiders

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a re-r...

19 Jun 56min

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an a...

12 Jun 56min

Wealth

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Jun 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Mai 56min

Thinking with Food

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Mai 56min

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