Arts & Ideas

From Brighton Rock and Goodfellas to the streets of Glasgow, London’s East End and Chicago, what’s it really like to be part of a gang and do gangs lead to organised crime? Matthew Sweet calls a meeti...

21 Mar 201844min

From Monarchs to Presidents. Joanne Paul on satire, flattery and document leaks in the C16 and C17 centuries and the relevance of strategies for telling truth to those who hold power over us now. Five...

21 Mar 201820min

Anne McElvoy hosts Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator; David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends; Caroline MacFarland, the head of a think tank promoting the interests of ‘millennials’ a...

21 Mar 201844min

April 1916. By the Nile, the foremost poets of the Middle East are arguing about Shakespeare. In 2004, Egyptian singer Essam Karika released his urban song Oh Romeo. Reflecting on his travels and enco...

20 Mar 201820min

Author of A Book of Silence Sara Maitland, medievalist John-Henry Clay, and writer Lionel Shriver face the crowd to contemplate the many sides to solitude. Chaired by Rana Mitter with an audience at t...

20 Mar 201844min

A fashion show in Buenos Aires was put on for propaganda but football fixtures were deemed too risky. New Generation Thinker Dr Christopher Bannister, from the University of Manchester, looks at attem...

19 Mar 201819min

Alastair Fraser talks about teenagers, street life and filling time. Doing nothing has become the mantra of twenty-first century life. In an accelerated world, we yearn for a space where minds are emp...

16 Mar 201821min

Gilbert and Sullivan gave university-educated women the English comic operetta treatment in their eighth collaboration, Princess Ida (1884) but why did the most famous musical duo of their day choose ...

15 Mar 201823min