Arts & Ideas

A hundred years ago, Ernest Shackleton set out on his Trans-Antarctic expedition which ended when his ship Endurance became trapped in packed ice. The lure of this polar region remains strong both in ...

17 Nov 201444min

The Spin Doctors of 19th-Century America. Embracing the emerging sciences of the age, 19th-century Americans thought they might be able to combine physiognomy (the science of reading faces) and the te...

14 Nov 201413min

Drawing on Shakespeare's plays and Indian translations of them from recent times - and on writing by Saadat Hasan Manto and Rabindranath Tagore, the voices of partition and independence - Preti Taneja...

13 Nov 201413min

Animals: Watching Us Watching Them Watching Each Other. Rana Mitter talks to the primatologist, Andrew Whiten, Professor of Evolutionary and Development Psychology at St Andrews, to Dr Katie Slocombe ...

13 Nov 201443min

Naomi Paxton from the University of Manchester explores the international movement for a Women's Theatre from the 1890s to the start of the First World War, and considers how their ideas may have chan...

13 Nov 201413min

John Lanchester talks to Matthew Sweet about his novel Capital, our understanding of the economy and whether the language of money creates barriers between bankers and borrowers. This event was record...

12 Nov 201444min

Where did language come from? It's often been described as the fundamental barrier between humans and animals. However, many scientists now believe speech evolved gradually from animal communication. ...

11 Nov 201413min

Turkey's best selling female writer, Elif Shafak, talks to Anne McElvoy about imagination and storytelling as she publishes her new novel The Architect's Apprentice. Her cosmopolitan voice is of parti...

11 Nov 201443min