Arts & Ideas

What exactly is a portrait? As the National Portrait Gallery re-opens and Sheffield Documentary Festival begins, Shahidha Bari talks to the gallery's Chief Curator Alison Smith, film-makers Kim Longin...

14 Jun 202345min

Edinburgh GP Gavin Francis has been reading the writings of Thomas Browne (1605 -1682), who travelled to Padua and Leiden to qualify in medicine and then wrote on topics including religion, burial and...

13 Jun 202345min

The father of capitalism or a sensitive moral philosopher? Adam Smith has been claimed as the defender of self-interest and advocate of free market economics, but his reputation has undergone a recent...

8 Jun 202345min

Is it ever okay to pass off someone else’s work as your own? What if it’s a computer programme faking it? And how are our perceptions of ownership and Identity influenced by the apparent power of digi...

7 Jun 202345min

Le Mépris in 1963 brought fame to Michel Piccoli. Jean-Luc Godard's new wave film was based on an Italian novel about a love triangle and power dynamics involving a playwright asked to work on a film ...

6 Jun 202344min

From Pakistan to Bulgaria to swimming the waterways of Britain: Rana Mitter is joined by a panel of writers to look at our relationship with particular landscapes and the natural world. Kapka Kassabov...

31 Mai 202344min

From dockworkers in Poland to meetings with European prime ministers and presidents and witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall - the latest book by Timothy Garton Ash is a memoir called Homelands: A P...

31 Mai 202345min

The Imperial War Museum in London is putting on display recently collected objects and new first-hand testimony describing life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles in its first show to look at thi...

26 Mai 202345min