Syria: hope and poetry
Two years of staying inside her own home in Homs, whilst 60 per cent of her neighbourhood was turned into rubble hasn't deterred architect Marwa al-Sabouni. She talks to Anne McElvoy about rebuilding ...
18 Mar 202145min
Introducing New Generation Thinkers 2021
From clues in paintings to colonial trade to letters sent between Australia and England; the links between a Durham based poet and India to the female singers and dancers from Latin America who were c...
17 Mar 202144min
Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: Sindhubala
The rights of tribal people, the lives of ordinary workers and the depiction of female desire were amongst the themes explored by the writer Mahasweta Devi. Born in Dhaka in 1926, she attended the sch...
17 Mar 202113min
Books To Make Space For On The Bookshelf: John Halifax, Gentleman
Dinah Mulock Craik achieved fame and fortune as the author of the 1856 bestselling novel John Halifax, Gentleman. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore reads this rags-to-riches tale of an orphan b...
16 Mar 202113min
New Thinking: what do we learn from census stats?
Everyday lives from the past are often hard to reconstruct. As we prepare for the Census 2021, what stories can we tell from past censuses and the records held at Kew at the National Archives? John Ga...
16 Mar 202144min
Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: The Black Lizard
Edogawa Rampo's stories give us a Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding traces the way detective fiction chimed with the modernising of Japan, when the abilit...
15 Mar 202114min
Edward Said's thinking
Orientalism was his book, published in 1978, which outlined Said's view that imperialism and a romanticised version of Arab Culture clouded the way the East was depicted by Western scholars. In 1981 h...
12 Mar 202145min
The Vietnam Paris connection
Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the Fr...
11 Mar 202144min
