Free Thinking

Anne McElvoy looks at what we mean by the idea of fairness. She also talks to novelist Tom McCarthy who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel C. His new work Satin Island follows a man wo...

12 Mar 201545min

An extended interview in which Philip Dodd is joined by novelist, screenwriter and dramatist Hanif Kureishi. He discusses subjects including immigration, sexuality and mortality.

11 Mar 201544min

Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar and Hans Ulrich Obrist explain the Extreme Present to Matthew Sweet. Their co-authored book The Age of Earthquakes builds on Marshall McLuhan's analysis of how technolog...

10 Mar 201544min

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talks to Anne McElvoy about his latest book – The Buried Giant. And as two separate productions of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, are performed on stage in London – the playwrig...

5 Mar 201545min

Churchill famously commented that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' Rana Mitter and his guests David Runciman, Profe...

4 Mar 201544min

John Gray talks to Matthew Sweet about why the Aztecs might have had a better understanding of freedom than we do and other human illusions about meaning and progress. Also we consider how artistic mo...

3 Mar 201543min

Rana Mitter talks to Tony Harrison, the winner of the biennial David Cohen prize - one of our most prestigious literary awards. Two other writers join Rana - Ru Freeman and Romesh Gunesekara. Both fro...

26 Feb 201544min

Philip Dodd looks at the value of the arts with the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the EU, biologist Anne Glover,and discusses the notion of belonging and social identity in Europe with Dutch auth...

25 Feb 201545min