Free Thinking

Naomi Alderman, Roger Luckhurst and BALTIC curator Alessandro Vincentelli join Matthew Sweet to discuss how science fiction and space travel change our view of this world and to discuss whether the li...

25 Nov 201443min

The Cost of Free Information. Against a backdrop of perceived excess of intellectual property, and problems that require solving with a matter of urgency, Rana Mitter and Jodie Ginsburg, Dr. Rufus Pol...

20 Nov 201443min

How much self-knowledge do you need to be happy – and what are the limits to what you can achieve alone? Paul Dolan, Vincent Deary and Beatrix Campbell ask why everybody from governments to therapists...

19 Nov 201443min

Knowing Your Characters. Matthew Sweet talks to playwright David Greig and actor Siobhan Redmond about their approaches to drama. How much do you have to know about the characters and the story before...

18 Nov 201443min

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