Women warriors and power brokers
Aethelflaed and Bertha are two of the figures discussed in the new history of women in the Middle Ages written by Janina Ramirez. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has taken the heroine who fights Tancr...
13 Jul 202245min
The Black Fantastic
From Beyonce to Octavia Butler, from Chris Ofili to Jordan Peele, the speculative and the mythical have been used as powerful tools to shape Black art, film, music and writing. Ekow Eshun, who has cur...
7 Jul 202245min
Writing about money
How does money shape history and how do we write about it? Anne McElvoy discusses those questions with a finalist in the political writing category of the 2022 Orwell Prize. In Uncommon Wealth: Britai...
6 Jul 202245min
Vampires and the Penny Dreadful
Varney the Vampire was a blood soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a...
30 Jun 202245min
David Chalmers & Iain McGilchrist
David Chalmers is credited with setting the terms for much of the work done in the philosophy of mind today when he posed the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how does matter, which is fundamentally i...
29 Jun 202245min
Belief, Habit & Religion
For evolutionary scientists studying religion, it's more fruitful to examine what people do in religious contexts, rather than listen to what they say they believe. There's a new recognition that as w...
28 Jun 202244min
Late works
Geoff Dyer, Dame Sheila Hancock and Rachel Stott join Matthew Sweet to discuss the work and performance of writers, artists, athletes and musicians near the end of their careers.Old Rage by Sheila Han...
23 Jun 202245min
ETA Hoffmann
The German Romantic author of horror and fantasy published stories which form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the ballet Coppélia and the Nutcracker. In the theatre he wo...
22 Jun 202245min
