Free Thinking

Archiving or hoarding - the mother in Ruth Ozeki's new novel The Book of Form and Emptiness is overwhelmed by the newspaper cuttings she is supposed to categorise for her job. In his new history of in...

30 Sep 202145min

Would he condemn Hitler? That's the question novelist Thomas Mann was continually asked, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 following novels such as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mounta...

29 Sep 202145min

Historical novelist Philippa Gregory, historians Susan Doran and Nandini Das, and literary scholar and author Adam Roberts join Matthew Sweet at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry to discuss the enduring ...

28 Sep 202144min

Rebellion and causing offence: Shahidha Bari looks at punk and finds that beyond the filth and the fury of the ‘70s music scene, it provided a new vocabulary for artists that’s shaped the cultural sce...

23 Sep 202145min

Hannah Arendt tackled the big ideas behind possibly the most dangerous period of the twentieth century: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. These phenomena and the concepts of freedom and ...

21 Sep 202145min

"I have no relation or friend" - words spoken by Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. That story, alongside Georg Büchner's expressionist classic Woyzeck, has inspired the new producti...

16 Sep 202145min

One definition of a glitch is a short-lived fault in a system operating otherwise as it should. Glitches in digital systems have been used by artists for at least a decade to produce work with a chara...

15 Sep 202144min

Descending into the nine circles of Hell is one of the key ideas set out in Dante's Inferno. Today's Free Thinking looks at the way his thinking and imagery have been taken up by other artists and wri...

14 Sep 202144min