Seriously...

The writing of Carson McCullers has perhaps never been as popular or acclaimed as that of contemporaries such as Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams, but nonetheless she remains one of the most remarkab...

9 Feb 201630min

Why is homosexuality still illegal in the world's so-called largest democracy? In his celebrated family memoir 'And All is Said', historian Dr Zareer Masani made no bones about his own homosexuality ...

5 Feb 201628min

In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who we...

2 Feb 201642min

For the past few decades music teacher and pianist Francesco Lotoro has been collecting music written in concentration camps from the Second World War. Francesco's life is entirely given over to recov...

26 Jan 201628min

What is it really like to make decisions affecting millions of people, knowing that a mistake might be pounced upon instantly and your career left in tatters? Government ministers face this challenge ...

22 Jan 201629min

Many of us have grown up with the belief that a strong work ethic is a positive thing, and that by contrast idle hands are the devil's playthings. According to Professor Andrew Hussey, that argument m...

8 Jan 201658min

How many stories are there in the world? According to William Wallace Cook, dime novelist and prolific producer of American pulp, there were precisely 1,462 and in Plotto, his "Master Book of All Plot...

5 Jan 201628min

The comedian and actor Isy Suttie sets out to explore how creativity is influenced by the mysterious and medically controversial phenomenon ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Ever since she ...

29 Des 201531min