Life expectations, philosophy in the world, protest
Can we still expect a meaningful job, stable income, a chance of owning property? How have expectations changed and what is the place of protest? Matthew Sweet's guests this week are: David Willetts i...
10 Maj 202456min
Winning & Losing, Plato Scroll, the Decline of Nightlife
Matthew Sweet talks about the philosophy of winning and losing with Professor Lea Ypi a political scientist at the London School of Economics and the journalist and author Peter Hitchens. They'll be j...
4 Maj 202457min
Kant today, Spice Girls Reunited, Impersonating an Animal
Marshmallows and Kant, ideas about girl power from Mary Wollstonecraft (born April 27th 1759) to the Spice girls; and galloping horses, sea-gull sounds and life as a goat. On today's Free Thinking Sha...
26 Apr 202457min
New Thinking: Exploring the local
Women made up 10-15% of the workforce in the early days of the post office. Looking at a series of different records from the 17th century onwards, Sarah Ward Clavier has discovered stories about spyi...
26 Apr 202443min
Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey
Classicist Mary Beard picks Tacitus as a figure who still has relevance if we're thinking about satire, power and celebrity. Shahidha Bari is joined by Mary, historian Helen Carr, who co-edited What i...
19 Apr 202457min
Change, scrabble and cultural christianity
"The times they are a changin" or are they? In politics people are talking about an appetite for change, or being a candidate for change but how radical can you be? With climate change, seasonal chang...
12 Apr 202456min
Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine
What do you owe the state and what does it provide for us? Writing during the English civil war, Thomas Hobbes came up with an outline for the social contract between individuals and the sovereign – o...
5 Apr 202456min
Unravelling plainness
Gold sequins, silk and vibrant colour threads might not be what you expect to find in a sampler stitched by a Quaker girl in the seventeenth century. New Generation Thinker Isabella Rosner has studied...
29 Mars 202414min
