Arts & Ideas

This evening Free Thinking is devoted to one of the pinnacles of Victorian England – Anthony Trollope’s massive novel The Way We Live Now. To examine the book and its social and historical context P...

8 Apr 201544min

With the publication of the widest survey of sexual behaviour since the Kinsey Report, Matthew Sweet picks apart the data with its author, David Spiegelhalter, and New Generation Thinker, Fern Riddell...

7 Apr 201543min

Patricia Duncker talks to Anne McElvoy about her new novel which imagines George Eliot's relationship with her German publishers, Max and Wolfgang Duncker. Adrienne Mayor discusses the strength of wom...

2 Apr 201544min

In this programme about private and public art, Philip Dodd talks to Nicholas Penny, the outgoing Director of the National Gallery and Budi Tek, global art collector and private museum owner.

1 Apr 201543min

As Ridley Scott's science fiction extravaganza, Blade Runner is re-released, Matthew Sweet is joined by the critics Roger Luckhurst and Sarah Churchwell, and by the philosopher Max de Gaynesford, to d...

31 Mars 201544min

Philip Dodd continues his exploration of the culture wars by investigating the tension between cosmopolitanism and the nation state and how this is playing out in Europe. He speaks to Dr Ayça Çubukçu ...

26 Mars 201545min

Philip Dodd talks to one of the icons of what used to be called the counter-culture, Peggy Seeger. Her voice and career are emblematic of a life lived against the establishment grain.

25 Mars 201544min

In the first of three programmes exploring fractures and faultlines in contemporary society, Philip Dodd and guests discuss the tension between secularism and religion. With philosopher and atheist Da...

24 Mars 201544min