Free Thinking

Matthew Sweet and guests explore the art of the con.... If you've ever fallen for a scam, you'll be reassured by Maria Konnikova's new book The Confidence Game, in which she explains why most of us a...

26 Jan 201645min

Anne McElvoy looks at what happened to the Arab Spring five years on, talking to Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany - whose new novel is called The Automobile Club of Egypt - and to satirist and critic ...

21 Jan 201644min

Rana Mitter goes underground to discover a world which long fed the human imagination and which fulfils all humanity's practical needs outside of food and yet which has become something we like to ign...

20 Jan 201643min

Merlin Holland, Will Self and Fiona Shaw join Matthew Sweet for a discussion about Oscar Wilde's novel which was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in the July 1890 issue and then as a book 12...

19 Jan 201643min

Matthew Sweet is joined by Professor Christopher Frayling to look at the revival of Westerns and Bryony Hanson and Laurence Scott consider the 2016 Oscar contenders.

14 Jan 201644min

Philip Dodd wrestles with an especially knotty question – does France have to stop being French to survive? Its a question which owes its urgency to recent events from the massacres of last year to th...

14 Jan 201645min

Anne McElvoy talks to the winner of this year's TS Eliot poetry prize Sarah Howe - who won for her first collection; Anne talks to leading physicist Lisa Randall - author of Dark Matter and the Dinosa...

12 Jan 201644min

Anne McElvoy looks at changing fashions and values in the art world as she talks to Observer critic Laura Cumming about her researches into a 19th-century court case involving a Velázquez portrait. Ne...

8 Jan 201645min