Free Thinking

Caryl Phillips talks to Matthew Sweet about his new novel The Lost Child which re-imagines Heathcliff. The Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells will be discussing his new book, Great Shakespearean Actors...

21 Apr 201545min

Anne McElvoy is joined by the German novelist Eugen Ruge, British author Lawrence Norfolk, the journalist Oliver Kamm; and the literary historians, Karen Leeder and Julian Preece for a programme devot...

16 Apr 201544min

Philip Dodd considers violence in culture with crime writer Frances Fyfield, historian Professor Richard Bessel, Forensic Psychiatrist Mayura Deshpande, and writer Peter Stanford

15 Apr 201543min

As Mexico takes centre stage at London's Book Fair Matthew Sweet speaks to two of the country's award-winning writers - Valeria Luiselli and Francisco Goldman. Playwright Simon Stephens talks about tr...

14 Apr 201545min

Rana Mitter discusses a new model for understanding the brain, with researcher and writer Norman Doidge. Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi talks about his latest film - Foreign Body - and a new t...

9 Apr 201546min

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