Free Thinking

TV dramatist Jed Mercurio, producer Caryn Mandabach and writer-director, Dominic Savage talk to Anne McElvoy about creating successful dramas including The Line of Duty and Peaky Blinders. Novelist Sa...

11 Dec 201444min

American author Rebecca Solnit discusses the impact of "mansplaining" which she explores in her book Men Explain Things To Me. Matthew Sweet looks at the image of Wonder Woman with comic artist Steve...

10 Dec 201445min

Mona Siddiqui talks to Philip Dodd about her book called My Way: A Muslim Woman's Journey. The scholar Ziauddin Sardar has written Mecca, The Sacred City which explores the history of the birthplace o...

9 Dec 201444min

Philip Dodd and a panel including historians Philip Ziegler and John Guy, biographer Sarah Bradford, journalist Deborah Orr and author William Kuhn explore British monarchy past and present and ask wh...

4 Dec 201443min

Philip Dodd, Roger Scruton and Janet Suzman look at theatre in South Africa - a year since Mandela’s death and in the Czech Republic 25 years on from the Velvet Revolution. Director Howard Davies disc...

3 Dec 201444min

Scientist Brian Cox and Professor Chris Frayling join the actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood for a discussion about Stanley Kubrick's landmark film 2001: A Space Odyssey chaired by Matthew Sweet and...

2 Dec 201444min

Anne McElvoy talks to the historian Geoffrey Parker about Global Crisis, his influential game-changing account of the political and social upheavals which characterised the Seventeenth Century around ...

27 Nov 201445min

Matthew Sweet looks at depictions of American life and history in a special edition hearing from three contemporary American authors: Marilynne Robinson, Jane Smiley and Richard Ford.

26 Nov 201443min