Who needs critics?
Is Gogglebox the main place on TV where you now find criticism? What does that tell us about the role of the critic today? Suzi Feay, Arifa Akbar and Charlotte Mullins join Matthew Sweet to review a n...
20 Maj 202145min
Ghosts of the Spanish civil war
A ghostly Franco visits an elderly man in the latest novel by Patrick McGrath. He joins historian Duncan Wheeler and the makers of a prize winning documentary Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, as R...
19 Maj 202145min
The Wolfson History Prize 2021
Toussaint Louverture's revolutionary leadership in Haiti; Ravenna's place as a hub of culture and a meeting point of East and West; how motherhood and work have changed from Victorian Manchester facto...
18 Maj 202145min
Lost cities, 20s divas and 2011 uprisings
Singer Umm Kulthum, Mounira al-Mahdiyya, Badia Masabni. These are the names of the pioneering performers working in Cairo's dance halls and theatres in the 1020s whom Raphael Cormack has written about...
13 Maj 202145min
New Thinking: Archiving, curating and digging for data
What stories are being uncovered by people working behind the scenes at museums and institutions? Lisa Mullen finds out talking to Tessa Jackson – Conservator; David Beavan – Senior Research Software ...
12 Maj 202144min
Marlon James and Neil Gaiman
From the appeal of trickster gods Anansi and Loki to the joy of comics and fantasy: Booker prize winner Marlon James and Neil Gaiman, author of the book American Gods which has been turned into a TV s...
11 Maj 202145min
Alison Bechdel
The Bechdel test asks whether two women are having a conversation which doesn't relate to a man. Many films, books and plays fall foul of the measure which first appeared in the comic strip Dykes to W...
6 Maj 202145min
Napoleon the gardener and art thief
The day before Napoleon's death on May 5th 1821, the willow tree he liked to sit under on St Helena was felled by tempestuous winds. Ruth Scurr has written Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows. Nat...
5 Maj 202145min
