Free Thinking Folgen

David Hendy, Glyn Maxwell, Kate Kennedy and Lucy Walker with Philip Dodd and an audience at Aldeburgh in a discussion exploring Britten’s relationship with radio in Britain and in America, with his subjects as varied as mountaineering (with words from Christopher Isherwood), a dramatisation of Homer’s Odyssey and short stories by D.H. Lawrence (with a young W.H. Auden). But why was Britten so reluctant to accept a job at the BBC’s Music department in the 1930s? David Hendy is a historian of the BBC and Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex.Glyn Maxwell is a poet and librettist who has traced the journey of Auden and MacNeice to Iceland.Kate Kennedy is a biographer and editor of the forthcoming ‘Literary Britten’Lucy Walker is Director of Programmes and Learning at the Britten-Pears Foundation. Recorded in front of an audience as part of the Britten on the Radio weekend at the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings.Producer: Fiona McLean.

What does Gulliver's Travels say to us now? Satirical cartoonist Martin Rowson and Daniel Cook from the University of Dundee assess the legacy of Swift's best-known work. And Monochrome exhibition co-curator Jennifer Sliwka and photographer Sarah Pickering discuss exhibits ranging from black and white art on glass, vellum, ceramic, silk, wood, and canvas from Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter to a room filled with yellow light by the artist Olafur Eliasson, who created the Sun installation at Tate Modern. And New Generation Thinker Will Abberley tells Anne about a new project to compile a comprehensive history of British nature writing.Monochrome: Painting in Black and White runs at the National Gallery in London from October 30th until February 18th 2018.Swift at 350: A Graphic Anthology is launched at Dundee on November 25th along with a series of events for families, Telling Tall Tales, Gulliver! A Fantastical Pantomime and an exhibition at the local library in Dundee. Find out more at www.beinghumanfestival.org. Martin Rowson is taking part in a discussion about satire at the British Library on November 28th with Jonathan Coe, Rory Bremner, Judith Hawley, and Sathnam Sanghera.Land Lines – Modern British Nature Writing 1789-2014 - Finding the UK's favourite nature book. Find out More at http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/favouritenaturebooks/

Alex Cox discusses surveillance, mind bending and the power of the individual versus the collective in the 1967 cult TV series The Prisoner. Plus Christopher Fowler, Clare Walker Gore and Lynda Nead look back at bestsellers from the past which deserve re-reading and the way movies and fiction of the 1950s reflected both the smog and fashions of post-war British culture. Christopher Fowler's The Book of Forgotten Authors catalogues 99 writers whom he thinks should be better known. The Prisoner first aired in Canada in 1967 and ran for 17 episodes. I am (not) a Number: Decoding The Prisoner by Alex Cox is published later this year. The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-war Britain by Professor Lynda Nead is published by London and New Haven: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Studies in British Art.Clare Walker Gore is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Cambridge who has edited a critical edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s out-of-print novel A Noble Life, published by Victorian Secrets - an independent publisher which makes available scholarly editions of unjustly neglected Victorian novels. Producer: Karl Bos