Free Thinking Folgen

Professor Lynda Nead has curated an exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London which looks at depictions of "the Fallen Woman" in Victorian England by artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Redgrave, George Frederic Watts and Thomas Faed. The display includes a specially-commissioned sound installation by musician and composer Steve Lewinson. Lynda Nead joins Anne McElvoy along with James Bartholomew, an historian of the Welfare State who has studied Victorian responses to poverty. Gillian Tett is managing editor of the New York office of The Financial Times. She reported on the financial crisis of 2007-8 in close detail, but before she became a journalist Tett trained as an anthropologist. Her latest book, The Silo Effect, combines reportage with anthropology to identify the deep structure in our thinking that contributed to the crisis: the tendency to organize things into discrete silos. Steve Silberman is a Wired reporter and author of an article on "The Geek Syndrome" which went viral. He talks to Anne McElvoy about why we need to think about autism in a new way, along with Matthew Smith, an historian of psychiatry at the University of Strathclyde and former Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.