Free Thinking Folgen

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talks to Anne McElvoy about his latest book – The Buried Giant. And as two separate productions of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, are performed on stage in London – the playwright Roy Williams and the Greek scholar and translator, Oliver Taplin assess the enduring appeal of the play.

Churchill famously commented that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' Rana Mitter and his guests David Runciman, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge; Duncan Kelly, Reader in Political Thought, University of Cambridge; Patricia Thornton, University Lecturer in the Politics of China, University of Oxford and Tim Stanley, blogger and columnist for The Daily Telegraph test Free Thinking to its limits by looking at the alternatives to our own political system.

John Gray talks to Matthew Sweet about why the Aztecs might have had a better understanding of freedom than we do and other human illusions about meaning and progress. Also we consider how artistic movements become successful as the National Gallery stages an exhibition devoted to Paul Durand-Ruel, the french art dealer who discovered the Impressionists. Matthew talks to National gallery curator Christopher Riopelle. Also Jacky Klein, art historian and Godfrey Barker, man of letters and art critic discuss the anthropology of the art world through time.