麻豆约拍

In tonight's Night Waves Anne McElvoy discusses the complicated history of power with Simon Heffer and Robert Guest.

Noo Saro-Wiwa's father Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian Government of General Sani Abacha in 1995 when she was nineteen. In Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria she returns to the land of her birth to try and engage with Africa's most dynamic nation again, the country her father loved intensely.

From calligraphy to symmetry and patterns, Anne discusses the riches of Islamic Art with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and novelists Kamila Shamsie and Adam Foulds. All three were asked to visit the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar and choose an object to which they could personally connect, an experience which allowed them to appreciate Islamic Art beyond a purely aesthetic level.

We remember George Whitman, the proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris who has died aged 98 and who was a mainstay of the Anglophone literary scene in Paris in the 1950s.
That's Night Waves tonight at 10pm on 麻豆约拍 Radio3 with Anne McElvoy.

And Neil Brand is in studio with a piano to accomany a review of silent film The Artist, a cinematic celebration of 1920's Tinseltown.