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Arts & Ideas Episodes

  1.

    The well-groomed Georgian

    Alun Withey on what made 18th-century men shave off centuries of manly growth

  2. The Weird. Science and Art at FACT. Japanese film Your Name.

    Rana Mitter on science and art on show at Liverpool's FACT and what we mean by the weird.

  3. The wealth gap, #MeToo and Edith Wharton

    Rereading Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence.

  4. The Way We Used To Feel

    From Neanderthals, via Tudor England to Chartists - 4 historians on emotion in the past

  5. The Way I See It: Steven Pinker and Picasso

    Harvard professor Steven Pinker picks a work of art that inspires him from MOMA, New York

  6. The Vietnam Paris connection

    Author Viet Thanh Nguyen, film critic Phuong Le and Peter Salmon join Matthew Sweet

  7. The Unsaid

    Some people, some times, just can’t say what they want to. But why not?

  8. The TV Debate

    Gore Vidal v William F Buckley Jr, Germaine Greer v Norman Mailer: Have debates changed?

  9. The Tudor Mind

    Donne, Hamlet, 16th century psychology and mathematics, Tudor portraits

  10. The Troubles in Northern Ireland

    As an Imperial War Museum show opens, Anne McElvoy and guests discuss art and the Troubles

  11. The Trial of Ubu, David Scheffer & The Hajj

    Matthew Sweet talks to David Scheffer, architect of the Modern War Crimes Tribunal and...

  12. The Surreal World of Alejandro Jodorowsky

    Matthew Sweet talks to the Chilean French director Alejandro Jodorowsky and to critics

  13. The Strange Case of the Huge Country Pile

    Why are we so obsessed by the setting of the big country house, upstairs and downstairs?

  14. The Stasi poetry circle, Nazi schools and German culture

    How an East German creative writing class fought the cold war: was their poetry any good?

  15. The Spirit of a Place: A Free Thinking Royal Society of Literature Discussion

    Alan Johnson, Pascale Petit, Hisham Matar & Peter Pomerantsev join Eleanor Barraclough

  16. The Speed of Life - Short Stories: Jenn Ashworth, Paul McVeigh & Kirsty Logan

    Stories on the theme of this year’s Free Thinking Festival

  17. The Sorrows of Young Werther

    The book of the Sturm und Drang generation: Anne McElvoy explores the ideas behind it

  18. The shadow of slavery

    From sugar and spice, to reparations and memorials: slavery and how we acknowledge it

  19. The shadow of empire and colonialism

    The company that gave the world atrocious corporate violence and beautiful art

  20. The Rules Of Good Science

    Jim al-Khalili, Carlos Frenk, Katy Price and Tom Shakespeare debate scientific discovery.

  21. The Rossettis and Walter Pater

    Matthew Sweet and guests visit a Tate Britain show and look at Pater's Renaissance ideas

  22. The rise of translation and the death of foreign language learning

    Arundhati Roy, Meena Kandasamy and Preti Taneja on translation. With Anne McElvoy

  23. The Red Shoes

    Ahead of a BFI festival, Matthew Sweet and guests discuss Powell and Pressburger's film

  24. The Radiophonic Workshop

    Matthew Sweet meets members of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radiophonic Workshop.

  25. The pros and cons of Swearing.

    Comedian Janey Godley, historian John Gallagher, author Emma Byrne, poet Bridget Minamore

  26. The power of dance and the meaning of 'public'.

    The links between dance, art and the brain and the meaning of "the public"

  27. The post-Covid city

    How the pandemic has transformed our use and experience of urban space

  28. The Population Bomb

    Danny Dorling, Lionel Shriver and Stephen Emmott debate with Matthew Sweet.

  29. The Politics of Fashion and Drag

    Shahidha Bari talks fashion with Jenny Gilbert & to Scrumbly Koldewyn about the Cockettes

  30. The Piano and Love

    Debbie Wiseman, Fern Riddell, Frank Tallis and Tiffany Watt Smith join Matthew Sweet.

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