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BBC Radio 4


Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives – looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Broadcast as Free Thinking, Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari and Anne McElvoy.


Arts & Ideas

In a special programme looking ahead to International Women’s Day on March 8th, Shahidha Bari looks at how women express themselves in language, argument, poetry and art. Her guests include:

Sara Ahmed is the author of No is Not a Lonely Utterance
Karen McCarthy Woolf's latest poetry collection is called Unsafe
Lauren Elkin's books include Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, she translated Simone de Beauvoir's previously-unpublished novel The Inseparables and has a new book coming out in May Vocal Break: On Women, Music, and Power. She has been reading the new translation by Sophie Lewis of Angst by the French feminist thinker Hélène Cixous
Mary Wellesley is a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers
Ash Percival-Borley, military historian and former soldier

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Women, language & experience

Is authority a justly unfashionable quality that we should consign to the past? Or does it still have a place in political and business leadership, schools, medical settings and in the home? What is the difference between authority and power, how have historical shifts such as the advent of the internet affected public perceptions of authority, and how much should authority feature in the raising of children?

In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme about ideas past and present, Anne McElvoy and guests explore these questions and more.

Justine Greening is a former Conservative Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media who published a book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Sophie Scott-Brown is a philosopher and historian of anarchism
Peter Hyman is a former headteacher and adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer who writes a Substack, Changing the Story
Tom Simpson is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Authority

How have attitudes to punishment changed over time, and what ideas about the rationale for punishment are circulating today? In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme, Matthew Sweet and guests explore the criminal justice system through history.

With:

Stephanie Brown, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull and BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinker on the scheme which puts research on radio

Scout Tzofiya Bolton, poet and broadcaster who presents on National Prison Radio, and for Radio 4 the Illuminated episode called The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag. Her poetry collection is called The Mad Art of Doing Time

Joanna Hardy-Susskind, criminal barrister and presenter for Radio 4 of a series called You Do Not Have To Say Anything

Stephen Shapiro, Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick

Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court judge and now Moral Maze panellist for BBC Radio 4 and author of a five-volume account of The Hundred Years War

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Crime and punishment medieval to modern

From an impoverished neighbourhood in South London, Charlie Chaplin became one of the most significant figures in the development of cinema. More recently, TV writers like Sophie Willan and Michaela Coel have transformed the way working class lives are depicted on TV, from the concerned paternalism of the 1960s to a more celebratory view from the inside in the 2020s. In this week's edition of Radio 4's arts and ideas discussion programme, Matthew Sweet charts these changes, and considers what they mean for our understanding of class categories in wider society. With TV historian Laura Minor, art historian Jacqueline Riding, novelist Adelle Stripe, and historian Samuel Johnson-Schlee. Plus, an interview with Ian La Frenais, co-creator of such comedy classics as The Likely Lads and Porridge.
The paperback of Adelle Stripe's memoir Base Notes, and Jacqueline Riding's book Hard Street: Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London, are both published in February.
Producer: Luke Mulhall

Working Class Creativity

'The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must'. So claimed the powerful Athenians, according to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Plato tried to demonstrate that might does not make right, and thinkers ever since, from Hobbes and Rousseau to Kant and Carl Schmitt, have placed the idea that might is right at the centre of their political philosophies, for better or worse. Matthew Sweet traces the intellectual history of the idea, with Angie Hobbs, Margaret MacMillan, Lea Ypi, and Hugo Drochon.
Angie Hobbs' book Why Plato Matters Now, and Lea Ypi's book Indignity, are both out now, Hugo Drochon's book Elites And Democracy is published in March
Producer: Luke Mulhall

Is Might Right?

What do we mean when we talk about productivity?

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss labour in the context of both work and motherhood: what the language of childbirth tells us about how mothers and their bodies are viewed today; how the language of production and reproduction is used in the public and private contexts of the workplace, in macroeconomics, in the labour ward and at home; and the current public debates about parental and domestic labour, the maternal pay gap and the 'productivity puzzle'.

With:
John Callanan, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London
Beth Malory, Lecturer in English Linguistics at University College London
Patrick Foulis, author and journalist
Corinne Low, Associate Professor of Economics at the Wharton School and author of Femonomics
Helen Charman, Fellow in English at Clare College, Cambridge and author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Labour, work and productivity

From undercover field operatives to online anonymity, via lives led in the closet and large scale infidelity, Matthew Sweet discusses the what can prompt people to lead double lives.
With:
Ashleigh Percival-Borleigh, Radio 4 New Generation Thinker, former soldier and historian, researching the lives of under-cover agents during WW2
Lawrence Scott, literary critic and commentator on social media and the double lives people lead online
Peter Parker, historian of gay life in Britain before homosexuality was decriminalized, has documented decades of lives lived in the closet
Clare Carlisle, philosopher and biographer of Soren Kierkegaard, who thought there’s always a difference between our inner selves and the face we present to the world
Plus the actress Ruth Wilson, whose 2018 drama Mrs Wilson unraveled the story of her own grandfather's multiple lives

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Double Lives

What does the phrase 'Victorian values' conjure today? Matthew Sweet and guests explore what we have inherited from that formative era in relation to political ideas, civic culture, aesthetics, and social and sexual mores. How does our view of the Victorian age match the historical reality? And can we move beyond stereotypes of repression and the stiff upper lip?

AN Wilson, writer, biographer and historian

Gisela Stuart, Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston, crossbench peer in the House of Lords

Sarah Williams, Research Professor in the History of Christianity at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada and author of When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women

Fern Riddell, historian and writer. Her latest book is Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (2025)

And Matthew Stallard, Research Associate from the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Victorian Values

Are we addicted to novelty? What are the cultural settings that allow innovation to flourish? And are novelty and innovation things we've always valued?
Matthew Sweet is joined by writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan, Professor of Innovation Tim Minshall, and historians Agnes Arnold-Forster, and Christina Faraday.

Tim Minshall is the author of Your Life is Manufactured.
Margaret Heffernan's most recent book is Embracing Uncertainty
Agnes Arnold-Foster has written Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion
Christina Faraday is the author of The Story of Tudor Art
Nick Hilton, presenter of The Ned Ludd Radio Hour podcast

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Innovation

Are you planning your summer holiday? The first Saturday in January is called Sunshine Saturday because typically more holidays are booked on that day than on any other in the year. Today, planning a trip might involve consulting AI rather than reading a travel guide or visiting a travel agent. And the trip itself is more likely to involve an airplane than a stagecoach. But it's not just the practicalities of travel that have altered over the years. Reasons for travelling have changed, so have the meanings assigned to it. Was it ever a good vehicle for self discovery?
Shahidha Bari is joined by award-winning travel journalist Mary Novakovich, TV globe trotter Bettany Hughes, historian Alun Withey, literary historian Lucy Powell and philosopher Julian Baggini.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Is Might Right?

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