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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

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

Travel

Is idleness ever a virtue? In a world that seems to privilege utility and productivity above all else, Matthew Sweet considers whether we can rethink the importance of doing nothing. His guests for Radio 4's late night ideas discussion programme are:

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and author of books including Idle Thoughts: Letters on Good Living, How to Live Like a Stoic: A Handbook for Happiness
Polly Dickson, a literary scholar at the University of Durham, who’s researching the art of doodling
Katrien Devolder, Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford
Gavin Francis, doctor and author of many books including The Bridge Between Worlds and coming in Feb 2026 The Unfragile Mind, Making Sense of Mental Health
Steve Connor, cultural historian, Director of Research of the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College, London.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Idleness

Do individuals or broader forces shape history? In the 2025 Reith lectures on BBC Radio 4, Rutger Bregman argues that small groups of individuals can have an outsize influence and he looks to examples in history from suffragism to the ending of slavery. In the Free Thinking studio for Radio 4's round-table discussion about the history of ideas, Matthew Sweet is joined by:

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer prize winning historian and author of Autocracy Inc, which looks at the networks linking powerful people in our world
Jake Subryan Richards, New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC which puts research on radio. His new book is The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade
Selina Todd, historian and author of The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class
Clare Jackson, historian of seventeenth century Britain, whose latest book is Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I
Rupert Read, philosopher, climate advocate and co author of Transformative Adaptation and The Climate Majority Project

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Influencing History

Why marry? Jane Austen began her novel Pride and Prejudice with the observation "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife". Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics show less than half the adult UK population are married or in a legal partnership and predictions are that by 2050, only 3 in 10 people in the UK will marry.

Shahidha Bari hosts Radio 4's round-table discussion programme Free Thinking, which brings together philosophical and historical insights in a conversation about issues resonating in the present day. Her guests this week are:
columnist Zoe Strimpel, who has been considering the history and current state of the family in a 5 part series running on Radio 4 this week
Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, biographer of Thomas Cromwell and author of Lower than Angels: A history of Sex and Christianity
Dr Reetika Subramanian from the University of East Anglia, who hosts a podcast called Climate Brides. Reetika is one of Radio 4's current researchers in residence on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Psychoanalyst and literary scholar Josh Cohen
Philosopher and film scholar Catherine Wheatley

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Marriage

Rocks have shaped the fates of civilizations and the study of geology has transformed our intellectual landscape. In the 19th century developments in earth sciences led to the scientific rejection of Biblical timescales in favour of the far greater spans of geological time, which opened the way for Darwin's development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. More recently, historians have been keen to incorporate factors like access to natural resources and major events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions into their accounts of the past and analyses of the present. Matthew Sweet asks how disciplines in the humanities, like history and political theory, might be transformed by incorporating insights and data from the earth sciences, and also how the earth sciences might be transformed if they become more historically and culturally aware. With historians Peter Frankopan and Rosemary Hill, geologist Anjana Khatwa, philosopher Graham Harman, and poet Sarah Jackson.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Rocks

What function do ceremonies like Armistice Day perform? How do we balance desires for reconciliation with feelings about revenge? How we remember wars and what commemoration means is much less settled than we might think. And that throws up questions, in times when conflicts are spreading close to us in western Europe, of how wars end and how we balance our concern for justice and peace with darker impulses?

Joining presenter Anne McElvoy for BBC Radio 4's roundtable discussion about the ideas shaping our world are:
classicist Natalie Haynes whose most recent novel No End to this House re-imagines the story of Medea,
former solider Ashleigh Percival-Borley, who is now an academic and on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Duncan Wheeler, author of Following Franco and an academic studying contemporary Spain.
neuro-scientist Nicholas Wright who advises the Pentagon and has written Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain
and, Andy West, prison philosophy teacher and author of The Life Inside

Producer: Ruth Watts

Revenge and reconciliation

"Doom-prepping" tech billionaires have been in the headlines recently and whether it’s ecological crisis or a breakdown in law and order, fear of societal collapse seems to lurk in the background of a lot of discussion in politics and wider society. But what does it mean? When has it happened in the past? Can we avoid it – or survive it – in the future? Joining presenter Shahidha Bari for Radio 4's roundtable discussion about the ideas shaping our world are:
Luke Kemp from the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the writer and commentator Peter Hitchens, classical historian Neville Morley, historian of modern politics Phil Tinline and Rhiannon Firth, sociologist at University College London.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The end of civilisations and societies

From economics to dreams: Anne McElvoy and guests consider the value of irrationality. How often is emotion, instinct and unsound thinking behind the decisions taken by governments, financial markets and citizens? And does it matter if long term strategic thinking relying on calm assessments of the trade offs, conventional wisdom and the lessons of experience take a back seat. Is there a value in irrationality? Guests include: Bronwen Maddox, Director and CEO of Chatham House, the international think tank; Lionel Barber, author of Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan's Masayoshi Son; Salma Shah, who sits on the boards of Policy Exchange and the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge; Patrick Foulis, the foreign editor at the Economist and, Jonathan Egid, philosopher and BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Rational and Irrational decision making

From military ceremonies to folk customs - can traditions really provide an answer to nationalism and boost local pride? Former MP Penny Mordaunt is publishing a book called Pomp and Circumstance: Why Britain's Traditions Matter written with Chris Lewis. She's one of Matthew Sweet's guests in the Free Thinking studio alongside
Sunder Katwala, author of How to be a patriot: Why love of country can end our very British culture war. He is the director of British Future which conducted the biggest-ever public consultation on immigration.
Muriel Zagha is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Garlic & Pearls which compares French and British culture and attitudes.
Ceri Houlbrook is one of the academics involved in a National Folklore Survey for England and the co-author with Owen Davies of Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present.
Dr Uran Ferizi has a background in scientific and financial research and since January 2024 he has been the Albanian Ambassador to the UK and to Ireland.

Producer: Robyn Read

Traditions, roots and local pride

Matthew Sweet talks to author Sarah Perry about her gothic imagination, writing about religion, rationalism and disease in novels including The Essex Serpent, After Me Comes The Flood and Melmoth. Recorded from her home in Norwich, Sarah discusses her experience of these times as someone who has an auto-immune condition, her interest in comets and the way she used sewing to overcome a temporary inability to write. 

You can hear more from authors in the Norfolk area on the website of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival https://nnfestival.org.uk/

There is a collection of in depth interviews with guests including Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Sebastian Faulks, Marilynne Robinson and other authors on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8

Sarah Perry can be found discussing her novel Melmoth in detail in this episode of Free Thinking called Sarah Perry, Spookiness and Fear https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kk2
and she discusses the Essex Serpent in this episode Still Loving Victoriana Jokes and All https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081tkr7

Producer: Robyn Read

Sarah Perry

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