Sunday Feature

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Sunday Feature

1antimuzak
jul 25, 2021, 1:45 am

Sunday 25th July 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Allan Little examines why Walter Scott fell so dramatically out of public favour after dominating the 19th century cultural landscape as a poet and historical novelist, looking at why writers from the 20th century onwards began to denigrate his work as prolix, dull twaddle. With readings by Gary Ross.

2antimuzak
aug 2, 2021, 1:50 am

Monday 2nd August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

Lord Of The Flies was written when William Golding was a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth School, in a school exercise book in his spare time between and sometimes during lessons. Having already had three earlier books turned down for publication, this story was inspired by what he knew at first hand about how boys really behaved. The manuscript was only narrowly saved from rejection by rookie Editor Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber. After asking for substantial editorial changes, including cutting a whole section at the start of the novel, and altering the title, the tale of stranded boys descending into savagery on a desert island went on to become a classic. Sarah Dillon goes in search of the story of determined perseverance, compromise and incredible luck behind the publication of novel.

3antimuzak
aug 3, 2021, 1:46 am

Tuesday 3rd August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood.

In November 1959, Truman Capote read a newspaper headline: Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain. It was a murder in Kansas. The sheriff was quoted as saying it might be the work of a psychopath. And Capote set off to Kansas, believing this was exactly the story he'd been waiting for. Travelling with him was his friend, Harper Lee, soon to win a Pulitzer prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. Together they began conducting rigorous interviews on the impact of this murder. Initially, Capote planned an article for the New Yorker magazine, but when the two murderers were caught, Capote realised he had something much bigger on his hands - the non-fiction novel, the very first one he declared, and the book that led to an explosion in true crime. Tracing his journey is Corin Throsby. She picks her way through Capote's sometimes exaggerated claims to discover a story that remains relevant to this day. Written largely in Verbier in Switzerland, the book came to obsess Capote - he was close to the murderers, friendly, perhaps more. But for his book to succeed, they needed to die. Corin Throsby teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker. Contributors include Thomas Fahy, author of Understanding Capote; Brenda Currin who played the murdered Nancy Clutter in the 1967 film of the book; Ed Pilkington of the Guardian; James Linville, formerly of the Paris Review; actor Toby Jones; Ralph Voss, author of the Legacy of In Cold Blood; plus Ebs Burnough and Lawrence Elman who made the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes.

4antimuzak
aug 4, 2021, 1:50 am

Wednesday 4th August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

It's exactly 300 years since Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe on April 25th 1719. Never out of print, the novel's themes and images go deep into our culture, from Karl Marx and James Joyce to Desert Island Discs and Love Island. Emma Smith sets off on a road-trip to trace its popularity across the centuries but also to ask whether Defoe's defence of slavery makes it too unpalatable a read today. Might this be the end of the road for Robinson Crusoe? She's delighted to discovers a fabulous read, the intriguing suggestion of a more radical novel-that-might-have-been, and huge potential for a rewrite. Emma traces the story across seven versions and their readers, from the first edition in the British Library to a children's spin-off. She talks to scholars Alan Downie, Nicholas Seager and Judith Buchanan, and novelists Jane Gardam and Jasmine Richards. She visits the London haunts of Charles Gildon, the envious hack who wrote a vitriolic satire, Cherryburn in Northumberland, where the young Thomas Bewick ran naked across the fell in imitation of the "savages"; and Kent to meet Jane Gardam, author of Crusoe's Daughter. But it is at the Crusoe Collection at Reading University that Emma has her greatest insight. In the company of scholar Rebecca Bullard and writer Jasmine Richards, who is also the founder of a Storymix which develops inclusive stories for children, she hears what a future Crusoe might be like, but is also won over by a counter-factual argument that Defoe might have expedited the abolition of slavery if only he had created a different relationship between Crusoe and Friday.

5antimuzak
aug 5, 2021, 1:50 am

Thursday 5th August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

John Ashbery is one of the towering figures in American poetry of the last 52 years. Up until his death in September 2017 at the age of 90, he produced a vast and hugely acclaimed body of poetry and prose, often characterised as a surrealist river of ideas and playfulness: the reader tossed around, seldom entirely sure what's going on, yet swept along by the sheer exuberance and mischievous glint of Ashbery's writing. The life story is compelling: from an isolated farm in upstate New York, and a childhood family tragedy, a gifted young writer went to Harvard, and found himself in a class of soon-to-be-successful literary talents. There were years in Paris, and then home to the buzzing experimentalism of Warhol's New York. In a writing career whose trajectory took him from enfant terrible to national treasure, Ashbery achieved a dazzling string of literary successes including a 1976 Pulitzer; and at a point where alcohol-fuelled self-destruction was ominously close, Ashbery met David Kermani, the man who would become his partner for nearly fifty years. Together they eloped upstream from Manhattan, and bought a house at Hudson, on the banks of the river. It would become a magical space: gallery, museum, studio, and home. From it, the couple would build on Ashbery's achievements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s by providing a stable and happy place from which to continue writing, but also to provide lavish and warm welcomes for a constant stream of guests. Drawing on the testimony of many who knew him, including Ann Lauterbach, Karin Roffman, Robert Polito, John Yau, and Mark Ford, Colm Toibin draws on his own memories of Ashbery to present an intimate portrait of the brilliant, unpredictable, mischievous, Pulitzer-winning American poet.

6antimuzak
aug 9, 2021, 1:54 am

Monday 9th August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

In 1919, architect Walter Gropius founded the experimental Bauhaus school in the centre of Germany's new democracy Weimar. He wanted to combine traditional craft with modern functionality and create a new generation of free-thinking designers for the post-war world. Gropius brought in some of the best artists of the day, including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, to teach the students to bring modernism to traditional crafts. He was also radical in declaring there would be equality between men and women and said it was open to anyone regardless of age or gender. Over 50% of students in the first term were female. But this egalitarian picture isn't the whole story. Olivia Horsfall Turner explores how the male masters who were running the school swiftly made it harder for women to get in, fearing it would be seen as too feminine. They also directed many women towards the weaving workshop, which was seen as more appropriate feminine work than carpentry or architecture. Despite this, many women flourished at the school and their contribution to 20th-century design is now being recognised. Olivia explores the textile art of Anni Albers, and Gunta Stölzl who became the only female workshop master and revolutionised the role of textiles in design. When the school moved to the industrial town of Dessau in 1926, it was the women who often had the most financial success. Olivia discovers how they managed to fight their way into the male domains of photography, carpentry, architecture and metalwork, and how metal worker Marianne Brandt forged relationships with manufacturers in Dessau. Brandt's designs are now among the most valuable objects to come out of the Bauhaus.

7antimuzak
aug 15, 2021, 1:53 am

Sunday 15th August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:00 (15 minutes long)

Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist pioneer, is best known for her book, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women'. She was never afraid to make waves. But after the book came out in 1792, she embarked on perhaps her greatest and most personal experiment in modern womanhood - travelling alone as a single mother. She hadn't planned her life this way. Her passionate affair with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, had come to an end when he abandoned her and their baby daughter, Fanny. Undeterred, she set off for Scandinavia, where she hoped to impress Imlay by tracking down some business assets that seemed to have been lost at sea. Mary turned the letters she wrote during her travels into her next book, and it gives us a vivid picture of a single mother who is fully engaged in the world around her -- a fallen woman refusing to stay at home and play the victim. In the end, the book impressed a much worthier man, Mary's fellow radical activist and writer, William Godwin. 'If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book,' he said. We join Professor Lisa Mullen, herself a single mother with experience of the vicissitudes of travel-with-child , as she sets off on a voyage of the imagination in the company of one of the greatest intellects of western culture, to 18th-century Sweden and Norway. Restlessness, sex and single motherhood - treacherous waters indeed.

8antimuzak
aug 30, 2021, 1:53 am

Monday 30th August 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

It's been described as one of the most remarkable collections of minds on the planet. It has a brilliant international faculty, but no students. Its researchers have made some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but it has never had a laboratory. Sally Marlow joins scholars for the start of a new term at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, conceived as a paradise for curiosity-driven research in mathematics, natural sciences, social science and history. The Institute has more than once been called an Intellectual Hotel, and that certainly captures its leisurely pace, but appearances can be deceptive. Scholars here have an extraordinary ability to work on what everyone else is looking at, but to see something differently. Since its founding in 1930, it's been home to a remarkable number of world-class thinkers, the most famous of whom was Albert Einstein who exerted a gravitational pull on attracting many scientists of promise to the Institute. From John von Neumann, widely credited with inventing the programmable computer, to J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead architect of the atomic bomb, to the surprise arrival of poet and playwright TS Eliot - the Institute's first Artist in Residence, Sally Marlow gets beneath the skin of some of its rich history and its extraordinary ethos, wondering how the weight of the past plays out on those bright minds there today. As a scholar herself at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, Sally knows that space and time to think is becoming increasingly challenged, So what happens when you turn thinkers loose from the constraints of a traditional academic institution? And amidst the Institute's hotbed of string theorists, she seeks answers to Einstein's biggest, most tantalising question of all - whether there's a grand, all-embracing theory, a unified theory of everything, that will complete our understanding of the laws of the universe.

9antimuzak
sep 3, 2021, 1:54 am

Friday 3rd September 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

Author Carlo Gebler believes Northern Ireland is sitting on a hidden reservoir of pain. 50 years on from the onset of the Troubles, estimates suggest around a quarter of the population continues to be affected by the psychological trauma of the conflict. No political agreement has been reached on how to deal with the legacy of the violence - yet for many victims and survivors, members of the security forces, individuals, families and even ex-combatants - the past is something which can't just be left behind. As a teacher of creative writing in some of Northern Ireland's toughest prisons, Carlo Gebler witnessed first hand the transformative role the arts can play in enabling positive change. Now Carlo looks at the numerous arts based initiatives, schemes and individual projects aimed at promoting peace-building and reconciliation in Northern Ireland - and asks they're helping to heal a society still in pain - or simply perpetuating bitter memories.

10antimuzak
sep 10, 2021, 1:48 am

Friday 10th September 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

Writer Jon Gower explores RS Thomas's life and work through the prism of bird-watching in a programme marking the centenary of the poet's birth. Featuring some of the recordings they made together and contributions by those who knew him and took inspiration from his words, including Rowan Williams, Gwyneth Lewis and Andrew Motion.

11antimuzak
sep 19, 2021, 1:48 am

Sunday 19th September 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Phil Hebblethwaite delves into the tragic death of Robert Schumann, who attempted suicide by casting himself into the Rhine in 1854, and died two years later, aged just 46. Schumann has been the focus of vast quantities of research conducted by psychiatrists. In tracing these many post-death diagnoses, a bigger story emerges - a history of psychiatry itself since the 1850s, as well as a portrait of political upheaval and changing social values. With readings by Oliver Soden.

12antimuzak
nov 14, 2021, 1:52 am

Sunday 14th November 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Simone de Beauvoir

A profile of the French author, philosopher and feminist told through the words of those who knew her and those who have studied her work, With the voice of Simone de Beauvoir courtesy of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, and readings by Caroline Crier.

13antimuzak
nov 21, 2021, 1:53 am

Sunday 21st November 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Mary Oliver

A dive into the poetic worlds of the American writer Mary Oliver, through rare recordings of the poet herself, interviews with those who knew her and writers for whom her work has been a guiding light.

In this edition of Afterwords, we explore Oliver's poetic invitations to finding redemption, devotion and love within a harsh and beautiful world. Her words sing the natural landscape - alive with awe, ecstasy, wildness - but also with a deep awareness of its capacity for heartbreak, pain and brutality.

In 'Our World', Mary Oliver's elegy for the photographer Molly Malone Cook - her partner of over four decades - Oliver wrote "Attention without feeling... is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter". Using the image of Cook tenderly observing the world in the slow bloom of her photographer's darkroom, Oliver reflects on how this notion of attention wove into her writing, "M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking..."

We hear from Helene Atwan, her publisher at Beacon Press, poet and friend Lisa Starr and the writers Mary Jean Chan and Nadine Aisha Jassat

Archive recordings include excerpts from the On Being podcast ('Mary Oliver - Listening to the World' interview by Krista Tippett, 5.02.15 - hear the conversation in full at www.onbeing.org), the Lannan Foundation ('Mary Oliver in Conversation with Coleman Barks', 4.08.01), Literary Hub ('A Phonecall from Paul: A Conversation with John Waters', 18.07.19) and Beacon Press ('At Blackwater Pond', 15.04.06).

Poems feat. (Reprinted by the permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency as agent for the author.)

“In Blackwater Woods”
Copyright © Mary Oliver 1983

“Sleeping in the Forest”
Copyright © Mary Oliver 1978

“Wild Geese”
Copyright © Mary Oliver 1986

“The Whistler”
Copyright © Mary Oliver 1999

“When Death Comes”
Copyright © Mary Oliver 1992

14antimuzak
nov 28, 2021, 1:49 am

Sunday 28th November 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Stuart Hall

Reflections on the life and work of the Jamaican-British academic, writer and cultural studies pioneer, Stuart Hall, through archive and contributions from those who knew him and his work.

In his memoir, published three years after his death in 2014, Stuart Hall wrote, “You could say I have lived, metaphorically speaking, on the hinge between the colonial and post-colonial worlds; because of radically changing locations, I have belonged, in different ways, to both at different times of my life without ever being fully of either.” It was this position of belonging and not-belonging, of being perpetually ‘in-between’ his homeland, Jamaica, and the place he made his home - Britain - that inspired many of Hall’s progressive theories on identity, art, politics and culture, making him one of the most influential and respected British thinkers of our time.

Through his own words, and with contributions from loved ones, academics, artists, and a new generation inspired by his work, Afterwords explores Hall’s ideas, influence and identities, from Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, to founding editor of the New Left Review, co-creator of the first Cultural Studies department at Birmingham University, Professor of Sociology at the Open University, champion of black British art, TV presenter, political activist, lover of music and family man.

15antimuzak
dec 12, 2021, 1:52 am

Sunday 12th December 2021 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

The writing of Louis MacNeice, which returned time and time again to the theme of what Ireland meant to him. With contributions from Leontia Flynn, Gail McConnell, Stephen Connolly, Terence Brown and Tom Walker.

16antimuzak
jan 30, 2022, 1:50 am

Sunday 30th January 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Writer James Marriott explores the single day - or circadian - artwork, pioneered by James Joyce: Ulysses, published in February 1922, and generally considered a landmark moment in the emergence of the modernist movement before it swept through European culture.

17antimuzak
feb 27, 2022, 1:47 am

Sunday 27th February 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, because of the colour of her skin. The staging of the concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial made history and was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights. Bassoonist Linton Stephens goes in search of Anderson's legacy with mezzo Denyce Graves, travelling to the US capital and visiting the Marian Anderson Museum in Philadelphia to reflects on her role as a symbol of the civil rights movement. With contributions by historian Kira Thurmann, political adviser Allida Black and Marcia Sells, the New York Metropolitan Opera's chief diversity officer.

18antimuzak
mrt 6, 2022, 1:50 am

Sunday 6th March 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Born in Segregation-era Little Rock, Arkansas, Florence Price is now considered amongst the most important American musicians of the 20th century, a pioneering and gifted African-American composer whose life and music challenged - and broke through - barriers of race and gender to claim a place in music history. In this programme, Samantha Ege unravels a tale of music, kinship and community in 1920s Chicago as she examines the story of the female musicians and activists who helped composer Price to thrive.

19antimuzak
mrt 13, 2022, 1:48 am

Sunday 13th March 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 the Irish leader Éamon De Valera vowed that Ireland would play no part in the conflict. Instead he declared a state of emergency. Neutrality had serious political consequences for Ireland but in Dublin, the city saw a brief burst of creativity as writers, artists, dancers and thinkers sought refuge from the war. There were art openings, poetry readings, dance performances, recitals and underground house parties. Restaurants were filled across the city and hotels held daily dances and jazz nights. The story of 1940s Dublin is more complex, however. There was great poverty, fuel shortages, travel restrictions and a constant threat of invasion. For some artists and writers there was also a sense of isolation and confusion. Writers such as Seán Ó'Faoláin, who felt a strong intellectual connection to Europe, agonised over the decision to remain neutral. Another writer, Elizabeth Bowen, saw her role as a 'marriage counsellor' between Britain and Ireland at a time when relations between those two countries were at a low point. The White Stag Group of artists, the poet John Betjeman (from Britain), the dancer Erina Brady (from Germany) and the physicist Erwin Schrodinger (from Austria) may all have spent an evening in The Palace Bar with the Irish writers and artists who regularly propped up the bar there. With its German and Japanese diplomats, Dublin was also a potential den of spies and to add to the chaotic mix there was a strict regime of censorship as well as a constant wave of propaganda over the wireless. In this programme, Regan Hutchins hears how this confusion and creativity fed into the life of the city to bring about a new, welcome energy. It was a time of hardship but also a time of collaboration, intrigue and play.

20antimuzak
mrt 27, 2022, 1:49 am

Sunday 27th March 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Krishnamurti in England.

Artist Paul Purgas reassesses the legacy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the first thinkers to bring eastern philosophy to a western audience.

21antimuzak
apr 3, 2022, 1:54 am

Sunday 3rd April 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza tells the little-known story of the female poets and writers who helped shape the surrealist movement. Drawing on rare recordings including an interview with Leonora Carrington as well as readings of poems by Méret Oppenheim, Joyce Mansour, Gisèle Prassinos, Claud Cahun and Suzanne Césaire, Alexandra examines how these writers' confronted issues of gender identity, the erotic, colonialism and power structures using the tools of surrealism to reimagine the world. With readings by Anne Gallien and Emily Bruni.

22antimuzak
jun 12, 2022, 1:51 am

Sunday 12th June 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

Afterwords: Muriel Spark

"One's prime is elusive ..."

Muriel Spark is probably still best known for the novel based on her own schooling in Edinburgh in the 1930s, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'. But she published over twenty other novels, as well as essays and poems - she always thought of herself as a poet first - and, though 'Scottish by formation', she left Scotland for 'adventures' in what used to be Rhodesia, London, New York and Rome, before finally settling into a kind of 'spiritual exile' for the last thirty years of her life in Arezzo, Tuscany.

But her work and her ideas about what a writer is still resonate, as can be heard in recordings with her from the early 1970s onwards and through the observations of the writers Ian Rankin and Zoe Strachan, Colin McIlroy of the National Library of Scotland and Muriel Spark's friend and author of 'Appointment in Arezzo', Alan Taylor.

With extracts from Spark's writing read by Kate Arneil.

"Everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease." (Loitering With Intent)

23antimuzak
jun 19, 2022, 1:51 am

Sunday 19th June 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 19:30 (45 minutes long)

The life and ideas of trailblazing Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in his own words, and through interviews with those who knew and loved him, or were inspired by him. With contributions by Somali novelist and poet Nuruddin Farah, author Caryl Phillips, Nigerian writer Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo and Igbo historian (and Achebe's youngest child) Dr Nwando Achebe.

24antimuzak
aug 1, 2022, 1:48 am

Monday 1st August 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

250 years ago, the brilliant but impoverished Thomas Chatterton died in his cold, bare garret, alone. The image of the tragic and neglected young genius, doomed by his art, has rippled through the centuries. Sophie Coulombeau discovers that the myths built up around this tortured poet are as enticing and complex as the poems he is accused of faking. Chatterton ended his brief life at 17 years of age. But his story catapulted around the world and was captured in poetry, novels, operas and paintings. There was Chatterton merch with postcards and handkerchiefs; he captivated the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites, shaped the work of myriad writers and musicians from Oscar Wilde to Keith Jarrett, Samuel Wesley to Serge Gainsbourg and his invented poet monk Rowley is hailed as an inspiration for literary duplicity even today. Telling Chatterton's story through five works he inspired, New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau pins down the man and the myth, exploring how each generation has passed the baton and reinvented the poet for their own age.
(Repeat)

25antimuzak
aug 2, 2022, 1:45 am

Tuesday 2nd August 2022 (starting this evening)
Time: 22:00 to 22:45 (45 minutes long)

Toni Morrison.

Reflections on the American writer Toni Morrison, who died in 2019, through her own words and those of her peers. The words of the author Toni Morrison, whose work received the Nobel Prize and many other awards, take us on a journey that spans her literary career and the black American story. Through a selection of Morrison's interviews for BBC outlets, spanning her entire career, Morrison is placed in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, writers and activists - as well as with readings from her work. Afterwords outlines the events that shaped her powerful command of language and the great visionary force through which she chronicled the black American experience. With contributions from writers, historians and curators, including Jay Bernard, Nydia Sawby, Ifeanyi Awachie, Dana Williams and Morrison's friend, Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin.

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