Arts & Ideas Folgen

From full stops to emojis, a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic. The first parentheses appear in a 1399 manuscript by the Italian lawyer Coluccio Salutati, but - as her essay outlines - it took over 500 years for the sign born at the same time as the bracket, the exclamation mark (which printers rather aptly call “bang”) to find its true environment: the internet.Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Sheffield. She is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of Essays, discussions and features showcasing the research of New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35Producer: Robyn Read

Linking tea, sugar, opium, addiction and trade, Fariha Shaikh's essay looks at the novel An Insular Possession published in 1986 by Timothy Mo, and at Amitav Ghosh's trilogy which began in 2008 with Sea of Poppies and how their depiction of the opium trade differs from the publication in 1821 of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which paved the way for drug memoirs. She also quotes from her researches into The Calcutta Review, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country and the book Tea and Coffee written by the campaigning vegetarian William Alcott. Dr Fariha Shaikh teaches in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

What made him great? Celebrated as a military leader, Alexander took over an empire created by the Persians. Julia Hartley's essay looks at two examples of myth-making about Alexander: The Persian Boy, a 1972 historical novel by the English writer Mary Renault and the Shānāmeh or ‘Book of Kings’, an epic written by the medieval Persian poet Abdolghassem Ferdowsi.Julia Hartley lectures at King's College London. She was selected in 2021 as a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which turns research into radio. You can hear her in this Free Thinking discussion Dante's Visions https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zm9b and in another episode about Epic Iran, Lost Cities and Proust https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000xlzhProducer: Torquil MacLeod