Arts & Ideas Folgen

A stunt track and farting game are said to be this year's must have toys but what can we learn from the toys children played with in Argentina during the Cold War and from Beatrix Potter's anger at the production of cuddly German Peter Rabbits? And why is the idea of toys coming to life both endearing and terrifying? Matthew Sweet is joined by Jordana Blejmar, Miranda Corcoran, Filippo Yacob and Nadia Cohen.Jordana Blejmar is Lecturer in Visual Media & Cultural Studies at Liverpool University and is leading the research project Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina. Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork. Her book Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction is out now. Filippo Yacob is the CEO & Cofounder of URSOR, a browser and search engine for children, Design Director at product studio FINH, partner at Studio Playfool, and creator of the coding robot toy Cubetto. Nadia Cohen has written biographies of Enid Blyton, A.A. Milne and Roald Dahl. Her latest book The Real Beatrix Potter is out now.Producer: Torquil MacLeod.You can find a playlist on the Free Thinking website called The Way We Live Now which has a host of conversations on everything from breakfast to time, punk to breathing, accents to autism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072637b

Left unfinished at his death in 2011, the poet worked on his version of the Illiad for over 40 years. As a new audio book of Christopher Logue reading War Music is released, Shahidha Bari and her guests, the writers Marina Warner and Tariq Ali, and Logue's widow, the historian Rosemary Hill, examine the work. Rosemary Hill describes Logue as writing "poems to be read to jazz accompaniment, to be set to music and to be printed on posters. He wanted poetry to be part of everybody’s life." In War Music he used anachronistic imagery to link this classical war to more modern examples. In the Second World War Logue served briefly in the Black Watch, before spending sixteen months in a military prison and later becoming a member of CND.The British Library has acquired the archive of Christopher Logue, which includes 22 boxes of private papers, along with 53 files of drafts, working materials and correspondence relating to War Music, and annotated printed books and an event in December marks this.In the programme you will hear Christopher Logue – War Music The original recording read by the Author Recorded December 1995, Sound Development Studios, London Produced and directed by Liane Aukin Mastered by Simon Heyworth (P) & © 2021 Laurence Aston and Rosemary Hill Clips from War Music are not to be reproduced in any way without prior permission of the copyright holders.This programme also includes a clip from a programme Christopher Logue made on 'Minor Poets' for the Third Programme in 1957, and a clip of Christopher Logue reading part of his poem Lecture on Man at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.Producer Luke Mulhall

The Fall of Ceaușescu in 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. How did the experience of living through that make its way into fiction? Georgina Harding published In Another Europe: A Journey To Romania in 1990 and followed that with a novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania of the 1950s. Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 and has published novels, poems and essays. In the novel Nostalgia published in 1989, he looks at communist Bucharist in the 80's, in a dreamlike narrative seen in part through the eyes of children and young adults. Philippe Sands has chronicled Jewish histories in Eastern Europe in his books and podcast series The Ratline. He recommends Mihail Sebastian's book For Two Thousand Years.Producer: Ruth WattsYou can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website which contains other conversations organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh