Arts & Ideas Folgen

Anne McElvoy talks to celebrated Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose most recent novel MaddAddam completed her dystopian trilogy that began a decade ago with Oryx and Crake and continued six years later with The Year of the Flood. Originally broadcast on 17.09.2013.

How history can help to shape policy making? Rana Mitter is joined by The History Manifesto's co-author, David Armitage, Chris Skidmore MP and historian, and Lucy Delap, Director of Cambridge University and Kings College London’s History and Policy Unit. And one of Australia’s most prominent novelists Peter Carey is back with a new book ‘Amnesia’. He talks to Philip Dodd.

This Free Thinking is devoted to one of the landmarks of European literature -- Marcel Proust's gigantic novel, A la recherche du temps perdu which is perhaps best known in English as In Search of Lost Time. Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer prize winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has edited the latest translation of the book and from France, the writer, Marie Darrieussecq. The actor Peter Marinker tackles the difficult task of giving an English voice to Proust.