Arts & Ideas Folgen

As the Schaubühne Berlin's production of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' opens at The Barbican, Anne McElvoy speaks to the play's director Thomas Ostermeier. American novelist Joseph O'Neill discusses his new book 'The Dog' and, continuing the series meeting this year's shortlisted authors for the Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith explains the connected stories which comprise her novel 'How to Be Both'.

Fukuyama and Howard Jacobson are interviewed by Philip Dodd. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published an essay which he titled “The End of History?" He's just published Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker prize in 210 for his comic novel The Finkler Question. His new book J is a dystopian love story.

Steven Pinker's research at Harvard is into language and cognition. His new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century explores the links between syntax and ideas. Will Self experiments with language and literary form. Will Self's new book Shark links an incident in World War II with an American resident in a therapeutic community in London overseen by psychiatrist Zack Busner. They join Matthew Sweet for a Free Thinking programme about language.