Arts & Ideas Folgen

Bestselling writer Amy Tan joins Anne McElvoy to discuss her new novel, The Valley of Amazement. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh's latest work, Strange Blooms, is inspired by the visual flamboyance of flowers; she is joined by fashion historian Caroline Cox to explore the changing depictions of flowers in fashion and culture. Writer Philip Short discusses his biography of one of the key architects of modern Europe, François Mitterrand.

Rana Mitter looks forward to an Age of the Happy City with innovative urban scholar, Richard Burdett, and journalist and urban experimentalist, Charles Montgomery. One of India's leading historians Ramachandra Guha tells Rana about Gandhi before India. He traces the friendships, set-backs, struggles and events which shaped Gandhi's thinking and honed skills he would take back into India's struggle for independence. And Jacky Klein reviews a major retrospective of artist brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman's work opening this week at London's Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

As Scotland and England consider the future of the United Kingdom, Philip Dodd discusses what Orwell and his version of Englishness might have to offer the debate, with Robert Colls, author of 'George Orwell: English Rebel', historian Selina Todd, and singer and author Pat Kane. As an exhibition of glasswork by contemporary British artists opens in London, Philip talks to two of the contributors Gavin Turk and Sue Webster about working in the medium. Philip is joined by Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Jules Evans who is one of the organisers of Stoic Week and by classicist Professor Edith Hall, and philosopher and journalist Mark Vernon to discuss the concept.