Arts & Ideas Folgen

Rana Mitter discusses the allure of the missing work of art with the writer Rick Gekoski. Are some works of art more interesting in their absence? New Generation thinkers Corin Throsby and Laurence Scott propose the idea that crowd-funding and social media are changing the relationship of artists and their audiences. Rana talks to the playwright Tanika Gupta about her new play for the RSC, The Empress, opening at the Swan in Stratford. And Ian Macmillan and Julia Jordan discuss the films of the experimental writer BC Johnson who would have been eighty this year.

Howard Brenton discusses his new play The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei with Philip Dodd. Are the BRICS countries set to challenge the World Bank, and realise a power shift from the West and Northern hemispheres to the East and South? Philip discusses with Oscar Guardiola Rivera, Andrew Chesnut and Robert Guest. New Generation thinker Jonathan Healey explains how land reforms brought in by Napoleon in Spring 1813 heralded a profound social change that still affects us today. And a review of Gus Van Sant's latest film Promised Land by Lionel Shriver.

Matthew Sweet asks historian Charles Glass, author of a new book on deserters in World War Two, whether desertion is an act of sanity, and not - as some armed forces have tended to believe - a symptom of mental illness. He also talks to Ben Griffin of the organisation Veterans for Peace, who represents soldiers in current conflicts who seek a way out. Hermione Lee discusses the letters novelist Willa Cather didn't want you to read, and Sandra Hebron and Mary Wild review Pasolini's controversial film Theorem.