Arts & Ideas Folgen

Samira Ahmed talks to American film director Oliver Stone about his documentary miniseries which uses new archive material and little known documents to explore an unconventional account of events that took place during the twentieth century that have shaped America's history. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses her new novel Americanah. As the British Library expands its archiving power by storing every UK Website, plus public tweets and Facebook entries, we ask what lies behind our need to collect everything with AS Byatt and Jane Humphries. And Samira talks to the Estonian composer Eugene Birman about his new cantata Nostra Culpa.

Matthew Sweet visits Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, home to Rembrandt's The Night Watch, which reopens to the public this month, following a decade of restoration.

Philip Dodd explores one of the classics of social history, The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson. Ground breaking and passionately engaged it changed the way we thought about the Industrial Revolution and the men, women and children whose hard labour drove it. Even fifty years after its publication modern historians are in dialogue with the book --arguing with its thesis, qualifying its messages and, in the case of the very bold, claiming to have improved on it. To discuss its status as a landmark of our culture Philip is joined by Maurice Glassman, the political theoretician and erstwhile guru of Ed Miliband's Labour and the historians, Alison Light, Miles Taylor and Emma Griffin.