Arts & Ideas Folgen

Matthew Sweet is leading an elite party of literary explorers - Linda Grant, Aminatta Forna, Naomi Alderman and Tim Stanley on an expedition to find "the common reader" -- being stalked by Woolf in the 20th Century and by Johnson in the 18th. Both believed that the common reader "uncorrupted with literary prejudices" was the final arbiter of "poetical honours" so it's a quest that's clearly still relevant today. The question is what does a common reader look like in our digital age? What are they reading? Where? And how?

Anne McElvoy and Susannah Clapp review the west-end play Doktor Glas, starring Krister Henricksson, best known in the UK for his role as Kurt Wallander. Sheryl Sandberg the chief operating officer of Facebook talks about her new book, Lean In, describing how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers and encourages women to sit at the table and pursue their goals. Saloua Raouda Choucair has her first international exhibition at Tate Modern. Richard Cork and Karl Sharro assess her work and examine how she fits within 20th century art history. Thane Rosenbaum and Salil Tripathi discuss revenge and justice.

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.