Arts & Ideas Folgen

Philip Dodd talks to psychologist Bertolt Meyer, the model for the world's first complete bionic human and recipient of a bionic arm. Opera Now Editor Ashutosh Khandekhar joins Philip to review Kasper Holten's much anticipated debut at the ROH with Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London looks at the positive sides of extinction and palaeontologist Norman Macleod, scientist Georgina Mace and psycho-geographer and poet Iain Sinclair discuss. And Philip speaks to the lawyer Conor Gearty about his new book Liberty and Security.

The King in the car park: what is the significance of the University of Leicester’s discovery of the bones of Richard III, one of Britain’s most vilified monarchs? Matthew Sweet is joined by human remains sociologist Tiffany Jenkins and historian Jonathan Healey to discuss. BFI curator Nathalie Morris reviews the new film Hitchcock, and discusses the importance of his wife, Alma, for his career and reputation. We look at cross-dressing in the late nineteenth century, with biographer Neil McKenna. And Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer Jared Diamond discusses his new thought-provoking study of tribes from New Guinea to the Kalahari Desert.

Anne McElvoy discusses the libraries of Timbuktu, and what they teach us about literacy and book culture in Africa, with Dr Shamil Jeppie, Dr Marion Wallace, Head of African Collections at the British Library, and the novelist Aminatta Forna. Susannah Clapp delivers a first-night review of a revival of Harold Pinter’s play, Old Times. Historian Paul Kennedy delves into the story of the problem solvers of the Second War, the subject of his new book The Engineers of Victory. And Karl Sharro gives us his reflections from the top of The Shard.