Free Thinking Folgen

Matthew Sweet and his guests begin coverage of the After Dark Festival - an overnight extravaganza recorded at Sage Gateshead for the equinox weekend. What meanings and interpretations has humanity given to the equinox moment - when the length of day and night is equal and to other key points of the solar year? Cosmologist Carlos Frenk from Durham University, archaeologist Penny Bickle from the University of York, Kevin Lapping from the Pagan Federation and his wife Kirsten discuss the significance of the changing seasons, what we learn from the solar alignment of Neolithic monuments and the vaster galactic and cosmic cycles that are we are also a part of.Producer: Torquil MacLeodPart of Radio 3’s After Dark Festival, a major new live music festival for 2022 in partnership with Sage Gateshead and TUSK Music, featuring some of the biggest names in contemporary, classical and experimental music. For all related content, search “After Dark Festival” in BBC Sounds.

JM Keynes and his theory, Keynesianism, is central to the financial history of twentieth century. However, he is also central to its cultural history. Keynes was not only an economist, but a man equally concerned with aesthetics and ethics; as interested in the ballet as he was with the stock market crash. Anne McElvoy talks to Robert Hudson about the musical drama has written about the political trading behind the Treaty of Versailles from Keynes's perspective. How does looking again at Keynes life and work offer us a different view of the man and his times?Zachary D. Carter is a Writer in Residence with the Omidyar Network's Reimagining Capitalism initiative and the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.Robert Hudson is the co-author of Hall of Mirrors a musical based on JM Keynes's experiences at the Paris Peace Conference. His other work includes Magnitsky the Musical.Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor History at Columbia University and he serves as Director of the European Institute. His books include: Shutdown: how COVID-19 shook the world's economy; Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World; and, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931.Emma West is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham and her current research project, Revolutionary Red Tape, examines how public servants and official committees helped to produce and popularise modern British culture.Producer: Ruth Watts

June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, used to be the date given for the beginning of the Viking age but research by Neil Price shows that it began centuries before. He traces the impact of an economy geared to maritime war and the central role of slavery in Viking life and trade. Judith Jesch is Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and Dr Kevan Manwaring is an author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Arts University Bournemouth. New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough presents.The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price is out in paperback in April Vikings Valhalla is available now on Netflix New Generation Thinker Eleanor Barraclough researches this history and has written Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. You can find her presenting the Radio 3 Sunday feature on runes, and the supernatural north https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnwpProducer: Luke MulhallImage: A reconstruction of the Viking life at Murton Park Dark Age Village (part of Yorkshire Museum of Farming).Words and Music - Radio 3's weekly curation of prose, poems and music choices also looks at Vikings. You can hear it on Sunday at 5.30pm and then on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35f