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Radio 3’s flagship arts programme until 2013. Over 350 editions available in the archive.

Radio 3’s flagship arts programme until 2013. Search the extensive archive for interviews, debates and reviews. Go to Free Thinking for the new home of arts and ideas on Radio 3.

Night Waves: Peter Carey/The Music Instinct/Gwyneth Lewis/Catcher in the Rye

Peter Carey/The Music Instinct/Gwyneth Lewis/Catcher in the Rye

01/02/2010

BBC Radio 3 - Night Waves, Peter Carey/The Music Instinct/Gwyneth Lewis/Catcher in the Rye

Matthew Sweet talks to Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey about his latest novel.

Presented by Matthew Sweet. With Peter Carey on his latest novel, science writer Philip Ball on listening to music, Welsh Poet Laureate Gwyneth Lewis and Catcher in the Rye.

Matthew Sweet talks to novelist Peter Carey. Having won two Booker prizes for his novels Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey will be discussing his latest novel, Parrot and Olivier in America. The novel is set in formative America as the two eponymous heroes - one a printer's son from Devon, the other a French aristocrat form an 'unlikely and everlasting bond' after being displaced from revolutionary France and the Old World. The book is described as an improvisation on the life of Alexis De Tocqueville - the great French Chronicler of American democracy - and provides a timely exploration of the emergence of America and American ideas about democracy and freedom in theory and in practice.

Science writer Philip Ball's new book, The Music Instinct, discusses how listening to music is more than hearing it, and enjoying it; we are performing a cognitive feat of astounding complexity.  He also argues that we all have an instinct for music and it's a part of what makes us human.  Musicologist Grenville Hancox talks about Philip's latest research, and how music can impact upon our mental health.

And the first Welsh Poet Laureate, Gwyneth Lewis, reads from her book length poem A Hospital Odyssey, a surreal fantasy voyage through illness and healing. 

It's set in a hospital basement, known in the poem as The Other World.  The epic  confronts her husband's battle with cancer through mythical confrontations with characters from knights and physicians to the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan.

After the death of JD Salinger last week, guests Bidisha and the historian Diane Purkiss discuss how the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, established an adolescent voice that still lingers, and ask how adolescents are developing in film and literature.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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