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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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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.

Anne McElvoy

Amy Tan

Shobana Jeyasingh

Caroline Cox

Philip Short

Night Waves: Amy Tan, Strange Blooms, Francois Mitterrand

Amy Tan, Strange Blooms, Francois Mitterrand

28/11/2013

BBC Radio 3 - Night Waves, Amy Tan, Strange Blooms, Francois Mitterrand

Novelist Amy Tan talks to Anne McElvoy about her new book The Valley of Amazement.

Novelist Amy Tan talks to Anne McElvoy about her new book The Valley of Amazement, set in China and America and spanning the first half of the 20th century.

Amy Tan, bestselling writer of The Joy Luck Club, the Kitchen God's Wife and three other novels, has a new book out after nearly eight years. The Valley of Amazement is an ambitious historical novel spanning nearly fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century through to the start of the Second World War. It moves between America and China but the main story is set in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, told through the voice of Violet Minturn, daughter of the American mistress of Shanghai's most exclusive courtesan house.

The visual flamboyance and evolutionary tenacity of flowers inspire choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh's latest work, Strange Blooms, which has been commissioned by London's Southbank Centre to celebrate her company's 25th anniversary. Shobana and fashion historian Caroline Cox discuss the ways in which our depiction of flowers in culture and fashion have changed.

François Mitterrand was one of the key architects of modern Europe but also a deeply ambiguous figure: a civil servant in the Vichy government but also a Resistance leader; a left-wing politician but not a socialist; a man who maintained a long-term mistress and the child they had together alongside his 'official' family. Anne talks to the author of a new biography, Philip Short.

Image Credit: Chris Nash.

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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