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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

Radio 3

Free Thinking

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with artists and thinkers in debates and interviews.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Matthew Sweet

Philip Hensher

Daisy Hay

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Anthony Joseph

Sarah White

Peter de Rome

Jacqueline Smith

Free Thinking: Radical Bookshops, Philip Hensher

Radical Bookshops, Philip Hensher

17/06/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Radical Bookshops, Philip Hensher

Matthew Sweet with Philip Hensher and poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph.

With Matthew Sweet: Radical black publishing then and now, with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Anthony Joseph and Sarah White plus Philip Hensher on his novel The Emperor Waltz.

Philip Hensher's novel The Emperor Waltz draws together stories about a man who founds the first gay bookshop in London, a young painter who joins the Bauhaus and a woman fascinated by a Roman cult. He joins Matthew Sweet in the Free Thinking studio. Radical bookshops are also discussed by the poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph and the co-founder of New Beacon Sarah White. 

New Generation Thinker Daisy Hay looks at the Victorian practice of keeping hair as a personal memento.

The Sheffield documentary festival has just premiered a film called "Peter De Rome Grandfather of Gay Porn - Matthew Sweet has been to meet him. 

John La Rose's New Beacon project was the focal point of a black radical publishing industry that emerged in the UK in the late sixties. Its aim was to give a platform and voice to a post-independence generation of Caribbean writers whilst nurturing homegrown work by Britain's growing black population. As the Black Cultural Archives settles into its own home in Brixton and The George Padmore Institute makes New Beacon's archive available, Matthew Sweet asks if this period is now consigned to history or are such small, vibrant, personality led spaces as important as ever for diversity and the enrichment of the literary voice? 

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

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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