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

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Free Thinking

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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

Andrew Scull

Lisa Appignanesi

Matthew Beaumont

Deborah Longworth

Jacqueline Smith

Free Thinking: Madness in Civilisation, Night Walking

Madness in Civilisation, Night Walking

17/03/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Madness in Civilisation, Night Walking

Matthew Sweet discusses the history of mental illness. Plus a nocturnal history of London.

Matthew Sweet with Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilisation, and Lisa Appignanesi. Plus Matthew Beaumont, author of Night Walking, and Deborah Longworth on the 'flaneuse'.

Matthew Sweet talks to Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilisation about how different cultures around the world and through time have dealt with what we might call madness, insanity or the loss of reason and how the experience, felt or observed, has been interpreted by writers and artists. They are joined by Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion and Mad, Bad and Sad to discuss whether the west's long-term belief that madness had its roots in the body was bad news for women.
Matthew Beaumont also presents his history of an ancient crime but one still on the statute books of Massachussetts - Night Walking. Via the pens of Samuel Johnson who blamed London's noxious night hours on arrogant aristocrats, to William Blake's evocations of London's Darkness, Free Thinking hears from those who had nothing in common with their slumbering fellows and who like Charles Dickens, enjoyed a time that brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable. Alongside, Deborah Longworth with a view of the flaneuse, the female solitary ambler and a pen-portrait of Dorothy Richardson whose relationship with the city of London outweighed all other passions in her life.

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