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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

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

The Essay: Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects: Episode 4: Old Mother Hubbard and the Cabinet of Curiosity: The Story of Storage

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Episode 4

Episode 4: Old Mother Hubbard and the Cabinet of Curiosity: The Story of Storage

Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

Old Mother Hubbard and the Cabinet of Curiosity: The Story of Storage

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects, Old Mother Hubbard and the Cabinet of Curiosity: The Story of StorageClose menu

Novelist Ian Sansom explores what cupboards and cabinets reveal about human nature.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores what cupboards and cabinets reveal about human nature and whether they tell our life stories.

Novelist Ian Sansom delves into cupboards and cabinets to explore what they reveal about human nature. Le Corbusier didn't approve of the clutter cupboards encourage, wanting to free our lives of 'junk'; whereas artist Herbert Distel filled a cabinet with trinkets donated by Man Ray, Annette Messager, Andy Warhol, and John Cage - 'a roll-call of twentieth-century conceptualists, creatives, collagists and curators of the curious' in his Museum of Drawers. Rimbaud wrote about an old sideboard crammed with memories, and Duchamp fitted his life's work in a suitcase, but Ian wonders if the contents of our cupboards really do tell our life stories, complete with the all the hopes, dreams and broken promises suggested by unused pasta machines and unfinished jigsaws - or in the end does it all 'amount to nothing, just so much junk?'.

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.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the history and symbolism of furniture

Series in which novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the history and symbolism of furniture

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Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

Episode 4: Old Mother Hubbard and the Cabinet of Curiosity: The Story of Storage

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