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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: Free Thinking 2017

The Essay: Free Thinking 2017: Episode 2: Alexander the Great's Lost City

Alexander the Great's Lost City

Episode 2

Episode 2: Alexander the Great's Lost City

Free Thinking 2017

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The story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram air base, Afghanistan.

New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson on the story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried under Bagram air base in Afghanistan, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks.

New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson with the story of Alexander the Great's lost city, buried beneath Bagram airbase, a CIA detention site and wrecked Soviet tanks. For centuries, it was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1832, it was discovered by the unlikeliest person imaginable: a ragged British con-man called Charles Masson, on the run from a death sentence. Today, Alexander's lost civilization is lost again. And Masson? For his next trick, he accidentally started the most disastrous war of the nineteenth century.

Edmund Richardson's Essay tells the story of the liar and the lost city, of how the unlikeliest people can change history.

Recorded in front of an audience as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

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.

New Generation Thinkers give talks in front of an audience at Free Thinking 2017

Talks given in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead by New Generation Thinkers, for the 2017 Free Thinking festival. The theme is 'the speed of life'

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