Original version

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.

Philip Dodd

Kamila Shamsie

John Kasmin

Natalie Haynes

Rebecca McCutcheon

Robyn Read

Free Thinking: Kamila Shamsie: John Kasmin. Dido

Kamila Shamsie: John Kasmin.

26/09/2017

Kamila Shamsie: John Kasmin. Dido

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Kamila Shamsie: John Kasmin. Dido

Philip Dodd looks at postcards of beggars, the love and scorn of Dido and radicalisation.

The love and scorn of Dido, the conflicted love in a modern day version of Antigone by novelist Kamila Shamsie and black and white images of bathing in John Kasmin's postcards.

Family ties and radicalisation in Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire; images of beggars and slaughterhouses in the old postcards collected by John Kasmin, the art dealer who promoted abstract artists including Anthony Caro and Gillian Ayres. Plus Dido, Queen of Carthage - from Virgil and Christopher Marlowe to Purcell and TS Eliot - classicist Natalie Haynes and theatre director Rebecca McCutcheon discuss the different interpretations. 

Kamila Shamsie's novels include Burnt Shadows which links events in Nagasaki and partition in India to Pakistan in the early 1980s, New York post 9/11 and Afghanistan in the wake of a US bombing campaign; and A God in Every Stone moves from the time of Persian Darius I to the experiences of Indian troops fighting the First World War and the independence movement in Peshawar. 

John Kasmin's Postcards series published by Trivia Press is themed into collections Meat; Scrub; Elders; Size; and Wreck. 

Dido, Queen of Carthage is at the Swan theatre in Stratford with Kimberley Sykes directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company until October 28th 2017.

Natalie Haynes is the author The Ancient Guide to Modern Life and her latest novel is The Children of Jocasta. 
 
Rebecca McCutcheon directed performances of Christopher Marlowe's drama in a women's refuge and at Kensington Palace and her theatre company Lost Text, Found Space is now working on staging a rarely performed play by Elizabeth Inchbold at a Victorian House in Peckham. 


Producer: Robyn Read

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.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Free Thinking

Kamila Shamsie: John Kasmin. Dido

Contributors

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3