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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music.

Stig Abel

Corinne Julius

Lynne Truss

John Bowen

Kitty Joe

Louis Wise

Jerome Weatherald

Front Row: Frida Kahlo, Fly by Night, Queer Eye, Cats in literature

Frida Kahlo, Queer Eye, Cats in literature, Fly by Night

15/06/2018

Frida Kahlo, Fly by Night, Queer Eye, Cats in literature

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Frida Kahlo, Fly by Night, Queer Eye, Cats in literature

The new Frida Kahlo exhibition Making Her Self Up at the V&A and Queer Eye on TV.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in a major new exhibition. Plus the presence of cats in literature, from Keats to TS Eliot, 1500 pigeons create a work of art and Queer Eye on TV.

The V&A's latest exhibition includes 13 artworks by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, but far more of her colourful skirts, blouses and pieces of jewellery because Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up concentrates on Kahlo's greatest creation - the artist herself. Design critic Corinne Julius considers what it reveals about the famous modern Latin American artist and our attitude to her.

When we think of John Keats, we mostly think of Odes, Grecian Urns, Nightingales, and Autumn - we certainly don't think of cats. 200 years after Keats wrote his little-known comic gem To Mrs Reynolds's Cat, we consider the place of cats in literature - from Hemingway to Colette, and Stephen King to Tove Janssen. Cat-lover and writer Lynne Truss and literary historian John Bowen consider the relationship between writers and their feline 'mewses' and asks what makes a 'purr-fect' piece of cat prose? 

1500 pigeons with small LED lights attached to their legs representing the messages they would once have carried over the battlefields of the First World War are the latest work by the American artist Duke Riley, who brings his performance piece Fly by Night to the UK for the first time. The work's co-ordinator Kitty Joe describes the event.

As the second series of Queer Eye launches on Netflix, writer Louis Wise assesses the show's popularity.

Presenter Stig Abell
Producer Jerome Weatherald.

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