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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

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.

Anne McElvoy

Chantal Joffe

Heather Widdows

Catherine Fletcher

Sarah Goldsmith

Zahid Warley

Free Thinking: The body, past and present

The body, past and present

27/06/2018

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, The body, past and present

Beauty from the Renaissance to the present.

Beauty from the Renaissance to the present. Painter Charlotte Joffe, philosopher Heather Widdows, and writer and historian Catherine Fletcher talk to Anne McElvoy.

Can beauty be an ethical ideal? What did being handsome mean in C18 England? How do we look at images by Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman or a Renaissance nude and is that affected by changing attitudes towards the body now? Anne McElvoy talks to the painter, Chantal Joffe, the philosopher, Heather Widdows, the writer, performer and activist Penny Pepper and the New Generation Thinkers Catherine Fletcher and Sarah Goldsmith. 

Chantal Joffe's solo show - Personal Feeling is the Main thing - is at the Lowry in Manchester until 2nd September.
The Tate Liverpool exhibition Life in Motion: Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman runs until September 23rd. 
The Italian Renaissance Nude by Jill Burke from the University of Edinburgh is out now from Yale University Press. 
Penny Pepper's book First in the World Somewhere, a memoir is published by Unbound 

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. 
Sarah Goldsmith is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leicester working on A History of the Eighteenth-Century Elite Male Body
Catherine Fletcher is Associate Professor at Swansea University who has published Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome and The Black Prince of Florence.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Main image: Detail from The Squid and the Whale, 2017 by Chantal Joffe (c) - Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice.

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.

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