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Front Row: Robert Redford's Career, Fiction within Fiction, Poet Fred D'Aguiar

03/12/2018

Robert Redford's Career, Fiction within Fiction, Poet Fred D'Aguiar

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Robert Redford's Career, Fiction within Fiction, Poet Fred D'Aguiar

Robert Redford's swansong, fictional characters reading fiction and poet Fred D'Aguiar

In his final film Robert Redford plays - what else - a charming bank robber. Characters in books who read and what this tells us. Poet Fred D'Aguiar responds to history. All of it.

For his final role as an actor, Robert Redford plays a charming bank robber in The Old Man and the Gun, harking back to his early roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Tim Robey reviews. 

Booker prize winning narrator of Anna Burns’s Milkman reads 19th century novels as she cannot bear the 20th century. What do other fictional characters read and what does it reveal about them, their authors and the period in which the books were written.  John Bown, Professor of Literature at York university joins to discuss  fiction within fiction

Poet Fred D'Aguiar's new collection, Translations from Memory, starts with Gilgamesh, the earliest poem and ends with with a response Kamau Brathwaite, the poet from Barbados, who is still alive. It includes responses to philosophers - Spinoza, Hume, Kant - to writers - Lorca, Akhmatova, Seferis - to scientists such as Marie Curie, to political leaders - Nelson Mandela -  to religion - Islam - and great movements such as the Reformation. He talks to Samira Ahmed about writing
poems about what amounts to the whole of western civilisation and history. 

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Julian May

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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