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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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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: New Generation Thinkers 2019: Marble, Muscle and Manly Bodies in the 18th Century

Marble, Muscle and Manly Bodies in the 18th Century

New Generation Thinkers 2019

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Sarah Goldsmith on how the C18th craze for weight lifting fed into ideas about masculinity

Sarah Goldsmith from the University of Leicester explores the way the C18th craze for weight lifting fed into ideas about masculinity. Recorded at the 2019 Free Thinking Festival.

What was more important in the construction of an eighteenth-century man’s body: the dumbbell or the dumbwaiter? Who had the most enviable body shape: the svelte Apollo Belvedere or the rotund John Bull? Dr Sarah Goldsmith, from the University of Leicester, explores the early origins of modern gym culture in the tantalisingly elusive and occasionally surprisingly sweaty world of eighteenth-century male physicality. 

Sarah Goldsmith is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centure for Urban History and School of History, University of Leicester. 

Her Essay was recorded in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of this year's Free Thinking Festival.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The Essay: New Generation Thinkers 2019

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.

Essays recorded at the Free Thinking Festival with an audience at Sage Gateshead.

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