Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Breakdown: Horatio Clare, Stevie Smith

Breakdown: Horatio Clare, Stevie Smith

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Breakdown: Horatio Clare, Stevie Smith

Horatio Clare talks to Laurence Scott about mania and healing. Plus Stevie Smith.

In his memoir Heavy Light, Horatio Clare traces going from recording long walks for Radio 3 to being in a lockdown ward in a psychiatric hospital and coming out again.

Paranoia, the collateral damage on his family and the investigations he makes into drugs used to treat such a breakdown: Horatio Clare talks to Laurence Scott about his Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing. Plus the poetry of Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971). Author of the much-quoted lines Not Waving but Drowning; Stevie Smith suffered from depression and acute shyness. New Generation Thinker Noreen Masud looks at her writing. 

Horatio Clare has recorded a series of different walks for BBC Radio 3. His books include The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal; A Single Swallow; Down the Sea in Ships and his new memoir Heavy Light. 
Dr Noreen Masud teaches on 20th-century fiction at Durham University. You can hear her talking about nonsense writing in this episode of Free Thinking about Dada https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k9ws and in this Sunday Feature she looks at aphorisms https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rtxb

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

(photo: James Bedford)

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Free Thinking

Breakdown: Horatio Clare, Stevie Smith

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