The Essay: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

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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

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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: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: Closer

Closer

Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf, Closer

Diarmuid Hester looks at the George Miles Cycle from punk radical Dennis Cooper.

New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester compares the transgressive writing of Dennis Cooper about teenage boys, love and pain to the Marquis de Sade, and The Ramones' punk gigs.

Drugs, sex, violence and thinking about death are at the core of the George Miles cycle of five novels.  New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester draws the links between the author Dennis Cooper and the radicalism of the Marquis de Sade. Now 70, Cooper's books have been praised for his non naturalistic writing and the texture of teenage thought that he captures in the series, which begins with Closer, and condemned for depravity.  George Miles was his childhood friend and then lover, who ended up committing suicide.  

Diarmuid Hester teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a  2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.  He has published WRONG: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, and  Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories 
You can hear him talking about Derek Jarman's garden in this Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jgm5 and discussing the new narrative movement in America alongside Dodie Bellamy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001q76q 

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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.

Five New Generation Thinkers each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

Five current New Generation Thinkers, on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

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