Free Thinking

Original version

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

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

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.

Free Thinking: Paper

Paper

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Paper

An exploration of the cultural and social history of paper.

Adam Smyth, Nicholas Basbanes, Therese Weber and Emily Cockayne join Laurence Scott to look at our long history of paper use and the prospects for a paperless future.

Laurence Scott explores the cultural and social history of paper, from the Chinese Han Dynasty in 105 AD to the 20th-century workplace. His guests are:

Adam Smyth, a Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at the University of Oxford. His books include Material Texts in Early Modern England;  Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (co-edited with Dennis Duncan) and  Book Parts: A collection of essays on the history of parts of a book; Therese Weber, an artist who has made paintings out of pulp, paper tearing and dipping and is the author of The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years; Nicholas Basbanes, a writer and journalist, whose books include On Paper: The Everything of its Two Thousand Year History and Emily Cockayne, an Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and author of Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go. Laurence Scott is the author of books about digital life including The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning. 

How did such a mundane substance revolutionise modern warfare, enable Imperialism and transform art? Can there ever be a blank page? Is recycling the answer to waste?

The conversation ranges  across  the relationship  between paper and religious history in the printing of the Quran and Tibetan rituals for the dead; to C17 Swedish paper bullets; Dickens’ Bleak House - in which a pile of paper leads to a fatal fire; the Bristol company who specialised in papier-mâché – a material used for elaborate decorations in C18 homes – and then used by artists like Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s and 50s and a scrap of paper, which survived 9/11 and told a widow, about her husband's final moments.


Producer: Jayne Egerton


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.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Free Thinking

Paper

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3