Free Thinking

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The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: Pirates

Pirates

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Pirates

From Treasure Island to Kynance Cove, Anne Bonney to Captain Pugwash. Anne McElvoy hosts.

Robert Blyth, Joan Passey and Michael Talbot join Anne McElvoy to talk about piracy in fact and fiction, from the Caribbean to Cornwall, as a new exhibition opens.

From the Pirates of Penzance and Captain Hook, to Ottoman corsairs, Henry Avery, Mary Read and Lady Killigrew: Anne McElvoy is joined by New Generation Thinkers Michael Talbot and Joan Passey, and by Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History, Royal Museums Greenwich, who is also one of the co-curators of Pirates at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.

Producer: Harry Parker

Pirates runs at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall from April to December and then moves in 2025 to Royal Museums Greenwich.

You might be interested in a discussion of David Graeber's ideas on a Free Thinking episode about anarchism. His recently published book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia argues that the "Golden Age of Piracy" was also a time of radical democracy as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.

Other conversations in the Free Thinking archives available on the website include Ships and History with Hew Locke, Sara Caputo, Jake Subryan Richards and Tom Nancollas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001626t

Seagoings with artists Katie Patterson, Charlotte Runcie and Julia Blackburn and Cutty Sark curator Hannah Stockton https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002868

Oceans and the Sea with Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh and literature scholar and New Generation Thinker Joan Passey at Hay Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017m2y

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