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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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: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: There's No Story There

Who Wrote Animal Farm?

There's No Story There

Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf, There's No Story There

Lisa Mullen looks at the depiction of war-time factory workers in a novel by Inez Holden.

New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen profiles Inez Holden, novelist and journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials and was a friend of George Orwell, HG Wells and Stevie Smith.

The dangerous world of an explosives factory is the setting of Inez Holden’s 1944 novel There’s No Story There. A bohemian figure who went on to write film scripts for J Arthur Rank, to report on the Nuremberg Trials, and produce articles published in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon - Holden campaigned for workers’ rights and was close friend of George Orwell, and though she published ten books in her lifetime, she fell out of fashion - until now. New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen re-reads her writing and finds a  refreshingly modern mind.

Lisa Mullen is the author of Mid-Century Gothic: The Uncanny Objects of Modernity in British Literature and Culture after the Second World War.  She teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a 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. 
You can hear Lisa writing on George Orwell and the contribution of his wife in a Radio 3 Essay called Who Wrote Animal Farm? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000413q 
She has presented short features about Mary Wollstonecraft as a single mother https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00061ly 
On the blackthorn in Sloe Time https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000n6bx
She has contributed to Free Thinking discussions about Contagion and Viruses https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gbq6 and Weimar and the Subversion of Cabaret https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b7r7 
She has presented episodes of Free Thinking looking at eco-criticism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rw8t and Panto and magic https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q376 

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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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