The Essay

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates why Cravan is known as the father of performance art.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt from Cravan's Weird Seance courtesy of Dani

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates Cravan's work as a notorious art critic.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt from Cravan

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada , surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century.Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.In this episode Ross investigates how Cravan's career as a boxer influenced his art.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy WarmsleyExcerpt f

Ross Sutherland takes us to the birth of modern art as he traces the extraordinary life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan's anarchic art heralded Dada, surrealism, situationism, punk rock and alternative comedy. His whole life was an extravagant show and his influence spreads right across the 20th century. Cravan went through life using multiple mysterious personas. He was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a boxing champion, a notorious art critic, a scandalous performer, a deserter, the husband of modernist poet Mina Loy, and was pursued by the CIA.This mystery story, led by writer Ross Sutherland, tracks across twenty countries as Cravan's outlandish persona shifts between incarnations. Ross's journey leads him to Cravan's greatest riddle of all - his disappearance in the Gulf of Mexico. In this episode Ross comes to terms with Cravan's brazenly offensive poetry.This programme contains very strong language.Writer and Presenter: Ross Sutherland Produced for the BBC by Melvin Rickarby Music by Jeremy Warmsley

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.When she first encountered Jane Eyre in the classroom, Philippa Gregory was looking for a love story - between Jane Eyre and the brooding Mr Rochester. Years later, she reads the book very differently. Join Philippa as she explores the nuances within Charlotte Brontë's classic and writes an original scene, a new ending, for the book. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends. Award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak first glimpsed Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on a bookshelf at school. It was only years later that she managed to get her hands on a copy. The experience stirred her soul. The romance was raw, wrong and real. But the book's ending came as a surprise. For this Boxing Day edition, Elif imagines what would happen if Anna were able to meet her creator, Tolstoy himself, after the novel's final page. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.For the six-year-old AL Kennedy, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows provided firelight calm and comfort. She still has her childhood copy, bound up in green cloth with gold lettering, the only hardback she possessed at that age. This Christmas Day, she imagines what might have happened to Mole, Rat and Badger years after the Battle of Toad Hall. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Literature A Level. She loathed the book. But a few years ago, she gave Woolf another go, reading Mrs Dalloway. As a writer who experiments with language and form, she marvelled at the inventiveness, how Woolf's characters float in and out of the prose. In this Christmas Eve edition of Open Endings, Bernardine reveals her admiration for Woolf's work and imagines a different end for Clarissa Dalloway's extravagant party. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.In the first essay of the series, the crime writer Ian Rankin picks William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like many students, Ian first encountered the novel at school but certain scenes and moments have stayed with him for the past 40 years. In this essay, Ian explores his relationship with the work as a teenager of the 1970s and imagines what might have happened to two of the shipwrecked boys, Ralph and Jack, once they reach adulthood.Producer: Camellia Sinclair

In April 1881, a young African man named John Ocansey set sail from the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) for Liverpool in order to try and discover what had happened to goods that his father had dispatched to a Liverpudlian agent. The Africans had not received the two and a half thousand pounds they were owed in exchange for the goods, and rather than sit at home and accept the fact that they had most likely been swindled, young John Ocansey had decided to journey to the world-famous port of Liverpool and claim the money that rightfully belonged to his father. Trading between Africa and Liverpool had been established for over two centuries, and was based on the slave trade in which it was understood that Africans had no rights. Even after the abolition of the trade such attitudes persisted, but Ocansey was determined that he would not be treated as a slave.Producer Neil McCarthy

To mark the 400 years since the arrival of African slaves to America, Jamaican-born author Anne Bailey reflects on two remarkable women pertinent to this commemoration and discusses how they have influenced her journey as a Black female historian. Mary Prince, a West Indian slave who after enduring incredible hardships at the hands of several masters obtained her freedom and wrote an abolitionist narrative that was published in Britain. And Sally Hemings - the enigmatic enslaved mistress of Thomas Jefferson who never officially received her freedom and who never wrote her own story, yet as a historical figure looms large in history and in memory.Anne Bailey reflects on how each of them represented freedom in their own way.Producer Neil McCarthy

To mark 400 years since the arrival of African slaves to America, David Olusoga reflects on the life of Sarah Forbes Bonetta. As a young Dahomeyan girl called Ina, she was sold into slavery and, in an extraordinary twist of fate, was gifted to Queen Victoria and became her goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonetta.Producer Neil McCarthy

To mark 400 years since the arrival of African slaves to America, the author Daina Ramey Berry reflects on Isaac, who led a rebellion, and whose life ended in a final act of defiance.Reflecting on the 400-year anniversary of African arrivals in America and the legacy of slavery, Daina Ramey Berry is drawn to an enslaved man she met while researching her book The Price for their Pound of Flesh. His name is Isaac and she learned about him through a 19th century newspaper that recorded his remarkable story. He is someone she thinks of often because of his expression of soul values which enslaved people clung to and used to resist the commodification of their bodies. Daina shares Isaac’s story, his powerful statement, and legacies of slavery that reverberate today. Producer Neil McCarthy

To mark the 400 years since the arrival of African slaves to America, the author and playwright Caryl Phillips reflects on the life of one individual.In February 1766, a twenty-five year old African man, Philip Quaque, arrived back in his native Africa, with an English wife. He had been taken to England as a teenager to be educated as a Christian missionary. In England he had been ordained into the church, and married, and now the young man was to serve in a slave fort as both a missionary to his own African people, and a Chaplain to the English troops and merchants stationed on the coast. His was an impossible situation, trapped as he was between the hostility of his own people and the disdain of the English. For nearly half a century he managed to maintain a life balanced between these two opposing groups, and he recorded the anxieties visited upon him in a remarkable series of letters that he dispatched back to his employers in England.Producer Neil McCarthy

In the last of five personal takes on the Weimar Republic, Ute Lemper looks at the enduring appeal of Weimar music and song.

Film critic Clarisse Loughrey looks at the cinema of the Weimar Republic.

Katie Sutton, author of The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany looks at sexuality in the Republic.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations and extreme divides between rich and poor The legendary writer on film, David Thomson, takes a long hard look back at Ridley Scott's rain soaked mash up of existential noir and artificial souls. "Maybe you’ve never seen Blade Runner – but you think

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations and extreme divides between rich and poor.Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways. Dr Beth Singler, Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at Homerton College, Cambridge asks what is real and fake in A.I. sex and

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by, Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations & extreme divides between rich and poor.Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways. The writer Ken Hollings takes the Voight Kampff test as he examines the ethical barriers between us and the machine. "According to both the nov