The Essay

Radio 3 presenter John Toal the French composer Maurice Ravel, whose music had a special place in his life long before he discovered an unexpected connection.

Clemency Burton-Hill celebrates the Romanian composer George Enescu, whose philosophy of the profound importance of music in all areas of life has been a particular inspiration to her.

Radio 3 presenter and poet Ian McMillan celebrates the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music has been particularly special to him ever since he first heard The Lark Ascending at the age of eight.

Radio 3 presenter Fiona Talkington celebrates the French composer Joseph Canteloube, whose famous Songs of the Auvergne have become particularly important to her during her experience of cancer.

The author Natasha Carthew on Rame Head Chapel, near Whitsand Bay, in south east Cornwall.5/5 Natasha describes how she would write here in the wild as a child and how the chapel symbolised hope.This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building featured, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet.Image courtesy of Natasha CarthewProducer: Clare Walker

The writer Bridget Collins takes us backstage to Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells.4/5 Bridget reflects on repurposing old buildings and the links between church and theatre. This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building featured, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet.Producer: Clare Walker

Author James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd, talks about Malcolm's place, Taigh na Trathad (The Beach House) in Uig on the Isle of Lewis.3/5 James describes how the history and sense of community on Lewis has informed the buildings and that it is "not the ‘edge of the world’, but the centre of another that we have chosen not to see".This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building featured, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet.Image courtesy of Alistair MacCallumProducer: Clare Walker

Novelist Beth Underdown on Rochdale Town Hall.2/5 Beth describes how her family's personal history is tied up with the building and how Hitler reputedly admired it so much that he ordered it spared during the Second World War. This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building featured, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet.Producer: Clare Walker

Author Louise Welsh reflects on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art.1/5 Louise describes her memories of the building before it was ravaged by two fires. This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building featured, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet.Image courtesy of Alan McAteerProducer: Clare Walker

A song about a Glaswegian tough guy begins this Essay from New Generation Thinker Alistair Fraser. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. To hear audience questions download the Essay as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. The image of the hard man runs like an electric current through Glasgow's history. Unafraid, unabashed, with outlaw swagger, he stalks the pages of countless crime novels and TV dramas. The unpredictable tough guy, schooled in both fist and knife, a symbol of the city's industrial past. But what does being a hard man mean in the Glasgow of today, now call-centre capital of Europe? And what lessons can be drawn from his changing fates and fortunes to understand masculinity and violence elsewhere?Alistair Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has spent the last fifteen years studying youth gangs and street culture around the world, and is au

What does wearing a suit say? New Generation Thinker Sarah Goldsmith's Essay introduces an audience at York Festival of Ideas to Beau Brummel and others who have understood the mixed messages of suits through time. England football coach Gareth Southgate's pitch-side waistcoats and 007's exquisite collection of Tom Ford suits all make one thing clear: sweatpants are out and the formal man's suit, along with its tailor, has triumphantly returned. From the colourful flamboyances of the eighteenth century to the dandy dictates of Beau Brummell and into the inky black 'Great Renunciation' of the nineteenth century, join Sarah Goldsmith for a whirlwind tour of the origins of the most ubiquitous, enduring item of male sartorial fashion and the 'second skin' of the male body, the three-piece suit.Sarah Goldsmith is a historian of masculinity, the body and travel. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, an AHRC/BBC 2018 New Generation Thinker and a life-long rugby fan. Her first book, Masc

Queerness might not be the most obvious association with soldiering, but New Generation Thinker Tom Smith's Essay argues that although the East German army had a reputation for unbending masculinity, it's surprising how central queerness was to the enterprise. Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. Brutality along the Berlin Wall, monumental Soviet-style parades, rows of saluting soldiers: these are the familiar images of the East German military. Army training promoted toughness, endurance and self-control and forced its soldiers into itchy, shapeless uniforms. Delve deeper, though, and you find countless examples of the army’s fascination with homosexuality. Even more unexpectedly, gay and bisexual soldiers found ways of expressing desires and intimacy. LGBT people have long faced discrimination and violence in arenas aimed at the promotion of traditional masculinity, but look closely and we discover that queerness has not always been as marginalised as we’d think. What can East Germany te

Lockdown brought beards and the question of to shave or not to shave to the fore. New Generation Thinker Alun Withey looks at what made 18th-century men shave off centuries of manly growth. Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. You can hear audience questions from the event as an episode of the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast.To be clean-shaven was the mark of a C18 gentleman, beard-wearing marked out the rough rustic. For the first time, men were beginning to shave themselves instead of visiting the barber, and a whole new market emerged to cater for rising demand in all sorts of shaving products - soaps, pastes and powders. But the way these were promoted suggests there was confusion over exactly what the ideal man should be. On the one hand, razor makers appealed to masculine characteristics like hardness, control and temper in their advertisements whilst perfumers and other manufacturers of shaving soaps, stressed softness, ease and luxury. So enter the world of Georgian personal grooming

Napoleon inspired much fiction and non-fiction. New Generation Thinker Emma Butcher looks at the publishing phenomenon that was the traumatised Napoleonic Redcoat - Recorded before an audience at the York Festival of Ideas.The Napoleonic Wars, like all wars, had their celebrities. Chief among them, Wellington and Napoleon, whose petty rivalry and military bravado ensured their status as household names long after Waterloo. But these wars also saw the rise of a new genre of personal and sentimental war literature which took the public by storm. The writers were foot soldiers rather than officers, infantrymen like the Reverend George Gleig and John Malcolm. Both fought in some of the most decisive battles on the Continent but it is their written accounts of their daily lives, of the true nature of war, its personal costs and the terrors endured, which ensured their best-selling status. This is the story of the rise and rise of the military memoir, with foot soldier as hero, and the way his war stories were lapp

Daniel Hahn considers language in the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, and how two meeting cultures communicateIn this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

Alys Conran reflects on the theme of isolation in Robinson Crusoe and the act of reading it as a novelist In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

Having enjoyed it as an eight-year-old boy, Alex Wheatle re-reads Robinson Crusoe and reflects on its themes of imperialism and slavery.In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

Horatio Clare explores the castaway myth, looking at what happens to the soul and mind in the great spaces and on actual desert islands.In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

Fiona Stafford explores ‘The Strange, Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, looking at what Crusoe the narrator was most surprised by, and the stranger aspects of the bookIn this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

Poet and wild swimmer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett joins Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough for an inspirational dip in the chilly River Avon.Elizabeth-Jane's latest book, The Grassling, is a nature memoir about her father, his illness and her attempts to reconnect with the fields and rivers that sustained and moulded his family for generations. Her poetry collection Swims describes a series of wild swims around Britain, connecting them to the environmental and political issues of the day.In Worcestershire she enjoys her first taste of the River Avon, braving the cold but enjoying the sand martins, the skylarks and a low flying heron which might just find itself immortalised in Elizabeth-Jane's next poetry collection.Producer: Alasdair Cross