The Essay

As part of the BBC Music Get Playing, supporting amateur music making around the UK, 5 leading writers and artists contribute an Essay in this series, in which they talk about their little-known passions for playing an instrument. In the first programme, the impressionist, actor and writer Alistair McGowan describes his attempts to relearn the piano. He started learning as a child but gave it up to play football instead. He tried it again in his 30s but stopped when his TV series "The Big Impression" took over. Then, later on, after a midnight piano lesson on a cruise ship, he began in earnest again and discovered a new world of music-making. Alistair is fascinated by short pieces in particular. His special favourites are the pieces he heard his mother play and also ones he has discovered on piano courses and through hearing them on the radio. A tiny nugget of Satie, Mompou or John Field carries for him all the weight of human experience and channels a musical history into one small but perfect form. more inf

In this series of The Essay, recorded this week in front of an audience at the Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include linguist Prof. David Crystal, artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal, broadcaster and musician Clemency Burton-Hill and novelist Jon Gower.Today, Prof. Emma Smith takes a closer look at Shakespeare's skills as a storyteller and how his plots, where the outcome is often signposted from the beginning, still hold audiences enthralled.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded this week in front of an audience at Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal, broadcaster and musician Clemency Burton-Hill, Shakespeare scholar Professor Emma Smith and novelist Jon Gower. Today, with so many of the world's languages disappearing, Professor David Crystal asks how we can preserve for the future the many different stories of accent, dialect and language. Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded earlier this week in front of an audience at Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include novelist Jon Gower, linguist Professor David Crystal, artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal and Shakespeare scholar Professor Emma Smith.Today broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill considers the relationship between storytelling and music.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded this week in front of an audience at Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include linguist Professor David Crystal, broadcaster and musician Clemency Burton-Hill, artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal and Shakespeare scholar Professor Emma Smith. Today novelist and short story writer Jon Gower reflects on lessons learned from a master storyteller - his grandfather - and recalls an encounter with The Lady of the Lake.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded this week in front of an audience at the Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include linguist Prof. David Crystal, broadcaster and musician Clemency Burton-Hill, Shakespeare scholar Prof. Emma Smith and novelist Jon Gower.Today Edmund de Waal, artist and writer of the memoir 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' considers the idea of storytelling through objects, taking as his starting-point a fragment of 12th century porcelain he bought in a Chinese street-market.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival.

In Lines of Work prominent people in a particular job read and reflect on the writings of an illustrious forebear. In this essay the gardener Jackie Bennett responds to the ideas and principles laid out by the Elizabethan thinker Francis Bacon in his Essay 'Of Gardens'.Producer: James Cook.

In Lines of Work prominent people in a particular job read and reflect on the writings of an illustrious forebear of the same trade. The essays are partly about ideas and how they change, but also about the practice and experience of being a certain kind of thing; be it a teacher, a journalist, a soldier or a critic.Journalist Helen Lewis reads the poet John Milton's defence of a Free Press, Aeropagitica. The question of freedom of the press rarely goes away but it feels particularly of the moment. Helen, deputy editor of the New Statesman, reads Milton for the first time to see whether his 17th century concerns can help us think through the post-Leveson age.Producer: James Cook.

Prominent people in a particular line of work read and reflect on the writings of an illustrious forebear of the same trade. The essays are partly about ideas and how they change, but also about the practice and the human experience of being a certain kind of thing; be it a teacher, a soldier a critic or a journalist.Soldier and author Harry Parker, relives The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant, through the lens of his own experiences in Helmand province. Grant fought in the US Mexican War and then commanded the Union armies in the American Civil War. Reading Grant's spare prose Harry reflects on the changes in the way war is experienced, consumed and portrayed.Producer: James Cook.

Prominent people in a particular line of work read and reflect on the writings of an illustrious forebear of the same trade. The essays are partly about ideas and how they change, but also about the practice and the human experience of being a certain kind of thing; be it a teacher, a soldier a critic or a journalist.Theatre critic Susannah Clapp has a passionate exchange of views with Oscar Wilde through his essays on criticism. Many of Wilde's pungent epithets and observations â€" his 'silken arrows' as Susannah describes them - still have the power to thrill, inform and entertain. But Susannah finds Wilde was on the wrong side of anonymity arguments and struggles to make sense of the internet age. Susannah ends telling her illustrious forebear of her fears for Wildean criticism in the age of mere opinion.Producer: James Cook.

Prominent people in a particular line of work read and reflect on the writings of an illustrious forebear of the same trade. The essays are partly about ideas and how they change, but also about the practice and the human experience of being a certain kind of thing; be it a teacher, a soldier a critic or a journalist.Francis Gilbert was a secondary school teacher for a number of years and is now Lecturer in Education at the University of London. He reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile and reflects on whether this template for a perfect education has a place and an influence on today's curriculum. Rousseau was an 18th-century Swiss philosopher and Emile - which charted the imagined education of the books titular young man - can be through of as the educational textbook of the Romantic movement. Rousseau's ideas have influenced Steiner Schools and the Montessori movement but are they desirable (or even feasible) in the age of mass state education.Producer: James Cook.

Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon.5.Siobhan Keenan on Shakespeare Beyond LondonThe Globe Theatre on the South Bank gives us such a clear image of productions of Shakespeare's plays in his own day, that it's easy to forget they were also performed far beyond London. Siobhan sets out to explain how Shakespeare and his fellow actors regularly toured the country, performing in spaces ranging from town halls and churches to large country houses.Siobhan sheds light on why most of Shakespeare's plays were designed so that they could be performed anywhere - with call for few props and little scenery - in order to reveal the importance of touring to his career, and the emergence of Shakespeare as a cultural icon in Elizabethan and Jacobean England - and beyond. Siobhan Keenan is Reader in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at De Mon

Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon.4.Preti Taneja: Freedom of Speech or "Nothing": King Lear and Contemporary IndiaPreti recently undertook a wide-reaching trip to India in order to research her own new novel based on King Lear. In this Essay, she considers Shakespeare's great tragedy as a lens through which to explore some of the contradictions of freedom of speech and censorship, development and corruption, activism and violence facing the world's youngest, fastest growing democracy today. Preti Taneja is a former Radio 3 New Generation Thinker and post-doctoral research fellow in Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of London, and Warwick University. BBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets

Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon.3.Joan Fitzpatrick with "Wolf All?- Shakespeare and Food in Renaissance England"Joan Fitzpatrick explains her new research on what people ate in Shakepeare's England, and what food and the consumption of food signifies in his plays. She starts with details of enormously popular Dietary books, such as William Bullein's Government of Health, (first printed in 1542) and goes on to explore why eating is about far more than nourishment, shedding important new light on the old, the young, the thin, the fat, women, foreigners, the poor and social elites in Shakespeare's plays. Joan Fitzpatrick is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Loughborough UniversityBBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance t

Joan explores the symbolism of food and eating in Shakespeare's plays

Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon. 2.James Loxley on Undiscovered Countries: Shakespeare and the NationAt a time when relationships between the UK and the rest of Europe, and between the UK's own constituent nations, looks more unsettled than for many years, James Loxley explores what light Shakespeares plays might throw on tricky questions of national identity and the political debates that can grow up around them.James starts by considering Henry V, for which Shakespeare is often depicted as a celebrant of untroubled Englishness, giong on to explain that during Shakespeare's most creative period, the very name and nature of the country was in dispute, with the concept of "Great Britain" becoming a prospect for the first time.And he concludes by wondering how Shakespeare's plays can help us understand our own national question

James explores the light Shakespeare throws on national identity, then and now

Four centuries after the death of Shakespeare, five young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon. 1.Sophie Duncan on Shakespeare and the SuffragettesSophie Duncan reveals how Shakespeare's heroines helped transform Victorian schoolgirls into Edwardian activists.The 19th century actress Ellen Terry told the suffragettes that they had more in common with Shakespeare's female characters than with the fragile, domestic ladies of Victorian novels. Sohie Duncan's new research starts with the unanticipated results of a competition run in The Girls' Own Paper in 1888 to find its readers' favourite Shakespearean heroine. It moves into more conventional scholarly territory with an analysis of a Suffragist-led production of The Winter's Tale in 1914, and its impact on English Suffragettes as a depiction of violence against women and the transformative power of female friendship.Sophie Dunca

Playwright and academic Elizabeth Kuti explores Sean O'Casey's "The Silver Tassie"

Photographer John D McHugh explores one of the war photos taken by Fr Francis Browne