The Essay

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Colm Toibin tells the story of Lady Gregory's fighter pilot son, whose death inspired one of Yeats' most famous poems, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'.Written and read by Colm Toibin Produced by Emma Harding.

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended.These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 Now, a major cultural programme across the United Kingdom.Tonight, Elif Shafak contemplates a point of no return in the history of her native country, Turkey.Written and read by Elif Shafak Produced by Emma Hardinghttp://www.1418now.org.uk/.

"It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts", Michael PowellContinuing the Sound of Cinema season, film critic Peter Bradshaw looks at Powell and Pressburger's sensuous 1947 melodrama, 'Black Narcissus'.Set in a convent in an isolated Himalayan valley, in which tensions are running high, Black Narcissus was based on the 1939 novel of the same name by Rumer Godden. It stars Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron and Jean Simmons, and was described by Michael Powell described as the most erotic film he ever made.Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus'.Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.P

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War through individual works of art10.The poet Ruth Padel reflects on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son Peter, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914.The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty, hunger and war in the 20th century.The death of her youngest son, Peter, in October 1914, prompted a prolonged period of deep depression, but by the end of that year she was turning her thoughts to creating a moument to Peter and his fallen comrades.She destroyed this first monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The final memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed in 1932 and placed in the cemetery where Peter lay.The poet Ruth Padel traces Kollwitz's long period of anguish and artistic growth.Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring.Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Of her 1917 collection, Rabindranath Tagore declared: "Your poems in The Broken Wing seem to be made of tears and fire, like the clouds of a July evening, glowing with the muffled power of sunset."The distinguished scholar of the First World War, Santanu Das, a reader in English at King's College, London, reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in their work.BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet, fresh from her experiences in Afghanistan and Syria, introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France, 'Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort'.Wharton, best known for 'The Age Of Innocence' and 'The House of Mirth', was granted unique access to the Western front and wrote one of the most evocative and undeservedly neglected accounts of life in France in World War One.In its pages, penned early in the war, are Wharton's painterly descriptions of the country's overnight transformation from peace to war, her deep love for France and its people, and her accounts of the destruction wrought upon the villages and towns in the path of the German invader.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship7.Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship PotemkinFor Russians of Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Soviet state emerged. Eisenstein seized the opportunity of serving in the Red Army in order to become a radical theatre director, which led him into film as part of the first generation of Soviet film-makers who would astonish the world in the late 1920s with films like The Battleship Potemkin and October. These films would shape the cultural and political landscape of the interwar years - championed by those who wanted to condemn the Great War as an imperialist struggle, and also foreshadowing the Second World War, as in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. The distinguished film historian Ian Christie untangles this complex st

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual work.6. Dr Heather Jones of the LSE reflects on Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu. Completed in 1916 and the work of a French soldier at the front, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions there. It proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working- class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent.Producer: Ben Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art, literature and scholarship5.Michal Shapira on Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a text written in Vienna in 1915, expressing his dismay as the war progressed.The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud shared the general moodBut, like his fellow-citizens, Freud expected a quick war. By February 1915, with two of his sons fighting and thousands of injured and traumatised soldiers returning from the front, Freud's feelings had changed.Dr Michal Shapira reflects on his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and considers how it prefigures some of his later, better-known works on war and the death-drive.Dr Michal Shapira is a senior lecturer of history and gender studies at Tel Aviv University Producer : Beaty Rubens.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art.Professor David Edgerton of King's College London reflects on the Memorandum on the Neglect of Science, a 1916 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment.In a letter to The Times that year, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously.They continued by observing that the entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the civil service, were weighted towards the Classics rather than sciences. Was this the first stirrings CP Snow's Two Cultures debate?David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History, at King's College London, finds out what was

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art Cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson reflects on Otto Dix's Der Krieg, a harrowing cycle of prints of wartime experience.In 1924, six years after the end of hostiliies, the painter Otto Dix, who had been a machine-gunner in the German Army, produced his 51 Der Krieg prints. Gruesome, hallucinatory, and terribly frank, these postcards of conflict tell the soldier's ghastly tale.Cartoonist Martin Rowson, whose own work is similarly direct and uncompromising, tells Dix's story, exposing what the War did to the man and ponders why Der Krieg remains such a powerful statement.Producer: Benedict Warren.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the Frst World War in individual works of art2.Sarah LeFanu reflects on Rose Macaulay's 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and OthersRose Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, but her biographer, Sarah LeFanu, has long believed that one of her earlier novels, Non-Combatants and Others, is a work of striking originality. She also argues for its importance to our understanding of the impact of the First World War not only on soldiers at the front but on the entire nation.The books which have become the foundational texts of our perception and understanding of the war are all by men who had served as soldiers - Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves - but all were written more than a decade later, when their authors had had time to shape and mediate their experiences through a process of post-war reflections.The immediacy of Non-Combatants and Others - written and set in 1915 - is another reason for its claim to be regarded

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art 1. BBC Correspondent Allan Little reflects on C.R.W.Nevinson's great 1917 painting, Paths of GloryC.R.W.Nevinson's painting, Paths of Glory, is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters which appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in the mud, against a backdrop of tangled barbed wire, somewhere on the Western Front.Unsuprisingly, it was censored at the time.Perhaps part of its shock value was in its title. In his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the 18th century poet, Thomas Gray, had declared "the Paths of Glory lead but to the grave", but in Nevinson's painting, the two fallen soldiers are far from the comfort even of a grave in an English country churchyard, and, indeed, from any decent burial at all.In his many years as a BBC Special Correspondent, Allan Little has witnessed some shocking scenes of war and has also reflected on the depicti

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Simon Calder recalls the small-scale delights of Holguin in Cuba. It' so different to the capital city, but worth the detour - if you can get there!Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Travel writer Michela Wrong sees beautiful Italianate buildings, and all things Futurist - in Africa. In Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to be precise.Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere, recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Vanora Bennett describes Makhachkala in Russia as 'beyond the mountains', yet these days it's on the brink of enormous change...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.The novelist Romesh Gunesekera can't wait to tell us about Kunming, which is so unlike any other modern Chinese city...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

It's over the mountains, it has no major roads, it's too dangerous, or tourists don't get it at all. Five writers with a desire for travel or living elsewhere recall a city that once captured their hearts and minds for reasons of secrecy or isolation, or simply being off limits.Novelist Nicholas Shakespeare once lived in Hobart, Tasmania, and reveals to us its convict and whaling past, and the story of a monkey...Producer Duncan MinshullFirst broadcast in April 2013.

Recorded at the Laugharne Live Festival 2014, in the grounds of Laugharne Castle, West Wales. Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Poet and musician Twm Morys explores the links between Wales's poetic heritage and Dylan Thomas's writing. Drawing on memories of living in Thomas's hometown of Swansea, he considers whether Thomas's writing is universally acknowledged to represent the cultural landscape that nurtured its creation.

Five leading writers and artists reflect on the ways in which they connect with one of Wales's most famous cultural exports, Dylan Thomas. Linking up from New York, writer, poet and activist Kevin Powell looks at Dylan Thomas's far-reaching influence on Black American writers, from his own introduction to Thomas's words in the new poetry and spoken-word scene happening in New York in the early 90s, to the new wave of Black American artists inspired through hip-hop, spoken word and America's oral tradition. Recorded in front of an audience at the Laugharne Live Festival.