Arts & Ideas

Is authority a justly unfashionable quality that we should consign to the past? Or does it still have a place in political and business leadership, schools, medical settings and in the home? What is the difference between authority and power, how have historical shifts such as the advent of the internet affected public perceptions of authority, and how much should authority feature in the raising of children?
In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme about ideas past and present, Anne McElvoy and guests explore these questions and more.
Justine Greening is a former Conservative Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media who published a book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Sophie Scott-Brown is a philosopher and historian of anarchism
Peter Hyman is a former headteacher and adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer who writes a Substack, Changing the Story
Tom Simpson is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Producer: Eliane Glaser

How have attitudes to punishment changed over time, and what ideas about the rationale for punishment are circulating today? In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme, Matthew Sweet and guests explore the criminal justice system through history.
With:
Stephanie Brown, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull and BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinker on the scheme which puts research on radio
Scout Tzofiya Bolton, poet and broadcaster who presents on National Prison Radio, and for Radio 4 the Illuminated episode called The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag. Her poetry collection is called The Mad Art of Doing Time
Joanna Hardy-Susskind, criminal barrister and presenter for Radio 4 of a series called You Do Not Have To Say Anything
Stephen Shapiro, Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick
Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court judge and now Moral Maze panellist for BBC Radio 4 and author of a five-volume account of The Hundred Years War
Producer: Eliane Glaser

From an impoverished neighbourhood in South London, Charlie Chaplin became one of the most significant figures in the development of cinema. More recently, TV writers like Sophie Willan and Michaela Coel have transformed the way working class lives are depicted on TV, from the concerned paternalism of the 1960s to a more celebratory view from the inside in the 2020s. In this week's edition of Radio 4's arts and ideas discussion programme, Matthew Sweet charts these changes, and considers what they mean for our understanding of class categories in wider society. With TV historian Laura Minor, art historian Jacqueline Riding, novelist Adelle Stripe, and historian Samuel Johnson-Schlee. Plus, an interview with Ian La Frenais, co-creator of such comedy classics as The Likely Lads and Porridge.
The paperback of Adelle Stripe's memoir Base Notes, and Jacqueline Riding's book Hard Street: Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London, are both published in February.
Producer: Luke Mulhall

'The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must'. So claimed the powerful Athenians, according to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Plato tried to demonstrate that might does not make right, and thinkers ever since, from Hobbes and Rousseau to Kant and Carl Schmitt, have placed the idea that might is right at the centre of their political philosophies, for better or worse. Matthew Sweet traces the intellectual history of the idea, with Angie Hobbs, Margaret MacMillan, Lea Ypi, and Hugo Drochon.
Angie Hobbs' book Why Plato Matters Now, and Lea Ypi's book Indignity, are both out now, Hugo Drochon's book Elites And Democracy is published in March
Producer: Luke Mulhall

What do we mean when we talk about productivity?
Anne McElvoy and guests discuss labour in the context of both work and motherhood: what the language of childbirth tells us about how mothers and their bodies are viewed today; how the language of production and reproduction is used in the public and private contexts of the workplace, in macroeconomics, in the labour ward and at home; and the current public debates about parental and domestic labour, the maternal pay gap and the 'productivity puzzle'.
With:
John Callanan, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London
Beth Malory, Lecturer in English Linguistics at University College London
Patrick Foulis, author and journalist
Corinne Low, Associate Professor of Economics at the Wharton School and author of Femonomics
Helen Charman, Fellow in English at Clare College, Cambridge and author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
Producer: Eliane Glaser