Anne Applebaum, Ingrid Bergman, Herland
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne Applebaum's new book The Twilight of Democracy has the subtitle The failure of democracy and the parting of friends. She talks to Anne McElvoy about what happened when she tried to connect up with past friends whose politics are now different to her own. The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Will Abberley tells us about her view of fashion and why women should not seek to stand out because a focus on their appearance was counterproductive to them gaining more public power. Gilman conjured a female utopia in her 1915 book Herland. And 2020 New Generation Thinker Sophie Oliver from the University of Liverpool writes us a postcard about the actress Ingrid Bergman and the way she and her would-be biographer Bessie Breuer tried to carve out a different public image for a female star in a novel Breuer published in 1957 called The Actress.
Will Abberley's book is called Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture You might be interested in the Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf which looked at Yolande Mukagasana, Storm Jameson, Margaret Oliphant, Lady Mary Wroth and Charlotte Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwff and this Essay about another feminist utopia in the writing of Sarah Scott https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7hrw4
You can find previous Free Thinking conversations with Anne Applebaum to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts on Marxism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0x6m0 and Russian Nationalism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b094f9p0
Producer: Ruth Watts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.1 | Hello, I'm Anne McAlvoy, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, |
| 0:41.8 | Anne Applebaum's new book on the disruptions to liberal democracy since 1989, |
| 0:46.6 | and New Generation Thinkers on Ingrid Bergman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. |
| 0:50.9 | Coming up after this short message. |
| 0:56.8 | Hi, I'm Amal Rajan and I want to tell you about a new podcast from the BBC. It's called |
| 1:01.6 | Rethink. The podcast is all about the enormous opportunity we have to change what the future |
| 1:07.6 | looks like after the coronavirus pandemic. We've asked leading thinkers |
| 1:11.3 | from around the world to give us their three-minute audio essay on the kind of change they want |
| 1:15.9 | to see, covering issues such as travel, healthcare, homelessness, democracy and humility. What kind |
| 1:22.7 | of change can we expect? Will it be changed for the better? Or will we pick up where we left |
| 1:26.9 | off as if nothing |
| 1:28.1 | had happened? We created the Rethink podcast to find out. It's an opportunity for all of us to |
| 1:35.0 | consider the kind of change we want to see in our own lives and in our societies. Subscribe to |
| 1:40.7 | the Rethink Podcast Now, You can find it on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:52.1 | In 1915, the American author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, |
| 1:56.6 | published a novel which imagined a society composed entirely of women. |
| 2:02.4 | Later in today's program, I'll be discussing her vision and her views about what women should wear. |
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