Free Thinking - 18th Century
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2014
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If Mrs Thatcher thought she was living again through Victorian England, we are now living through the eighteenth century. This special edition of Free Thinking explores London as the centre of the world then and now, financial bubbles bursting then and now, and the lust for consumption then and now, whether of bodies or bodices. Philip Dodd brings together the MP and author Kwasi Kwarteng, historians Helen Berry, Jerry White and AN Wilson and playwright April De Angelis for a discussion which is part of BBC Radio 3's eighteenth century season of programming.
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, it's 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 at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | 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. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:34.1 | For more information and our terms of use, |
| 0:36.2 | go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:40.4 | London, an overweening global city. |
| 0:44.8 | Reckless financial speculation, new cultural networks, the Scottish question, a seemingly bottomless appetite for consumption. |
| 0:54.0 | If this sounds like a description of present-day Britain, it is and it is not. |
| 0:59.3 | It's also an account of Britain in the 18th century, |
| 1:02.2 | the subject of a radio three season which runs throughout this month. |
| 1:06.9 | The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, |
| 1:10.1 | one said that the present changes everything in the past. |
| 1:14.0 | He was right. |
| 1:15.1 | Look at the way Margaret Thatcher remade Victorian England in her own image, |
| 1:19.2 | or the way the great French revolutionary painter Jean-Louis David dressed the Roman Republic in Jacobin colours. |
| 1:26.3 | Our renewed interest in the 18th century is at least in part |
| 1:29.1 | a matter of grasping that time in terms of our own interests. Or maybe we're condemned to relive |
| 1:35.4 | the 18th century again, not having learnt its lessons the first time round. Well, in this, |
| 1:41.4 | the first free-thinking programme of the 18th century season |
| 1:44.2 | will be exploring how its ambitions, tragedies and experiences foreshadow our own. |
... |
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