Free Thinking - Jane Mayer Dark Money - Money & US Politics - Flora Nwapa's Efuru - African Literature - Emma Cline The Girls
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Dodd talks to Emma Cline whose first novel about teenage girls and the Charles Manson cult and our third 2016 New Generation Thinker Louisa Uchum Egbunike marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Efuru by Flora Nwapa - the first novel written by a Nigerian woman to be published. She's joined by editor and critic Ellah Allfrey to look at African writing today. Plus Dark Money - New Yorker writer, Jane Mayer examines how money has changed American politics. And she's joined by Professor Gary Gerstle and Dr James Boys to discuss the tensions between free speech and big donors, populists and libertarians.
Emma Cline's first novel The Girls is out now.
Jane Mayer's book is called Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US
Louisa Uchum Egbunike is at Manchester Metropolitan University. Louisa co-convenes an annual Igbo conference at SOAS
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. Find out more from our website and hear them introducing their research in the programme which broadcast on May 31st - available as an arts and ideas podcast.
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 when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.3 | On tonight's program, The Mother of African Fiction, Flora Nahuapa and and a novel Efferu, as well as a conversation |
| 0:39.2 | about writing an Africa now when literature is increasingly delivered, or so it's argued, |
| 0:45.1 | on the mobile phone in that continent, and an interview with Emma Klein, whose first novel |
| 0:50.2 | at 27 goes back to Charles Manson's California. We'll find out why. But first, the GOP, the Republican Party, the Tea Party, Conservative libertarianism, into that already heady mix has been stirred Donald Trump. A billionaire who claims one of the reasons to trust him is that he needs no campaign money from donors. |
| 1:13.0 | No one doubts that presidential candidates need billions of dollars to bankroll their campaigns. |
| 1:18.7 | And it's not only Republican candidates who do so. Bernie Sanders has criticised Hillary Clinton |
| 1:24.0 | for accepting money from what he sees as unsavory donors. |
| 1:28.3 | But what if money can and has reshaped the whole political landscape of the US |
| 1:35.3 | and particularly the Republican Party? |
| 1:37.3 | That's the argument of a new book, Dark Money, with a wonderful subtitle, |
| 1:42.3 | How a Secretive Group of Bill billionaires is trying to buy political |
| 1:45.6 | control in the US. |
| 1:47.2 | We'll widen out the conversation later to talk about American conservative libertarianism, |
| 1:53.0 | but now dark money. |
| 1:55.5 | Jane Mayer, its author joins me down the line from Washington. |
| 1:58.8 | Jane, welcome plutocrats have structured American |
| 2:01.8 | politics for a long time, Rockefeller Carnegie. What distinctive do you think about this generation? |
| 2:09.9 | Well, what we've been looking at here is a whole new generation of philanthropists that |
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