Free Thinking - Julian Barnes
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne McElvoy is joined by the Booker Prize-winning writer Julian Barnes to discuss the painters he admires, and his new collection of essays on 19th and 20th century artists. The Pakistani novelist and women's rights activist Bapsi Sidhwa talks about her 1978 novel The Crow Eaters, which is about to be re-published. And Anne discusses poetry inspired by light, and in particular the work of Jackson Mac Low with James Wilkes and Greg Lynall.
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 when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, on the show tonight, Julian Barnes talks to me about a lifetime appreciating visual art and the painters |
| 0:38.8 | he's set out to explore in his new book. Babsi Sidwa, Pakistan's best-known novelist, will be |
| 0:45.0 | talking to me about the republication of her most famous story, The Crow Eaters. And throwing |
| 0:50.7 | light on the art of verse, we'll be looking at poetry inspired by light. |
| 0:55.0 | As a mad scientist, buster lights a Bunsen burner flame that starts a series of processes that eventually releases the monster. |
| 1:05.0 | As an undertaker, Buster lights a Bunsen burner flame that starts a series of processes that awakes-n-a-drunk was about to be buried as a corpse. |
| 1:14.7 | The poet, composer and performance artist Jackson McLeod there, reading from one of his light poems in 1975, |
| 1:22.4 | more on the challenges and promise of illuminating poetry later on. |
| 1:27.6 | Julian Barnes is a prolific novelist and critic |
| 1:30.1 | and an author who can weave touching stories of modern lives |
| 1:33.8 | against a background of wider culture and history. |
| 1:37.1 | It's a lot easier to list the awards Barnes hasn't won than those he has. |
| 1:41.7 | He's carried off the man Booker and enjoyed recognition, rare for an English writer, |
| 1:46.2 | in France for his engagement in French culture, from Metroland, set between the London suburbs |
| 1:52.2 | and the heady freedoms of a young man's encounters with Paris, and Flobert's parrot, |
| 1:57.8 | his character's quest to track down that iconic animal, but also a search for |
| 2:02.5 | a deeper understanding of Anglo-French preoccupations. In a history of the world in ten and a half |
| 2:08.6 | chapters, he explored the story and presentation of one of the great naval disasters portrayed |
| 2:14.7 | in Gerico's 19th century painting The Raft of the Medusa. |
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