Revenge and reconciliation
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What function do ceremonies like Armistice Day perform? How do we balance desires for reconciliation with feelings about revenge? How we remember wars and what commemoration means is much less settled than we might think. And that throws up questions, in times when conflicts are spreading close to us in western Europe, of how wars end and how we balance our concern for justice and peace with darker impulses?
Joining presenter Anne McElvoy for BBC Radio 4's roundtable discussion about the ideas shaping our world are: classicist Natalie Haynes whose most recent novel No End to this House re-imagines the story of Medea, former solider Ashleigh Percival-Borley, who is now an academic and on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council Duncan Wheeler, author of Following Franco and an academic studying contemporary Spain. neuro-scientist Nicholas Wright who advises the Pentagon and has written Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain and, Andy West, prison philosophy teacher and author of The Life Inside
Producer: Ruth Watts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought |
| 0:21.7 | that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.0 | Hello and welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me and Mikhailvoy. |
| 0:44.3 | On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month this week, Parliament and public buildings fell silent. |
| 0:52.5 | A couple of minutes of reflection to remember armistice day, |
| 0:56.6 | marking the moment the guns of the First World War fell silent. The news spread fast across |
| 1:03.0 | a shattered Europe. And although the armistice didn't end the fighting in Africa and Russia, |
| 1:08.7 | it does stand as a moment that marked the beginning of the end of |
| 1:12.8 | the conflict. The carnage of the war and the massive casualties still loom large in our memories |
| 1:18.9 | and in our imaginations too. Alan Bennett has scripted a film out in cinemas now called |
| 1:25.3 | The Coral. It follows a choir, losing male voices as the men go to |
| 1:30.3 | fight. The English exam curriculum is rarely without Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen poetry. And yet, |
| 1:37.3 | as I noted the armistice moment had come, I was in Germany at a big defence conference. The armistice |
| 1:43.7 | isn't marked there, |
... |
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