Start the Week gets emotional at the Free Thinking Festival

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

Harriet Shawcross is a film-maker whose first book Unspeakable reflects on how, as a teenager, she stopped speaking at school for almost a year, communicating only when absolutely necessary. It mixes personal experience with travel diaries and interviews. Ambassador William J. Burns is known as America’s ‘secret diplomatic weapon’. Having served five presidents and ten secretaries of state, he has been central to the past four decades’ most consequential foreign policy episodes. Now retired from the US Foreign Service, he is President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has written The Back Channel: American Diplomacy in a Disordered World. Kathryn Tickell is widely acclaimed as the world’s foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes. Presenter for BBC Radio 3's "Music Planet" she has just released Hollowbone with her new band The Darkening. Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. He gave the Free Thinking Lecture 2019 which you can also find as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast.

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.
0:33.2	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:37.5	Hello, I'm Tom Sutcliffe.
0:38.9	Thank you for listening to this edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4.
0:42.7	We're at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead this week,
0:45.8	so an extra bonus at the end, questions from the audience.
0:54.0	Hello, we're in Gateshead this week at the Free Thinking Festival where emotions have been running high all weekend.
1:00.0	That's the theme this year. Emotion, and we have with us a historian of emotions, Thomas Dixon, to talk about how social changes govern what we can feel and how we can express it.
1:11.6	If you think your feelings belong to you alone, you might be surprised.
1:15.2	Harriet Shaw crosses book, Unspeakable, deals with the inability to express feeling,
1:19.6	an anxiety that can sometimes leave people entirely mute,
1:23.0	while the musician, Catherine Tickel, mostly lets the Northumbrian pipes do the talking for her with a fluency
1:29.4	that reaches across language barriers. Also with us, a man skilled at keeping the most difficult
1:34.8	conversations going and disruptive emotions at bay, the American diplomat William Burns, who served
1:40.9	five American presidents through some of the most turbulent events of recent history.
1:46.4	Bill Burns, your book The Back Channel is about that process. Is my assumption right that
1:52.8	emotions always have to be kept at bay, or are there times when emotion is diplomatically useful?
1:59.1	Well, first, it's great to be here. I think one of the misconceptions about diplomacy
2:03.6	is that it's simply a profession of manners,
	...

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