Weapons, real and symbolic
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do weapons exert real and symbolic power, both now and in history?
Joining Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round table discussion programme about ideas are:
The former soldier and politician Tobias Ellwood
The sculptor Hew Locke, whose artworks exploring colonial power have featured weaponry
The Renaissance historian Catherine Fletcher, whose latest book is The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires
The historian and broadcaster Mark Urban, whose books include Tank and Rifles
and
Hailey Austin, Lecturer in Visual Media and Culture at Abertay University who researches comics and videogames.
Producer: Eliane Glaser
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Your time starts now. |
| 0:07.2 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:09.4 | Absolutely right. |
| 0:11.5 | So, you might like to know that the BBC makes loads of other podcasts. |
| 0:15.6 | Really? |
| 0:16.4 | Wow. |
| 0:17.2 | Many of them are very funny. |
| 0:19.1 | Which I think means... |
| 0:20.3 | A hatful of ha-hars. And energy. Even if we do very funny. Which I think means... A hatful of ha haas. |
| 0:21.7 | And energy. |
| 0:39.7 | Even if we do say so ourselves. I agree 100% of that. Find them all on BBC Sounds. Just tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Just search comedy on BBC Sounds. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. You're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:39.6 | The revolver, the candlestick, I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. You're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:44.4 | The revolver, the candlestick, the lead piping, the dagger, the rope. |
| 0:47.9 | In board games, the weapon is easy to define. |
| 0:51.1 | There are only a certain number of boxes on that checklist. |
| 0:53.2 | Life isn't so neat. |
| 0:57.5 | The gun, the drone, the tank, the knife, the mobile phone, |
| 1:03.9 | the straight of Hormuz, the narrative, the language. There are weapons and then there are those things that can be weaponised. We'll track them tonight in a week that began with a shooting at the |
| 1:09.7 | White House correspondentrespondence dinner |
| 1:11.3 | and continued with the terrorist knife attack in Golders Green. |
| 1:15.6 | And we'll go back much further to the rules of the dual and gun control in the Europe |
... |
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