Arts and Ideas

Jeremy Deller and Fiona McCarthy have each curated an exhibition looking at the art of William Morris. David Cromer's production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town was an off Broadway hit. Now the actor director is staging it in London. Ken Burns won an Emmy for his documentary about The American Civil War. Anne McElvoy has been watching his new series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and discusses it with historian Charlie Laderman and DD Guttenplan, who writes for The International Herald Tribune, The Nation and The New York Times.

Rana Mitter talks to three people who have been exploring their own relationship with the Jewish faith: writer and broadcaster David Baddiel, the Israeli historian Professor Shlomo Sand and the journalist Julie Burchill

Sherlock Holmes is investigated by Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet as the Museum of London opens an exhibition. Literary critic Alex Clark gives her verdict as the Man Booker Prize is announced. Also the relevance of Plato and Aristotle to contemporary life are debated by the American novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Armand Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London.

Anne McElvoy talks to Phyllida Lloyd about playing Shakespeare in a female prison in her new version of Henry IV. Tim Marlow, Karen Lang, and Daniel Johnson discuss reading history through the paintings of Kiefer and Polke ahead of next month's 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. And the man often touted as France's greatest writer has just won this year's Nobel prize for Literature. Anne talks about the contribution of Patrick Modiano to film as well as literature with Ian Christie and Akane Kawakami.

Canadian filmmaker and originator of the body horror genre, David Cronenberg covers topics as wide ranging as consumption, cancer, and creativity as he talks about his debut novel and new film. Shami Chakrabarti discusses her work as a human rights campaigner, and the idea of anger as a motivating force. Plus Tim Minchin on turning Storm, a poem he performed in a live set, into a graphic novel.Presenter: Matthew Sweet. Producer: Ella-mai Robey

Colm Toibin is one of Ireland's finest writers, whose books explore issues such as Catholicism, immigration and homosexuality. This month he has published Nora Webster - a novel set in Ireland in the late 1960s which features a cameo appearance from one of his characters in Brooklyn. In 2012 he published a re-imagining of the life of the Virgin Mary - The Testament of Mary. As booking opens this week for this year's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead, hear the conversation he recorded with Philip Dodd at the 2012 festival. First broadcast on 6th December 2012.

At a time when the special relationship between the UK and the US is under particular scrutiny, Anne McElvoy talks to the American Ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, about the politics of power and takes a look with Matt Wolf at sexual politics in Hollywood in the new Anglo-American production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, starring Lindsay Lohan and Richard Schiff.

Rana Mitter has a first-night review of Electra with Kristin Scott Thomas from Professor Edith Hall and Susannah Clapp; historian Andrew Roberts talks about his new biography of Napoleon and Katie Hill discusses the most extensive to date UK exhibition of Ai Weiwei's artworks just opening at Blenheim Palace.

Matthew Sweet examines our contradictory attitudes to China and it's culture with the film historian Sir Christopher Frayling and the Chinese ceramics expert Stacey Pierson, who has been to see the British Museum's new exhibition about Ming. Padraig Reidy who writes for Index on Censorship and Rob Gifford of the Economist discuss the merits of Tim Berners Lee's Magna Carta for the web. And novelist Neel Mukherjee talks about his Man Booker Prize nominated book The Lives of Others.

As the Schaubühne Berlin's production of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' opens at The Barbican, Anne McElvoy speaks to the play's director Thomas Ostermeier. American novelist Joseph O'Neill discusses his new book 'The Dog' and, continuing the series meeting this year's shortlisted authors for the Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith explains the connected stories which comprise her novel 'How to Be Both'.

Fukuyama and Howard Jacobson are interviewed by Philip Dodd. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published an essay which he titled “The End of History?" He's just published Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker prize in 210 for his comic novel The Finkler Question. His new book J is a dystopian love story.

Steven Pinker's research at Harvard is into language and cognition. His new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century explores the links between syntax and ideas. Will Self experiments with language and literary form. Will Self's new book Shark links an incident in World War II with an American resident in a therapeutic community in London overseen by psychiatrist Zack Busner. They join Matthew Sweet for a Free Thinking programme about language.

Scientist Susan Greenfield, painter Fiona Rae, poet Paul Farley and artist and TV presenter Matt Collings discuss abstract art past and present. The event recorded in front of an audience at the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern is chaired by Anne McElvoy. Part of a series of broadcasts tying into BBC 4 Goes Abstract

Martin Amis talks to Philip Dodd about his reputation for courting controversy and his 14th novel The Zone of Interest. Recorded in front of an audience as part of the BBC Proms.

Rudy's Rare Records stars Lenny Henry as the son who works alongside his father in a record shop. The Radio 4 comedy has been adapted for stage and is being performed with live music at Birmingham Rep and the Hackney Empire. In a conversation recorded in front of an audience at The Studio at Birmingham Rep, Lenny Henry talks to Matthew Sweet about performing on radio, stage and screen and his campaign for better Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) representation.