Radio 3 Essay

Bryan Pearce, a painter from St Ives in Cornwall, was born with the metabolic disorder phenylketonuria, which led to intellectual impairment and other health problems. As a teenager, he was encouraged by his mother and other artists to paint, and went on to enjoy a long and successful career, exhibiting throughout the UK. Tom Shakespeare celebrates his life and work.

Tom Shakespeare challenges stereotypical ideas about creativity and disability by celebrating five disabled artists, discussing how their impairments fuelled their genius. Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri was born near Aleppo in the year 973 AD, became partially sighted in childhood and went on to become the most famous poet in the Arab world. Although welcomed in the literary salons of Baghdad, Al-Ma'arri became an ascetic, who avoided other people, and refused to sell his poetry.

What makes a soldier able to kill? The German artist Herlinde Koebl describes her worldwide exploration into targets and explores how soldiers were trained in the First World War. Recorded in front of an audience at the Bundeswehr Military Museum in Dresden.

In the place where World War One was sparked off. Sarajevo theatre director Haris Pasovic explores its effect on the long history of nationalism in the Balkans.

What was the emotional, cultural and physical impact of the shells of World War One? Joanna Bourke explores their meaning to soldiers with an audience at the Imperial War Museum in London.

How did the war change Russia? Novelist Tatyana Tolstaya tells an audience at the Hermitage in St Petersburg about the effect of revolutionary change on her own grandmother.

For this Christmas edition of The Essay, recorded with an audience at Hotel National des Invalides, in Paris - the historic and ceremonial heart of the French Armed Forces -€“ filmmaker Christian Carion looks at heroism and the truce of Christmas 1914.

Oscar-winning screen writer Frederic Raphael reads the final essay in his series about living abroad across Europe, this time in Greece.

Oscar-winning screen writer Frederic Raphael on living in early 1960s Italy, where he mixes ancient Roman history, with a very personal experience of some of the key players in the Italian film industry.

Frederic Raphael gives an off-the-beaten-track perspective on Franco's Spain, during the late 1950s, where he lived in a small artistic community and witnessed the impact of grand politics on Spanish village life.

'Every man has two countries, his own and France' says Frederic Raphael, quoting Thomas Jefferson, as he begins his essay series about living abroad across Europe.

Oscar-winning writer Frederic Raphael reads the first of his essay series about living abroad throughout Europe between the 1940s and 60s, beginning with the first foreign country he ever lived in: England.

The last of five personal essays on the voice and radio. Broadcaster Fi Glover on how radio voices make the global local and the local global. Fi Glover has worked in almost every job that radio offers and is currently presenting the Listening Project on BBC Radio 4 - a programme in which her voice hardly appears whilst the voices of its contributors (ordinary people often at corners of their lives) are rich in personality and incident. Is radio good at not presenting and just listening? Has the BBC traditionally over-managed those who speak on its airwaves? And what of hate speech and hate radio? Why does the radio voice still reach deep into our hearts and minds in the era of screen-based living and social media? An essay given in front of an audience at the British Academy in London in October 2014 as part of a series of events marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dylan Thomas. Producer: Tim Dee.

The fourth of five personal essays on the voice and radio. BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Roger Phillips describes his job as the listening anchorman of the station's daily phone-in programme. What is is like to be the in the middle of a city as it talks to and of itself every day of the week? How does the city's voice manifest itself in the way it talks? Are there as many talkers in Newcastle or Bristol? What does the Liverpool voice do to the Liverpool mind? Thoughts too on victim culture and Scally jokes. An essay given in front of an audience at the British Academy in London in October 2014 as part of a series of events marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dylan Thomas. Producer: Tim Dee.

The third of five personal essays on the voice and radio. Former BBC journalist and now media professor David Hendy explores how, in the early years of radio, the voices coming through the airwaves were heard and regarded. Why did a heard voice carry more swaying power than written words, why did a radio voice carry - so experiments and test showed - even more potency? How did radio become a tool for demagogues? Why are our ears susceptible? An essay given in front of an audience at the British Academy in London in October 2014 as part of a series of events marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dylan Thomas. Producer: Tim Dee.