Proms 2017 Proms Extra: Talk

Ahead of tonight's performance of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Richard Davenport-Hines, author of The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs and historian and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Daisy Hay consider how opium became a stimulus to creativity in 19th-century Paris, where writers such as Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Mallarmé wrote under the drug’s influence.

Edited version broadcast on BBC Radio 3 during tonight's interval.

Booking is not required for this event. Entry is on a first-come-first-served basis (doors open from 30 minutes before the event begins; capacity is limited).

Image: Dr Daisy Hay © Steven Haywood