Lists

The list of contributors joining Lisa Mullen: Henry Eliot, author of a book of bookish lists which details everything from the different deaths of Greek tragedians to the contents of Joan Didion's travel bag; Florence Hazrat, New Generation Thinker and historian of punctuation; Liam Young, author of a book about lists as a way of organising knowledge, from Ancient Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed; and Joanna Nolan, a researcher in sociolinguistics at SOAS who asks whether lists are ever private languages.

Eliot's Book of Bookish Lists, List Cultures by Liam Cole Young and An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Punctuation Mark by Florence Hazrat and The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca: Fact and Fiction by Joanna Nolan are out now and you can hear Joanna talking about that research in a previous episode called What Language Did Columbus Speak? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bs9p

A Radio 3 Essay from Florence Hazrat called Pause for Thought exploring the way punctuation has developed over the centuries is available now on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001767f

The Free Thinking programme website has a collection of discussions exploring The Way We Live Now including episodes about breakfast, hitchhiking, immortality, writing about money, tattoos, mental health https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072637b

Producer: Luke Mulhall