Free Thinking 2006

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Matthew Sweet introduces more highlights from Radio 3's Free Thinking festival. Tonight's subject is history.

It's not where you come from, it's where you're going that matters. Duration 45 mins.

Listen to the debate.

Playlist

It's not where you come from, it's where you're going that matters
First there's a debate live from the Walker Art Gallery where Loyd Grossman - chairman of the Trustees of National Museums Liverpool - and his guests tried to work out whether it's where you come from, or where you're going that matters.

On the way they looked at what history was for, whether a return to religion is a backward step, if multiculturalism is dead and whether you can say sorry for the holocaust - and if so, what would it mean.

Howard Jacobson, James Woudhuysen, Juliet Gardiner and Kenan Malik discuss our national obsession with the past.

The Fused Rice Bowl
We close this Freethinking week with a drama, which takes as it's starting point one of Liverpool's most remarkable exhibits.

It's a rice bowl, just as it should be on one side, and horribly blistered and burned on the other. It was found just outside the centre of the destruction in Hiroshima, and it fired the imagination of the playwright Jim Morris.

You can hear the results in his new drama 'Fused Rice Bowl'.

Free Thinking 2006

Episode and Playlist Information

• 10 Nov 06 Fused Rice Bowl
• 9 Nov 06 OU Radio Lecture
• 8 Nov 06 Loneliness
• 7 Nov 06 Carl Djerassi on sex
• 6 Nov 06 The future & children
• 5 Nov 06 Complications
• 3 Nov 06 Brian Eno lecture

Free Thinking - related pages and programmes