'Chinese Style'
Thursday 24 April 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Rana Mitter and guests discuss the British fashion for 'Chinese Style' in the 17th and 18th centuries, as displayed in a new exhibition in Brighton.
Chinese Style
Pair of shoes by Stead & Simpson,
English,
1925 Victoria & Albert Museum
Playlist
The Orwell Prize
Rana Mitter interviews Raja Shehadeh, the winner of this year's most prestigious prize for political writing -The Orwell Prize. Which work of the past year has best achieved George Orwell's aim to "make political writing into an art" as he himself did with books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Down and Out in Paris and London? The subjects on this year's shortlist range from Guantanamo Bay and radical Islam in Britain to the life of the great anti-slave campaigner William Wilberforce and how the liberal left has lost its way.
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh is published by Profile.
To find out more about the Orwell Prize click here.
Parag Khanna
Parag Khanna is an important voice in geopolitics, global governance, and Asian and European affairs. For his latest book he has been traveling the world - from Azerbaijan to Libya and to the backwaters of China - to describe what he sees is a major shift in the global power structure. In "The Second World" he claims that the moment of American supremacy is over and that the new global order will be equally dictated by China and by Europe as well as by the United States. He warns of global conflict, as new superpowers compete for control of energy and natural resources in regions like Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Parag Khanna talks to Rana Mitter about what's at stake as competing powers attempt to win influence across the globe. What's in it for the winners - and the losers?
The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna is published by Allen Lane.
Palestinian Arabs
During the 1948 war with the nascent state of Israel over a million Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes or fled into neighbouring Arab states. In tonight's programme Rana hears about the Nakba archive, a unique collection of filmed eye-witness testimonies of 'al Nakba' - 'the catastrophe' - from Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. A resource of memory, both of traumatic events and of cultural practices which threatened to disappear with a generation.
Chinese Whispers
Also on the programme - Rana and Craig Clunas review 'Chinese Whispers' at the Brighton Pavilion a celebration of 'Chinoiserie' those objects inspired by the silk, porcelain and lacquer of centuries-old English merchant trade with China, and looks into the story behind this fanciful imagery of an imaginary China.
Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930 is at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery at the Brighton Pavilion from 3rd May.
