12 March 2008
Wednesday 12 March 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Kenan Malik tours Liverpool city centre's oldest building, the Bluecoat, to see how the art venue has been transformed by a 12 million pound refit.
And he talks to Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis about Islam's early impact on Europe.
The Bluecoat
Hew Locke
Sin Eater
Courtesy of the Bluecoat, Liverpool.
Click here for images from the Bluecoat.
Playlist
The Bluecoat
The Bluecoat is the oldest building in Liverpool city centre and Britain's oldest arts centre.
Poised between the traditional shopping district and the Paradise Project, the biggest redevelopment project in Europe at the moment, this former school for destitute children is at the heart of the city, and provides a unique space in which artists' studios, gallery, performance and public spaces combine.
This weekend it reopens after a multimillion-pound refurbishment.
Kenan Malik looks around with the architect who created it.
Click here for images from the Bluecoat.
The Bluecoat opens on Saturday, 15 March.
David Levering Lewis
Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis puts forward his revisionist theory about the role of Islam in early Europe.
He suggests that a different outcome in the 8th century battle of Poitiers might have brought about an Islamised medieval Europe and seen the arrival of the enlightenment three hundred years earlier.
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 is published by W W Norton & Co.
Redacted
Kenan Malik also reviews Brian de Palma's new film, Redacted.
De Palma is another mainstream Hollywood director to put the American intervention in Iraq under the spotlight.
His film presents a fictionalised account of a real event under investigation - the rape of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of five members of her family by American soldiers.
Redacted is released in cinemas on Friday, 14 March.
Robert Crawford
Robert Crawford, the award winning Scots poet, reads from his new collection of poems, Full Volume, already being hailed as his best work.
Full Volume is published by Cape Poetry.
