Jim Crace
Wednesday 14 March 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Playlist
What is the future for Burma?
Burma remains one of the world's most repressive regimes, whose military dictatorship has been fighting a long running battle with underground pro-democracy movements.
Isabel Hilton explores the nature of Burma's regime, with Thant Myint-U, who has written a new history of Burma, and the novelist Karen Connelly who has written a fictional account of a Burmese protest singer arrested by the dictatorship.
What is the future for Burma? What is the role of culture and religion? And should we be encouraged to visit this beautiful region of South East Asia?
Jim Crace
Jim Crace, one of Britain's most inventive novelists has set his latest work in an imagined America of the future.
This is America post apocalypse where machinery no longer functions, armed gangs roam the countryside and where the surviving population is struggling to the East Coast to escape the country by ship. Jim Crace discusses what fuels his vision for the future of America and mankind?
Dido and Aeneas
An unusual new adaptation of Purcell's classic opera Dido & Aeneas is opening at Sadler's Wells in London.
This brings opera and dance together and includes action in a giant tank of water. Ismene Brown reviews this underwater dance.
Monet's Pastels
And, as a new exhibition of Monet's pastels and drawings opens, the artists Tom Philips and Margaret Glass discuss the extraordinary history and power of pastels.
Isabel Hilton hears of a pre-revolutionary time in France when the academy believed that pastel paintings would overtake oils as the dominant form.
