4 April 2006
Tuesday 4 April 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Modernism: bringing beauty to the people or keeping art exclusive? Susan Hitch is joined by novelist AS Byatt and design writer Stephen Bayley to discuss what answers the huge new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum reveals...
Playlist
As a huge new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World, opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Susan Hitch is joined by novelist AS Byatt and design writer Stephen Bayley to discuss the modernist drive to build utopia in the rubble of the First World War. Is the legacy of that effort a continuing desire to bring beauty to the people, or a snobbish exclusivity?
Plus, Nigel Floyd joins Susan to review the new film about Britain's best-known, and last, hangman; Albert Pierrepoint, played by in the new movie that bears his name by Timothy Spall...
On the night the Orwell Prize for Political Writing is announced, Susan talks to the winner...
And are the consequences of neoconservative idealism in Iraq leading to a revival of the reputation of Henry Kissinger? One American academic tells Susan why his research into the record of American intellectuals in power has forced him to re-examine his preconceptions about the arch-practitioner of realpolitik...
FURTHER INFORMATION
Pierrepoint opens in cities across the country on Friday 7 April.
The six titles short-listed for the Book Award for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2005 are:
Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa by Ekow Eshun;
Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare;
Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting by David Lyon;
Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley;
The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt by Richard Webster;
I Didn't Do it For You: How the World Betrayed a Poor African Nation by Michela Wrong.
The winner of the Book Award for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2005 is Delia Jarrett-Macauley for her novel Moses, Citizen and Me, published by Granta. Her documentary about returning to Sierra Leone, 'Imaginary Homeland', was broadcast on BBC Radio Four on 31st March 2006, and is available to listen to again on the Radio 4 website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/pip/ssj2w/
Modernism: Designing a New World opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Thursday, and runs until 23 July.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/modernism . And later in the year, BBC2 will be broadcasting Dan Cruickshank's Modern Marvels, a four-part series exploring modernist architecture.
Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger by Bruce Kuklick is published by Princeton University Press on 12 April.
