2 May 2007
Wednesday 2 May 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Playlist
Contemporary Utopias
Robert Service, the biographer of Lenin and Stalin, joins Philip Dodd to discuss his new book: a history of world communism.
The communist dream of equality was the foremost utopian project of the twentieth century. So does its end mean that we have entered an age without such hopes? And can we live without utopias?
Philip Booth, editor of 'Towards a Liberal Utopia?' disucusses an idea of utopia based on the free market. Dr Dylan Evans explains why he is spending eighteen months leading the 'Utopia Experiment', an attempt to live out a scenario of what life might be like after environmental and economic calamity.
'Comrades Communism: A World History' by Robert Service is published by Macmillan.
The Poetry of Medicine
Science and the liberal arts can sometimes seem worlds apart. What, for example, does poetry have to say about medicine?
Philip puts this question to the country's top neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh. They discuss 'Signs and Humours' an anthology which examines how poets have written about the body over the past two thousand years.
Molly Dineen
The documentary maker Molly Dineen has specialised in exploring institutions undergoing radical change from the Welsh Guards, to the House of Lords via London Zoo.
She explains why she has turned her attention to the Britain's troubled countryside in her new film, 'The Lie of the Land'.
