Memory, The Wasp Factory, New Generation Thinker Rebecca Steinfeld

Available for over a year

Can we choose what we want to remember and what we want to forget? "Memory Palace" is a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum inspired by Hari Kunzru's book of the same name. It presents a dystopian world in which remembering the past has been banned. Philip Dodd goes to the V&A to speak to Hari Kunzru about his new work, and discusses manipulation of memory, and our anxieties about forgetting, with the actor Edward Petherbridge, the historical novelist Lawrence Norfolk, and memory expert Professor Giuliana Mazzoni. On the sixteenth of February 1984 a first book by an unknown writer hit the bookshelves. The story of murder and mayhem told by sixteen year old Frank Cauldhame was called The Wasp Factory and it was met with a mixture of admiration and disgust. Thirteen years later The Wasp Factory was included in a list of one of the top one hundred books of the twentieth century. The writer Val McDermid talks to Philip Dodd about this remarkable book and its impact, and her friend and fellow writer Iain Banks. And historian, Rebecca Steinfeld, one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers, on "the war of the wombs" in Israel, a battle that pits Jewish against Arab reproductive power.