Jason Mark visits Alaska's remote northern rim, and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean at a barbecue with Inuits, he reflects on the impact of our lust for hydrocarbons. Whilst the ice melts beneath them, so the search goes on for oil in these northern parts. As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season, Mark tries to square what he sees as the bitter ironies of climate change, confirmed by his encounters with Inuit hunters and others who describe how much the weather is warming. 

Producer: Mark Smalley. Published on December 11, 2015.

Northern Lights - Cornerstones: Alaska

Five writers recall clothes and accessories that resonate vividly in works of art:

Author and critic Stephen Bayley on a pair of glasses sported brilliantly in the film 8 1/2 by Marcello Mastroianni. So classic and cool are the frames, that we desire them today.

Producer Duncan Minshull. Published on January 13, 2016.

Federico Fellini's 8 1/2

Acclaimed writer A L Kennedy muses on the hell that is other people, kicking off with strangers. 

In Jean Paul Sartre's Play 'No Exit' one character declares, 'L'Enfer - c'est les autres' - hell is other people, and A L Kennedy has found herself very much behind this idea. As someone so unable to deal with other people that she works at home, making up imaginary friends, who even then don't always behave, she admits to not necessarily being the best person to dish out advice on relationships. However, in this series she wonders whether she's perhaps been a little harsh when it comes to 'other people'.

Today, she reveals why, despite being a solitary novelist with an existential fear of strangers, she has found herself hugging the odd one in the street. 

Written and read by A L Kennedy, the award-winning novelist, dramatist and broadcaster.
Producer: Justine Willett. Published on January 25, 2016.

Strangers

Acclaimed writer A L Kennedy muses on the hell that is other people, today looking at family.

As someone so unable to deal with other people that she works at home, making up imaginary friends, who even then don't always behave, A L Kennedy admits to not necessarily being the best person to dish out advice on relationships. However, in this series she wonders whether she's perhaps been a little harsh when it comes to 'other people'.

Written and read by A L Kennedy, the award-winning novelist, dramatist and broadcaster.
Producer: Justine Willett. Published on January 28, 2016.

Family

Daybreak.. and five writers set off on foot - and report back :

This time, novelist Nicola Barker negotiates the slopes of her back garden at 5am, winter-time. It's a mini-walk, full of massive muddy challenges and includes vigil of her 'benighted goldfish'..

Producer Duncan Minshull. Published on March 29, 2016.

Dawnwalks: Nicola Barker

Four centuries after Shakespeare's death, young scholars share new evaluations of his work - in a series of essays recorded in front of an audience in Shakespeare's old classroom at the Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon.

5.Siobhan Keenan on Shakespeare Beyond London

The Globe Theatre on the South Bank gives us such a clear image of productions of Shakespeare's plays in his own day, that it's easy to forget they were also performed far beyond London. Siobhan sets out to explain how Shakespeare and his fellow actors regularly toured the country, performing in spaces ranging from town halls and churches to large country houses.

Siobhan sheds light on why most of Shakespeare's plays were designed so that they could be performed anywhere - with call for few props and little scenery - in order to reveal the importance of touring to his career, and the emergence of Shakespeare as a cultural icon in Elizabethan and Jacobean England - and beyond. 

Siobhan Keenan is Reader in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at De Montfort University. 

BBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets have inspired. 

Producer: Beaty Rubens. Published on April 29, 2016.

Shakespeare 400: Shakespeare Beyond London

In this series of The Essay, recorded this week in front of an audience at the Hay Festival, five writers explore The Art of Storytelling. The writers include linguist Prof. David Crystal, broadcaster and musician Clemency Burton-Hill, Shakespeare scholar Prof. Emma Smith and novelist Jon Gower.

Today Edmund de Waal, artist and writer of the memoir 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' considers the idea of storytelling through objects, taking as his starting-point a fragment of 12th century porcelain he bought in a Chinese street-market.

Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes In Tune, Lunchtime Concert, Free Thinking and The Verb all broadcasting from the Festival. Published on May 30, 2016.

The Art of Storytelling: Edmund de Waal

In a week of broadcasts tracking the 100th anniversary of the first week of the Battle of the Somme, Radio 3's Essay series is featuring five new poems written in response to the battle. The poems have been commissioned by 14-18Now and these programmes will broadcast the poems for the first time and also hear from the poets about their inspiration and writing. 

4th July: Paul Muldoon: July 1st 1916, With the Ulster Division
5th July: Yrsa Daley-Ward: When your mother calls you, come.
6th July: Bill Manhire: Known Unto God
7th July: Jackie Kay: Private Joseph Kay
8th July: Daljit Nagra: On your 'A 1940 Memory'

Bill Manhire's poem was commissioned by 14-18 NOW:WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Writers' Centre Norwich. It was published by Gatehouse Press."

Producer: Tim Dee. Published on July 6, 2016.

Bill Manhire - Known unto God

In 1912 Freud compared psychoanalysis to using the telephone, an instrument he disliked. Reflecting on this fear of the phone, the poet and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jackson, from Nottingham Trent University, explores the telephone's voices in philosophy and fiction.

The Essay is recorded in front of an audience as part of Sound Frontiers: BBC Radio 3 live at Southbank Centre celebrating 7 decades of pioneering music and culture.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Fiona McLean. Published on September 28, 2016.

Telephone Terrors

Pauline Black, the singer who found fame with the ska band The Selecter, on how Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" helped her understand her place as a black girl adopted by a white family. She both identified with Scout, the tomboyish main character, while it was the first book she read in which the black characters "shared a dignity and gravitas". It allowed her to understand the racial tensions and hypocrisy which surrounded her childhood. "This novel gave the little black girl that timidly lingered inside me the security to come out and fight against racial injustice with my chosen profession, music."
Producer: Smita Patel. Published on November 1, 2016.

Pauline Black

Radio 3 Essay

Authored essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week. Each episode is full of insight, opinion and intellectual surprise from one expert voice. We aim to include as many episodes of The Essay in the download as we can but you'll find that some aren't included for rights reasons.

BBC Radio 3 Essays

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