Can we still expect a meaningful job, stable income, a chance of owning property? How have expectations changed and what is the place of protest? Matthew Sweet's guests this week are: David Willetts is a former Universities Minister and now a life peer. The Rt Hon Lord Willetts FRS is also current President of the Resolution Foundation, Chair of the UK Space Agency and a visiting Professor at King’s College London. His books include The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back Dr Tiffany Watt Smith is Director for the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, London. Her books include Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune, and The Book of Human Emotions. She was chosen as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2014 and you can hear her in Free Thinking discussions about happiness, schadenfreude and she presented a short feature about the science of baby laughs. Professor Will Davies is a sociologist and political economist teaching at Goldsmiths University of London. His books include Nervous States: How feeling took over the world, The Happiness Industry: How the government and big business sold us wellbeing and This is Not Normal: The collapse of liberal Britain. Elizabeth Oldfield's latest book is called Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. She hosts The Sacred podcast and is a former director of Theos, a religion and society think tank.
Plus a report from an event this week in which the Royal Institute of Philosophy was paying tribute to its outgoing president, the political philosopher and ethicist Onora O’Neill, and welcoming her successor, the political philosopher Jonathan Wolff. We hear from Angie Hobbs, Paul, Tom Shakespeare, Grace Lockrobin, Onora O’Neill and Jo Wolff.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Shakespeare's Women
Dust, dirt and domesticity
Octavia Butler's Kindred
Essay writing
Travel, pleasure and peril
Dickens, Disney and copyright
New Thinking: Carols and Convents
Greek myth, goddesses and art
Prize Winners 2023
Harry Belafonte
Margaret Cavendish
Narnia and CS Lewis
Humboldt, soil, gardens and Frank Walter
New Thinking: Disability in Music and Theatre
Kadare, Gospodinov, Kafka and Dickens
Libraries
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AS Byatt and The Children's Book
Post-War Germany
Sam Selvon and The Lonely Londoners
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