John Baptist Dasalu and fighting for freedom

Jake Subryan Richards reads the letter sent by a captured man who arrived in Cuba in 1854

• 15 mins

A Brazilian soprano in jazz-age Paris

Adjoa Osei celebrates Elsie Houston, who mixed Afro-Brazilian folk with European opera.

• 15 mins

Kawanabe Kyōsai and Yukio Mishima

Japanese cultural experimentation: painter, Kyōsai 1831-1889 & writer, Mishima 1925-1970

• 45 mins

Windows

From Rear Window to stained glass, TB to paintings at Dulwich: Shahidha Bari hosts.

• 44 mins

New Generation Thinkers: Alexander and the Persians

Julia Hartley asks why we call Alexander "the Great".

• 13 mins

Opium Tales

Ways of seeing the trade triangle from Confessions of an Opium Eater to modern novels.

• 12 mins

Pause for Thought

From the bracket & exclamation mark to emojis - Florence Hazrat's history of punctuation

• 14 mins

Odessa Stories

Matthew Sweet explores the work of Soviet Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel

• 45 mins

Mental Health

Anne McElvoy looks at ASMR, clean air, loneliness and a memoir exploring mental health.

• 45 mins

Soho

130 acres of central London synonymous with sex and shadiness immortalised in film

• 44 mins

New Thinking: Flooding and Energy

Can old field names and labelling energy sources help us cope better with climate change?

• 34 mins

Speaking Welsh

Catherine Fletcher with Richard King, Caryl Lewis, Elen Ifan and Seiriol Davies

• 45 mins

Soil

John Gallagher and guests dig deep into the significance of soil

• 45 mins

Gandhi, Indian Architecture

Rana Mitter looks at a new play at the National Theatre about the man who murdered Gandhi

• 45 mins

Goddesses

Christopher Harding explores the feminine divine with Ronald Hutton and others

• 43 mins

Tattoos

Shahidha Bari traces the move from markings on convicts and aristos to today's body art.

• 44 mins

The Tudor Mind

Donne, Hamlet, 16th century psychology and mathematics, Tudor portraits

• 44 mins

Tudor families

Tangled bloodlines, executions and a big, gold inflatable thing belonging to Henry VIII

• 44 mins

New Generation Thinkers: Ruffs in Jamestown

Lauren Working on what fashion reveals about C16th English settlers in America

• 14 mins

New Generation Thinkers: The Paradox of Ecological Art

Vid Simoniti considers eco-art, from Olafur Eliasson to videos by Bo Zheng

• 14 mins

New Generation Thinkers: Contesting an Alphabet

Mirela Ivanova on the countries claiming to be the birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet

• 14 mins

Oceans and the Sea

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Emily Shuckburgh and Joan Passey join Rana Mitter at Hay Festival

• 45 mins

Amia Srinivasan and Philosophical Genealogy

The Right to Sex is the title of Amia Srinivasan's new book. Christopher Harding hosts.

• 45 mins

Get Carter

Digging beneath the surface of the classic Brit noir film with director Mike Hodges.

• 45 mins

New Thinking: Uncovering Queer Communities

Hidden LGBTQ+ histories in Northern Ireland and queer cinema in contemporary China

• 39 mins

The Wolfson Prize 2022

Rana Mitter interviews the shortlisted authors for this prize for history writing.

• 45 mins

Victorian streets

Is that strong inescapable image of 19th century city streets in our heads the right one?

• 44 mins

John McGrath's Scottish Drama

Anne McElvoy revisits the 1973 play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

• 44 mins

South African writing

Damon Galgut discusses his Booker winning novel, The Promise, with Anne McElvoy

• 45 mins

Bloomsday, Dalloway Day and 1922

Shahidha Bari looks at the writing of Woolf and Joyce and what was really popular in 1922

• 45 mins