Arts reviews for the Art Show on Yorvik Radio

Description

Written and recorded for the Arts Show, Yorvik Radio, produced by Miles Salter, April to June 2020. Sample review script, 3/6/2020: 

The highlight of the week was Hay Festival.  One of the advantages of lockdown is that you can zoom in, as you might say, to a lot of otherwise inaccessible events.  So I sampled philosophy, physics, history, psychology and well-being, spirituality, nature, economics, as well as language and literature, and came out of it with a new reading list full of seductive goodies.  I started the week with Ali Smith The Beginning of the And –, in which she spoke over a film.  It was a wonderful, lyrical, meandering exploration of words, including an in-depth analysis of the origins of the word ‘and’.  I really wanted to watch it again, but it had been shown just as a one-off performance and isn’t on the Hay Player, much to my disappointment.  But all the others are, and for £10 you can access a huge collection of talks for a year. So this week William Dalrymple talked about his new book on the rise of the East India Company – a small company based in a street in London which gained a massive army on the Indian sub-continent by the end of the eighteenth century – and massive political power – and how Indian politics, the end of the Mogul Empire and the shift into several states within the subcontinent affected the rise of the British Empire. And more on politics with A C Grayling, the distinguished philosopher, who was talking about his new book The Good State, which is one I shall be reading, about what he called the ‘unprecedented assault’ on democracy in recent years.  Prof Grayling did say he has been angry in recent months and years, but he assured us that the book itself is calm and measured. Someone else calm and measured was Jim Al-Khalili, who I often listen to on Radio 4, taking us all completely out of ourselves with ‘the world according to physics’, into what he called ‘the ocean of the unknown’ – touching on infinity, time, dark matter, - and whether the expansion of the universe is like stretching a spring or stretching blu tak.  And if all that doesn’t sound spiritual enough, there was Diana Beresford-Kroeger from Ontario, on spirituality and trees -  ‘You and I’ she said, ‘have a covenant with nature’, and she gave us a journey through botany via Celtic spirituality and eco-politics, which I found an irresistible combination.  She was introduced, appropriately enough, by people from Black Mountains College - Black Mountains College hasn’t even started its first programmes yet, but is designing holistic degrees blending science and the arts.  And there was more comfort from Claudia Hammond introducing her book with the great title  – The Art of Rest – based on a big research project surveying habits of rest and attitudes, often negative, to resting.  What is rest exactly?  Well, doing nothing is not something people tend to find restful. But activities that mean you can switch off from participation, be somehow alone, but still look on in some way seems to work well – hence binge-watching Netflix, for example, or going for a walk.  What was interesting for me, however, was that the winning restful activity from the survey was – READING. Hoping for more of this, I logged on to the  economist Daniel Susskind ‘a world without work’.  But he was talking about AI, the idea of how technology might mean increased unemployment, and about the things machines can or can’t do in the same way as human beings – even though they can now drive cars, and even make medical diagnoses.  But probably my most favourite talk of all – was David Crystal, the guru of language study – talking about conversation, specifically English conversation  –   and it had that quality you get with very experienced speakers – the joyous way in which it all looked very simple and fluent, as if he was just having a chat with you (‘Let’s Talk’ he called the event, and indeed his book), and yet was deeply informed and full of insights.  Hay Festival aims, it says, ‘to imagine the world as it is and as it might be.’ Half a million attended from around the world and donations reached £350,000,  as they said ‘It feels like a moment of adventure and opportunity’ – so I’ll be watching to see what they make of this enforced lock-down situation, and what it might mean they develop in future, as they ‘absorb the wonders’ as they said, of this digital event, and "think carefully about how to move forward."