Thought Portal

The Palace of Dreams is a novel set in the Ottoman empire but used by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare to reflect on the totalitarian state. Lea Ypi has been reading the novel which was banned two weeks after publication in 1981, but it had already sold out. Matthew Sweet looks at this and other examples of fiction exploring dreams, power and bureaucracy from Kafka to Dickens and Gospodinov. This Bulgarian novelist won the 2023 International Booker prize for his novel Time Shelter, which New Generation Thinker Mirela Ivanova has been reading. Also joining the conversation is Roger Luckhurst, Professor at Birkbeck University London who studies literature, film and cultural history.

The Great Library of Alexandria had a mission to collect every book in the world. In attempting to do so it created the foundations for the systems and structures of public libraries that we know today. We discuss the development of libraries, our emotional attachment to them and their pupose in the digital age.

Islam Issa's new book traces the development of Alexandria. He joins Andrew Pettegree, author of The Library: A Fragile History, Fflur Dafydd whose murder mystery story The Library Suicides is set in the National Library of Wales and academic Jess Cotton who is researching the history of loneliness and the role played by public libraries as hubs for communities. Laurence Scott hosts.

Andrew Pettegree is a Professor at St Andrews University and the author of The Library: A Fragile History Fflur Dafydd is a novelist and screenwriter who writes in Welsh and English. She is the author of BAFTA Cymru nominated thrillers 35 awr and 35 Diwrnod and her novel The Library Suicides has also been made as a film Y Llyfrgell. Dr Jess Cotton from the University of Cambridge has been researching Lonely Subjects: Loneliness in Postwar Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1945-1975 Islam Issa is a Professor at Birmingham City University, author of Alexandria: The City that Changed the World. He is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council to share academic research on radio. You can hear him discussing the Shakespeare collection at the Birmingham Library in an Arts and Ideas podcast episode called Everything to Everybody - Shakespeare for the people

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, by film critic Phuong Le and by Peter Salmon - author of a biography of Derrida - he's been investigating the ideas of the Vietnamese thinker Tran Duc Thao who inspired some of Derrida's work.

The Sympathizer and the new novel The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen are out now. You can hear Phuong Le in a Free Thinking discussion about Marlene Dietrich https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q8cq and about Billy Wilder https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p1dx Peter Salmon's biography of Derrida is called An Event, Perhaps. You can hear him talking about that in a Free Thinking called Derrida and post truth https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nc7t Free Thinking also has a playlist exploring different takes on the idea of Home and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mb66k

Producer: Harry Parker