Monday 09:00-09:45
Rpt: Mon 21:30-22:00
Setting the week's cultural agenda.
8 May 2006
This week Andrew Marr is joined by Jonathan Tokeley, Dawn Ades, Sir David Hare and D J Taylor.
Who ought to own ancient artefacts: the countries in which they are found or the countries that find - and can look after - them? The restorer (and convicted smuggler) JONATHAN TOKELEY argues against the widely accepted view that past acquisitions, like the Elgin Marbles, should be returned, claiming that far from solving the problem, such political correctness is hastening the destruction of ancient treasures. Rescuing the Past: The Cultural Heritage Crusade is published by Imprint Academic.
Georges Bataille represented in the late 1920s an intellectual, internal opposition to André Breton's Surrealism, in the form of a magazine that attracted many of the best non-conformist poets, artists and writers of the age. A new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, curated by DAWN ADES, looks at this Undercover Surrealism. UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille is at the Hayward Gallery from 11 May to 30 July.
SIR DAVID HARE talks about his latest play, an adaptation of Maxim Gorky's Enemies, a play about unrest between workers and factory owners in Russia before the revolution. Despite being written exactly a hundred years ago, the play's themes of social and moral conflict, and its questioning of whether our beliefs are led by our social circumstances, are surprisingly current. Enemies is at the Almeida Theatre in London and runs until 24 June.
In bygone days, amateurism - in sport anyway - was a byword for sportsmanship, fair play and honour, so why, less than a hundred years later, is it used to refer to cack-handed novices, while professionalism, barely a respectable word at the time, has come to embody competence, respectability and a job well done? D J TAYLOR has written On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport which is published by Yellow Jersey Press.
Next week: Sulayman Al-Bassam
Frank Gardner
Matthew Pearl
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites
