大象传媒

Philip Dodd discusses a new cache of letters between Philip Larkin and his lover Monica Jones, which only came to light after Monica Jones's death in 2001. Nearly 2000 letters, postcards and telegrams cover every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship from when they first met in 1946 until Larkin's death in 1985. Poets Fiona Sampson and Anthony Thwaite - who edited the letters - join Philip Dodd to discuss them, with actor Oliver Ford Davies live in studio reading a selection of extracts.

The Comprehensive Spending Review announced yesterday by the Chancellor, George Osborne, means one thing for certain. The British State is about to get much smaller. Phillip discusses the intellectual underpinnings of British attitudes to the state from Hobbes to Hayek. He's joined by political philosophers Jeremy Jennings and Rodney Barker to examine how arguements about the relationship between the individual and the government present competing versions of the past.

Philip also talks to film director Clio Barnard about her hugely anticipated debut film, The Arbor. The film tells the true story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar who died aged in 1990, aged 29, leaving behind her ten-year-old daughter, Lorraine. The Arbor catches up with Lorraine in the present day, also aged 29, and in prison after being convicted of the manslaughter of her two year old son. The film employs an unusual documentary device of actors, on screen, lip synching the real voices of all the interviewees.

And the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat discusses her new book, a reflection on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. It's inspired by Albert Camus and his relatioinship with French Algeria and tells the story of artists who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands.