This week on Inside Culture presenter Fionn Davenport speaks to Belfast born painter Colin Davidson about his new exhibition of nudes – ‘Ten Night Paintings’ at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin. Davidson is one of Ireland’s leading portrait artists whose paintings of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Angela Merkel are known internationally. He guides Fionn about his exhibition and discusses his work and his subjects.
Colin Davidson & Fionn Davenport
To many, Joseph Stalin was a brutal dictator, a mass murderer and a tyrant but try to imagine him as a devoted book-worm, an avid reader who would consume hundreds of volumes of history, literature, biography and memoir. The image of the Russian leader curling up on a couch with a good book is a difficult one to picture but by the time of his death Stalin had a book collection of over 20,000 volumes. Professor of History and International Relations at UCC, Geoffrey Roberts will be speaking at the Dublin Festival of History (Sept 23- Oct 08) on Stalin’s books and he joins Fionn in studio to shed light on Uncle Joe’s bedside reading.
Steven Poole is a British author of a book called Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. It looks at how ideas, once discarded or neglected have found their way back into current research and the way we live our lives today. It takes in the world of philosophy, science, technology and business and asks us to, well, as the title says, to rethink the history of ideas. Are there any new ideas out there?
Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Stephen Poole
Benedict Schlepper Connolly is a Dublin based composer whose new album The Weathered Stone will soon be launched. It’s a minimal meditation on the natural world, inspired by landscape, old maps and memories. Benedict introduces one of the tracks from the album, Beekeepers, which is inspired by an old photograph of him and his father beside their beehives in Co.Sligo.
Broadcast on 12 September 2016
