Syria: hope and poetry

Is idleness ever a virtue? In a world that seems to privilege utility and productivity above all else, Matthew Sweet considers whether we can rethink the importance of doing nothing. His guests for Radio 4's late night ideas discussion programme are:Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The ...  Show more

Do individuals or broader forces shape history? In the 2025 Reith lectures on BBC Radio 4, Rutger Bregman argues that small groups of individuals can have an outsize influence and he looks to examples in history from suffragism to the ending of slavery. In the Free Thinking studi ...  Show more

To mark a decade since protests first began in Syria, we are bringing you the stories and experiences of five different Syrians, in their own words. Omar Alshogre is now a student at Georgetown University, and he was 15 when he attended his first protest in 2011 and was subsequen ...  Show more

This is a conversation with Asser Khattab, a Syrian writer who has reported on Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq for various international news outlets. We spoke about his essay for New Lines Magazine, "

This is a conversation with Banah Ghadbian. She’s a Syrian activist  whose dissertation “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s  Protests, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege” was the subject of our conversation. As usual, we ended up talking about a lot ...

BBC Arabic reporter Dima Babilie marks 10 years since the Arab Spring and speaks to poets, film-makers and artists about how that moment of revolutionary change transformed their lives, their countries and their art. When the protests first broke out in Syria, Dima was a student ...  Show more