Minds At War - Series 1

1. BBC Correspondent Allan Little reflects on C.R.W.Nevinson's great 1917 painting, Paths of Glory

C.R.W.Nevinson's painting, Paths of Glory, is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters which appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in the mud, against a backdrop of tangled barbed wire, somewhere on the Western Front.

Unsuprisingly, it was censored at the time.

Perhaps part of its shock value was in its title. In his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the 18th century poet, Thomas Gray, had declared 'the Paths of Glory lead but to the grave', but in Nevinson's painting, the two fallen soldiers are far from the comfort even of a grave in an English country churchyard, and, indeed, from any decent burial at all.

In his many years as a BBC Special Correspondent, Allan Little has witnessed some shocking scenes of war and has also reflected on the depiction of war in news footage and photography as well as in the works of contemporary war artists.

He considers the continuing power of Nevinson's painting and the role of art both in recruiting soldiers and in denouncing war.

Producer; Beaty Rubens.

BBC correspondent Allan Little reflects on CRW Nevinson's 1917 painting Paths of Glory.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

2.Sarah LeFanu reflects on Rose Macaulay's 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and Others

Rose Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, but her biographer, Sarah LeFanu, has long believed that one of her earlier novels, Non-Combatants and Others, is a work of striking originality. She also argues for its importance to our understanding of the impact of the First World War not only on soldiers at the front but on the entire nation.

The books which have become the foundational texts of our perception and understanding of the war are all by men who had served as soldiers - Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves - but all were written more than a decade later, when their authors had had time to shape and mediate their experiences through a process of post-war reflections.

The immediacy of Non-Combatants and Others - written and set in 1915 - is another reason for its claim to be regarded as a key text of the war.

Sarah LeFanu brings the novel alive by interweaving a re-telling of its story with her reflections on how it sheds light on Macaulay's own changing attitude to the war, and her later commitment to the League of Nations Union and the Peace Pledge Union.

Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Author Sara LeFanu reflects on Rose Macaulay's 1916 novel Non-Combatants and Others.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson reflects on Otto Dix's Der Krieg, a harrowing cycle of prints of wartime experience.

In 1924, six years after the end of hostiliies, the painter Otto Dix, who had been a machine-gunner in the German Army, produced his 51 Der Krieg prints. Gruesome, hallucinatory, and terribly frank, these postcards of conflict tell the soldier's ghastly tale.

Cartoonist Martin Rowson, whose own work is similarly direct and uncompromising, tells Dix's story, exposing what the War did to the man and ponders why Der Krieg remains such a powerful statement.

Producer: Benedict Warren.

Cartoonist Martin Rowson on Otto Dix's Der Krieg, a cycle of prints of wartime experience.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Professor David Edgerton of King's College London reflects on the Memorandum on the Neglect of Science, a 1916 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment.

In a letter to The Times that year, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously.

They continued by observing that the entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the civil service, were weighted towards the Classics rather than sciences. Was this the first stirrings CP Snow's Two Cultures debate?

David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History, at King's College London, finds out what was going on at the time and looks at how the First World War advanced British science.

Producer: Benedict Warren.

Prof David Edgerton discusses the 1916 Memorandum on the Neglect of Science.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

5.Michal Shapira on Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a text written in Vienna in 1915, expressing his dismay as the war progressed.

The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud shared the general mood

But, like his fellow-citizens, Freud expected a quick war. By February 1915, with two of his sons fighting and thousands of injured and traumatised soldiers returning from the front, Freud's feelings had changed.

Dr Michal Shapira reflects on his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and considers how it prefigures some of his later, better-known works on war and the death-drive.

Dr Michal Shapira is a senior lecturer of history and gender studies at Tel Aviv University

Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Michal Shapira explores Sigmund Freud's Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

6. Dr Heather Jones of the LSE reflects on Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu.

Completed in 1916 and the work of a French soldier at the front, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions there. It proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working- class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent.

Producer: Ben Warren.

Heather Jones on Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, the first explicit account of WWI conditions.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

7.Ian Christie on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin

For Russians of Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Soviet state emerged.

Eisenstein seized the opportunity of serving in the Red Army in order to become a radical theatre director, which led him into film as part of the first generation of Soviet film-makers who would astonish the world in the late 1920s with films like The Battleship Potemkin and October. These films would shape the cultural and political landscape of the interwar years - championed by those who wanted to condemn the Great War as an imperialist struggle, and also foreshadowing the Second World War, as in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.

The distinguished film historian Ian Christie untangles this complex story.

Producer Beaty Rubens

Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Ian Christie discusses Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin as a response to World War I.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet, fresh from her experiences in Afghanistan and Syria, introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France, 'Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort'.

Wharton, best known for 'The Age Of Innocence' and 'The House of Mirth', was granted unique access to the Western front and wrote one of the most evocative and undeservedly neglected accounts of life in France in World War One.

In its pages, penned early in the war, are Wharton's painterly descriptions of the country's overnight transformation from peace to war, her deep love for France and its people, and her accounts of the destruction wrought upon the villages and towns in the path of the German invader.

Producer: Benedict Warren.

BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet discusses Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring.

Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as 'the Nightingale of India' for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist.

Of her 1917 collection, Rabindranath Tagore declared: 'Your poems in The Broken Wing seem to be made of tears and fire, like the clouds of a July evening, glowing with the muffled power of sunset.

The distinguished scholar of the First World War, Santanu Das, a reader in English at King's College, London, reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence.

Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Santanu Das discusses the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection The Broken Wing.

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

10.The poet Ruth Padel reflects on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son Peter, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914.

The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty, hunger and war in the 20th century.

The death of her youngest son, Peter, in October 1914, prompted a prolonged period of deep depression, but by the end of that year she was turning her thoughts to creating a moument to Peter and his fallen comrades.

She destroyed this first monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The final memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed in 1932 and placed in the cemetery where Peter lay.

The poet Ruth Padel traces Kollwitz's long period of anguish and artistic growth.

Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Ruth Padel reflects on German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her youngest son, Peter

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.