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Pirates

Robert Blyth, Joan Passey and Michael Talbot join Anne McElvoy to talk about piracy in fact and fiction, from the Caribbean to Cornwall, as a new exhibition opens.

From the Pirates of Penzance and Captain Hook, to Ottoman corsairs, Henry Avery, Mary Read and Lady Killigrew: Anne McElvoy is joined by New Generation Thinkers Michael Talbot and Joan Passey, and by Robert Blyth, Senior Curator of World and Maritime History, Royal Museums Greenwich, who is also one of the co-curators of Pirates at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.

Producer: Harry Parker

Pirates runs at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall from April to December and then moves in 2025 to Royal Museums Greenwich.

You might be interested in a discussion of David Graeber's ideas on a Free Thinking episode about anarchism. His recently published book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia argues that the "Golden Age of Piracy" was also a time of radical democracy as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.

Other conversations in the Free Thinking archives available on the website include Ships and History with Hew Locke, Sara Caputo, Jake Subryan Richards and Tom Nancollas
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Seagoings with artists Katie Patterson, Charlotte Runcie and Julia Blackburn and Cutty Sark curator Hannah Stockton /programmes/m0002868

Oceans and the Sea with Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh and literature scholar and New Generation Thinker Joan Passey at Hay Festival /programmes/m0017m2y

Available now

44 minutes

Last on

Tue 11 Apr 2023 22:00

Broadcast

  • Tue 11 Apr 2023 22:00

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The Arts & Ideas Podcast

The Arts & Ideas Podcast

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