MEMO 342

Gertrude Stein has been called a genius and an idiot. So which was she? For some Stein is on a literary par with her contemporaries and friends; James Joyce, T.S Eliot, Marcel Proust or Ezra Pound, but for others she's a fraud, the 'eminent idiot' of the Modernist period, writing gibberish and passing it off as art.
There's no doubting the importance of Stein as a creative catalyst. She gathered some of the greatest artists of the 20th century into her circle, offering financial, emotional and intellectual support. Picasso and Hemingway in particular cited her importance to their work.
She spent much of her life working on her opus, 'The Making of Americans', a book likened to Joyce's Ulysses in its scale, ambition and incomprehensibility. Does it deserve re-examination? Is it fair that Joyce is lauded and Stein marginalised?
In this program the poet and presenter of Radio 3's The Verb, Ian McMillan asks if Gertrude Stein was any good.

In the third of this year's Lent Talks, journalist and broadcaster Benjamin Cohen reflects on the fear of being abandoned by his own Jewish community, for being gay.
The Lent Talks feature six well-known figures from public life, the arts, human rights and religion, who reflect on how the Lenten story of Jesus' ministry and Passion continues to interact with contemporary society and culture. The 2013 Lent Talks consider the theme of "abandonment".

The Muslim Brotherhood is a global ideological network enjoying popular support across the Sunni Muslim world. It, and closely related Islamic groups, are well established across the Muslim world: from North Africa to the Middle East, Turkey, the Indian subcontinent and Malaysia. Christopher de Bellaigue discovers how this community of faith and politics has been influenced by the rise to power of its founding branch: the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.