Night Waves - Patrick Wright, Carlos, Ordinance Survey Map, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brain Drain

Rana Mitter talks to historian Patrick Wright. Patrick has written on the history of the tank and the way in which the Iron Curtain became a symbol of the cold war. His new book examines Anglo-Chinese relations through the prism of a British government delegation to China in 1954. 'Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao's China uses previously unpublished diaries and letters to reconstruct the experience of Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan and AJ Ayer among other delegates who arrived in China at the invitation of Prime Minister Chou En-lai. The result is a faintly comic tale of British post war attitudes to China caught between a sense of western superiority and China's left wing revolutionary allure. Also in the programme, Nigel Floyd reviews a new film about terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Rachel Hewitt and Andy Martin discuss the history of the Ordinance Survey map and its influence on the British imagination. Rana also gets a lesson in the mathematics of Fractals from professor Ian Stewart to mark the passing of their creator, Benoit Mandelbrot. Finally, Rana is joined by Jane Gregory and Laura Chappell to examine the idea of the 'brain drain', a much used phrase at this time of economic difficulty. they examine the origins of the phrase in post war science and looks at whether its rhetorical use bears any relation to economic facts.