The Essay - North East Free Thinkers - Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society

Free Thinking 2009 A series recorded in front of an audience as part of the Free Thinking ideas festival. It focuses on free-thinking figures and institutions in North-East England whose ideas challenged their times. Leading poet Sean O'Brien charts the profound contribution to Newcastle's cultural life of the Literary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1793, which grew into one of the most important intellectual institutions of its age. A place of talking, thinking, reading and listening, its history and membership have long been at the heart of Tyneside culture.