麻豆社

How do we think about war? How do we imagine it, picture it and explain it? Adam Rutherford hosts Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week, asking what we can learn about ourselves from our varied intellectual and cultural responses to conflict.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is one of the world's leading scholars of warfare. In his new collection of essays, On Strategists and Strategy, he considers some of the key strategic thinkers of the last century and thoughts about the significance of political calculation, military tactics, organisational behaviour, character and psychology.

The violence of war and its aftermath has long been the subject of art. A new exhibition opens at the Imperial War Museum, Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art. The curator, Rebecca Newell explains what we can observe from the ways in which artists recorded changes to the city during the Second World War in paintings, drawings and film.

The H么tel Lutetia, the grand hotel on Paris's Left Bank has over the years drawn bohemians and great artists, including Matisse and Picasso. However, for a short period around the Second World War the hotel was witness to significant events at the edges of the conflict. Jane Rogoyska's new novel Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War peoples the hotel with the intellectual and refugees gathering there in the 1930s, the men of the German military intelligence service who made it their headquarters and the deportees returning from concentration camps.

Producer: Ruth Watts