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Open Accesss, Anne Applebaum, Berenice

Rana Mitter is joined by Anne Applebaum, whose new book Iron Curtain tells the personal stories of Eastern Europeans who where affected by the rising tide of communism after 1944.

On tonight's Night Waves with Rana Mitter...

Education minister David Willetts and research chief Dame Janet Finch are in the studio to debate Open Access - the biggest change in the way that academics and the public can access research for four centuries. But what might work for the sciences doesn't necessarily work for the humanities. Professor Roey Sweet, historian and journal editor, New Generation Thinker Nandini Das and Ross Mounce, scientist working with the Open Knowledge Foundation discuss the ramifications of this fundamental rethink of the way academic research is published and crucially - who pays for it?

In November 1956 Soviet tanks arrived on the streets of Budapest to put down an uprising against the Communist government which had been in power since the end of the Second World War. In her book 'Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956', Anne Applebaum presents the events of 1956 as the end and inevitable outcome of the various attempts to create Soviet-style totalitarian societies in Eastern Europe. Drawing on recently-opened archives from Germany, Hungary and Poland, as well as testimony from people who lived through the events, Applebaum looks at how civil society was picked apart under Communism, and at the ways people found to resist it.

And it's first night at the Donmar Warehouse for Racine's Berenice in a new translation by Alan Hollinghurst. Andrew Dickson , Nandini Das and Rana review.

That's on Night Waves tonight at 10pm.

Producer Neil Trevithick.

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45 minutes

Last on

Tue 2 Oct 2012 22:00

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  • Tue 2 Oct 2012 22:00

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