Free Thinking: Piranesi and the Architecture of a Disturbed Mind

Susanna Clarke, Adam Scovell and Lucy Arnold are Matthew Sweet's guests. Susanna Clarke talks about the inspiration behind the follow up to her best-selling first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Piranesi is the springboard for a discussion about mental health, haunted spaces and mind-bending architecture in film, fiction and art from MC Escher to Christopher Nolan's Inception, Shirley Jackson to Mervyn Peake. The print maker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was born 300 years ago on Oct 4th 1720, became known for his etchings of Rome and images of imagined prisons