Radio review: Twenty Minutes – Stravinsky and the King's Horse

What a civilised programme Twenty Minutes (Radio 3) is. Designed to fit the space of a classical music concert interval, it is a beautifully slight and often intensely clever interlude of thoughts. Tonight, in the time it might take to drink a gin and tonic or tackle an ice-cream, we heard Stravinsky and the King's Horse. Philip Bullock's essay took us back to two moments in 1913: the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in London and, a month earlier, the death of suffragette Emily Davison under the King's horse. Bullock teased out links between them, arguing that each involved "the public destruction of women's bodies and a challenge to the artistic and political values of the old order". It was a bit like sitting next to someone very bright at dinner and only discovering how fascinating they were quite late in the meal when time was short. Re-reading suffragette tactics in light of modern-day phenomena ("it's almost like a flash mob"), but also in the context of European avant-garde artists such as the Italian futurists, Bullock gave their well-known protests a new interpretation as politicised performance art. "The medium wasn't paint and canvas but their own bodies," he argued. There were some fabulous archive clips too, but mainly this was just fresh ideas bubbling away with seductive succinctness.