Free Thinking Landmark - 1001 Nights

It's three hundred years since the death of Antoine Galland, a French orientalist and archaeologist, whose translation of The One Thousand and One Nights kick-started its adventures in the West via the works of English orientalists, Richard Burton, Edward Lane and John Payne. Philip Dodd asks a panel of experts on these hugely influential tales, plus story-tellers who continue to wrest new life out of them. He talks to Scholars Robert Irwin and Wen-chin Ouyang, the theatre director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh.