Avsnitt
-
In front of an audience at the Hay Literary Festival Tom Sutcliffe talks to The archaeologist and presenter of the hit TV show, The Great British Dig, Chloë Duckworth, who explains how every object tells a story. She reveals how even the rubbish our ancestors threw away can offer a window on the past and forge a connection with the present day.
Business journalist Saabira Chaudhuri's new book Consumed, examines how companies have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits over the last seventy years. Consumer goods makers have poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable cups, bags, bottles, sachets and plastic-packaged ultra-processed foods. Taking in marketing, commercial strategy and psychology, she explains just how we got here.
The paleobiologist Sarah Gabbott is more interested in looking at how what we throw away today becomes the fossils of tomorrow. Discarded (co-authored with Jan Zalasiewicz) highlights the cutting-edge science that is emerging to reveal the far-future human footprint on Earth.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
In his new book, Blueprints, Marcus du Sautoy traces the connections between mathematics and art and the ways in which creatives use numbers to underpin their work – unconsciously or otherwise. From the earliest stone circles to the unique architecture of Zaha Hadid, du Sautoy shows us that there are blueprints everywhere and how logic and aesthetics are intrinsically intermingled.
Sophie Pavelle is also interested in connections and her forthcoming book, To Have or To Hold, explores symbiotic relationships in nature. Focusing on eight key examples, Sophie Pavelle explains how these mutually beneficial connections are crucial for the survival of our natural world and how they play an integral role in regulating ecosystems and strengthening resilience. She asks if we are capable of restoring and nurturing our environment or will we continue to exploit the Earth’s resources, till death do us part?
The British Museum’s new exhibition illuminates the captivating work of the nineteenth-century Japanese artist, Utagawa Hiroshige (from 1st May to 7th September 2025). He was fascinated by the natural world and many of his pictures take flora and fauna as their subject matter. Hiroshige was one of Japan’s most talented, prolific and popular artists and his influence was not only felt in his home country, but spread globally – influencing artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and contemporary artists such as Julian Opie. The curator of the exhibition, Alfred Haft, shines a light on the oeuvre of Hiroshige, his techniques and enduring legacy.
Producer: Natalia Fernandez
-
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
The cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins looks at the long history of the private life from Ancient Athens to the digital age. In her new book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and fall of the Private Life, she examines how our attitudes to the intimate and personal, have shifted over time. She argues that the challenge of big tech is simply the latest development that has seen our private lives increasingly exposed for public consumption. It is only through understanding the history of the very idea of the private life, that we might protect it.
Homework: A Memoir is Geoff Dyer's new book. In it he tells his own story, that of a boy growing up in a working class family in the 1960s and 1970s. He charts the transformative opportunities afforded by the post war settlement for an eleven year old boy who wins a place at a grammar school. Evoking deep personal memories, he explores the challenges of his childhood and teenage years in the mid twentieth century England.
Lanre Bakare is interested in the stories of the Black Britain we don’t often hear – the one that exists beyond London. In moving his focus outside the capital, he explores the economic and social unrest of 1970s and 1980s from very different perspectives. His new book, We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain suggests that we need to incorporate a broader range of the experiences of Black Britons into the fabric of our national story.
Producer: Ruth Watts
-
Our sense of smell is vital to appreciating food and drink, it can warn us of danger, and enhance enjoyment of our environment, and yet it is one of our least explored sensory systems. In The Forgotten Sense, olfaction specialist Dr Jonas Olofsson explains the science behind our sense of smell.
Dr Ally Louks caused a stink on social media when she mentioned the subject of her PhD thesis, Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. But she shows just how much readers can learn from paying attention to the aroma of a writer’s work.
While imagining the stench of a Dickensian city street can enhance a reader’s experience, what about actually smelling burning rubber as you play a video racing game? Professor Alan Chalmers explains the groundbreaking research currently ongoing to make gaming a more immersive experience, with smell at its centre.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
In his new book, Robert Macfarlane takes the reader on a river journey, through history and geography, to posit the idea that rivers are not merely for human use, but living beings. In Is A River Alive? he argues that human fate is interwoven with the natural world, and that it’s time we treated nature not as a resource, but a fellow being.
But does the natural world have legal rights? In A Barrister for the Earth the lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta explains how she’s sought justice for environmental wrongs. Her case against the destruction of cloud forests was the world’s first Rights of Nature case.
In Britain many environmental campaigners argue for the Right to Roam and greater access to private land. But in Uncommon Ground, Patrick Galbraith presents a counterargument on the benefits of restricting access to the countryside, advocating for wildlife’s right to tranquillity.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
As congregations age and dwindle, what are we to make of the decline of Christianity in England? Bijan Omrani argues that Christianity has had a profound and ongoing impact on English society, laws and culture. In his new book, God is an Englishman, he makes the case for the things we stand to lose as a nation as Christianity loses its hold on our hearts and minds.
In Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Lamorna Ash talks to those bucking the trend: the young people discovering Christianity. She considers various encounters with faith from evangelical festivals to monastic retreats and Quaker meetings. Through interviews she explores what it means to embrace Christianity today.
Dr Helen-Ann Hartley is the Bishop of Newcastle who has led calls for reform, as the Church of England has been mired in safeguarding scandals. She believes that the Anglican church still has a vital role to play supporting communities, offering a lifeline to the lonely, the homeless, those living with mental illness, and welcoming those of all faiths and none. In order to play its full role in the modern world, she wants to see the church modernised and its governance overhauled.
Presenter: Shahidha BariProducer: Ruth Watts
-
The lawyer Philippe Sands weaves together a story of historical crimes, impunity and the law in his latest book, 38 Londres Street. He uncovers the links between a Nazi hiding in plain sight in Patagonia and the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the failed attempts to bring either to justice.
Kenneth Roth has led Human Rights Watch for the last three decades, overseeing investigations into violence and oppression in countries all over the world. In Righting Wrongs he tells the stories of the wins and the losses, and the ongoing fight to uncover, and prosecute, abuses.
The BBC’s former Syria correspondent Lina Sinjab was forced into exile more than a decade ago after threats from President Bashar al-Assad’s government. She could only watch as death and destruction ripped through her country, and those in power appeared to act with impunity. She looks at how Syria is faring since the fall of al-Assad’s brutal regime.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
In 1967 a group of writers in the US pulled off an ingenious hoax – the publication of a so-called top secret document detailing how global peace would destroy American society. Even when the deception was revealed, many groups on the left and right argued it was true, or that it revealed truths about the ‘deep state’. Phil Tinline takes up the story in Ghosts of Iron Mountain, showing how what started as satire gained currency, as trust in government and institutions collapsed.
During the Covid-19 lockdown the comedian Rosie Holt began a series of satirical videos in which she spliced together actual footage from news interviews with her play-acting the role of a politician. Many of her parodies caused outrage as viewers thought she was a real MP.
The statistician and epidemiologist Professor Adam Kucharski is interested in how people establish fact from fiction. In Proof: The Uncertain Science Of Certainty he explores how truth emerges, but warns against building a society that distrusts and doubts everything.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
The celebrated artist, Sir Grayson Perry, has a new exhibition of work, Delusions of Grandeur, made in direct response to the masterpieces at the Wallace Collection in London (until 26th October). He candidly admits he initially found the Collection’s opulence difficult to work with, until he created an alter-ego artist, Shirley, who was inspired by the aesthetic.
In recent years museums and art galleries have become a regular battleground in the culture wars. One of today’s anti-woke warriors is the writer Lionel Shriver. Her latest satirical novel, Mania, imagines a world where intellectual meritocracy is heresy; the words 'stupid' and 'smart' are no longer acceptable, and novels like The Idiot and My Brilliant Friend are banned.
In Shriver’s imaginative world language and thought is heavily policed, speech is free only if it doesn’t offend. The academic Fara Dabhoiwala has written about the emergence of this contested idea, in What Is Free Speech? He shows in the shifting story of the last three hundred years that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which different societies have drifted or dissented, but a much more mercurial, complicated matter.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.’ In his latest novel, Theft, he returns to the streets of his childhood home in Zanzibar, to trace the intertwined lives of three young people in a story of love, betrayal and kindness.
The Possibility of Tenderness is a memoir by the prize-winning poet Jason Allen-Paisant as he moves from his family home in the rural Jamaican hills, to Oxford’s gleaming spires, to the woodlands of Leeds. It’s a story about the transformative power of plants and the legacy of dreams.
Language, music and food are at the heart of Samantha Ellis’s new book, Chopping Onions On My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, she grew up surrounded by the noisy, colourful sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, a language in danger of being lost forever.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
Five years ago, in response to the Covid pandemic, the government mandated a series of lockdowns, with the closure of schools and businesses and social distancing. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by guests to discuss how such a monumental event could have had affected brain cognition, and whether there have been lasting effects on young people. But he also hears tales of resilience among neurodiverse communities.
The neuroscientist Daniel Yon looks at the cognitive impact of unprecedented events in his forthcoming book, A Trick of the Mind - How the Brain Invents Your Reality (published, June 2025). He explains how times of instability and uncertainty upset the brain’s ability to understand the world, and make people more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
The Covid-19 Social Study was the largest study exploring the psychological and social effects of the pandemic on the UK population. Dr Daisy Fancourt, Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London explains what they learnt about the impact of social isolation. The developmental psychologist at Cambridge University, Professor Claire Hughes, has looked more closely at families with young children, across six different countries, with very different lockdown policies. Although there was a link between family stress related to the pandemic and child problem behaviours, more recent work questions whether the lockdown has had longer term effects.
The artist and zinemaker Dr Lea Cooper has co-curated a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice (until 14th September). Zines are self-published works, and Dr Cooper says several on display were created during lockdown, and showcase personal stories of resistance and self-expression.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Part of BBC Radio 4's series of programmes exploring Lockdown’s Legacy
-
In The Ideological Brain Leor Zmigrod studies the impact of political ideology on the makeup and shape of the brain. She found that those on the political extremes, as well as those with the most dogmatic beliefs, display more cognitive rigidity.
The historian John Rees focuses on the small group of firebrand parliamentarians at the heart of the English Civil Wars. The Fiery Spirits describes how the radical republicans influenced more moderate MPs and led to the defeat, and execution, of Charles I.
2025 is the centenary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher and fifty years since she became the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK. The political commentator and broadcaster Iain Dale publishes a biography of her later this year, and questions the role of ideology within Thatcherism.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife is the subject of Tim Birkhead’s new book. This goose-sized seabird became the favoured food of hungry sailors and hunters, and the last two were killed in 1844. But then the bird became an obsession for collectors who vied for the last skins, eggs and skeletons.
Victorian hunters, explorers and collectors feature strongly in the story of the Great Auk. The writer Kaliane Bradley places the 19th century polar explorer Commander Graham Gore at the heart of her time-travelling novel, The Ministry of Time. The book is being made into a television series on BBC1 – to be aired later in the Spring.
Human activity has had, and continues to have, a big impact on bird populations. While several species have gone extinct, more are classified as threatened. But a joint conservation project between farmers and wildlife organisations is looking at restoring ‘zombie’ ponds, in an effort to increase pockets of wildlife. The RSPB’s Mark Nowers helps to organise the Lost Ponds Project and is involved in the protection of turtle doves, whose numbers are vulnerable.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
The story of Liverpool’s once thriving port is one of spectacular rise, and spectacular fall. In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, the historian Sam Wetherell looks at the city post-WWII, as the decline in the port led to the poverty and neglect of its population, the deportation of Chinese sailors, and the discrimination against the city’s Black population. It’s a history as prophecy for what the future might hold for the communities caught in the same trap of obsolescence.
As manufacturing has declined in the UK it has grown exponentially in China, which is now known as ‘the world’s factory’. Dr Yu Jie is a senior research fellow at Chatham House and an expert in China’s economic diplomacy. She considers what the mega-cities that have emerged out of China’s rise, and the communities living in them, can learn from the history of Liverpool.
Corby in the Midlands was once at the heart of British steelmaking, with one of the largest operations in Western Europe. But once the plant was closed in the 1980s, the ‘clean-up’ became known as one of the worst environmental scandals, causing serious birth defects in the town. The four-part series, Toxic Town, written by Jack Thorne (on Netflix from 27th February) tells the story of the families as they fight for justice.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
History was written down for the very first time in the ancient region of Mesopotamia. In Between Two Rivers, Moudhy Al-Rashid tells the story of the civilisations that rose and fell, through the details left on cuneiform tablets from 4000 years ago – from diplomatic letters to receipts for beer. And the drive that led ancient scribes to record the events and legends of the past.
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was probably born in AD69, and although little is known about his own life, his biography of the twelve Caesars vividly captured what it was like to be at the centre of power in the Roman Empire. The historian Tom Holland pays homage to his fellow history-writer, Suetonius, in a new translation of The Lives of the Caesars.
Archaeologists at the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur believe they found evidence of a museum in the ruins, which suggests that the desire to display and preserve artefacts, and tell stories from the past, is nothing new. Gus Casely-Hayford is the curator of the V&A East which opens in the Spring, and is expected to offer a new way of viewing the past, and a chance to see behind the scenes of a museum.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
From the early 1970s feminist activists from across the globe campaigned under a single demand – Wages for Housework. The historian Emily Callaci traces the lives and ideas of its key creators in her new book, Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise. The campaign highlighted the need to change the way work, and especially what has been traditionally deemed women’s work, is valued.
Although men are still paid more than women, and women still play a greater role in the home, recent polling reveals that nearly half of Britons say women's equality has gone far enough. And that figure has been rising significantly in the last decade. Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at King’s College London also points out that a growing number of young men believe it will be harder to be a man than a woman in 20 years’ time.
So is it time for women to stop campaigning and #JustBeKind? Definitely not, according to the writer Victoria Smith. In her new book, UnKind, she unpicks the kindness trend that emerged in the 2020s, and argues that women and girls have again been coerced into a passive role.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
We might live surrounded by manufactured goods but the business of making is far removed and often hidden from our lives, according to the Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge, Tim Minshall. In Your Life Is Manufactured he takes readers on a tour of mega-factories to artisanal craft shops, seaports to supermarkets to reveal the systems and decisions behind manufacturing.
The former Chief Scientist of BP, Bernie Bulkin is interested in how cutting edge developments in manufacturing have helped both companies and countries remain financially competitive in the global market. In The Material Advantage he looks at the latest innovative materials and new opportunities.
But at the heart of the discussion around manufacturing in the 21st century is sustainability. Fiona Dear is Co-Director of the Restart Project, a social enterprise that runs repair events in the community, but also campaigns for broader Right 2 Repair legislation to force companies to make it easier and cheaper for people to mend products, rather than simply buying new.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
Every year world leaders gather at the United Nation’s COP (the Conference of Parties) to discuss how to work together on solutions to tackle climate change. And every year the wrangling lasts into the night as it becomes clear how difficult it is to achieve consensus. In Kyoto the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson have recreated the drama, intrigue and power plays that resulted in one of COP’s greatest successes, the Kyoto Protocol from 1997. Kyoto is on at the Soho Place Theatre until May 2025.
Professor Mike Berners-Lee is an expert on the impact and footprint of carbon and has watched as countries see-saw on commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuels. In his latest book, A Climate of Truth he argues that we already have the technology to combat many of the problems, but what we’re lacking is the honesty – in our politics, our media, and our businesses – to make a real difference.
But how to save the planet is not necessarily straightforward. In The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father’s Islands, Marianne Brown returns home after the death of her father. She finds the islanders at loggerheads over the construction of a huge windfarm: while some celebrate the production of sustainable energy, others argue the costs are too high for the environment and local wildlife.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
Music as Medicine is the latest work by the neuroscientist and best-selling author Daniel Levitin. In it he explores the healing power of music, and the cutting edge research which examines how sound affects the brain. The dance critic Sara Veale is interested in movement. In Wild Grace she tells the untold history of the extraordinary women who were the pioneers of modern dance. While Nwando Ebizie is a practitioner of both music and movement, and is interested in using the latest neurological studies in her art. She will perform the works, Solve et Coagula (arr. Mark Knoop) and All the Calm of a Distant Sea at the Southbank Centre, London (23rd January) as part of the BBC Radio 3 Unclassified concert.
Producer: Katy Hickman
-
In the first programme of the New Year Adam Rutherford follows two possible guides to a more fulfilled life – Socrates and optimism – but asks whether either has any answers to dealing with racism.
The philosopher Agnes Callard proposes the questioning Socratic method in Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. She shows that this ancient method offers a new ethics to live by, from answering questions about identity and inequality, to helping us love and die well. But to truly flourish we also need a huge dose of optimism, according to the science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury. In The Bright Side he argues that being optimistic is not only central to the human psyche, but plays a crucial role in overcoming the challenges of the twenty-first century.
The social psychologist Keon West is more sceptical. In his new book The Science of Racism, he challenges those – a reputed half of the population – who think that racism doesn’t exist. He goes back to the data and research to reveal the extent and prevalence of racist behaviour, and the repeated inadequacy of attempts to address it.
Producer: Katy Hickman
- Visa fler
