On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks back at lost heroes of science, and forward to cutting-edge experiments. Saiful Islam, Professor of Materials Chemistry, recreates Michael Faraday's famous 19th century experiments for the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures before exploring the latest materials being invented to boost clean energy. More Christmas fare as Brian Cox attempts to explain the birth of the entire universe with music, dance and comedy. Andrea Wulf celebrates the Victorian natural...
Dec 19, 2016•42 min
Tom Sutcliffe talks to the academic Simon Morrison about the remarkable story of the Bolshoi ballet: a 250 year history that encompasses being the pride of Tsarist Russia to state control by Stalin to the scandal of acid attacks in the 21st century. Ismene Brown explores the different styles which set apart the Russian corps de ballet from its British counterpart. Art and politics are also at the forefront of Nigel Cliff's story of the Texan pianist Van Cliburn, who for a short time bridged the ...
Dec 12, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Kirsty Wark explores the history of protest. The Levellers were revolutionaries who brought 17th century England to the edge of radical republicanism. In his biography, John Rees argues the Levellers are central figures in the country's history of democracy. The original soldier-turned-saint and nationalist protester Joan of Arc takes centre stage in Josie Rourke's revival of Bernard Shaw's play, Saint Joan. The Labour MP, Rachel Reeves, finds inspiration in her fellow parliame...
Dec 05, 2016•43 min
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe looks at what happens during a health epidemic and its aftermath. The US activist Peter Staley was instrumental in forcing scientists and pharmaceutical companies to develop life-saving HIV/AIDs drugs. Thirty years later and with drugs now readily available, the concern is that the rate of new cases of HIV remains constant. Professor Anne Johnson was involved in the biggest-ever-official investigation of Britain's sexual habits, which was vetoed at the time by Mar...
Nov 28, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks back to the end of Empire when government officials systematically destroyed the records of imperial rule, and he explores the impact of outside organisations on a nation's ability to govern. The journalist Ian Cobain has uncovered details of the mass bonfires of sensitive official papers across Africa, which subverted the legal obligation to preserve important historical records. Edna Adan Ismail first came to Britain in the 1950s to train as a nurse before c...
Nov 21, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Amol Rajan considers the making of the British landscape and an island mentality. The President of the Royal Geographical Society Nicholas Crane looks back over the last 12 millennia to understand how we have shaped our habitat but also how the landscape has shaped our lives. Madeleine Bunting travels through the Hebrides to see what the furthest reaches of these isles can tell us about the country as a whole. David Olusoga re-tells the story of the relationship between Britain...
Nov 14, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr hears stories of virtue and vice. Lucy Bailey is directing Milton's Comus, a masque in honour of chastity, in which a Lady, lost in the woods, is tempted by pleasure. In Berg's opera Lulu the eponymous heroine appears to be the epitome of seductive pleasure, an amoral seductress, but William Kentridge's production questions how much she is the real victim. The academic Simon Goldhill charts the transition from the high Victorian period into modernity through one fam...
Nov 07, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the writer Alan Bennett about his life and work. As he publishes his third and, he says, final selection of his diaries, Keeping On Keeping On, Bennett reflects on his reputation for tweeness, his radical politics and sexuality. He writes, "Nothing is ever quite so bad that one can't write it down or so shameful either, though this took me a long time to learn with my earliest diaries reticent and even prudish." Producer: Katy Hickman.
Oct 31, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks at winners and losers - from microbes and genes, to athletes and adventurers. Ed Yong seeks to expand our understanding of microscopic microbes which inhabit every corner of the earth, and influence our bodies more than we know. Each person's DNA is unique but Adam Rutherford reveals how collectively it tells the story of the history of our species - the successes and the failures. When one's own genetic make-up and hard work aren't enough, there's always chem...
Oct 24, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the former Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt about the history of the British Army, its role in present conflicts and relations with NATO. The writer Ben Macintyre reveals the wartime antics of one of the most secret regiments, the SAS and the historian Catherine Merridale recreates Lenin's journey across Europe in the midst of the Great War. John Lough was NATO's first representative based in Moscow and explores the tensions on Russia's borders....
Oct 04, 2016•42 min
In a special edition of Start the Week Andrew Marr is at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool. He's joined by the writer Phil Redmond, historian John Belchem and journalists Gary Younge and Kajsa Norman to discuss historical myth-making, segregation and assimilation - from Liverpool's radical past, to the US and its obsession with guns and race, to the Transvaal and the survival tactics of the Afrikaner community. With the Labour party conference in full swing in Liverpool Andrew Marr will also be ...
Sep 26, 2016•43 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the MP Margaret Hodge who challenged multinational companies to explain their tax affairs and shone a light on the billions wasted by government every year. The former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee argues that it's time Ministers and Civil Servants learnt from their mistakes. Sir John Armitt masterminded the successful delivery of the 2012 London Olympics and explains why big projects are notorious for budget overspends. MPs will have to decide soo...
Sep 19, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew discusses love, loss and scandal. Carrie Cracknell is directing Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, the story of an overpowering, self-destructive love affair set in post-war Britain. Michel Faber's collection of poetry explores the loss and grief at the death of his beloved wife, Eva. AE Housman wrote a series of poems at the end of the 19th century - A Shropshire Lad - which were hugely popular and came to encapsulate the nostalgia for an unspoilt pastoral idyll, but the wri...
Jul 04, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores food and politics. Churchill charged Lord Woolton with the daunting task of feeding Britain during WW2. The food writer William Sitwell looks at the black markets and shop raids Woolton had to battle as the country teetered on the edge of anarchy. Economist Jane Harrigan argues that it was rising food prices that sowed the seeds for the Arab Spring Uprisings, and food historian Bee Wilson asks what governments can do now to control what we eat. Producer: Ha...
Jun 27, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe asks if one day we might know everything. The mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and the physicist Roger Penrose explore the far reaches of knowledge, questioning whether certain fields of research will always lie beyond human comprehension. They ask how much fashion and faith shape scientific theories. The experimental physicist Suzie Sheehy attempts to build machines to test the latest theories, while Joanna Kavenna plays with a philosophical Theory of Everything in...
Jun 20, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores the state of the arts. The English National Opera has lost £5 million of funding and its chorus recently went on strike, but the newly appointed Artistic Director Daniel Kramer, hopes to turn it around. He's directing a new production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and the philosopher Roger Scruton celebrates the mastery of Wagner to express truths about the human condition. The biographer Franny Moyle looks at the life and career of Britain's most famous ...
Jun 13, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr traces the quest to decipher the human genome. The idea of a 'unit of heredity' first emerged at the end of the 19th century: cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee recounts the history of the gene and the latest research into genetic heredity and mutation. Giles Yeo looks at what genes can tell us about body weight, while Aarathi Prasad explores how India practises medicine - from cutting-edge science to traditional healing. The historian Emily Mayhew traces the med...
Jun 06, 2016•41 min
Start the Week is at Hay Literary Festival this week discussing war and intelligence. Michael Hayden is a former Air Force four-star general who became director of the US National Security Agency and then the CIA. He talks to Tom Sutcliffe about the decisions made during America's war on terror: from rendition and interrogation to widespread surveillance. Harry Parker was in his twenties when he signed up to join the British Army - he uses the paraphernalia and weaponry of war to tell the story ...
May 30, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the artist Cornelia Parker about the secrets revealed in found objects. Parker's latest exhibition at the Foundling Museum is inspired by the 18th Century tokens left with babies by their mothers. Simon Armitage finds a new way of telling the medieval poem Pearl, an allegorical story of grief and lost love. Archaeologist Cyprian Broodbank explains how Must Farm, the first landscape-scale investigation of deep Fenland, is transforming our understanding of Br...
May 23, 2016•42 min
World on the Move: on Start the Week Andrew Marr explores how the mass movement of people has changed societies, in a special edition broadcast in front of an audience as part of a day of programmes on BBC Radio 4. The historian Sir Hew Strachan looks back at the largest single influx of people into Britain when 250,000 Belgians arrived during the Great War, while Frank Dikötter explores the biggest forced internal migration as tens of millions of young Chinese were sent to work in the countrysi...
May 16, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores the use of technology in education. Professor Sugata Mitra has installed an internet-connected PC in a slum in India and watched how curiosity leads children to learn together. Digital technology is increasingly used in schools but the educationalist Neil Selwyn questions whether this is a positive step. The writer Lynsey Hanley looks at how class is embedded in the education system and the former Headmaster at Eton, Tony Little, on his vision for the futur...
May 09, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Grayson Perry discusses the concept of masculinity in modern Britain with Mary Ann Sieghart. The new artistic director at the Globe Theatre, Emma Rice, explains how she is playing with gender in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the celebrated mezzo-soprano Alice Coote talks of her career in 'breeches', singing the male role. The former artists' model, Kelley Swain reveals what it's like being the object of a work of art. Producer: Katy Hickman.
May 02, 2016•41 min
On Start the Week the sculptor Anish Kapoor talks to Andrew Marr about his fascination with voids and black holes, and his excitement at the latest technological advances in deepest black: vantablack. The astrophysicist Martin Ward explains his research into supermassive black holes and why we're finding more of them, while the solar physicist Lucie Green journeys to the centre of the sun where each photon takes hundreds of thousands of years to reach the surface, but just eight minutes to shine...
Apr 25, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe discusses the writing of war and conflict. The journalist Patrick Cockburn looks back at his years covering crises in the Middle East, especially the rise of the so-called Islamic state. The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran looks at the difficulty of reporting in a country where press freedoms are severely curtailed and asks whether fiction and poetry are a way of telling a more truthful story. The legendary American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh first gained ...
Apr 18, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the psychologist Charles Fernyhough about the inner speech in our heads. But what if it's a lone voice? The writer Olivia Laing explores what it's like to be lonely in a bustling city, while the playwright Alistair McDowall explores what happens when you're abandoned on a distant planet with no sense of time. The biographer Frances Wilson writes a tale of hero-worship, betrayal and revenge through the life of Thomas De Quincey, a man who modelled his opium-...
Apr 11, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses the state of the Eurozone and the politics of austerity with the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, the Director of the Institute of Global Affairs Erik Berglof and the Mayor of London's Chief Economic Advisor, Gerard Lyons. Yanis Varoufakis tracks the problems of the Eurozone to its woeful design and its continued reliance on debt and austerity, rather than reform. The classicist Paul Cartledge explores the history of democracy ...
Apr 04, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Kirsty Wark asks how we make choices about freedom and authenticity - questions that preoccupied Paris intellectuals in the 1930s. Sarah Bakewell looks back at one of the twentieth century's major philosophical movements - existentialism - and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it. Sartre and de Beauvoir may have spent their days drinking apricot cocktails in café's but Bakewell believes their ideas are more relevant than ever. The historian Sunil Khilnani reveals the...
Mar 28, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks at the pace of life with the writer Robert Colvile who celebrates today's accelerating flow of change and argues that we are hard-wired to crave novelty, speed and convenience. But Carl Honoré challenges this cult of speed in his praise of slowness. The scientist Steve Jones looks back at another period of history where the pace of change was revolutionary impacting scientifically, socially and politically - the French Revolution. And the writer Sarah Dunant f...
Mar 21, 2016•42 min
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe looks back a hundred years to Easter Rising of 1916. Ruth Dudley Edwards explores the lives of Ireland's founding fathers and questions how they should be remembered, while Heather Jones places this historical moment in the context of the Great War. David Rieff praises forgetting in his study of the uses and abuses of historical memory, and its often pernicious influence on the present. And the Irish commentator Fintan O'Toole examines the present fortunes of a co...
Mar 14, 2016•42 min
Start the Week comes from Glasgow this week. As the debate over the EU Referendum continues Kirsty Wark looks back at the Scottish Referendum with the historians Tom Devine and Chris Whatley. How much did the history of the union from 1707 and Scotland's sense of identity play a role in the public vote and imagination? The poet Kathleen Jamie wrote a poem a week to mark the momentous changes taking place in Scotland last year. Jamie is well-known for her celebration of the country's wild landsca...
Mar 07, 2016•42 min
