Against a backdrop of fierce political battles in Parliament and in court, Andrew Marr explores political power and examines those who wield it - from absolutism to anarchism. The political commentator Steve Richards has been in the House of Commons for many nights of political strife. Watching the behaviour of parliament and government today, he considers how different British Prime Ministers have used their many powers. In his new book 'The Prime Ministers' he reflects on the individual charac...
Sep 30, 2019•42 min
Antony Gormley talks to Tom Sutcliffe about his forthcoming major show at the Royal Academy. The sculptor returns to his enduring interest in the inner dark space of the body and the body’s relation to its surroundings. As well as the famous casts of this own figure, seawater and clay fill one gallery, evoking the depths from which life emerged. The award-winning playwright Laura Wade discusses her revolutionary adaptation of Jane Austen. Her new play, The Watsons, is based on Austen’s unfinishe...
Sep 23, 2019•42 min
Andrew Marr discusses how far nations have managed to confront the past. In Learning from the Germans, the philosopher Susan Neiman contrasts the way in which Germany continues to come to terms with its Nazi past, with the failure of the US to deal with slavery and the legacy of racial violence. The historian Stuart James Ward is interested in how far the ghosts of Empire have haunted the debate around Brexit. From the simplistic caricature of hankering after the past to a global vision of the f...
Sep 16, 2019•42 min
The playwright David Hare is adapting Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, an epic story of vanity and egotism. He tells Tom Sutcliffe his radical new working keeps the mountain of trolls but becomes a contemporary reflection of toxic masculinity in the age of the selfie. The writer Lucy Hughes-Hallett reincarnates ancient myths and folklore in her collection of short stories, Fabulous. Old tales from Orpheus to Mary Magdalen and Psyche, find new homes in the lives of a people-trafficking gangmaster and a well-be...
Jul 01, 2019•42 min
Rowan Williams celebrates The Book of Taliesin – legendary Welsh poems of enchantment and warfare. The former Archbishop of Canterbury tells Andrew Marr how the collection of poems speak of a lost world of folklore and mythology, and the figure of Taliesin is an elusive and exuberant creative poetic fiction. Martin Sixsmith tells the extraordinary story of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin at the turn of the 20th century. Yesenin lived through the most turbulent times in Russian history, and durin...
Jun 24, 2019•42 min
Andrew Marr discusses money, from central banks to personal finances. The historian John Guy looks back to the emergence of London as the financial centre of the world. His latest biography focuses on the life and world of Sir Thomas Gresham, Elizabeth I’s banker – a flawed and ambitious man who dabbled in blackmail, fraud and adultery and left his widow saddled with debt. Few of today’s central bankers could match Gresham’s tumultuous private life, but they do wield enormous power in the market...
Jun 17, 2019•42 min
Diego Maradona was a footballer of unrivalled talent, but off the pitch his story is one of despair and betrayal. Chris King, the editor of a feature documentary on the player, tells Kirsty Wark that the film reveals the life of this flawed icon through his own words and personal archive. Hussein Kesvani also aims to tell a story that goes beyond the usual headlines, exploring the unexpected online worlds of British Muslims. He reveals a new generation of young media-savvy Muslims creating their...
Jun 10, 2019•42 min
Jared Diamond explores how countries survive national crises. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and polymath talks to Andrew Marr about the process seven countries went through at moments of huge upheaval – from Japan and Finland to Australia and Chile. Using the lessons learnt in overcoming personal trauma, Diamond charts the painful process of self-appraisal, selective change and flexibility needed to move forward. Britain is facing its own national crisis, with the public and political partie...
Jun 03, 2019•42 min
In a special edition recorded live at the Hay Festival, Tom Sutcliffe discusses the impact of human ingenuity. From the myth of Frankenstein to geoengineering, he explores how normality and deviancy became entrenched in society. In her latest novel, the award-winning writer Jeanette Winterson moves between 1816, when the young Mary Shelley wrote the great Gothic novel of scientific hubris, Frankenstein, and the present day, exploring the far-reaching consequences of the AI revolution. John Brown...
May 27, 2019•42 min
Dr Joshua Mezrich is a leading transplant surgeon. He tells Andrew Marr how death and life are intimately connected in his field of expertise. And he explains the extraordinary breakthroughs that have emerged in transplant surgery, along with the ethical questions that arise when choosing who will be given the chance of a new beginning. Scientific research needs to be evidence-based. But it can too easily be based on underlying assumptions and biases. The science writer Angela Saini reports on t...
May 20, 2019•42 min
Kerry Hudson grew up in all-encompassing and grinding poverty. She is now an acclaimed author, but tells Tom Sutcliffe why she returned home to explore the impact and trap of being lowborn. Howard Brenton’s latest play is loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and features a clever, ambitious young woman fighting for an opportunity, yet held back by her background. Will Tanner, director of the think tank Onward, looks at what social mobility - or a lack of it - means in the politica...
May 13, 2019•42 min
Chaucer is renowned as the father of English literature. But in a new biography Marion Turner argues he is a far more cosmopolitan writer and thinker than we might assume. She tells Andrew Marr how the 14th-century author of The Canterbury Tales moved from the commercial wharves of London to the chapels of Florence, and from a spell as a prisoner of war in France to the role of diplomat in Milan. The academic Emma Smith challenges audiences to look with fresh eyes at the plays of Shakespeare. In...
May 06, 2019•42 min
'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced', wrote the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. His new biographer, Clare Carlisle, explores the life experiences that moulded Kierkegaard's ideas as he struggled to understand how to be a human being in this world. She tells Amol Rajan that Kierkegaard was very much a philosopher of the heart. DeRay Mckesson’s reality became one of struggle and action after he quit his job as a school teacher and became a key figure in the Black Li...
Apr 29, 2019•42 min
We underestimate how difficult it is to live in remote areas, says travel writer Dan Richards. He tells Kirsty Wark how he trekked to high mountain huts and distant snowy cabins for his new book, Outposts. Richards followed in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl and Jack Kerouac, who all found inspiration in the wilderness. But just as Kerouac went temporarily mad living on a remote mountainside, so today’s tourists in the Scottish Highlands and Nordic isles underestimate “hard nature’s ...
Apr 22, 2019•42 min
Ian McEwan talks to Andrew Marr about his new novel, Machines Like Us, and reflects, at the age of 70, on a career which began more than four decades ago. Machines Like Us is set in an alternative Britain in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher has lost the Falklands war and the scientist Alan Turing has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence leading to a series of synthetic humans. The love-triangle at the heart of the book forces the reader to confront ideas about what makes us human and what ...
Apr 15, 2019•42 min
850,000 people in the UK are thought to be living with dementia. The writer Nicci Gerrard tells Andrew Marr about her father’s slow death from the illness. She explores issues around memory, language and identity, as well as asking how society will cope as the population ages and the number of people suffering with dementia rises into the millions. But why and how do we age? The science journalist Sue Armstrong has been investigating what happens to cells when the body gets older, and whether ag...
Apr 08, 2019•43 min
At the Free Thinking Festival at Sage, Gateshead Tom Sutcliffe presents a special edition exploring the art and science of communication. The American diplomat William J Burns played a central role in American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War to the collapse of relations with Putin’s Russian, and including secret talks with Iran. He explores the language of diplomacy. Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She reflects on how as a teenager she stopped speaking...
Apr 01, 2019•51 min
The prize-winning author Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of a fellow Norwegian artist, Expressionist Edvard Munch. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that Munch’s work extends far beyond his iconic painting The Scream. Knausgaard brings together art history, biography and personal memoir to reflect on what it means to be an artist. Munch is known as a painter of the inner life and even his landscapes are infused with personal reflection. But at the turn of the twentieth century, while he was ...
Mar 25, 2019•42 min
The Chinese journalist and activist Xinran tells the story of China since the start of the 20th century through four generations of one family. She tells Andrew Marr how the family lived through enormous social upheaval, and reveals how traditional values started to unravel with the tide of modernity. The academic Roel Sterckx looks back beyond the last century to ancient Chinese philosophers and thinkers. He argues that in order to understand modern China we need to understand its past. The pra...
Mar 18, 2019•42 min
David Nott's holiday plans are not like most. For 25 years the surgeon has used unpaid leave to volunteer as a war doctor. His work has taken him from Sarajevo under siege to rebel-held Aleppo, and to the aftermath of natural disasters in Haiti and Nepal. He tells Kirsty Wark how a combination of bravery, compassion and the thrill of danger inspired him to risk his life helping others. Azad Cudi had war forced upon him as a conscript in the Iranian army. A decade later he volunteered in the figh...
Mar 11, 2019•42 min
Andrew Marr discusses the complex interplay between language and culture. The prize-winning American author Jhumpa Lahiri has spent many years living in Italy immersing herself in the language. She has brought together 40 short story writers – many translated into English for the first time – in a collection that reflects the regional landscapes, private passions and political events of her adopted country over the past century. April De Angelis is a writer steeped in translation and adaptation:...
Mar 04, 2019•42 min
Amol Rajan explores how geology and demography have shaped the modern world. Paul Morland argues that we have underestimated the crucial impact of population changes on global events. He looks at how demography has had a major influence, from world wars to China’s rise; and from the Arab Spring to Brexit. In the distant past people could walk all the way from continental Europe to England through the ancient region of Doggerland. Julia Blackburn scours the Suffolk coastline for this lost land wh...
Feb 25, 2019•42 min
We have been obsessed with the ideal body since Renaissance artists rediscovered nudity, says art historian Jill Burke. She tells Andrew Marr how artists including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian established rigid beauty standards and an obsession with the body that we still live with today. Our image of power was hugely influenced by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. To mark his 400th anniversary, historian Elizabeth Goldring reexamines the artist who painte...
Feb 18, 2019•41 min
How far does evolution explain mental health? The psychiatrist Randolph Nesse tells Kirsty Wark that negative emotions make sense in certain situations but can become excessive. He argues that positioning disorders in light of natural selection helps explain the ubiquity of human suffering - and may help in finding new paths for relieving it. The neuropsychologist AK Benjamin investigates the boundaries of sanity and madness in his book, Let Me Not Be Mad. Through a series of consultations with ...
Feb 11, 2019•42 min
Society is at a turning point, warns Professor Shoshana Zuboff. Democracy and liberty are under threat as capitalism and the digital revolution combine forces. She tells Andrew Marr how new technologies are not only mining our minds for data, but radically changing them in the process. As Facebook celebrates its 15th birthday she examines what happens when a few companies have unprecedented power and little democratic oversight. Although behavioural data is constantly being abstracted by tech co...
Feb 04, 2019•42 min
There is nothing new for chemistry to discover, says Bernie Bulkin. In Solving Chemistry: A Scientist's Journey, the former Head of Science at BP argues that an unprecedented event has happened: a branch of science has made all the major discoveries it is likely to make. He tells Tom Sutcliffe what this means for chemistry - and for science more broadly. Medicine is in the midst of 'a biomedical revolution' says Professor Sir Robert Lechler. His own field of kidney transplants has been transform...
Jan 28, 2019•42 min
Andrew Marr on beauty and politics in art. Our idea of beauty was shaped by the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin. He thought all people deserved to see beauty every day, and compared, and founded a gallery in Sheffield for local industrial workers. To mark Ruskin's bicentenary, curator Louise Pullen has put together a new exhibition showing how his ideas about art, science, truth and beauty shaped the politics of the day. "All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the ...
Jan 21, 2019•42 min
The prize-winning writer John Lanchester considers the political endgame of a fractious world in his new novel, The Wall. He tells Amol Rajan why he has written a dystopian fable in which the young distrust the old, and the world appears broken. But just how violent are we as a species? The primatologist Richard Wrangham believes there is a 'goodness paradox': at an individual level we have evolved to become a more peaceful animal, especially compared to our closest relatives, the chimpanzee; bu...
Jan 14, 2019•42 min
Andrew Marr starts the year in search of happiness with the behavioural scientist and happiness professor Paul Dolan. Dolan has advised the government on how to measure wellbeing, and in his latest book Happy Ever After argues that we’ve been sold a lie about the sources of happiness. The route to fulfilment may be far more unexpected that we thought. The writer Laura Freeman deplores what she calls the current Pollyana tendencies to ‘keep smiling’ via the mood-tracker apps on your phone. Freema...
Jan 07, 2019•42 min
On Christmas Eve, Andrew Marr explores the mysteries of snow and ice. Michelle Paver's novels dwell in the darkest places: an Arctic hut in midwinter haunted by ghosts, an isolated mountain peak, and a prehistoric frozen forest. She explains the appeal of these inhospitable settings, and asks why the cold still terrifies us. Ben Saunders knows the sounds and smells of ice better than most. As one of the world's leading polar explorers he has skied to the North Pole and completed Scott and Shackl...
Dec 24, 2018•42 min
