The economist Yanis Varoufakis found himself in the eye of the storm as Greece’s Minister of Finance in 2015, at the height of the country’s debt crisis. Now he reflects on his political awakenings and the women who influenced him in Raise Your Soul. It’s a family story that starts in Egypt in the 1920s and traces Greece’s tumultuous century through Nazi occupation, civil war, dictatorship, socialism and economic crisis. The historian Professor Mary Vincent focuses on the Spanish Civil War and h...
Oct 06, 2025•42 min
The experimental cognitive psychologist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker delves into the intricacies of human interactions in his latest book, ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage’. From avoiding the elephant in the room to the outing of the emperor’s new clothes, Pinker reveals the paradoxes of human behaviour. Common knowledge can bind people and communities together in a shared purpose, but Aleks Krotoski, the...
Sep 29, 2025•42 min
At the Contains Strong Language Festival in Bradford, Tom Sutcliffe and guests explore the history and culture of the city, and nation, through its poetry and stories. From battlefields and royal courts, coalmines to curry houses Start the Week looks at the language and rhythms that have captured the country. The historian Catherine Clarke is retelling the story of the past in a new way in ‘A History of England in 25 Poems’. From the 8th century to today these verses illuminate the experiences, ...
Sep 22, 2025•42 min
Lyse Doucet tells the history of Afghanistan in recent decades through the story of the Inter-Continental hotel, which opened in the capital in 1969. The BBC’s international correspondent stayed there frequently from the late 1980s, and she details how the Soviet occupation, civil war, US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban have all left their mark on 'The Finest Hotel in Kabul', and the people who worked there. There’s plenty of pink champagne and fine dining in Michela Wrong’s ...
Sep 15, 2025•42 min
The Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy looks back at her foremost influences in her memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me. While her writing and activism are shaped by early circumstances – both financial and political – at the centre is her relationship with her mother, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’. The poet Sarah Howe won the TS Eliot prize for poetry for her debut collection, Loop of Jade. In her new work, Foretokens, she returns to the complex inheritance of family and l...
Sep 08, 2025•43 min
Sanctuary is an ancient idea of a place of refuge or freedom from harm. It has deep roots in the history, literature and myths of many cultures. Marina Warner’s new book Sanctuary explores travelling tales and concepts of hospitality and home - suggesting that myths, stories and works of art can be places of sanctuary too. The story of leprosy is a story of isolation and exclusion over thousands of years. In his book, Outcast, Oliver Basciano has written about his journey across the hinterlands ...
Jun 23, 2025•42 min
We think we know what a genius is: a tortured poet; rebellious scientist; monstrous artist; or a tech disruptor. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius says Helen Lewis in her new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers. From Leonardo da Vinci to Elon Musk, she asks if the modern idea of genius, as a class of special people, is distorting our view of the world. With ten platinum albums Tupac Shakur was one of the stars of hip hop...
Jun 16, 2025•42 min
There is a parallel world which operates under different rules and benefits those with money and power. That’s the argument made by the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in her new book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the world. She traces the rise of a freeports, charter cities and offshore havens. Danny Dorling contends that we’re not very good at spotting the real crises we face today. In The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future, he explains why the most urgent global crises are r...
Jun 09, 2025•42 min
Professor Frank Close looks at how the quest to understand radioactivity and the atomic nucleus was initially fired by scientific curiosity and then by more human motives. What began as collaboration between scientists in the pursuit of atomic energy was overwhelmed by politics and opened the way to the possibility of nuclear war. Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 shows how scientific knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relation...
Jun 02, 2025•42 min
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 th...
May 26, 2025•42 min
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 r...
May 19, 2025•42 min
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 ...
May 12, 2025•42 min
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...
May 05, 2025•42 min
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 ...
Apr 28, 2025•41 min
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 con...
Apr 21, 2025•42 min
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 stori...
Apr 14, 2025•42 min
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...
Apr 07, 2025•42 min
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 i...
Mar 31, 2025•42 min
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 gleami...
Mar 24, 2025•42 min
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 ...
Mar 17, 2025•42 min
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 Charle...
Mar 10, 2025•42 min
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 ...
Mar 03, 2025•42 min
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 manufacturin...
Feb 24, 2025•42 min
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...
Feb 17, 2025•42 min
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 hom...
Feb 10, 2025•42 min
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 manufactur...
Feb 03, 2025•42 min
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 M...
Jan 27, 2025•42 min
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 ...
Jan 20, 2025•42 min
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 ...
Jan 13, 2025•42 min
Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss how we solve problems and imagine the future. While many people now point to the potential of AI, the prize winning writer Naomi Alderman is interested in the messy magic of human thinking. In the forthcoming BBC Radio 4 series, Human Intelligence she tells the stories of the people – with all their ingenuity and foibles – who built the modern world. Across history human cultures have devised a wide range of practices to understand, and discover, the mysteries of...
Dec 30, 2024•42 min
