In May Wales will hold local elections to elect members of all twenty-two local authorities. Richard Wyn Jones, professor of Welsh politics, examines the issues facing the country. He tells Helen Lewis how nationalism plays an important role in politics in Wales, but that its national identity is a complex mix of Welsh, English and British. What does it meant to be Welsh today? And what of the future of Wales? These are the questions posed in a series of essays, Welsh [Plural]. The poet Hanan Is...
Mar 21, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Humans have been fascinated with birdlife since the first cave drawings 12,000 years ago. In Birds and Us, Tim Birkhead explores how birds have captured our imaginations and inspired both art and science. He looks back to the mummified ibises of Ancient Egypt and the Victorian obsessions with egg collecting, to today’s bustling guillemot colonies on the Faroe Islands and the fight to save endangered species. Around 1820 John James Audubon declared his intention to paint every bird species in Nor...
Mar 14, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast New York, 1984: the iconic artist Andy Warhol meets the rising star Jean-Michel Basquiat. Their relationship as they work together on a landmark exhibition is at the heart of the world premiere of Anthony McCarten’s new drama, The Collaboration, at the Young Vic theatre. The director Kwame Kwei-Armah tells Kirsty Wark how the drama pulls apart the creative, racial and sexual tensions between the two, and explores artistic reputations and rivalries. The artist Louise Bourgeois was already in her ...
Mar 07, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The historian Peter Hennessy asks whether post-Covid Britain needs to set out a new social contract, comparable to the Beveridge report after WWII. In A Duty of Care, he looks back to the foundations of the modern welfare state and the ‘five giants’ against which society had to battle – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. He tells Helen Lewis that after the effects of the pandemic, it’s time to be ambitious and try and work together to tackle today’s comparable giants. In a damning r...
Feb 28, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Sassoons were one of the great commercial dynasties of the 19th century: ‘the Rothschilds of the East’. In Global Merchants the historian Joseph Sassoon charts how his ancestors – Jewish refugee exiles from Ottoman Baghdad – built a vast enterprise of trade and influence across the world. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how their meteoric rise and ultimate fall mirrored the British imperial project. At the height of their ambition the Sassoons led an extravagant lifestyle, but never quite overcame th...
Feb 21, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stonehenge is one of Britain’s most iconic monuments: an ancient stone circle still shrouded in layers of speculation and folklore. A new exhibition at the British Museum looks at the human story behind the stones, and offers new insights into the beliefs, rituals and worldview of our Neolithic ancestors. The curator Neil Wilkin tells Adam Rutherford about one of the objects on show – the metal Nebra Sky Disc – which is the world’s oldest surviving map of the sky. The palaeobiologist Thomas Hall...
Feb 14, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Forget the Victorians, the Georgian era is having its moment. Regencycore, a fashion style inspired by the Netflix period drama Bridgerton was shortlisted for Word of the Year 2021, and there will be more frocks and 18th century gossip when the television series returns in the Spring. In The Georgians the historian Penelope Corfield explores all aspects of 18th century life, from politics and empire to culture and society, science and industry. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that Britain at the time wa...
Feb 07, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast The award-winning poet Fiona Benson retells the Greek myth of the Minotaur, upending the legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth. In a series of poems in her new collection Ephemeron we hear from the bull-child’s mother – the betrayed and violated Pasiphae. Benson tells Helen Lewis she wanted to explore male and female desire, and the extraordinary cycles of violence and abuse of power in the Greek myths. The cultural historian Ivan Jablonka has taken his native Fran...
Jan 31, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Modernism is a cultural and philosophical movement that emerged in the West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a complex hydra-headed beast that was pervasive in the arts, but also spread through modern industrial societies influencing architecture and science. As part of a series of programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4 celebrating modernism, Kirsty Wark presents an introduction to modernism – how and why did it arise at this time, and its legacy today. She is joined by the cultural ...
Jan 24, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Are we heading into an era of unending low-level conflict, of foreign interference and buying of influence? In The Weaponisation of Everything, the security expert Mark Galeotti argues that traditional warfare is on the wane, replaced by hybrid wars, disinformation, espionage and subversion. He tells Adam Rutherford that this 21st century way of war often goes unnoticed and can be dangerously destabilising, but it also offers opportunities for those who are able to take full advantage of this ne...
Jan 17, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The historian, writer and former politician Michael Ignatieff talks to Tom Sutcliffe about how consolation offers a way to survive the anguish and uncertainties of the 21st century. In his new book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, he looks at how works of literature – from the Psalms to Albert Camus and Anna Akhmatova – help increase hope and resilience. On Consolation will be Radio 4's Book of the Week from February 7th. Christopher Prendergast’s Living and Dying with Marcel Prous...
Jan 10, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Marr talks to two of the leading scientists who were at the forefront of research into fighting the spread of Covid-19. Professor Teresa Lambe was one of the Principal Investigators overseeing the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine programme. She co-designed the vaccine and led the pre-clinical studies, as well overseeing the impact on immunity. She will be taking part in this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (to be aired on BBC 4 at 8pm on 28th, 29th and 30th December), alongside Pro...
Dec 27, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The internationally renowned cellist Steven Isserlis talks to Andrew Marr about his companion guide to The Bach Cello Suites. Isserlis explores why Bach’s Six Suites have become some of the most cherished music, and how Bach takes the audience on a spiritual journey, from joy, through tragedy, to jubilation. Schubert’s heart-breaking song-cycle Winterreise tells of a young man’s desperate wanderings: the music and the poems creating images of fire and snow, of scalding and frozen tears. The bari...
Dec 20, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast What if virtual worlds become indistinguishable from the real one? In 1999 the science fiction film, The Matrix, depicted a dystopian future in which people are unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, run by intelligent machines. As the fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, is about to be released, the writer Naomi Alderman considers the influence this movie franchise has had in the last two decades, and how far virtual reality has become part of everyday life. The philosopher, David J ...
Dec 13, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The acclaimed actor Kathryn Hunter plays all three witches in the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth. The film is directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the central couple. Hunter tells Andrew Marr that she studied the witch hunts of the 17th century and was inspired by the ‘outcast women’ who survived and suffered. Her performance is rooted in something real, but also hints at something created in the mind of Macbeth. Claire Askew’s...
Dec 06, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is it possible to ‘level up’ the economy and help struggling places halt decline and become more prosperous? Paul Swinney is Director of Policy and Research at the think tank Centre for Cities and his research focuses on city economies and their development over time. He considers what strategies might be implemented to support declining town and city centres and if the government’s Levelling Up agenda is likely to deliver concrete results. The prize-winning poet Paul Batchelor was born in North...
Nov 29, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pentecostalism is global sensation: a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the 20th century by the son of freed slaves, that has become the fastest-growing religion in the world. Elle Hardy explains to Andrew Marr how this flourishing, tech-savvy movement is reshaping not only the expression of faith and one’s relationship with God, but whole societies as well. In her exposé, Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World, Hardy explores how miracles, money and power ...
Nov 22, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel revolves around the lies, schemes and vested interests that infected the development of Latin America. In Harsh Times (translated by Adrian Nathan West) a CIA-supported military coup topples the government of Guatemala, but the idea that the country was a Soviet satellite is shown up as manipulated fiction. Llosa tells Tom Sutcliffe about the murky tales of Cold War conspiracies that dominated at the time, and their legacy today. N...
Nov 15, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast At times it can feel as though we’re in the middle of a generational war, with the baby boomers battling the much maligned post-millennials. But in Generations the Director of The Policy Institute at King’s College London, Bobby Duffy explores just how far when we’re born determines our attitudes to money, sex, politics and much else. He tells Andrew Marr how the data from more than 40 countries unravels many of our preconceptions. Born since the mid-1990s, Generation Z is the first age group ne...
Nov 08, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The internationally-renowned artist Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his creativity and political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father. In 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, translated by Alan H. Barr, he looks back at the blighted life of his father Ai Qing, once China’s most celebrated poet before he was banished during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei tells Tom Sutcliffe about his own journey to becoming an artist and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalit...
Nov 01, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast ‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening’, wrote George Orwell in 1940. In Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit explores how the writer’s love for growing things, especially flowers, seeps into his work. She reflects on how he uses pleasure, beauty and joy as powerful acts of resistance. And how far these can counter the political and environmental challenges we face today. The father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was also driven by a desire to reform the society he lived in at the tu...
Oct 25, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Rationality, the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human beings have the power to think, act and behave rationally, if given the right tools to do so. He asks why rationality so often plays second fiddle to opinion, bias and prejudice. And he believes that in order to ensure our survival as a species we need to learn how to apply rational thought to our daily lives. Our attitudes towards sexual desire may not always be regarded as rational. Amia Srinivasan is C...
Oct 18, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast ‘Devil-Land’ – that was how foreign observers viewed England in the 17th century: a ‘failed state’ torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. The historian Clare Jackson recounts this stormy and radical era through the eyes of outsiders across the Channel. But she tells Andrew Marr that the country’s turbulence also bred great creativity and curiosity about the wider world. The Anglo-French journalist Benedicte Paviot is the UK correspondent of France 24. She expl...
Oct 11, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast What does the face of power look like? It’s a question the academic Mary Beard explores in her latest book, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. She tells Kirsty Wark how the depiction of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture and the presentation of power for more than two thousand years. King George III was condemned in the 18th century as ‘the cruellest tyrant of his age’ and depicted as a diminutive and pompous figure in the 21st century musical, Hamilt...
Oct 04, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The prize-winning author Colm Tóibín recreates the life and work of one of Germany’s most famous and acclaimed writers Thomas Mann. The Magician is a deeply intimate portrait of a private man, revealing both his suppressed homosexuality and complex family ties, and of a public writer who sought to explicate the soul of Germany in the 20th century. When Hitler came to power Thomas Mann fled his homeland and went into exile in America, and in Switzerland, never to return to live in the country tha...
Sep 27, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Richard Powers’s prize-winning Overstory was an impassioned evocation of the natural world and a call to arms to save it. In his latest novel, Bewilderment, a father and son navigate a world seemingly bent on destruction. Powers tells Andrew Marr how the father, an astrobiologist, models planets in far away galaxies searching for life, while his nature-loving 9 year old struggles to understand why earth’s life forms are so thoughtlessly destroyed. Mya-Rose Craig, aka ‘birdgirl’, is a young Briti...
Sep 20, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The neuroscientist Anil Seth is a leading researcher into consciousness. In his book, Being You, he explores why we experience life in the first person. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how our perceptual experiences are less a reflection of an objective external reality, and more a kind of controlled hallucination. He argues that perception is a brain-based ‘best guess’ – including our core sense of self – designed by evolution to keep the body alive. Tiffany Watt Smith is interested in how the individua...
Sep 13, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ali Smith talks to Andrew Marr about Summer, the finale to her ambitious, ground-breaking Seasonal quartet of novels. Since 2016, the prize-winning writer has been working on a cycle of novels that not only explore the changing seasons, but reflect the times we are living in. With the tightest turnaround from manuscript to book, Smith’s ambition was to create real contemporaneous ‘state of the nation’ works. She reflects on a country voting on its future, people and families on the brink of chan...
Jun 28, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Scotland’s former National Poet Jackie Kay celebrates the tempestuous life of the great blues singer, Bessie Smith. Born in Tennessee in 1894 Bessie was a street singer before she made it big at a time of racial violence and segregation. Jackie Kay remembers growing up as a young black girl in Glasgow and she tells Kirsty Wark how she idolised this iconic singer. In Time’s Witness the historian Rosemary Hill explores the historical shift in focus from the grand sweeping narratives of kings and s...
Jun 21, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Love it or hate it, London dominates the UK politically, economically and culturally. It’s nearly 200 years since one critic famously described the capital as ‘the Great Wen’ a monstrous cyst sucking the life blood from the rest of the country. And for many that belief still stands. In The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City the academic, and Londoner, Jack Brown untangles the complex strands of anti-London rhetoric, separating hyperbole from fact. In 2019 the former s...
Jun 14, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
