In Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics Kenan Malik questions what he sees as lazy assumptions about race and culture. He retells the forgotten history of a racialised working class which sits uncomfortably with today’s obsession with ‘white privilege’. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that we need to confront the issues facing society in terms of class and inequality, and not in terms of identity. The academic Francesca Sobande believes people’s racial ident...
Jan 09, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his new book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains. Anna Lapwood is an organist and conductor, and currently the Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is also a great believer in the transformative power of music. She regularly pla...
Dec 26, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Balanchine is one of the most revered and influential choreographers of the twentieth century. In this first major biography about his life Jennifer Homans offers an intimate portrait of the man who co-founded the New York City Ballet and brought the art form so spectacularly into the modern age. She explores his life and legacy, revealing a complicated genius who was inspired to choreograph dances from subjects as diverse as Spinoza’s philosophy to Orthodox icons, disrupting the norms of...
Dec 19, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Johan Eklöf is a Swedish bat scientist on a mission. In The Darkness Manifesto (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) he warns how light pollution is threatening the ancient rhythms of life. Many creatures across the world come to life at night – with bats specially adapted to fly using echolocation. By keeping the lights on we are disrupting entire ecosystems. But darkness can appear alien and frightening. The writer Kate Summerscale explores the phobias that haunt the imagination as the lights go of...
Dec 12, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is fifty years since the last manned-flight to the moon. While the Apollo missions have long been superseded by explorations further afield, the science journalist Oliver Morton insists the moon landings remain strong in our cultural imagination. In his 2019 book, The Moon, he explained how a spherical piece of rock had captured the world’s attention, but then been largely ignored. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how scientists and politicians are now once again turning their focus to our nearest neig...
Dec 05, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Real faith ‘passes first through the body/ like an arrow’ so writes the American-Iranian poet Kaveh Akbar. In his collection Pilgrim Bell he plays with the physical and divine, the human capacity for cruelty and grace, and the reality of living as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation. The Anglican priest and biblical scholar John Barton turns his attention to the word of God as it has travelled across the world. The Bible have been translated thousands of times into more than 700 languages. In The...
Nov 28, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Nobel peace prize-winner Maria Ressa is a journalist who has spent decades speaking truth to power in the country of her birth, the Philippines. She looks back at her life, and her ongoing battle against disinformation and political lies in How To Stand Up To A Dictator. She tells Kirsty Wark that although she is hounded by the state and faces threats of imprisonment, she is determined to continue fighting for the truth. Zsuzsanna Szelényi was once one of the leading politicians in Hungary’s...
Nov 21, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In art the Greek and Roman body is often portrayed as one of perfection – flawlessly cast in bronze and white marble. But the classicist Caroline Vout tells Adam Rutherford that the reality was very different. In her new book, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body, she reveals all the imperfections and anxieties, and makes visible those who were regarded at the time as far from perfect – women and servants. The curator and art historian Katy Hessel is also challenging the accepted history in her wor...
Nov 14, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The award-winning writer Jonathan Coe presents a portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family, in his latest novel Bournville. Set in middle England, in a suburb of Birmingham, he chronicles the years of social change post-war, and the events that both brought people together and divided them, from royal events and the World Cup to Brexit and Covid-19. The chocolate factory that features heavily in the novel, and was once at the centre of life in Bournville, has since been tra...
Nov 07, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Pulitzer-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee recalls the thrill of seeing for the first time the extraordinary ‘luminosity’ of a living cell. In his latest work, The Song of the Cell, he explores the history, the present and the future of cellular biology. He tells Adam Rutherford that without understanding cells you can’t understand the human body, medicine, and especially the story of life itself. ‘Once upon a time I fell in love with a cell.’ So recalls the leading cardiologist Sian H...
Oct 31, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Man Booker prize winning novelist George Saunders turns to short-stories for his latest book, Liberation Day. From workers dressed as ‘ghouls’ in an underground amusement park to brainwashed political protestors and story-telling slaves his protagonists underscore what it means to live in community with others. George Saunders tells Tom Sutcliffe how his stories veer from bizarre fantasy to brutal reality. The move from fantasy to stark reality can be seen in the history of Russians living i...
Oct 24, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first event marking Black History Month UK took place thirty five years ago, and the re-claiming and documenting of Black British and International History has since evolved into a national movement. But how much has changed in those three decades? The historian Miranda Kaufmann has spent years uncovering evidence of Africans in Renaissance Britain. Her first book Black Tudors: The Untold Story was published five years ago and has since become a free online course. The British Nigerian poet ...
Oct 17, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her latest novel, The Unfolding, the prize-winning AM Homes has created a compelling central character: a larger than life American patriot and family man. Undone by Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, he collects together a band of like-minded men to spread their version of the American dream, and to reclaim it by force if necessary. AM Homes tells Tom Sutcliffe her Big Guy’s fight to retain his influence is confounded by his failure to keep his own family from fracturing. Pow...
Oct 10, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast During the pandemic our laws were radically remade by a government which exercised almost unlimited power, according to the human rights barrister, Adam Wagner. In Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters he decries the lack of parliamentary debate and oversight as restrictions became tighter, and warns against the possiblity of future emergencies following the same political path. But how effective is our parliamentary democracy in scrutinising the government...
Oct 03, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In a special edition of the show, in front of an audience at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, Adam Rutherford and guests focus on scientific curiosity – its thrills and its dangers. Professor Matthew Cobb looks back over the last fifty years at the extraordinary development in gene editing. In his book The Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life he traces the excitement of innovation and progress. But as the full potential of manipulating life is understood, he sounds a wa...
Sep 26, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Forget the north south divide, what about the ‘squeezed middle’? Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss the cultural and political status of the country’s ‘second city’ Birmingham. The writer Kit de Waal looks back at growing up in the city, caught between three worlds – Irish, Caribbean and British – in her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes. The historian Richard Vinen argues, in his new book Second City, that Birmingham is the overlooked heart of modern Britain, and the remnants of the West ...
Sep 12, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast When people feel ill they go to the doctor for a diagnosis and what they hope will be the first step on the road to recovery. But former consultant neurologist Jules Montague argues that getting a diagnosis isn’t as simple as it sounds – they can be infected by medical bias, swayed by Big Pharma or political expedience, even refused because the condition isn’t officially recognised. In The Imaginary Patient Dr Montague meets those who have had to fight to get the right treatment. The GP Gavin Fr...
Jun 27, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Linda Kinstler’s Latvian grandfather disappeared after WWII and the family never spoke about him. But as she delved into Boris Kinstler’s life she found he had been a member of a killing brigade in the SS linked to the ‘Butcher of Riga’ Herbert Cukurs, before becoming a KGB agent and then vanishing. She attempts to uncover the truth in Come To This Court and Cry: How The Holocaust Ends, but also interrogates the uncertainties of memory, family, nation and justice. Although Herbert Cukur’s name c...
Jun 20, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The failure of British politics and public institutions to tackle social inequality is down to proximity, so says the writer, performer and activist Darren McGarvey. In The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain he looks at the huge gulf – geographic, economic and cultural – between those who make decisions and the people on the receiving end of them. He tells Adam Rutherford it’s time for a meaningful discussion in which the voiceless and powerless get heard. The Social...
Jun 13, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The environmentalist George Monbiot argues that farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction, but few people want to talk about it. In Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet he presents a vision for the future of food production. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that new ideas and technologies from soil ecology to laboratory-grown food could change the way people eat while regenerating the landscape. But many farmers believe that they have been unfairly accused of ...
Jun 06, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In front of an audience at this year’s Hay Festival Helen Lewis talks to three prize winning authors about their work. Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning The Promise tells the story of a family and a country – South Africa – and the failed promises that destroy them both. The exciting promise of a super-connected world where memories are currency is set against the quest for privacy in Jennifer Egan’s new novel The Candy House. And Margo Jefferson examines every passion, memory and influence – from f...
May 30, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Rutherford explores how other species can help us understand our own. The world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal has spent decades observing the behaviours of chimps and bonobos. In Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender he looks at, and questions, the interplay of biology and culture. Using his knowledge of apes he challenges widely held beliefs about masculinity and femininity and assumptions about authority, power, cooperation and sexual behaviour. Nichola Raihani’s research ...
May 23, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every moment of the day tiny biological clocks are ticking throughout the body, but Russell Foster, world-renowned expert in circadian neuroscience, warns that modern life is playing havoc with these ancient and delicate mechanisms. In his latest book, Life Time: The New Science Of The Body Clock And How It Can Revolutionise Your Sleep and Health, Professor Foster reveals how this essential part of our biology works. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how new understandings about our daily routines could he...
May 16, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni is the Guest Co-Director of this year’s Brighton Festival and her flagship project The Riwaq on Hove seafront provides a space for social and artistic exchange. Rebuilding is the festival’s theme and the subject of her latest book, Building for Hope – Towards an Architecture of Belonging which explores how cities can be rebuilt after crisis and war. She tells Helen Lewis that architecture has a pivotal role in generating community, not just in devastated cit...
May 09, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wonder at the natural world has inspired people and fuelled curiosity for millennia. The ancient Greek Theophrastus had interests that spread far and wide, from biology and physics to ethics and metaphysics. But although he was Aristotle’s friend and collaborator, and his notes on botany inspired Linnaeus, his name has mostly been forgotten. The writer Laura Beatty’s new book, Looking for Theophrastus, aims to rescue him from obscurity. The scientist, Suzie Sheehy, still feels a childlike wonder...
May 02, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In The Age of the Strongman, the journalist Gideon Rachman explores how populist and authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since Vladimir Putin took power in Russia at the beginning of the new millennium, self-styled strongmen have emerged across the globe, from Trump and Bolsonaro to Orbán, Xi and Modi. Rachman tells Tom Sutcliffe how these leaders have taken power and the challenge they pose to liberal democracy. Judy Dempsey is a senior fellow at Carnegie Eur...
Apr 25, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The new novel, Glory, by prize winning writing NoViolet Bulawayo is a postcolonial tale of power and tyranny – an African Animal Farm. It’s set in the fictional Jidada, that resembles Zimbabwe during the overthrow of Robert Mugabe, and is populated by a vivid cast of animals – from the vicious dog-soldiers to the powerful Old Horse leader himself. She tells Adam Rutherford how her chorus of animal voices help reveal the human world more clearly. The journalist Dipo Faloyin wants to push against ...
Apr 18, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Stand still, and I will read to thee / A lecture, love, in love's philosophy." John Donne is one of the greatest love poets in the history of the English language. In a new biography, Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell reveals the many transformations in his life – from scholar to sea adventurer to priest. She also tells Kirsty Wark of his extraordinary ability to transform language into something new. Copies of his Metaphysical Poems will be well-thumbed by students around the country. But what...
Apr 11, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The picture of a lone figure, plastic bags in hand, standing in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989 has become an iconic image of resistance to overpowering might. As Russian tanks have crossed into Ukraine, individuals have put themselves in similar positions to halt the advance. But what about in Russia itself. Arkady Ostrovksy is Russia and eastern Europe editor for The Economist. He tells Tom Sutcliffe about the thousands who have been arrested protesting against ...
Apr 04, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the Russian invasion of Ukraine images of war in Europe dominate the news, and questions rage about the political failure to both prevent and end the atrocities. Amol Rajan discusses the political forces that have allowed the West to flourish and the cracks that are beginning to widen. Developed in the wake of European wars of religion and nationalism, Liberalism was designed as a system to govern diverse societies, with a strong emphasis on the rights of individuals, equality and the rule ...
Mar 28, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
