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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast The poet laureate Simon Armitage challenges himself to write a new poem to capture the spirit of an animal and to see if he can bring it closer to the human world. For a new 10-part series, My Poetry and Other Animals (on BBC Radio 4 at 1.45, from December 23rd), he is guided by his fellow poets as he experiences a series of close encounters – looking into the eye of a tiger, tracking a fox and standing amongst a room full of spiders. Elizabeth Bishop and Feargal Sharkey are Simon Armitage’s gui...
Dec 23, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Sutcliffe explores the importance of acoustics and the evolution of building design in the enjoyment of music. The academic Fiona Smyth tells the story of the groundbreaking work undertaken by scientists, architects and musicians, who revolutionised this new science in the 20th century, in her new book Pistols in St Paul’s. Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, updates the story, revealing the very latest scientific breakthroughs and why certain music ve...
Dec 16, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sir Alex Younger is the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. He assesses the evolving security risks facing Britain in the 21st century, and how the country continues to build strategic partnerships and intelligence agreements in a fracturing world. Younger ran MI6 during President Trump’s first administration and reflects on prospects for ‘the special relationship’ in the second. With tensions between the US and China, increased economic protectionism and the war in Ukrain...
Dec 09, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast While the great Italian renaissance painters and the Dutch masters are world famous, why are there so few British artists from this period leading the way? It’s one of the questions the art historian Bendor Grosvenor examines in his new history, The Invention of British Art. From prehistoric bone carvings to the landscapes of John Constable, Grosvenor reassesses the contribution British artists have made at home and abroad. The writer and former curator at the V&A Susan Owens wants to turn o...
Dec 02, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The UK high street has appeared to be in a near perpetual state of distress since the birth of self-service shopping in the 1950s. Since then, local authorities approving out-of-town developments in the 1970s, the rise of the supermarket, the internet and the recent Covid lockdowns, have all taken their toll on town centres. Adam Rutherford talks to three guests about the changing nature of the high street. Annie Gray explores the long and varied history of shopping districts in The Bookshop, th...
Nov 25, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (on BBC iPlayer) adapted from the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, and directed by the BAFTA award winner Peter Kosminsky, traces the final four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life. After the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s fixer and royal secretary, Cromwell, continues his climb to power and wealth, becoming the most feared and influential figure of his time. But as the King becomes more irascible and Cromwell’s enemies circle, it’s only a matter of ...
Nov 18, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sex has become one of the most controversial topics in the history of the Church. But the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch shows in his book, Lower Than the Angels, that in the last 2,500 years Christianity has encompassed a much greater diversity of beliefs, including on homosexuality and the role of women. He argues that far from there being a single Christian theology of sex, there have always been a wide range of readings and attitudes. In one of the foundational stories of the Bible, in Genesi...
Nov 11, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The farmer James Rebanks recounts a season he spent on a remote Norwegian island learning the ancient trade of caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. In The Place of Tides he tells the story of Anna, a ‘duck woman’ who helped revive this centuries-old tradition. As he traces the rough pattern of her work and her relationship with the wild, Rebanks reassess his own relationship with his Lake District farm, his family and home. Alice Robinson is a designer who has never shied away f...
Nov 04, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Does ambition have to be seen as corrupting, or like a kind of illness’? These are the questions the business writer Stefan Stern asks in his book, Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition. He argues that far from the cliché of a scheming wife, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of human nature, that could help us navigate the pitfalls of ambition today. The playwright Zinnie Harris made Lady Macbeth the hero of her adaptation of the classic play l...
Oct 28, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Rutherford gets to grips with the crisis in adult social care and asks, whose responsibility is it to fix it? David Goodhart, from the Policy Exchange think tank, writes about the huge changes that have been wrought on family life over the past 60 years and how they have impacted the way in which we live and care for each other. In his new book, The Care Dilemma, he argues that we are in desperate need of a new policy settlement that not only supports gender equality, but also recognises th...
Oct 21, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling Sapiens explored human’s extraordinary progress alongside the capacity to spin stories. In Nexus he focuses on how those stories have been shared and manipulated, and how the flow of information has made, and unmade, our world. With examples from the ancient world, to contemporary democracies and authoritarian regimes, he pits the pursuit of truth against the desire to control the narrative. And warns against the dangers of allowing AI to dominate information net...
Oct 14, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The prize-winning writer Richard Powers moves from the forests and outer space in his last two novels The Overstory and Bewilderment, to dive into the vast and mysterious ocean in his latest work, Playground. Through the lives of four main characters he explores the ubiquity of play in the natural world, and the role technology is playing in the game of evolution. The scuba diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith concludes his three part exploration of the origins of intelligence, with Living on ...
Oct 07, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The best-selling historian William Dalrymple presents India as the great superpower of ancient times in The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. He argues that for more than a millennium India art, religions, technology, astronomy, music and mathematics spread far and wide from the Red Sea to the Pacific, and its influence was unprecedented, but now largely forgotten. China’s significance has long been celebrated and understood, with reference to the ancient trading routes linki...
Sep 30, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast ‘Professor Risk’ David Spiegelhalter delves into the data and statistics to explore the forces of chance, ignorance and luck in The Art of Uncertainty. Whereas life is uncertain, he shows how far the circumstances of how, when and where you were born have an overriding influence on your future. But he warns against confusing the improbable with the impossible. The novelist Roddy Doyle returns to the fortunes of one of his iconic characters, Paula Spencer, in his new book, The Woman Behind The Do...
Sep 23, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The historian Timothy Snyder is famous for his work on the horrors of the 20th century and his call to arms to fight against tyranny in the 21st. Now, in ‘On Freedom’ he explores what liberty really means. He challenges the idea that this is freedom ‘from’ state or other obligations, and explores how across the US, Russia and Ukraine, true liberty is the freedom ‘to’ thrive and take risks. The Ukrainian poet, Oskana Maksymchuk also considers the question of freedom in her collection, Still City,...
Sep 16, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The author and poet Kathleen Jamie celebrates a new form of writing – weaving personal notes, prose poems and acts of witness – in her latest book, Cairn. The new collection is a meditation on the preciousness and precariousness of both memory and the natural world. The broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan has taken a closer look at the relationship between humans and the earth in her book Clay. From the first clay tablets to the throwing of pots on a wheel, the history of this everyday material is b...
Jul 01, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do animals detect natural disasters before they happen? Martin Wikelski, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour at the University of Konstanz argues they have a ‘sixth sense’ that humans are only just beginning to understand. In his book, The Internet of Animals, he reveals the extraordinary network of information gathered by tagging and tracking thousands of animals across the world. At the University of Glasgow researchers have been looking at how technology can be used t...
Jun 24, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast British social etiquette might be famed for its liberal use of please and thank you, but civility is very much a European import, according to John Gallagher, professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds. As courtiers visited the French and Italian courts in the 16th century they not only learnt new languages but new rules of behaviour too. As the century progressed civility began to be weaponised as travellers sought to distinguish themselves from the ‘barbarous’ foreigners. The...
Jun 17, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Why are there areas of severe deprivation in prosperous countries, and how can prosperity be shared more equally? Those are the questions the world-renowned development economist Paul Collier explores in his book, Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places. He looks at areas that were once thriving – from the mining towns of South Yorkshire to the bustling city ports in Colombia – to explore widening inequality, but also to offer ideas of economic renewal. Matthew Xia directs the UK premi...
Jun 10, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In front of an audience at the Hay Literary Festival Adam Rutherford talks to the botanist and Native American Robin Wall Kimmerer. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass she shows the importance of bringing together indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge, to increase understanding of the languages and worlds of plants and animals. Hugh Warwick is an expert on hedgehogs but in his latest book, Cull of the Wild, he focuses on animals less native, and beloved. From grey squirrels in Anglesey to cane...
Jun 03, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
