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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Wark explores national stories and myths – from both inside and outside a country’s borders. Neil MacGregor discusses how Dickens, Monty Python and the Suez Crisis have influenced the way Britain is perceived abroad. He visits five different countries to find out which historical events, cultural influences and objects have shaped the way how others see us. The answers may well surprise people back home. Sweden has a strong sense of its own national identity: it boasts the world’s oldest ...
Dec 17, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Trees may have vibrant inner lives and certainly appear to have individual personalities, claims the forester-cum-writer Peter Wollheben. In his bestselling book, The Hidden Life of Trees, he uncovers an underground social network of communication between trees. In the late 1990s the journalist Ruth Pavey purchased four acres of scrub woodland in Somerset, and set about transforming this derelict land into a sanctuary for woodland plants, creatures and her own thoughts. The natural world comes a...
Dec 10, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today's battle for political power began with Thomas Cromwell, argues Diarmaid MacCulloch. In a landmark new biography he tells Tom Sutcliffe how Henry VIII's chief reformer claimed power from Europe and the pope - and gave it to an English parliament instead. But Cromwell is one of the most notorious figures in history, admired as a master statesman and reviled as a Machiavel. Acclaimed playwright James Graham dramatises the political power-play of the Brexit campaign in his new Channel 4 drama...
Dec 03, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The director Paulette Randall brings to the stage the ultimate tale of sacrifice in the pursuit of power: Doctor Faustus. She tells Andrew Marr how, in coveting fame, power and knowledge, he sells his soul to the devil. This bargain with the devil is one of the most iconic cultural motifs in the Western tradition. The poet and writer Ann Wroe looks to another founding story of Christianity, that of St Francis of Assisi. Born into luxury he forsakes it all after hearing the voice of God commandin...
Nov 26, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast A stifling culture of safety is now spreading throughout Western academic institutions leading to a crisis in mental health, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He tells Amol Rajan that the current obsession with ‘safe spaces’ and no-platforming, is not only a breach of freedom of speech, but is creating a generation unable to cope with modern life. But the commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues that free speech has often been used as a justification to spout hate speech and pr...
Nov 19, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Poland turns 100 this November. The country had existed for a thousand years but it was only in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles that an independent Poland was created. Amol Rajan explores its turbulent history. No nation's story has been so distorted as Poland's, says historian Adam Zamoyski. He looks back to the great medieval nation that was once a European heavyweight. But Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland up in 1797 and turned it into a backwater - before the Nazis and Soviet sol...
Nov 12, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Marr talks to the journalist Lindsey Hilsum about the extraordinary life of the war correspondent Marie Colvin. Throughout her career she travelled to the most dangerous places in the world, to bear witness to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. She wrote: “it has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.’ She was killed in Syria in 201...
Nov 05, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Budget day, Andrew Marr discusses what is broken in our economic and social system, and how it could be mended - if only those in charge were bold enough. Oxford’s Paul Collier is an economist known around the world for his work on inequality. His new book, The Future of Capitalism, focuses on the great rifts dividing Britain, with solutions on how to close them. David Willetts, the former Conservative minister, is focused on generational fairness and the increasing tensions between the succe...
Nov 05, 2018•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pirates come in many forms – from swashbuckling Captain Hook to today's poverty-stricken pirates off the coast of Somalia. It’s 400 years since one of the most charismatic and controversial figures in English history was executed. Sir Walter Ralegh was a favourite of Elizabeth I and was a famous adventurer and poet. But his exploits divided opinion even in his own lifetime, and his biographer Anna Beer tells Kirsty Wark the Spanish regarded him as a state-sponsored pirate. Captain Hook, Long Joh...
Oct 22, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Francis Fukuyama once famously announced ‘the end of history’. He now turns his attention to what he sees as the great challenge to liberal democracy: identity politics. He tells Andrew Marr that today’s descent into identities narrowly focused on nation, religion, race or gender have resulted in an increasingly polarised and factional society. Birkbeck Professor of Politics, Eric Kaufmann, is looking at populism, immigration and the future of white majorities. He argues that the concerns of whi...
Oct 15, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s nearly a century since the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was first conceived. It has gone on to become a multi-million pound industry categorising people from thinking introverts to feeling extroverts. But the mother-daughter team who came up with the idea had no psychological expertise and the test itself has no scientific basis, as the author Merve Emre explains to Tom Sutcliffe. Our genes are the most important factor in shaping who we are, according to the psychologist Robert Plomin. He a...
Oct 08, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yuval Noah Harari offers his 21 lessons for the 21st century. In a wide ranging discussion with Andrew Marr, Harari looks back to his best-selling history of the world, Sapiens, and forward to a possible post-human future. Technological disruption, ecological cataclysms, fake news and threats of terrorism make the 21st century a frightening prospect. Harari argues against sheltering in nostalgic political fantasies. He calls for a clear-sighted view of the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead...
Oct 01, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast The prize-winning novelist William Boyd has set his latest novel, Love Is Blind, at the turn of the 20th century. He tells Amol Rajan how his young Scottish protagonist travels across Europe in a tale of obsession, passion and music. Lust and violence combine in Strauss's opera Salome in which a young princess performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Director Adena Jacobs has put a bold new spin on the story for English National Opera in her psychologi...
Sep 24, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
