The writer and academic Emma Dabiri encourages unruliness in her latest book, Disobedient Bodies. She puts the origins of western beauty ideals under the spotlight and explores ways to rebel against and subvert the current orthodoxy. The book is accompanied by an exhibition, The Cult of Beauty, at the Wellcome Collection from 26 October 2023 to 28 April 2024. It was in the Wellcome’s archive that the filmmaker Carol Morley came across the works and writings of the artist Audrey Amiss. In her new...
Oct 16, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This programme was set up before the violence broke out in Israel. Tom Sutcliffe will also be joined by the BBC's Diplomatic Correspondent James Landale. The Israeli novelist and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen describes the shock felt by the attacks on her country. The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle Jake Wallis Simons discusses his book Israelophobia in which he argues that throughout history Jews have been hated for their religion and their race, and now anti-Semitism is focused on their nat...
Oct 09, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast After her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey the classicist Emily Wilson tackles his epic, The Iliad. She brings to life the battle cries between the Greeks and the Trojans, the bellicose leaders, the political manoeuvres and the deals with the gods. Mary Beard looks at the expression of power in the ancient Roman world in her new study of Emperor of Rome. From Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus nearly two hundred years later, she explores just how much control and authority these rulers had, an...
Oct 02, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In front of an audience at the Contains Strong Language Festival in Leeds the poets, Lemn Sissay and Lebogang Mashile, and the curator Clare O’Dowd explore the transformative power of language, and the quest to break down barriers. Each morning the award-winning writer Lemn Sissay composes a short poem as dawn breaks, to banish his own dark thoughts and look forward to the day. The result is his new collection, Let the Light Pour In. Transformation is also at the heart of his retelling of Kafka’...
Sep 25, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak has spent three decades uncovering evidence of ancient human life. In The Naked Neanderthal (translated by David Watson) he explores the last great extinction of a humanity that died out at the very moment Homo Sapiens expanded across the earth. The ingenuity, compassion and cruelty of Homo Sapiens are at the centre of Sebastian Faulks’s new novel, The Seventh Son. As scientists develop methods to genetically alter the human race, ethical questions arise, ...
Sep 18, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast To mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS Kirsty Wark looks back at its formation, its current health and future prognosis with the medic and broadcaster Kevin Fong, historian Andrew Seaton, political commentator Isabel Hardman and GP Phil Whitaker. In ‘Our NHS’ Andrew Seaton explores the history of Britain’s ‘best-loved institution’, and how it has changed and adapted over the decades. Isabel Hilton focuses on the most critical moments in its 75 years in ‘Fighting for Life’. She talks to key deci...
Jul 03, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium are the stars of Ed Conway’s book, Material World. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how they built our world, from the Dark Ages to the present day. And how much the battle to secure them will shape our geopolitical future. The science writer Aarathi Prasad focuses on one of the world’s strongest biological materials ever known – Silk. In her latest book she explores the ancient origins of silk, its global reach, and how it continues to inspire new technologies – ...
Jun 26, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Wark celebrates the artistry of numbers with three mathematicians Eugenia Cheng, Sarah Hart and Emily Howard. Eugenia Cheng asks Is Maths Real? in her new book, which offers a new way to look at the subject by focusing on the questions, rather than the answers. She explores how asking the simplest of questions – ‘why does 1 + 1 = 2?’ – can get to the very heart of the search for mathematical truth. Sarah Hart wants to break down the perceived barriers between mathematics and the creative ...
Jun 19, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just how safe is the online world? Yale Professor of Law and Philosophy Scott Shapiro delves into cybersecurity in his book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing. The book’s title derives from the exploits of ‘Fancy Bear’, an elite unit of the Russian military intelligence that hacked the US Democratic National Committee in 2016. From a bored graduate student who accidentally crashed the nascent internet, to cyber criminals and bot farms, Shapiro looks at the dark history of the information age. Dr Alice Hu...
Jun 12, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Billions of people worldwide suffer from some kind of allergy and this is the focus of Theresa MacPhail’s book, Allergic. As a medical anthropologist and allergy sufferer herself she looks back at the history of diagnosis and treatment and investigates the worrying increase in numbers. It's thought by 2030 half the population will be sufferers. James Kinross is a colorectal surgeon and suggests that some of the answer as to why there’s been a rise in allergies lies in the imbalance of our microb...
Jun 05, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In front of an audience at the Hay Festival Tom Sutcliffe asks what Dickens would say about the world today. The prize-winning Barbara Kingsolver discusses her retelling of David Copperfield, in which her eponymous hero, Demon Copperfield, must struggle to survive amid rural poverty and America’s opioid crisis. Michael Rosen has imagined his own modern Oliver Twist (An Unexpected Twist) and A Christmas Carol (Bah! Humbug!) and reflects on the unspoken grief and trauma of recent years, retold in ...
May 29, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The exhibition Animals: Art, Science and Sound at the British Library (until 28 August 2023) reveals how animals have been documented across the world through history. Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sound, explores how people have tried to capture bird song – from using musical notation in the 17th century to the first commercial recording three centuries later, and the recording of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō songbird in Haiwaii. Swifts are summer migrants, flying thousands of mile...
May 22, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The economic historian and former trader Anne Murphy looks back at the Bank of England in the 18th century. In Virtuous Bankers she shows how a private institution became ‘a great engine of state’ and central to Britain’s economic and geopolitical power. Anne Murphy tells Adam Rutherford that both its inner workings and outer structure had to command the respect of the general public. Interest was a fact of life long before the involvement of central banks and goes back as far as ancient Mesopot...
May 15, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast What to do with the art of monstrous men? That’s the question Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She wonders whether she can or should continue to love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? And if it’s possible to divorce the art from the artist. How do we now view the glorious, technicolour paintings of Paul Gauguin’s works from Tahiti? The writer Devika Ponnambalam has imagined the life of one of his muses Teha’amana in her latest novel,...
May 08, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Rutherford asks what ordinary life was like in the Soviet Union and how far its collapse helps to explain Russia today. Karl Schlögel is one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union. In his latest book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (translated by Rodney Livingstone), he recreates an encyclopaedic and richly detailed history of daily life, both big and small. He examines the planned economy, the railway system and the steel city of Magnitogorsk as well as cook...
May 01, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Trees have the remarkable ability to pass knowledge down to succeeding generations and to survive the ravages of climate change, if only we’d let them alone, according to the German forester Peter Wohlleben. In The Power of Trees (translated by Jane Billinghurst) he explains the significance of leaving ancient forests untouched, and is scathing about the failures in forestry management and the planting of non-native trees for profit. Jill Butler is an ancient tree specialist and a trustee of the...
Apr 24, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Why is it so difficult to find a place to call home? By the age of twenty five the journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses, from council estates in London to a car showroom in rural Wales. In All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In she reveals the reality of Britain’s housing crisis, the state’s neglect, and the toll it takes on those forced to move from place to place. In her memoir Undercurrent the writer and poet Natasha Carthew compares the picture-postcard view of her native ...
Apr 17, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The artist Ai Weiwei has always enjoyed ignoring the boundaries between disciplines, fusing art, architecture, design, collecting and social activism. He’s now taken over the Design Museum in London (from 7th April – 30th July 2023), filling it with his work and collections - from millions of handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds to Lego pieces and broken teapot spouts dating back to the Song Dynasty. The exhibition, Making Sense, explores what we value - from what we perceive to be precious or ...
Apr 10, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do people learn new skills and become real experts? These were the questions the author Adam Gopnik wanted to answer in his new book, The Real Work – a term magicians use for their accumulated craft. He apprenticed himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor to see if could get to the bottom of the mystery of mastery, and better himself. Rebecca Struthers is a true master of her profession – horology. In Hands of Time, A Watchmaker's History of Time she reveals the...
Apr 03, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Kirsty Wark talks to an historian, scientist and novelist about how to convey the story and impact of climate change. Floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and solar activity have all shaped the natural history of our world from its formation. In The Earth Transformed the historian Peter Frankopan looks back at how the climate has constantly changed our world, but also at the impact of extreme climatic events on an...
Mar 27, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The writer Sarah Bakewell explores the long tradition of humanist thought in her latest book, Humanly Possible. She celebrates the writers, thinkers, artists and scientists over the last 700 years who have placed humanity at the centre, while defying the forces of religion, fanatics, mystics and tyrants. But placing humans at the centre isn’t without problems – critics point to its anthropocentric nature and excessive rationalism and individualism, as well its Euro-centric history. The philosoph...
Mar 20, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Eliot was a leading novelist who scandalised Victorian society by eloping to Germany with a married man and living in unlawful conjugal bliss. She dedicated her books to ‘her husband’ and wrote of 'this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength'. The philosopher and writer Clare Carlisle has written a new biography of George Eliot which places The Marriage Question at the centre of her art and life. The playwright David Eldridge is writing a trilogy of plays about...
Mar 13, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s twenty years since the US and UK invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kirsty Wark discusses the lead up to the war, the impact on the lives of Iraqis and the legacy. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad left his job in Baghdad and became a journalist during the Iraq War in 2003. He witnessed first-hand the liberation of his country from a megalomaniac leader and then its descent into factionalism and violence. In A Stranger In Your Own City he movingly recounts the very real human cost of the invasion, a...
Mar 06, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s Ok To Be Angry About Capitalism is the title of the new book by the US politician Bernie Sanders. In it he castigates a system that he argues is fuelled by uncontrolled greed and rigged against ordinary people. He tells Tom Sutcliffe it’s time to reject an economic order and a political system that continues to benefit the super-rich, and fight for a democracy that recognises that economic rights are human rights. The Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times Martin Wolf looks more...
Feb 27, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli celebrates the life of an ancient Greek philosopher, in Anaximander And The Nature Of Science (translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg). He tells Adam Rutherford that this little known figure spearheaded the first great scientific revolution and understood that progress is made by the endless search for knowledge. Anaximander challenged conventions by proposing that the Earth floats in space, animals evolve and storms are natural, not supernatural. The trav...
Feb 20, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The psychologist Kimberley Wilson lays bear the truism ‘we are what we eat’. In Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat is Fuelling our Mental Health Crisis she bring into sharp focus the known links between diet, brain, behaviour and mental health. She tells Tom Sutcliffe how the government’s failure to address poor nutrition is a catastrophe. Rebecca O’Connell’s research focuses on the social, cultural and economic reasons that shape what children and families eat, and the part food plays in their ev...
Feb 13, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is ruthless in her pursuit of power and then driven into madness and despair. But the writer and director Zinnie Harris has re-imagined a new story for Lady Macbeth in her version of this classic play. Macbeth (an undoing) - published by Faber - is on at The Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh until 25th February. Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter and is interested in how power and superstition collide in witch-trials...
Feb 06, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Sutcliffe talks to three historians about the crimes of WWII and the shifting geopolitics, and the lasting reverberations today with the war in Ukraine. Dan Stone’s new book, The Holocaust - An Unfinished History moves beyond the concentration camps to reveal the true extent of the killing in towns and villages, and the depth of collaboration across the continent – from Norway to Romania. On BBC World Service and BBC Sounds Catherine Merridale uncovers the complex story of loss and silence a...
Jan 30, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The architect Sandra Youkhana takes readers on a tour of the structures of modern digital worlds in Videogame Atlas (co-authored with Luke Caspar Pearson). From Minecraft to Assassin’s Creed Unity she examines the real-world architectural theory that underpins these fantasy worlds, and their influence on concrete designs today. The journalist Louise Blain presents BBC Radio 3’s monthly Sound of Gaming which showcases the latest and best gaming soundtracks. She explores how composers help create ...
Jan 23, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Europe’s perspective Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America in 1492. But the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock shifts the focus in her new book, On Savage Shores, to explore what the great civilisations of the Americas – the Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others – found in return. The stories of Indigenous Americans abroad are ones of abduction, loss and cultural appropriation, but also bafflement at the lives and beliefs in 15th century Europe. On Savage Shores is BBC Radio 4's Book o...
Jan 16, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
