Start the Week
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Start the Week
Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday
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619 Episoden
Endangered languages and vanishing landscapes
Of the 7,000 languages estimated to exist, half will have disappeared by the end of this century. That’s the stark warning from the Director of the En...
Yanis Varoufakis on Greece’s civil war
The economist Yanis Varoufakis found himself in the eye of the storm as Greece’s Minister of Finance in 2015, at the height of the country’s debt cris...
Steven Pinker on common knowledge
The experimental cognitive psychologist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker delves into the intricacies of human interactions in his latest book...
Contains Strong Language Festival, Bradford
At the Contains Strong Language Festival in Bradford, Tom Sutcliffe and guests explore the history and culture of the city, and nation, through its po...
Afghanistan and the DRC
Lyse Doucet tells the history of Afghanistan in recent decades through the story of the Inter-Continental hotel, which opened in the capital in 1969....
Arundhati Roy and maternal inheritance
The Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy looks back at her foremost influences in her memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me. While her writing and ac...
Sanctuary, refuge and exile
Sanctuary is an ancient idea of a place of refuge or freedom from harm. It has deep roots in the history, literature and myths of many cultures. Mari...
The Idea of Genius
We think we know what a genius is: a tortured poet; rebellious scientist; monstrous artist; or a tech disruptor. You can tell what a society values by...
Hidden spaces and dangerous places
There is a parallel world which operates under different rules and benefits those with money and power. That’s the argument made by the journalist Ato...
The uses and abuses of the atom
Professor Frank Close looks at how the quest to understand radioactivity and the atomic nucleus was initially fired by scientific curiosity and then b...
Hay Festival: exposing the secrets of rubbish
In front of an audience at the Hay Literary Festival Tom Sutcliffe talks to The archaeologist and presenter of the hit TV show, The Great British Dig,...
Mathematics, Symbiosis and Japanese art
In his new book, Blueprints, Marcus du Sautoy traces the connections between mathematics and art and the ways in which creatives use numbers to underp...
History: private, personal and political
The cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins looks at the long history of the private life from Ancient Athens to the digital age. In her new book, Stranger...
Smell – the underrated sense
Our sense of smell is vital to appreciating food and drink, it can warn us of danger, and enhance enjoyment of our environment, and yet it is one of o...
Advocating for nature
In his new book, Robert Macfarlane takes the reader on a river journey, through history and geography, to posit the idea that rivers are not merely fo...
Christianity and British society
As congregations age and dwindle, what are we to make of the decline of Christianity in England? Bijan Omrani argues that Christianity has had a profo...
Impunity and fighting for justice
The lawyer Philippe Sands weaves together a story of historical crimes, impunity and the law in his latest book, 38 Londres Street. He uncovers the li...
Untangling fact from fiction
In 1967 a group of writers in the US pulled off an ingenious hoax – the publication of a so-called top secret document detailing how global peace woul...
Delusions of grandeur and freedom of speech
The celebrated artist, Sir Grayson Perry, has a new exhibition of work, Delusions of Grandeur, made in direct response to the masterpieces at the Wall...
Abdulrazak Gurnah on family and resistance
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.’ In...
Lockdown and the Covid generation
Five years ago, in response to the Covid pandemic, the government mandated a series of lockdowns, with the closure of schools and businesses and socia...
How political ideology affects the brain
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 polit...
The Great Auk meets Victorian explorers, and zombie ponds
The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife is the subject of Tim Birkhead’s new book. This goose-sized seabird beca...
Community and industrial decline
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...
Writing and rewriting history
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...
Wages for Housework – then and now
From the early 1970s feminist activists from across the globe campaigned under a single demand – Wages for Housework. The historian Emily Callaci trac...
Manufacturing and sustainability
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 o...
Climate Crisis: truth, lies and compromise
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...
Music and movement; mind and body
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 t...
Socrates, optimism and racism
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...
Human intelligence and imagination
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 w...
Animals – up close and talking
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...
Acoustics, music and architecture
Tom Sutcliffe explores the importance of acoustics and the evolution of building design in the enjoyment of music. The academic Fiona Smyth tells the...
Security threats and future prospects for Britain and the EU
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...
The story of British art - from cave paintings to landscapes
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...
The high street
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 a...
Rise and fall of the political fixer
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 Pe...
Sex and Christianity
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...
Ancient crafts: feathers, leather and thatch
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 gatheri...
Female ambition and control
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, Fa...