Episodes
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Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has published seven collections of her verse. She’s performed her poems to thousands of students at Poetry Live events, a scheme founded by her late husband Simon Rhys Powell.
Imtiaz was born in Lahore in Pakistan and was six months old when her family moved to Glasgow. There she grew up as – in her words – “a Muslim Calvinist”.
When she was 17 she fell in love with her first husband, married in secret and eloped to India. As a result she was disowned by her family, but began to publish her first poems. She illustrates all her collections with pen and ink drawings.
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Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.
Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the Science Museum in London – one about the Hadron Collider, another about the Sun, and his first book was called How To Make An Apple Pie from Scratch, a title which draws on a comment by the astronomer Carl Sagan: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". His most recent book Space Oddities looks at some of the strange things – anomalies - that are currently confounding scientists, and transforming our understanding of physics.
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The American writer Percival Everett is enjoying a moment in the spotlight: his novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022; an earlier book, Erasure, was adapted into the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction; and his latest novel, James, is already a best-seller in the United States. It’s a powerful re-telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim.
In the past four decades he's published two dozen novels, and another dozen books of stories and poetry, but he's just as happy away from the world of literature, fly-fishing or painting. He's also worked as a horse trainer, a cowboy and a jazz guitarist. Jazz and blues feature among the music he shares with us, along with Dvorak, Schoenberg, Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
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Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.
Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black.
Alison probably knows better than most what it’s like to be a young woman in the spotlight, as the mother of a high-profile star herself: the singer Lily Allen.
Her music choices include Beethoven, Coltrane, Ravel and Puccini.
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Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we write and think today.
She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World. Her writing and teaching are based on decades of scholarship, with a focus on ancient Greek drama, and she’s also a familiar voice as a broadcaster, on programmes such as In Our Time.
Her most recent book is Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks and Me - a deeply personal account of the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, drawing parallels between her own family history and characters from Greek tragedy. Edith's music selection includes Schubert, Beethoven, Gluck and Handel.
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Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English but he went to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.
He started out writing for newspapers, winning the Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002. He now writes for The Times. In 2008 he published his memoir of his early life called The Boy With the Topknot.
More recently he has focused on our colonial history. In 2021 he published Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, which was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards. Then came Empireworld: How British Imperialism has shaped the Globe, which quickly became a best-seller.Sathnam's musical choices include Bach, John Coltrane, Debussy and Jasdeep Singh Degun.
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Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.”Her painstaking work and expertise mean she can work out how people have met their end, and police forces, the Foreign Office and the UN have called on her evidence in countless high profile investigations. She was the lead forensic anthropologist to the British forensic team during the international war crimes investigations in Kosovo and the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Operation. Back in the UK she provided evidence that helped prosecute Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring.She is currently the President of St John’s College, Oxford, and in 2021 she entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer. She has just been appointed to the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in Scotland.Sue's music selections include Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn and Elgar.
(Photo: Sue Black. Credit David Gross)
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David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii – and back again.
Closer to home, he drew on his own childhood in Worcestershire in his coming-of-age tale Black Swan Green, about a teenager attempting to overcome a stammer and negotiate playground hierarchies, all against the backdrop of the Falklands War.
His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, charts the rise of an imaginary rock band in the late 1960s.
David's musical choices include Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius and Hildegard von Bingen.
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John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes.
In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering.
Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on high-profile public roles: he was the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he faced the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He’s also a cross-bench peer and was principal of Jesus College, Oxford, for a decade.
His musical choices include Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Corelli.
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Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe – Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan – which went for $108 million in June 2023.
Helena also plays the violin and the piano and her musical background has come in handy when standing on the auction block. She also loves the cross-over between music and art and how one can inspire the other.
Her musical choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Bach.
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Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the digital innovations of our own times. Mark has interviewed many of the most significant directors and actors of the past half century, and with Tilda Swinton he created the Screen Machine, a large portable cinema which they and their supporters sometimes pulled by hand through the Scottish Highlands.
Mark’s choices of film music range from Doris Day and Henry Mancini to a score by Alfred Schnittke and a song from Neneh Cherry.
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Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events.
He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including a version of Jude the Obscure with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet.
He’s worked extensively with Steve Coogan, starting in 2001 with 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson. More recently they’ve made four series of the BAFTA award-winning series The Trip, in which Coogan and Rob Brydon tour restaurants in England, Italy, Spain and Greece.
Many of his films react to real-world events, including Welcome to Sarajevo and The Road to Guantánamo. In 2022 he co-wrote and co-directed This England, a TV series about Boris Johnson’s leadership during the Covid crisis, with Kenneth Branagh playing the former Prime Minister.
Michael’s most recent film, Shoshana, is a political thriller set in the 1930s in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.
His music choices include Schumann, Bach and Philip Glass.
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The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a few. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians including Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Sting, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.
His most enduring collaboration has been with Elton John. Ray is on more than 90 of Elton’s recordings, and has performed over 1000 concerts with him, most recently on the Farewell Tour.
In 1979, Ray was asked by George Harrison to help run Handmade Films and he remained at the helm for just over a decade, overseeing the production of seminal British films such as Withnail and I, Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday.
Ray's musical choices include Bach, Shostakovich, John Tavener and Elton John.
Producer: Clare Walker
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Raymond Blanc is one of the finest chefs in the world and he is completely self-taught. He grew up in post-war France in Besancon in the Comte region of eastern France between Burgundy and the Jura Mountains with his four brothers and sisters.
Raymond’s mother – Maman Blanc - was his culinary inspiration. She would whip up delicious fresh, seasonal, local dishes, which became his guiding principal when he opened his first restaurant in Oxford, Les Quat’ Saisons, in September 1977. Within two years it had been awarded a Michelin star and Restaurant of the Year by food critic Egon Ronay.
Often working 18 hour days, he launched a bakery chain Maison Blanc in 1981 and then renovated and opened Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons a country house hotel which was awarded two Michelin stars and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
He’s also appeared on numerous TV shows including The Restaurant on BBC and the cookery series Simply Raymond on ITV.
Raymond's musical choices include Vivaldi, Verdi, Beethoven and Leonard Cohen.
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Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Trilogy, she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and unpalatable truths in her fiction, exploring issues of identity, sexuality, class, immigration, viral pandemics and shady economics.
Her latest book, To the Dogs, is a thriller centred around a university professor who finds himself dragged into his former life of violence and danger when his son is arrested on drugs charges.
But despite these serious themes, Louise’s work is punctuated by a playful, dry sense of humour, highlighting the absurdity of certain situations - and a vivid vocabulary. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and she loves to collaborate. She has written short stories and plays, edited collections of poetry and has a long-standing working relationship with the composer Stuart MacRae, with whom she’s written four opera librettos.
Her musical choices include works by Debussy, Purcell and Verdi.
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Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied range of settings – including original songs for the recent film Wonka, a chamber opera inspired by Tolstoy for Covent Garden, and the theme tune for the sitcom Father Ted.
Neil talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland with a bishop for a father, writing his first pop song when he was 14, and how, as a self-described "pathetic twerp", he managed to make it in the pop world. His typically wide-ranging musical passions include works by Puccini, Stravinsky, Chopin and Ravel, alongside tracks by Michael Nyman, Kate Bush and Scott Walker.
Producer: Graham Rogers
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Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-profile convictions. Her work has received global recognition and now inspires crime writers such as Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves.
Lorna is head of the centre for soil forensics at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, which conducts research into land, crops, water and the environment. She also works with SEFARI, the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutions, delivering farming systems that benefit the environment and nature.
Lorna's choices include music by Elgar, Mozart and Ravel.
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Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in our bodies, in the air we breathe - and only 6% of them have been identified. Merlin’s book “Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”, was an international best-seller. It caught the eye of the Icelandic singer and musician Bjork, who recently released an IMAX film with Merlin, which she narrates. It’s called Fungi: the web of life, and follows Merlin to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania, on a quest to find an incredibly precious blue mushroom. Merlin's choices include works by Chopin, Tallis, Bach and Purcell.
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Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of books.
She found herself running a home where Alan Bennett often appeared at suppertime and other famous neighbours and people would pop round - though Nina had often no idea who they were. Her affectionate, witty memoir won non-fiction Book of the Year in 2014 and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series.
After nannying, Nina worked in publishing and then moved to Cornwall where she lived with her partner and children. Since the success of Love Nina, she has written six more books, four of them novels. Her latest, Went to London, Took the Dog, charts her first return to the capital for twenty years. It’s a break from domestic life back in Cornwall, or perhaps a fresh start altogether.
Nina's musical choices include music by Handel, Mozart, Brahms and Benjamin Clementine.
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Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat. In his latest film, One Life, he stars alongside Anthony Hopkins, as the young Nicholas Winton, who helped Jewish children flee from the Nazis in what became known as the Kindertransport.
He’s currently starring as Richard Burton in the play The Motive and the Cue, the story of how Burton and Sir John Gielgud clashed as they staged Hamlet on Broadway in 1964.
Johnny has also released four albums with his band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. He composed the theme song for the acclaimed TV series Detectorists, and more recently he’s collaborated with the nature writer Robert MacFarlane on two folk albums: Lost in the Cedarwood and The Moon Also Rises. His musical choices include Paul Robeson, Sondheim and Bizet.
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