Start the Week

The Labour Party first took office on 22nd January 1924. In the century that followed it has only had six prime ministers and been in power for a total of 33 years. The Labour MP Jon Cruddas looks back at A Century of Labour – the successes and failures. While the Party has been riven by factions from the left and the right, Cruddas also looks at the competing visions of the what the Party represents.The Labour Party was born out of the increase in franchise, the industrialisation of the workforce and unions, and in its early days class was a key factor in voting patterns. The political scientist Jane Green is a specialist in public opinion and electoral behaviour. She argues that the Brexit vote created a new divide between Leavers and Remainers, and considers the significant impact of age and education on voting habits.With an election due this year all political parties will be preparing their manifestos and presenting their vision of the future. The Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, Jonathan White, focuses on the future as a political idea in The Long Run. While the democratic electoral cycle foregrounds short term policies, White argues it’s time for politicians to consider long-term solutions.Producer: Katy Hickman

Artificial Intelligence will be the focus of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by the Oxford Professor of Computer Science, Mike Wooldridge. In his series of lectures (broadcast on BBC Four in late December) he will attempt to disentangle the realities from the myths, but will also demonstrate the huge impact AI is already having in fields ranging from medicine to football to astrophysics, as well as on the creative arts. The bestselling novelist Naomi Alderman has fun with AI and its tech trillionaire-creators in her latest thriller The Future. While the wealthy corporate heads are effectively decapitated by an end-of-the-world scenario, the story explores whether the technology that could presage the apocalypse can also be used for the good of society.The Professor of Politics at Cambridge, David Runciman, wants to change the way people think about a future in which artificial intelligence has taken control. In The Handover he looks back to the formation of states and corporations, arguing that these are the precursors to AI: powerful artificial entities that have come to rule our world. While thy have made us richer and safer, he questions what will happen to human existence if these two machines – states and AI – join forces.Producer: Katy Hickman

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the theoretical physicist Armen Sarkissian returned home and became first the Prime Minister and then the President of the newly reformed state of Armenia. In his book, The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World, he argues that successful smaller nations have had to learn to be more agile, adaptive and cooperative, compared to the world’s ‘greater’ powers.The world map has changed considerably, especially in the 19th and 20th century, as empires fell apart and smaller nations fought for independence. The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan looks back at this time, and considers how small states survive during times of conflict. In 2018 she presented the BBC’s Reith Lectures, The Mark of Cain, on the tangled history of war and society. The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet is no stranger to conflict in the world, as she has covered all the major stories across the Middle East and North Africa for the past two decades. But she is also interested in the way small states have been instrumental in mediating world conflicts, and punching above their weight on international issues like the climate crisis.Producer: Katy Hickman

It’s play time on Start the Week. The mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy looks at the numbers behind the games we play, from Monopoly to rock paper scissors. In Around The World in 80 Games he shows how understanding maths can give you the edge, and why games are integral to human psychology and culture.The historian Anthony Bale looks at game-playing in the medieval world. In A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, he finds travellers passing the time with dice and tric trac, as well as collecting pilgrim badges along the way. Many of today’s most popular video games immerse players in historical settings, and the practice of collecting items along the way is nothing new to gamers. The co-director of the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow, Jane Draycott, researches the historical authenticity of these online worlds, and especially the depiction of women.And the mathematician G.T. Karber has taken his love of classic detective fiction and puzzles to create the murder-mystery riddle Murdle. A combination of Cluedo and Sudoku, what started as an online game is now a series of bestselling books. The latest is Murdle: More Killer Puzzles.Producer: Katy Hickman

Tim Peake was the first British astronaut to visit the International Space Station, and is one of only 628 people in human history to have left the Earth’s atmosphere. In Space he tells the human story of space exploration – from launch to landing. In Samantha Harvey’s latest novel Orbital six astronauts on a space station rotate above the Earth. While their waking lives are spent conducting scientific experiments and maintaining the spacecraft, their attention is constantly drawn back to the Earth – its beauty as they circle it, and the fragility of the human life on it. The cosmologist Roberto Trotta stands on firm ground and gazes skyward. In Starborn he wonders how different our world would be if our ancestors had looked up and there were no stars. From navigation to time, gravity to the wonder of the universe, the cosmos has profoundly shaped our understanding of the world.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Impressionist painter Claude Monet wrote that he was driven ‘wild with the need to put down what I experience’. In his long career he revolutionised painting and made some of the most iconic images of western art. The art critic Jackie Wullschläger’s biography of Monet looks at the man behind the famous artist.Monet’s late series of paintings of water lilies became less and less concerned with a conventional depiction of nature. The artist Mat Collishaw’s latest works also draw on evocative imagery from the natural world, including use of AI technology. At an exhibition at Kew Gardens (until April 2024) Collishaw takes inspiration from 17th century still life paintings of flowers, but on closer inspection the viewer sees the flowers morph into layers of insects. Humans have always used technology to expand our limited vision, from the stone mirror 8,000 years ago to facial recognition and surveillance software today. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. In her book, Machine Vision, she looks at the implications of the latest technologies, and how they are changing the way we see the world.Producer: Katy Hickman

The award-winning composer Errollyn Wallen offers an insight into what it’s like to write a piece of music. In her memoir, Becoming a Composer, she also looks back on how a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham found herself at home in the world of classical music.Handel was gradually losing his sight in 1751 as he finished what was his last dramatic oratorio Jephtha. The harpsichordist Laurence Cummings conducts a new performance of this biblical tale of faith and sacrifice, at the Royal Opera House (8–24 November; on BBC Radio 3 on 27 January). He explains how Handel’s work has been reinterpreted for today’s audience. Jazz musicians are celebrated for their re-interpretation of classics and improvisation. As the London Jazz festival is in full swing (10-19 November, and on BBC Radio 3), the celebrated jazz singer Emma Smith talks about what happens when the notes on the page are transformed into a performance.Producer: Katy Hickman

In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, ‘Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me…/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?’ Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces Du Fu’s journeys across China. He lived through war and famine, but his poetry found beauty and grandeur in the minutiae of everyday life and the natural world. Michael Wood tells Tom Sutcliffe how Du Fu’s poetry has the timeless quality of Shakespeare or Dante. The travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa goes on a different journey into China, finding out about the lives of Africans living there today. In Black Ghosts she traces the waves of immigration from the 1950s onwards, which benefitted African students and economic migrants who found Europe closed to them. As she meets those from all walks of life – from visa-overstayers to top surgeons – she considers the precarity of their lives, and the ultimate power imbalance in Sino-African relations. China is Africa's largest trading partner and in the past China has lent huge sums for infrastructure in its Belt and Road project. But as China’s economy begins to falter, the economist and China specialist George Magnus looks at the implications. Abroad many African countries are deeply indebted, and at home after 40 years of China’s seemingly irrepressible rise, the country is now facing a surge in urban youth unemployment and signs of deflation.Producer: Katy Hickman

The American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant often uses fictional or mythological characters in her songs, to capture contemporary and political concerns. Her latest album, Keep Your Courage, is a song cycle composed entirely of love songs. She tells Kirsty Wark she wanted to explore the isolation of illness and the power of care, felt in the last few years. In his new book, Musical Truth, the educator and broadcaster Jeffrey Boakye creates a soundtrack that encapsulates key historical moments of the 20th and 21st century – from the carving up of Africa to feminism and football. Using jazz, disco and hip hop he explores how music both feeds into and mirrors its time, as well as its political and cultural impact.But the writer Michel Faber is more interested in how music affects the individual. In a collection of essays, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, he explores what’s going on inside when we listen to a whole range of tunes. And he asks two questions: how do we listen to music and why?Producer: Katy Hickman

The plasma product Factor VIII was heralded in the 1960s as a miracle treatment that helped those with haemophilia to live fuller lives. By the 1980s it was killing them in their thousands, as the product from the US was riddled with hepatitis and AIDs. The investigative journalist Cara McGoogan pieces together the sorry tale of medical negligence, commercial greed and government failures in The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood.In many other countries inquiries have been held, compensation paid out and individuals sent to prison, but the victims and their families in the UK are still waiting, 40 years later. Jason Evans was just 4 years old when his father died after being infected by HIV in Factor VIII. He has dedicated his adult life to getting to the truth and is now awaiting the findings of the public inquiry which began in 2018, and is expected to publish its report in March 2024.The public health expert and physician Dr Gabriel Scally is a veteran of medical inquires – from the Bristol heart scandal to the Cervical Smear failures in Ireland. He has spent his career arguing for a system of clinical governance with a duty of candour placed not just on organisations but individual medics too. He tells Tom Sutcliffe why he thinks scandals and cover-ups continue to happen, and whether a public inquiry is the best way to get to the truth.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 film, Typist Artist Pirate King, Morley creates an imaginative tribute to an unjustly neglected and misunderstood artist. The norm in the world of medical research has been the male body, but in her latest work the scientist and author Cat Bohannon focuses exclusively on women. In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 million Years of Human Revolution she looks at everything from birth to death.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 nation-state. The journalist Nathan Thrall has been reporting in Israel and Palestine for many year. His book The Day in the Life of Abed Salama reveals the every day life of Palestinians in one of the most contested places on earth.Producer: Katy Hickman

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, and the lengths they had to go to in order to cling on to power. The Westminster journalist Ben Riley-Smith looks at how the Conservative Party has clung on to power over the past dozen years in his story, The Right to Rule. With five Prime Ministers in the last decade, this tale of political control involves betrayal, rebellion and the merciless ousting of leaders, in the bid to remain in government. Producer: Katy Hickman

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’s Metamorphosis for the stage, in a touring production by A Frantic Assembly.The poet, performer and activist Lebogang Mashile explains how poetry has always carried political power in her native South Africa. Exiled as a child to the US she returned to Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Her poetry highlights her sense of being an outsider and how verse is a vehicle in the fight for change.Divisions between the arts are broken down in the exhibition – The Weight of Words – at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (until 26th November). The co-curator Clare O’Dowd tells Tom Sutcliffe how the group exhibition explores what happens when poetry and sculpture intermingle and collide.Producer: Katy Hickman

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, as do questions about how humans respond to difference.The American playwright Lauren Gunderson interrogates our relationship with AI in her new play, Anthropology, at the Hampstead Theatre, London (to 14th October). When Angie goes missing, presumed dead, her grieving sister Merril assembles the digital footprint she left behind, and builds herself a digital simulation.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 decision makers from politicians to consultants, keyworkers to patients, to explore how the NHS has become a political battleground. Phil Whitaker has been a GP for more than 30 years. In ‘What Is A Doctor?’ he paints a damning portrait of political interference in medical treatment and what he sees as a worrying shift away from patient-centred care. As part of the BBC’s focus on the NHS the consultant anaesthetist Kevin Fong takes a step back to examine the roots of today’s problems, and possible solutions, in 'The NHS: Who Cares?' (on BBC Radio 4 from 10th July at 9am)Producer: Katy HickmanStart the Week is back on air on Monday 18th September

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 – from pharmaceuticals to holograms.And materials and how different civilisations use them are at the heart of the British Museum’s exhibition, Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece (until 13th August). The curator, Jamie Fraser, highlights the perceived excesses of the Persian empire – with its abundance of gold, finely crafted pottery and frankincense – in direct contrast to the plainer tastes of their Greek victors.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 arts. In Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature she reveals the geometry lurking in Moby-Dick, George Eliot’s obsession with statistics, and Jurassic Park’s fractal patterns.Emily Howard has a dual passion for maths and music. In her compositions she plays with mathematical shapes and processes. Her new record Torus, released on NMC Recordings in April, brings together works including sphere and Compass.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 Hutchings first began researching cybercrime in the late 1990s, while working in industry, and is now Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. She argues that the romanticised image of the underground hacker as an anti-authoritarian ‘lone wolf’ who possesses technological wizardry is outdated. Hacking has become industrialised with criminals able to buy ‘off-the-shelf’ tools to infect computers. While hackers constantly look to exploit vulnerabilities within the technology, one of the major weak points are users themselves. Jenny Radcliffe’s job is to expose the flaws and weaknesses in security operations. In People Hacker she explains how she uses a blend of psychology, stagecraft and charm to gain access to computer systems, and reveals how people can boost their security and make her job more difficult.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 microbiome - our inner ecosystem of viruses, bacteria and other microbes. In his book, Dark Matter, he argues that the microbiome is under threat from our modern lifestyles, the food we consume, and the air we breathe. Fermented foods are now thought to be integral to a healthy gut because they provide a vast amount of natural probiotics which can boost immunity and soothe the digestive tract. Johnny Drain is a materials scientist and a chef who believes in the benefits of fermentation, and has looked worldwide for innovations in techniques and flavours. Producer: Natalia Fernandez

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 his memoir, Getting Better.And while Natalie Haynes’s favourite Dickens adaptation is The Muppet Christmas Carol, she explores how the telling and retelling of stories and ancient myths shines a light on our contemporary world. Her latest work, Stone Blind, looks again at the tragedy of Medusa.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 miles, only pausing to breed in Europe. Their screeching cries and darting flight might be the sight and sound of summer evenings, and yet we know relatively little about their lives. In One Midsummer’s Day the naturalist Mark Cocker goes in search of the elusive swift, and finds a whole natural world of connections.The ecologist Tim Blackburn also discovers the hidden rules and interconnectedness of nature in his study of moths. His book, The Jewel Box, celebrates the diversity he finds within the moth trap on the roof of his flat. But also exposes a glimpse of a larger landscape, beyond the world of lepidoptera.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 Mesopotamia. In Price of Time the financial historian and Reuters’ commentator Edward Chancellor explores its long history and warns of the financial instability caused by years of low interest rates. Far from benefitting the majority of individuals, the ultra-low rates following the banking crash in 2008 have proved a boon for bankers, financiers and corporate stakeholders.After the crash, the businessman David Fishwick was concerned that few people or small businesses in his home town of Burnley could get access to credit. His challenge to the traditional high street banks was to set up his own banking enterprise which became Burnley Savings and Loans – a story told in a Channel 4 series and the film Bank of Dave (on Netflix). He argues for a return to banking as a means to serve and grow the local economy.Producer: Katy Hickman

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, I Am Not Your Eve. Gauguin was 43 when he first arrived on the island in 1891 and made numerous teenage girls his ‘unofficial wives’.The science writer Michael Bond is interested in the psychology behind fandom. In his book Fans he looks at the pleasure of tribalism and sense of belonging, but also what happens when one’s hero falls short, and the cognitive dissonance needed to continue to stay true to a monstrous genius.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 cookbooks, parades and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow.The historian Katja Hoyer presents a more nuanced picture of life in East Germany, far from the caricature often painted in the West. In Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 she acknowledges the oppression and hardship often faced by ordinary people, but argues that this now-vanished society was also home to its own distinctive and rich social and cultural landscape.But what did it feel like to live through the fall of communism and then democracy? These are the questions Adam Curtis looked to reveal in his 7-part television series, Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone (available on BBC iPlayer). The archive footage from thousands of hours of tapes filmed by BBC crews across the country records the lives of Russians at every level of society as their world collapsed around them.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 Tree Register of the British Isle which records the nation’s ‘champion trees’ – the tallest and biggest trees of their species. But she’s also keen on getting the public involved in helping to find and care for some of the country’s oldest trees with the citizen science project, Ancient Tree Inventory, run by the Woodland Trust.The healing powers of ancient trees is celebrated in stories throughout history, including the great Icelandic sagas. In The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think Carolyne Larrington, Professor of medieval European Literature explores the renewal that comes from the roots of Yggdrasill, the World Tree.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 Cornwall with the reality of growing up there. She explores the impact of rural poverty, political neglect, and the dominance of second-home owners, but also the sheer beauty of the landscape she calls home.Christine Whitehead OBE is a specialist in housing economics and evaluates government policies on home ownership and housing supply. She looks at the unintended consequences of implementing policies, like rent caps and controls on buying housing stock in rural areas, and the impact of Covid on the rental market. The architect Alice Brownfield, Director at Peter Barber Architects, advocates for high density, mixed-use residential schemes for local councils and housing associations. Her practice has been recognised for its work in developing social housing, often on small plots of land, that centres on fostering a sense of community.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Kiln Place, by Peter Barber Architects just after completion. Image credit: Morley von Sternberg

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 worthless, to the tensions between the past and present, as well as work made by hand and machine. The engineer Roma Agrawal invites readers to marvel at the design of many of the small but perfectly formed inventions that have changed the world. In Nuts & Bolts she deconstructs complex feats of engineering to focus on the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump.The economist Bent Flyvbjerg is also interested in deconstructing things, but he's focused on ambitious multi-million pound projects to find out why the vast majority are significantly over-budget and past their deadline. In How Big Things Get Done he extolls the virtue of 'thinking slow, acting fast', and how megaprojects that are designed with Lego-building in mind are more likely to succeed.Producer: Katy HickmanImage credit: close up of Monet's Water Lilies in Lego, constructed by Ai Wei Wei - photo copyright by Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio

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 inner cogs and workings of clocks, and explores the ways in which they have helped shape human history. But she also regrets the endangered art of traditional watchmaking and the loss of heritage skills.The neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow explains what’s happening in our brains when we learn new things, especially later in life. And she argues that two heads may be better than one. In her latest book, Joined Up Thinking, she extols the virtues of working and learning together.Producer: Katy HickmanImage Credit: Rebecca Struthers for Hands of Time

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 ancient human civilisations – often violent and epic in scale, from regime change to demographic decline. However, since the Industrial Revolution the balance has shifted and anthropogenic impacts on the climate can be seen more clearly. Peter Frankopan tells Kirsty Wark that learning lessons from the past has never been more important in tackling a precarious future.Professor Dame Jane Francis is Director of the British Antarctic Survey. As a geologist by training, she studies fossils to understand the change from greenhouse to icehouse climates in the polar regions over the past 100 million years. Her research enables others to map the huge changes now happening in the Antarctic and the range of possible scenarios for the future. “As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability, and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality, and did what we had always done. . . .” One of the narrators of Jessie Greengrass’s novel The High House realises too late the disastrous impact of climate change. In what has become known as the literary genre clifi – climate fiction – Greengrass reveals the physical and emotional challenges the survivors face.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: An iceberg in Antarctica

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 philosopher Julian Baggini guides the listener in unpicking the tenets of humanism. His latest books is How to Think Like a Philosopher: Essential Principles for Clearer Thinking.Humanism may have relegated the divine to the side lines, but for the characters in Leila Aboulela’s novels faith and devotion are integral to their sense of themselves. In her latest book, River Spirit, set in Sudan in the 1880s, her young protagonists struggle to survive and find love amidst the bloody struggle for Sudan itself.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 relationships. Beginning, which premiered in 2017, and Middle, from last year, take place overnight in one uninterrupted scene as the couples share their thoughts and feelings on love and loneliness. The final play will be called End. The prize winning poet Claudia Rankine talks about her collection Plot, published in full for the first time in the UK. In a series of conversations, reflections and dreams Rankine reveals the hopes and fears of Liv and Erland – a couple navigating the birth of their new baby.Producer: Katy Hickman

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, as well as the civil wars and rise of ISIS that followed. Emma Sky volunteered to help rebuild Iraq post-invasion and went on to serve as the representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and then as a political advisor to the US army in the following decade. Now an academic at Yale University, she looks back at why the Iraq invasion failed and its implications across the region. She's the author of The Unravelling and In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt.The BBC’s Security correspondent Gordon Corera was a young reporter during the frenetic build up to the war, talking to spies, defectors and politicians. In a 10-part series – Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On (from 13th March at 1.45 and on BBC Sounds) – he talks to those at the centre of that decision to go to war, and looks at the far-reaching consequences, from trust in politics, security and liberal intervention.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 closely at how and why the relationship between capitalism and democracy appears to be unravelling. But despite the failings – slowing growth, growing inequality and widespread popular disillusion – he argues in The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism that the relationship remains the best system for human flourishing. But the economist Kate Raworth believes that mainstream economics has had its day. Its failure to predict and prevent financial crises, while allowing extreme poverty, inequality and environment degradation to persist, means its contributing to, not solving, societal unrest. She argues that her theory – Doughnut Economics – offers a new model for a green, fair and thriving global economy.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 travel writer Kapka Kassabova has gone searching for ancient knowledge about the natural world in her latest book, Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time. The Mesta River, in her native Bulgaria, is one of the oldest inhabited rivers in Europe, and a mecca for wild plant gatherers, healers and mystics. In Dvořák’s lyric opera the eponymous hero Rusalka is a water spirit who sacrifices her voice and leaves her home for the love of a Prince. In a new contemporary staging at the Royal Opera House (21 February–7 March 2023) the co-directors Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami foreground the uneasy relationship between nature and humanity, and the latter's destruction of what it fails to heed.Producer: Katy HickmanImage credit: Asmik Grigorian in Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee’s Rusalka, The Royal Opera ©2023 Laura Stevens

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 everyday lives. With the cost of living crisis and an increase in families suffering food poverty, she looks at the capacity to ‘choose’ to buy healthier food, and what other countries, like Portugal, have achieved in prioritising school meals. But what about the food itself and how it’s grown? The author of The Ethical Carnivore, Louise Gray, turns her attention to fruit and veg in her latest book, Avocado Anxiety And Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From. Tracking from farm to table, Gray discovers the impact that growing fruits and vegetables has on the planet.Producer: Katy Hickman

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 through the centuries. In her latest book, The Witches of St Osyth, she tells the story of the sixteen women and one man accused of sorcery in a small rural village in 1582, and of a community devastated by violence and betrayal.The filmmaker Jo Ingabire Moys draws from her own experience of surviving the Genocide in Rwanda in her short film Bazigaga, shortlisted for a BAFTA. As violence erupts a Tutsi pastor and his young daughter take shelter in the home of the feared shaman Bazigaga. The film was inspired by the true story of Zura Karuhimbi who used her reputation as a witch doctor to save hundreds of lives.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: The actor Eliane Umuhire in 'Bazigaga', written and directed by Jo Ingabire Moys

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 about the murder of Soviet Jews during the Nazi invasion in 1941, and the extraordinary testimony of what was happening, detailed in The Black Book. Bernard Wasserstein’s family originally came from Krakowiec and in A Small Town in Ukraine he traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict through the fortunes of its inhabitants – from the earlier invasions of Cossaks, Turks and Swedes to the horrors of WWII and today’s war with Russia. Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Three Jewish women gather their belongings on Haifa dock, Palestine, after leaving the illegal immigrant ship Exodus. (Getty Images)

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 not only the atmosphere in a game, immersing players in these invented worlds, but their music is also integral to the game’s structure and design. Adrian Hon spent a decade co-creating the hit game Zombies, Run but has become increasingly disillusioned with the way real world institutions – corporations, governments and schools – are using gamification to monitor and control behaviour. In You’ve Been Played he shows how the elements of game playing have been co-opted as tools for profit and coercion.Producer: Katy HickmanImage Credit: Map of the game 'Katamari Damacy' by Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson from 'Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds'

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 of the Week.Iokiñe Rodríguez Fernandez is a Venezuelan sociologist who co-founded Grupo Confluencias, a consortium of Latin American conflict resolution practitioners. She works closely with indigenous communities who are fighting to retain their ways of life, and the focus is very much on local history, local knowledge and traditions. The Royal Academy of Arts in London is showcasing treasures from Spain and the Hispanic World from 21st January. This landmark exhibition will present a visual narrative of the history of Spanish culture, bringing together works from Spain and from its colonies in Latin America, from antiquity to the early 20th century. The co-curator Adrian Locke explains how the artistic, cultural and religious influences from abroad helped shape and enrich art in Spain.Producer: Katy Hickman

In Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics Kenan Malik questions what he sees as lazy assumptions about race and culture. He retells the forgotten history of a racialised working class which sits uncomfortably with today’s obsession with ‘white privilege’. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that we need to confront the issues facing society in terms of class and inequality, and not in terms of identity. The academic Francesca Sobande believes people’s racial identity is a key factor in their experiences and how they are treated. Black Oot Here, co-authored with layla-roxanne hill, explores the history and contemporary lives of Black people in Scotland. The prize winning poet Don Paterson grew up on a working-class council housing estate in Dundee in Scotland. He looks back at that time in his memoir, Toy Fights, interweaving the moments of love, joy and musical delight with the dark side of growing up surrounded by poverty.Producer: Katy HickmanImage credit: '40 George Square' by Francesca Sobande

The award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his new book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains. Anna Lapwood is an organist and conductor, and currently the Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is also a great believer in the transformative power of music. She regularly plays the Royal Albert Hall’s organ – described as ‘the voice of Jupiter’ – and believes listeners can feel the wonder vibrating through the music.Looking up at the night sky and contemplating galaxies far away is often seen as a sure way to elicit wonder, but the physicist Felix Flicker argues that it can be found much smaller and much closer to home. In The Magick of Matter he shows how truly inspiring crystalline specks of dust can be, and when they're combined the sky’s the limit.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Anna Lapwood - Leeds Town Hall (Credit Tom Arber)

George Balanchine is one of the most revered and influential choreographers of the twentieth century. In this first major biography about his life Jennifer Homans offers an intimate portrait of the man who co-founded the New York City Ballet and brought the art form so spectacularly into the modern age. She explores his life and legacy, revealing a complicated genius who was inspired to choreograph dances from subjects as diverse as Spinoza’s philosophy to Orthodox icons, disrupting the norms of ballet and pushing the dancers into creative worlds of abstraction.Wayne McGregor is a contemporary titan of the dance world. He has just returned from Toronto where his ballet based on Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic book, MADDADDAM, had its world premiere in a joint production for The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. Wayne McGregor’s own dance company is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary and since its inception has been the experimental and creative forum for Wayne’s innovative choreographic style.Ballet Black was founded by Cassa Pancho just over twenty years ago in response to the lack of racial diversity in ballet and offers dancers of Black and Asian descent a platform to showcase their talents. The company has gone from strength to strength, continually overturning stereotypes and transforming the landscape of classical dance. In March 2023 the company will perform ‘Pioneers’ at the Barbican, comprising new and original work by award-winning choreographers Will Tuckett and Mthuthuzeli November. Producer: Natalia FernandezMusic credits: Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM, Act 1 (except), original score by Max Richter. A co-production between the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet, inspired by the trilogy by Margaret Atwood. ‘Then or Now’. (ballet choreographed by Will Tuckett. The poetry of Adrienne Rich with music by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, arranged by Daniel Pioro. The poetry reading is by Michael Shaeffer.) Simon Rattle / Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - Stravinsky: Apollon Musagete (Second Tableau, variation of Calliope

Johan Eklöf is a Swedish bat scientist on a mission. In The Darkness Manifesto (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) he warns how light pollution is threatening the ancient rhythms of life. Many creatures across the world come to life at night – with bats specially adapted to fly using echolocation. By keeping the lights on we are disrupting entire ecosystems.But darkness can appear alien and frightening. The writer Kate Summerscale explores the phobias that haunt the imagination as the lights go off: nyctophobia, xylophobia and hypnophobia – intense and morbid fears of the dark, of forests and of falling asleep. But why do bumps in the night sound so much more unnerving than during the day? The neuroscientist Professor Geraint Rees focuses his research on seeking to understand the neural basis of consciousness and he explores how our different senses are integral to the way we perceive and experience the world around us.The forces of light and darkness are pitted against each other in the classic children’s story The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, now adapted for BBC World Service radio, starting on Tuesday 20th December. Producer and co-adapter Simon McBurney creates a spine-tingling winter soundscape with the use of binaural sound, giving listeners using headphones a unique immersive experience.Producer: Katy Hickman

It is fifty years since the last manned-flight to the moon. While the Apollo missions have long been superseded by explorations further afield, the science journalist Oliver Morton insists the moon landings remain strong in our cultural imagination. In his 2019 book, The Moon, he explained how a spherical piece of rock had captured the world’s attention, but then been largely ignored. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how scientists and politicians are now once again turning their focus to our nearest neighbour.Throughout history the moon has inspired artists, poets, scientists, writers and musicians the world over. The artist Luke Jerram has created an extraordinary replica of the Moon measuring seven metres in diameter, fusing NASA imagery of the lunar surface, moonlight, and sound composition. The Museum of the Moon has been exhibited hundreds of times – both indoors and outdoors – across the world, and Jerram explains how each installation has stimulated different events. While NASA’s Artemis mission explores sending astronauts back to the Moon as a stepping stone to human exploration to Mars, and celebrity billionaires sell visions of private space travel, Mary-Jane Rubenstein sounds a warning. In Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race she sees comparisons with the destructive effects of the centuries-long history of European colonialism. As problems multiply on Earth she dismisses the offer by wealthy messiahs of an other-worldly salvation for a chosen few.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Museum of the Moon by Luke Jerram, Cork Midsummer Festival, UK, 2017

Real faith ‘passes first through the body/ like an arrow’ so writes the American-Iranian poet Kaveh Akbar. In his collection Pilgrim Bell he plays with the physical and divine, the human capacity for cruelty and grace, and the reality of living as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation.The Anglican priest and biblical scholar John Barton turns his attention to the word of God as it has travelled across the world. The Bible have been translated thousands of times into more than 700 languages. In The Word he traces the challenges of crossing linguistic borders from antiquity to the present, while remaining faithful to the original. Faith, fanaticism and fame combine in Emma Donoghue’s novel, The Wonder, now made into a film, starring Florence Pugh. It follows the story of a young girl in 1860s Ireland who stops eating, but miraculously stays alive, and the nurse sent to discover the truth.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: From the film, 'The Wonder'. (L to R) Florence Pugh as Lib Wright, Josie Walker as Sister Michael in The Wonder. Cr. Aidan Monaghan/Netflix © 2022

The Nobel peace prize-winner Maria Ressa is a journalist who has spent decades speaking truth to power in the country of her birth, the Philippines. She looks back at her life, and her ongoing battle against disinformation and political lies in How To Stand Up To A Dictator. She tells Kirsty Wark that although she is hounded by the state and faces threats of imprisonment, she is determined to continue fighting for the truth.Zsuzsanna Szelényi was once one of the leading politicians in Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz, but now sits in opposition. In Tainted Democracy she charts what she calls her country’s descent into autocracy. She explores how the populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has consolidated his grip on power, reining in the media and making sweeping changes to legal and economic frameworks. In his latest three part series for BBC television, History of Now, Simon Schama looks back at the dramatic history that has played out in the decades of his own life from 1945. He explores the vital role of artists, writers and musicians in fighting for democracy and equality post-war. The series reveals the extraordinary power of art to shape the world, and the immense personal cost of creating work that dares to take a stand.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Simon Schama in front of Picasso’s 'Guernica'. From Simon Schama's 'History of Now', Episode 1, BBC 2 (Credit: BBC/Oxford Films/Eddie Knox)

In art the Greek and Roman body is often portrayed as one of perfection – flawlessly cast in bronze and white marble. But the classicist Caroline Vout tells Adam Rutherford that the reality was very different. In her new book, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body, she reveals all the imperfections and anxieties, and makes visible those who were regarded at the time as far from perfect – women and servants.The curator and art historian Katy Hessel is also challenging the accepted history in her work, The Story of Art Without Men. She shines a light on women artists, from Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, to the radical Harriet Power in 19th century America, and the women artists working all over the world in the 21st century. Throughout history the human skin has also been a canvas: permanent markings were discovered on bodies from as early as 5000 BCE. In Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos, Matt Lodder reveals the often hidden artworks – and the people who wore them – to explore a changing world.Producer: Katy Hickman

The award-winning writer Jonathan Coe presents a portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family, in his latest novel Bournville. Set in middle England, in a suburb of Birmingham, he chronicles the years of social change post-war, and the events that both brought people together and divided them, from royal events and the World Cup to Brexit and Covid-19. The chocolate factory that features heavily in the novel, and was once at the centre of life in Bournville, has since been transformed in part into a theme park, no doubt offering an authentic chocolate experience. The journalist Emily Bootle turns her attention to what she sees now as an obsession with authenticity. In a collection of essays, This Is Not Who I Am, she unpicks the ideology surrounding the goal of ‘living our truth’ amidst the fakery of digital culture and the illusion of infinite choice. The award-winning saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch also takes a long hard look at the state of the nation for his latest album, White Juju, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Conceived at the height of the pandemic the music is his response to lockdown, BLM, British history and the culture wars. He takes inspiration from European folklore, the African Diaspora and divisive national myths to create a unified modern tone poem.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Pulitzer-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee recalls the thrill of seeing for the first time the extraordinary ‘luminosity’ of a living cell. In his latest work, The Song of the Cell, he explores the history, the present and the future of cellular biology. He tells Adam Rutherford that without understanding cells you can’t understand the human body, medicine, and especially the story of life itself. ‘Once upon a time I fell in love with a cell.’ So recalls the leading cardiologist Sian Harding, when she looked closely at a single heart muscle cell, and she found a ‘deeper beauty’ revealing the ‘perfection of the heart’s construction’. In her book, The Exquisite Machine, she describes how new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart, and why a ‘broken heart’ might be more than a literary flight of fancy.The prize-winning science fiction writer Paul McAuley was once a research scientist studying symbiosis, especially single-celled algae inside host cells. He has since used his understanding of science to write books that ask questions about life on earth and outer-space, and about the implications of the latest cutting edge research, from nanotechnology to gene editing. His 2001 novel The Secret of Life, which features the escape of a protean Martian microorganism from a Chinese laboratory, has just been reissued. Producer: Katy Hickman