Start the Week

In a year when Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on families, with loved ones dying sometimes alone in hospital or without the usual funeral rites, Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss mortality and what it means to have ‘a good death’.In her latest book, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, the writer Lionel Shriver explores a number of alternative endings. The couple at the centre of her novel make a pact to end their lives when they hit 80, to avoid a slow decline either physically or mentally. As Shriver looks at how that decision might play out in reality, she’s arguing for a more open discussion about the end of life. It’s a view shared by the consultant geriatrician David Jarrett. In 33 Meditations on Death – Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine he draws on family stories and case histories from his three decades treating those who become old and frail. Jarret’s book is an impassioned plea for everyone – old and young – to engage and make plans for the end. The playwright Jack Thorne is part of the collaborative team (with designer Bunny Christie and director Jeremy Herrin) behind the National Theatre’s new play, After Life, based on Hirokazu Kore-eda's award-winning film. It follows a group of strangers as they grapple with the question: if you could spend eternity with just one precious memory, what would it be? Although all the characters are deceased, the play is a celebration of life, and about what matters to us most.Photo credit: Mark Kohn Producer: Katy Hickman

DH Lawrence was once a towering figure in literature in the 20th century but his reputation has taken a battering, with accusations of nostalgia, self-indulgence and misogyny. But Frances Wilson tells Andrew Marr that it’s time to look again at this complex and courageous man, and the full spectrum of work he produced – from his novels, poetry, criticism and letters. In Burning Man Wilson focuses on a decade in his life from the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915 through his years of travelling to his diagnosis of tuberculosis. Lawrence mined his own life in his novels, populating them with the people he met, pioneering the genre of ‘auto-fiction'. The award-winning writer Salman Rushdie rejected that form in his own novels, preferring ‘magic realism’. In his latest collection of essays Languages of Truth Rushdie explores the power of storytelling, and the relationship between reality and fantasy. The poet Simon Armitage – an admirer of DH Lawrence – looks to rescue glorious poetry from pretention and obscurity, arguing the form offers ‘the best opportunity for reflection and scrutiny’. A Vertical Art brings together the public lectures he gave during his tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. In them he offers his personal reflections of the work and lives of poets from Ted Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop and Douglas Dunn.Producer: Katy Hickman

Once-indomitable glaciers – from high up in the Himalayas to the polar regions – are today in grave peril, as our climate warms at an accelerating rate. The glaciologist Jemma Wadham says that melting ice sheets not only leads to meltwater overwhelming sensitive marine ecosystems but could also release vast quantities of methane. In her book Ice Rivers she shows that far from being freezing sterile environments, the world’s glaciers are teeming with microbial life, as rich and fascinating as the forests. Record ice loss last year and the effect of climate change are also having an impact on geopolitics and international relations. Dwayne Ryan Menezes, the founding director of the think tank Polar Research and Policy Initiative looks at the viability of a busy sea route through the arctic region as ice recedes for longer periods. And he explains why the recent elections in Greenland – a territory of just over 56,000 people – sent reverberations around the world. The importance of nature’s finely-tuned system to our everyday lives is at the heart of Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s research at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. In her new book Tapestries of Life she uncovers many of the lifesaving secrets of the natural world which impact directly on humans, from medicines to pollution control, carbon sequestration to spiritual health. Producer: Katy Hickman

The Nobel prize-winning economist and Professor of Psychology Daniel Kahneman focuses his latest research on the high cost of inconsistent decision making. In Noise, co-authored with Oliver Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, he looks at why humans can be so unreliable, and what can be done about it. He tells Andrew Marr that people working in the same job often make wildly different judgements, influenced by factors like their current mood, when they last ate, even the weather. He argues that ‘noise’ is distinct from bias and has been neglected by organisations and businesses.Gillian Tett is Editor-at-Large for the Financial Times and is also focused on transforming the world of business. But whereas Kahneman uses the methods of psychology, Tett argues for anthropology. For over a century anthropologists have immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, studying the hidden rituals at play. In her book Anthro-Vision, Tett uses similar techniques to reveal the underlying structures and human behaviour in our modern world – from Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley to City trading floors.Ann Cairns is the Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard which has hundreds of offices worldwide. She explores how psychology and anthropology can help to manage the company’s fortunes and employees through times of flux and change. Cairns started out as a research scientist before developing an interest in offshore engineering, becoming the first woman qualified to work offshore in Britain. She moved into banking in the late 1980s and joined Mastercard in 2011. Producer: Katy Hickman

The Sackler name is more often associated with philanthropy and lavish donations in the arts and sciences. But the investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe tells another story in Empire of Pain. He questions how much of the Sackler wealth was made from the making and aggressive marketing of the painkiller, Oxycontin. He tells Amol Rajan of the misery that has unfolded in today’s opioid crisis – an epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people in the US. The direct marketing to GPs and advertising campaigns in the US helped to make Oxycontin a hugely popular drug. But in the UK too there are concerns about the over-prescribing of painkillers for long periods of time. Dr Zoe Williams is a GP in South London and presenter of the BBC show, Trust Me I’m a Doctor. As a founding member of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine she’s pioneering changes to reduce dependency on drugs, and increase take-up of alternative treatments, like exercise. What happens when people start to mistrust medical authorities is at the heart of Heidi Larson’s work as Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In her latest book, Stuck, she looks at how vaccine reluctance and refusal is no longer limited to the margins of society. As mistrust of the official message and messenger grows so does rumour, conflict and hesitancy.Producer: Katy Hickman

The looting of art in war time is nothing new, but Napoleon took it to new heights: demanding of his defeated enemies across Italy their most valuable statues and paintings. Cynthia Saltzman’s Napoleon’s Plunder tells the story of how the most magnificent works of the High Renaissance – by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian and Veronese – went on triumphant display in the Louvre. She tells Andrew Marr how Paris was transformed during this period into the art capital of Europe, and the role art played in cementing the power of the new regime after the French Revolution. One of the most extraordinary paintings taken during this time was Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, stripped from the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice in 1797. The Italian architect and presenter Francesco da Mosto considers what this theft meant to Venice’s political and cultural authority at the time. While many paintings were returned after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. But Da Mosto looks at whether a 21st century solution – a digital facsimile – installed in the original monastery means that Venice can claim to have its Veronese back home. As the former Director of three major British institutions, including the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith understands the importance and prestige of a country’s national collections. In The Art Museum In Modern Times he explores the changes that have taken place in the past century – from the architecture of the buildings to the expectation of the visitors. Where once was a mission to instruct, educate and amaze, now the emphasis is on contemplation and individual experience.Producer: Katy Hickman

What it means to be a black Christian woman in the UK is at the heart of Chine McDonald’s new book, God Is Not a White Man. Part memoir and part theological and historical study, McDonald looks back at the role the Christian faith has played over the centuries in perpetuating ideas of white supremacy. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that black women in the church have stayed silent too long. The writer Jeet Thayil re-imagines the story of the New Testament through the eyes of the women suppressed and erased from the Gospels. Names of the Women brings to life fifteen women whose importance at the Crucifixion highlights the power they once had. Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in India and was inspired to write this work by the defiance and authority of his grandmother. In 2011 when the Occupy movement set up camp around St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Canon Giles Fraser was caught between his pastoral care of the protestors, the needs of the church and the demands of the City of London. He suffered a crisis of faith and mental health. In Chosen: Lost and Found Between Christianity and Judaism, Fraser explores his own religious roots, and discovers the healing power of theology for the individual and society. Producer: Katy Hickman

The French writer Laurent Binet’s new book Civilisations is a flight of fancy re-imagining the modern world. He tells Andrew Marr that his counter-factual novel looks at what could have happened if the Vikings had made it to America, Columbus had failed, and the Incas and Aztecs had ended up fighting over the colonisation of Europe. Caroline Dodds Pennock, one of the world’s foremost historians of Mesoamerican culture, considers the experiences of Indigenous Americans (such as the Aztecs, Maya, Tupi and Algonquians) coming to Europe in the sixteenth century. She argues that these people forged the course of European civilisation, just as surely as European colonists changed America. Colonisation and empire-building are also at the forefront of Christienna Fryar’s historical research at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her work on the modern Caribbean and Britain she argues that their histories are intertwined and cannot be properly understood in isolation. Producer: Katy Hickman

In 1962 the world teetered on the edge of nuclear destruction as the Presidents of the USA and the Soviet Union fought over Soviet warheads installed on the islands of Cuba. In Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the historian Serhii Plokhy retells the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. He tells Amol Rajan it was ultimately fear that saved the planet, and it’s time to draw lessons from the many mistakes that were made at the time.The Cold War era did produce a nuclear arms-control agreement – the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – signed in 1987. But the nuclear physicist and former director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research Patricia Lewis says that in 2019 the United States and Russia withdrew their support. Lewis, who now leads the International Security programme at Chatham House, asks whether we are now entering a second nuclear age.The BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford visited the sites of the Soviet Union's nuclear stations in Cuba when she was posted there in 2011. She wrote about her experiences and the end of the Castro era in Our Woman in Havana. Rainsford is now the BBC’s Moscow correspondent and explores how far Khrushchev’s political scheming and disinformation compare to the strategy of President Putin.Producer: Katy Hickman

Reports of a mental health epidemic among young people both leading up to and during the pandemic are now widespread. Sally Holland is the Children’s Commissioner for Wales and a former social worker. She tells Andrew Marr that mental health services in Wales, and the rest of the UK, need a serious rethink, because too many children are waiting too long for help.But the health researcher and psychologist Lucy Foulkes asks whether we have become fixated with labelling the stresses and challenges of human experience as a mental disorder. In Losing Our Minds she explains what is known about mental health problems, and why they so often appear during adolescence. But she argues that it’s vitally important to distinguish between ‘normal’ suffering and actual illness. Defining what is and isn’t an illness is also the subject of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s latest book The Sleeping Beauties – And Other Stories of Mystery Illness. Here the neurologist looks at startling cases of what appear to be psychosomatic illnesses which have infected groups of people – from refugee children in Sweden unable to wake up, to American high school students having seizures, to mass headaches and memory loss in the US embassy in Cuba. O’Sullivan looks at how far these disorders are influenced by societal forces and human biology.Producer: Katy Hickman

Tom Tugendhat MP is the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He tells Andrew Marr that he’s very much focused on British foreign policy priorities after Brexit. But the government’s new Trade Bill is facing opposition from those insisting that human rights abuses must be investigated before any deals are done. The MP for Tonbridge and Malling also highlights the need to be more aware of China’s economic ambitions and global role. Geeta Tharmaratnam is keen that more focus should be placed on Africa. As a venture capitalist and CEO of an investment company she see huge economic possibilities across the continent, especially in relation to African women entrepreneurs. She looks more closely at the African Continental Free Trade Area which was signed by a majority of countries in Kigali, Rwanda in 2018 and came into force this year.But the journalist Michela Wrong questions whether the Rwandan government, and especially its much feted leader President Paul Kagame can be trusted. Following the civil war and genocide in 1994 Kagame became vice-President and then leader of his country. He has prioritised national development and been successful in securing international aid, but Wrong follows the story of his rise to power and argues that he has overseen a regime intent on political repression.Producer: Katy Hickman

Edward St Aubyn is the award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose series. His new novel, Double Blind, also revolves around transformation and the headlong pursuit of knowledge. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that his characters range across the sciences – from genetics to ecology to psychoanalysis. And their investigations into inheritance, freedom and consciousness intertwine with their feelings of love, fear and greed.Isaac Newton is often revered as the scientific genius of the 18th century: an unworldly scholar who abandoned his intellectual life to rescue the country’s finances. But the academic Patricia Fara paints a more complicated picture in Life After Gravity. Here Newton is seen in the last 30 years of his life as he heads both the Royal Mint and the Royal Society – a scientist who revelled in the dirty worlds of money and politics. Chris van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor who has also forged a career presenting health and science programmes on radio and television. With his twin brother Xand he has put competing health theories to the test, and shared his own personal experience of Covid 19. In his new series for Radio 4, The Jump, he investigates the latest scientific evidence looking at how animal viruses spread to humans, and how far human behaviours are causing pandemics.Producer: Katy Hickman

The journalist Matthew d’Ancona attacks the torpor and complacency which has come to dominate the political landscape. In Identity, Ignorance, Innovation he analyses what’s gone wrong in Britain from education and social care, to technological inequality. He tells Andrew Marr that far from demonising identity politics, the right needs to embrace a diversity of voices.But identity politics has become a major battleground in the culture wars in Britain and the US. The writer Kenan Malik has been charting its rise, and focuses his attention on the growing interest in ‘white identity’, and the debate around the so-called ‘left behind’ in traditional working class areas. The economist and Director of the LSE, Minouche Shafik argues that societal breakdown and increasing polarisation can only be healed with a new social contract fit for the 21st century. In What We Owe Each Other she draws on evidence from around the world to look at how we can re-evaluate the balance between the individual and society, between rights and responsibilities. Producer: Katy Hickman

400 years ago Robert Burton produced his labyrinthine masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy – a work which was celebrated in the Renaissance for its understanding of the huge variety of causes, symptoms and cures of mental distress. In A User’s Guide To Melancholy the academic Mary Ann Lund looks back to this precursor of the self-help book. She tells Amol Rajan that we have much to learn from those who struggled with melancholy in the past.In Heavy Light, the writer Horatio Clare shares how his mind began to unwind; his growing mania followed by psychosis and his treatment in a psychiatric hospital. But he also details the journey of recovery and healing, and he investigates how society treats acute crises of mental health.The psychiatrist Ahmed Hankir understands only too well what it’s like to feel depressed and hopeless – he suffered from mental health difficulties during his studies. He has used his own experiences to produce The Wounded Healer which seeks to reduce stigma around mental health, blending psychiatry and the performing arts.Producer: Katy Hickman

The deep sea is the last, vast wilderness on Earth. In The Brilliant Abyss the marine biologist Helen Scales dives below the surface to tell the story of our relationship with the ocean floor. With an average depth of 12,000 feet it remains a frontier for new discoveries and extraordinary creatures. But Helen Scales warns Andrew Marr of the unfolding environmental disasters as people seek to exploit this new world, far beyond the public gaze.The writer Philip Hoare explores nature through the work of the artist Albrecht Dürer. From his 15th century prints of the plague-ridden Apocalypse to his leviathans in the deep, Dürer’s works were a revelation. In Albert & the Whale Hoare writes about the enduring quality of his art and its powerful message about the fragile beauty of the natural world.The journalist Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the international bestseller, The Sixth Extinction, which was a clear-eyed account of humanity’s impact on the Earth. In Under A White Sky she asks whether through scientific innovation we can reverse some of the damage done. She meets those re-engineering ‘super coral’ which can withstand hotter waters and those tasked with saving the rarest fish species in the world.Producer: Katy Hickman

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry-Londonderry at the height of the Troubles, to a Catholic mother and Protestant father. In Thin Places she traces a life affected by poverty, loss and violence, and the invisible border that runs through it. But she tells Kirsty Wark how the natural world has helped heal the traumas of childhood.For the writer Sally Bayley it was Shakespeare that brought her solace and ignited her imagination. Growing up in a working class household with no father figures Bayley roamed through his plays looking for companions and escape from her oppressive home. In No Boys Play Here: A Story of Shakespeare & My Family’s Missing Men she explores the crisis of male homelessness and mental illness.The award-winning actress Lisa Dwan has a deep affiliation with the works of Samuel Beckett. But in her latest performance she reaches back to the ancient Greek tragedians reimagined by another acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín. In Pale Sister she recounts Sophocles’ tragedy of Antigone from the viewpoint of her sister, Ismene. Producer: Katy Hickman

What happens when real life collides with your digital existence – the writer and ‘Poet Laureate of Twitter’ Patricia Lockwood talks to Andrew Marr. In her highly original novel, No One is Talking About This, Lockwood’s narrator becomes overwhelmed as drama in the human world encroaches on the life she leads online.Roisin Kiberd is part of the internet generation and believes the line between online and IRL has become so porous as to become meaningless. From the lure of endless scrolling, to the glamour of self-optimisation and the boundless possibility of connectivity, Kiberd explores the ups and downs of this new reality in a series of essays, The Disconnect.In a new series on Radio 4, Sideways, Matthew Syed exploits different ways of seeing the world to connect disparate ideas and offer new insights. He examines the online craze of ‘randonauting’ – in which an app sends people on random adventures – to unpick the misunderstanding of probability using digital and real life examples. Producer: Katy Hickman

Britain is a direct product of its imperial past. So argues the writer Sathnam Sanghera in his latest book, Empireland. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how we need to move beyond simplistic feelings of shame or pride in Britain’s empire if we are to truly understand who we are.It’s not just the story of empire shaping modern Britain but the longer more entrenched history of class. In Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, the historian Selina Todd explores how class distinctions still prevail today.Class and empire weave their way into the work of the poet Anthony Anaxagorou. His family is from Cyprus - an island deeply divided and with a history of colonisation. He charts his rise as a poet in the pocket-book series, ‘How to… Write it’. And his last collection, After the Formalities, explores the anxieties inherent in his British and Cypriot heritage. Producer: Katy Hickman

He was born into abject poverty in Czechoslovakia, fought for the British and was decorated for his heroism in WWII, and became a successful businessman and press baron courted by political leaders around the world. Yet Robert Maxwell ended his life reviled as the embodiment of greed and corruption. The writer John Preston discusses his book, Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, with Andrew Marr.The journalist Julia Langdon was appointed the political editor of the Daily Mirror in 1984 when Maxwell owned the newspaper. She looks back at his often extraordinary behaviour. But Langdon also examines the difficult and changing relationship between those in power in politics and the media moguls.Maxwell was brash and theatrical working from luxury apartments at his rechristened Maxwell House, complete with Doric columns at the entrance. Emily Bell, formerly a media journalist now academic at Columbia University, sees certain parallels with Trump Tower. But the media landscape since Maxwell’s days has changed dramatically, and it’s now the owners of today’s social media companies who wield the power.Producer: Katy Hickman

Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics at University College London, tells Amol Rajan it’s time western governments took a braver approach to the biggest problems of our time – inequality, disease and environmental crisis. In her book, Mission Economy, she argues that capitalism has foundered. Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s decision in 1962 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, she calls for a greater sense of purpose from governments and a bolder public-private cooperation. The former cabinet minister and Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable looks back over the last 250 years to understand the power politicians have to transform their countries’ fortunes, for better or worse. In Money and Power – The World Leaders who Changed Economics he ranges from Thatcher to Trump, from Lenin to Bismarck to examine the interplay of economics and politics.But what happens when people begin to feel the economy is broken. In Why You Won’t Get Rich the journalist Robert Verkaik aims his ire at capitalism and the failure to treat people fairly. He argues that for too many people hard work is no longer enough to keep them off the breadline. While economic statistics place the UK as the sixth richest economy Verkaik believes too few reap the benefit. Producer: Katy Hickman

Francis Bacon is one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists – a painter who captured and exposed the darker, stranger sides of life. He is the subject of a new biography, Revelations, by Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens. Swan tells Andrew Marr how Bacon often fashioned his own autobiography, revelling in story-telling while immersed in the Soho nightlife.Francis Bacon never hid his homosexuality, even at a time when it was illegal in Britain. The celebrated script writer Russell T Davies is well-known for his depiction of the gay scene in Manchester with his 1990s series, Queer as Folk. He now turns his attention to what happened in the decades of the HIV/ AIDs crisis in the Channel 4 series, It’s A Sin.The composer Mark-Anthony Turnage took inspiration from a Francis Bacon’s triptych in his work Three Screaming Popes, combining expressionist complexity with English lyricism. 2020 was planned as a celebratory year for Turnage’s 60th birthday with several premieres scheduled. All were cancelled due to Covid-19. The composer discusses these works and what is inspiring him in the new year.Producer: Katy Hickman Photograph: ‘Self-Portrait, 1975’ © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2021

The Acts of Union 1707 brought together England and Scotland, ‘United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain’. But the historian Karin Bowie tells Andrew Marr that in the years preceding a growing number of pamphlets and demonstrations showed that many people were divided on the issue. In ‘Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland c.1560–1707’ Bowie charts the growing debate across society. The failure of Scotland’s trading ambitions in the Darien Scheme also hit the country hard, both financially and emotionally.However the idea of an independent Scotland emerged surprisingly recently into public debate, according to academic Ben Jackson. In his book The Case for Scottish Independence he argues that an influential Scottish nationalism only began to take shape from the 1970s onwards. It was at heart a political project, born out of opposition to the Thatcher government. Ruth Wishart is a pro-independence journalist who has written about Scottish affairs for many decades. As s columnist for The National she is following every twist and turn as Scottish nationalists agitate for a second independence referendum to follow the Scottish Parliament election in May. The political scientist Ailsa Henderson will be watching the coming elections closely too as she’s an expert on voting behaviour and attitudes to both Scottish and English nationalism. A number of Scots felt a deep sense of grievance against their neighbours at the formation of the Union. Now more than three hundred years later Henderson shows, in her forthcoming book Englishness – co-written with Richard Wyn Jones – that English nationalism contains a strain of grievance about England’s place within the United Kingdom.Producer: Katy Hickman

2020 has been disastrous for the arts in Britain and many people have lost their jobs as Covid-19 has swept through the country. Sir Nicholas Hytner has been working in the theatre for nearly four decades and he tells Andrew Marr about the unprecedented challenges that now face his industry. Hytner made his name and fortune in the 1990s with the musical Miss Saigon. Further successes came with theatre and film productions of The Madness of King George and The History Boys, and the sell-out One Man, Two Guvnors.He ran the National Theatre for twelve years before setting up his own commercial venture – with his business partner Nick Starr – the Bridge Theatre. During the year of the pandemic Hytner has sought to keep the theatre afloat with performances of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a specially adapted, socially distanced, but joyful, version of A Christmas Carol.Producer: Katy Hickman Photographer: Helen Maybanks

As the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket approaches Andrew Marr explores the dynamic between church and state and what happens when the most powerful political friendships turn sour. The academic Laura Ashe explains the background to the murder in the cathedral on 29th December 1170. King Henry II had promoted the lowly born Thomas Becket to the highest positions in the land – first Lord Chancellor, then Archbishop of Canterbury. But their growing animosity and conflict over the rights and privileges of the church led to his infamous assassination by four of the King’s knights. In recent years the former librarian Christopher de Hamel has succeeded in identifying the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which Becket cherished in his lifetime and may even have been holding when he died. In The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket, de Hamel looks at what this book reveals about the life of Becket. He also compares the veneration for relics of the saints in the Middle Ages, with our relationship today with historical artefacts.In Britain the Anglican Church still has an establishment role within the state, with Bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch regarded as ‘defender of the faith’. But across the Channel in France a formal separation of church and state, laïcité, was enshrined in French law in 1905. The cultural historian Andrew Hussey, who is based in Paris, looks at the devastating fault lines that have emerged in 2020 in the country’s secularist ideals. Producer: Katy Hickman

Look into the night sky in the coming days and Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer than they’ve been since the early 17th century, according to the astronomer Stuart Clark. He tells Tom Sutcliffe it’s a beautiful great conjunction that happens once every 20 years, but this year is especially rare. In his book, Beneath the Night, Clark explores how the stars have shaped the history of humankind, inspiring awe and fascination throughout the centuries. It was the extremity and majesty of whales that inspired the writer Rebecca Giggs. In her latest book, Fathoms: the world in the whale, she fuses natural history, philosophy and science to look at our relationship with this most magnificent of mammals. She asks how far the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas, and the impact of climate change.Artists have long taken inspiration for their work from the heavens and the natural world around them. In Shaping the World: Sculpture from Pre-History to Now, the world-renowned sculptor Antony Gormley explores this art form, alongside the art critic Martin Gayford. Gormley argues that the desire to make objects can be found in every culture throughout the world, and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression.Producer: Katy Hickman

Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK. John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.Producer: Katy Hickman Photograph by Matt Crockett

Amol Rajan explores different ways of thinking, and how far humans can be seen as unique for their ability to invent. In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen shows how humans have evolved remarkable ingenuity in every area of their lives – from the arts to the sciences – by using complex systemizing mechanisms. He says this ability to formulate if-and-then processes has driven progress for more than 70,000 years. He goes on to argue that the areas of the brain important for systemizing overlap with those for autism. As the Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen wants to challenge people to think differently about an often misunderstood condition. The archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Skyes is also seeking to challenge people’s perceptions. In Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, she builds a picture of an ancient ancestor who was far from being a brutish thug. She depicts the Neanderthals as curious and clever connoisseurs of their world: technologically inventive and artistically inclined. Humans may have been the survivors but Wragg Sykes argues that we are not necessarily uniquely special - we share many traits and DNA with our Neanderthal relatives. Susan Carvahlo started her career as an archaeologist with a fascination for human evolution, but her interest in uncovering knowledge of our ancestors led her to become one of the main founders of the field of Primate Archaeology. For decades she has been studying stone-tool use by wild chimpanzees in West Africa. Alongside another project in the Rift Valley, she’s looking to use the knowledge gained from non-human primates to expand understanding of human origins and behaviour.Producer: Katy Hickman

‘A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible’. So wrote the superstar philosopher Jacques Derrida. But what does it mean to question and deconstruct everything we think we know? In a new biography of Derrida titled An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon explores the life and works of one of the most enigmatic of thinkers. He questions how far Derrida’s ideas have led to today’s ‘post-truth’ age? Virginia Woolf's essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ posed the question: ‘‘Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?’ The English professor Alexandra Harris looks at whether Woolf’s answer stands the test of time.Bernhard Schlink’s literary career took off in 1995 with the publication of his novel The Reader, which became an international bestseller. His latest work, Olga (translated into English by Charlotte Collins), is a story of love set in Germany against the backdrop of the traumas of the 20th century.Producer: Katy Hickman

Ireland itself is a main character in Kevin Barry's new short story collection, That Old Country Music. He brings the western regions to life in stories set firmly in Ireland's present day but with an ancient, magical past lingering in the background. A pregnant teenager waits for her robber boyfriend, a factory worker falls for a Polish waitress, and a police officer seeks a known criminal, in stories set amidst wild and flourishing countryside.The concrete walls and tower blocks of Peckham in south London are not often the subject of poetry. For his debut collection, Poor, Caleb Femi pays tribute to the streets that shaped him as a child. He brings to life the schoolboys, rappers, artists, pastors and gentrifying neighbours of Peckham, an area where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without a single step on the ground.Daisy Johnson became the youngest ever Booker Prize nominee with her debut novel, Everything Under, and quickly established herself as a master of creepy locations. Her new novel, Sisters, is a gothic tale set on lonely Yorkshire moors, while her short story series The Hotel, available now on BBC Sounds, looks at the unsettling, waterlogged Norfolk Fens, a place where dead bodies float back up to the surface.Producer: Hannah Sander

Sir Roger Penrose was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics this year for his ground-breaking work on black holes and their relationship with the general theory of relativity. He looks back at his extraordinary career with Andrew Marr – from his early interest in mathematical patterns and the ‘impossible’ works of Escher, to his revolutionary use of mathematics in cosmology and his continued fascination with the beginning and end of time. Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity, as well as a best-selling author. In his latest collection of essays, There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, he demonstrates a curiosity that crosses the boundaries from the sciences to the arts. He reflects on everything from Newton’s alchemy to Einstein’s mistakes, and from Dante’s cosmology to Nabokov's butterflies. The world underwater is the physicist Helen Czerski’s playground. The focus of much of her research has been the physics of breaking waves and bubbles on the ocean surface. As one of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers, Czerski will reveal the vital role oceans play in the Earth’s heating and plumbing systems, and the impact of human activity on the planet.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Latin scholar Shadi Bartsch has written a new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid. She tells Kirsty Wark how this timeless epic about the legendary ancestor of a Roman emperor has been constantly invoked and reinterpreted over its two thousand year history. She argues that this poem still has much to say to contemporary readers about gender, politics, religion, morality, nationalism and love.It was while arguing about the merits of the Aeneid’s tragic queen, Dido of Carthage, that the classicist Natalie Haynes decided it was time to rescue the women in ancient myths. Centuries of male interpretations, she argues, has led to the demonization and dismissal of the likes of Medusa, Phaedra and Medea. In Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myths she goes back to the original stories, reinstating the more complex roles given to these women in antiquity.In the 17th-century the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi drew inspiration from the women in ancient myths, allegories and the Bible, as seen in a new exhibition of her work at the National Gallery in London. The curator, Letizia Treves, says that Gentileschi challenged conventions and defied expectations, painting subjects that were traditionally the preserve of male artists, and transforming the meek into warriors.Producer: Katy Hickman(Picture credit: the National Gallery)

The pandemic has exposed serious weaknesses in Western governments, according to John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg and former editor of The Economist. In The Wake-Up Call he argues that the Covid crisis has accelerated a shift in balance of power from the West to East. Micklethwait tells Andrew Marr that unless the West can respond more creatively to what is happening, the prospect of a new Eastern-dominated world order, with China at the centre, will be inevitable.But the historian Rana Mitter argues that China is increasingly presenting itself as the creator and protector of the international order, rather than its threat. In China’s Good War he explores how the country is revisiting its role as an Allied Force in World War II, to assert newfound confidence abroad and to shape a new nationalism at home.And Katya Adler, the BBC's Europe Editor, looks at the problems facing the EU, including the relationship of China and the impact of coronavirus. She assesses how Macron, Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen and other leaders have handled this year's challenges.Producer: Hannah Sander

Fake news, conspiracy theories, and weaponising data to influence elections are all aspects of contemporary politics. But Amol Rajan explores their historical roots with two eminent historians, Jill Lepore and Sir Richard Evans.Decades before Silicon Valley tech companies had access to our personal information, The Simulmatics Corporation was dealing in the weaponisation of data. In her latest book, If Then – How One Data Company Invented the Future, Jill Lepore looks back at how algorithms that were supposedly able to forecast and influence human behaviour gained huge currency in the 1960s, and what happens when they were allowed to develop unchecked. Sir Richard Evans is one of the world’s leading authorities on Nazi Germany. In The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, Evans investigates key conspiracy theories that flourished at the time and still continue to arouse debate. Through painstaking research and evidence-based argument he reasserts the boundary between truth and fiction, and looks at why fake news takes hold.Producer: Katy Hickman

We are facing a crisis in care that could prove disastrous, according to the journalist Madeleine Bunting. Over five years she travelled the country to explore the value of care, talking to underpaid care-givers and distraught patients and families. She tells Andrew Marr that the impact of the care crisis will be felt throughout society, from the young to the old. Jeremy Hunt was the longest-serving Health Secretary in history and added Social Care to his portfolio in 2018. He is now the Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, having previously served as the Shadow Minister for Disabled People under a Labour government. He outlines the scale of the social care crisis, and explains why policy solutions have proved so difficult to enact - and so fiercely controversial.Dr Helen Kingston is a GP in Somerset who recognised the impact loneliness was having on the physical health of her patients. She helped set up the ‘Compassionate Frome’ project in 2013, bringing together more than 400 local care providers and volunteers to help people reconnect with their community. As well as having a huge impact on individual lives, studies have shown a dramatic drop in hospital admissions in the area.Producer: Katy Hickman

Europeans and Africans have been encountering one another since as early as the 3rd century, according to the historian Olivette Otele. In her new book, African Europeans: An Untold History, she traces those meetings through the lives of individuals, both ordinary and extraordinary. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that exploring a past long overlooked raises prescient questions about racism, identity, citizenship and power. Toussaint Louverture – the subject of Sudhir Hazareesingh’s biography, Black Spartacus – was no ordinary figure. A former slave, he became the leader of a revolution in the 1790s that transformed Haiti, the former French Caribbean colony. With access to archival material often overlooked, Hazareesingh draws a portrait of an extraordinary man who combined Enlightenment ideals and Machiavellian politics with Caribbean mysticism and African traditions.As Professor of Public Engagement with History at the University of Reading, Kate Williams has thought hard about how to tell history. Her books, TV and radio programmes have covered topics from England's queens to the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, often turning upside-down preconceived images of Britain's most powerful women. She discusses the new debates raging in history, including how we should approach the legacies of colonialism and misogyny.Producer: Katy Hickman

The prize-winning writer Marilynne Robinson and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams discuss belief, community and self-knowledge with Andrew Marr. The life and family of a Presbyterian minister in small-town Iowa is the focus in Marilynne Robinson’s quartet of Gilead novels. The latest, Jack, tells the story of the minister’s prodigal son and his romance with the daughter of a black preacher. Robinson’s work interrogates the complexities and paradoxes of American life, while exploring the power of our emotions and the wonders of a sacred world. Rowan Williams was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. Since stepping down he has written widely on poetry and literature, from Auden to Dostoevsky. Earlier this year he wrote about the importance and influence of the rules of monastic life. In The Way of St Benedict, Williams explores the appeal and relevance of Benedict’s sixth-century Rule to present-day Christians and non-believers.Producer: Katy Hickman

Claudia Rankine, one of America’s leading literary figures, and the double-Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood look at the world afresh, challenging conventions – with Kirsty Wark.In her latest book, Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine reflects on what it means to experience, and question, everyday racism. Her poems draw on a series of encounters with friends and strangers, as well as historical record. Her work moves beyond the silence, guilt and violence that often surround discussions about whiteness, and dares all of us to confront the world in which we live.Margaret Atwood recently won the Booker Prize for a second time with The Testaments, her sequel to the 1985 prize-winner The Handmaid’s Tale. Her story of the fictional Gilead’s dark misogyny has retained its relevance after more than three decades. The world of Gilead was originally sparked by an earlier poem, Spelling, and Atwood explores the importance of poetry in firing the imagination.Producer: Katy Hickman Photographer: John Lucas

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour movement promised radical change but ended disastrously with the 2019 general election. Labour insider and activist Owen Jones looks back over the last decade and tells Andrew Marr why the election went so badly wrong. In his new book, This Land: The Story of a Movement, he also reflects on the future of the Left in an age of upheaval.Sylvia Pankhurst was born into one of Britain’s most famous activist families. Her biographer Rachel Holmes argues that, although less well-known than her mother and sister, Sylvia was the most revolutionary of them all. In Natural Born Rebel, Holmes celebrates the radical life of a true internationalist.But politics can often appear to be a game between the radical fringes and the centre ground. The Times columnist and former Conservative Party adviser Danny Finkelstein has long applauded moderation. In a collection of his newspaper writings, Everything in Moderation, he argues that the political centre is less about ideology and more about temperament.Producer: Katy Hickman

As inequality continues to rise and political and social divisions become more entrenched, Amol Rajan discusses what can be done to restore social values and a sense of community - with the political philosopher Michael Sandel, the award winning novelist Elif Shafak, and commentator and author David Goodhart.Michael Sandel describes how we live in an age of winners and losers, an era in which social mobility has stalled. In the past the answer has been to attempt to increase access by rewarding the most able, regardless of wealth or class. But in The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel highlights the deep inequality this has continued to perpetuate, with hubris among those at the top and humiliation and judgement for those at the bottom.David Goodhart calls for a radical rebalancing of what we value. In Head, Hand and Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, Goodhart describes how success, esteem and power have become narrowly associated with cognitive abilities. This, he argues, has disrupted community cohesion and left large swathes of people feeling disregarded and unrewarded.Elif Shafak responds to the tenor of our time with a short manifesto How To Sane In An Age Of Division. She believes that we have entered a time of pessimism. She explores how storytelling can nurture the empathy, wisdom and tolerance needed to progress.Producer: Katy Hickman

The first episode of the new season. Andrew Marr and guests stop to consider the natural world and the changing seasons. When James Rebanks first learnt to work the land, at his grandfather's side, the family’s Lake District farm was a key part of the ancient landscape and was teeming with wildlife. By the time he inherited the farm, that landscape had profoundly changed. In English Pastoral, his follow-up to best-seller The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks assesses the revolutionary post-war farming methods - and the unintended destruction they caused. He looks at what can be done to restore rich soil and flourishing fields. Since the start of the pandemic, novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison has been documenting the wonder of the natural world, bringing the sights and sounds of her Suffolk countryside to homes all around the country. In her podcast The Stubborn Light of Things she plays close attention to what’s happening on her doorstep, from the arrival and departure of the swifts, to the bloom of the hawthorn, to the hunt in the undergrowth for glow-worms. A collection of Harrison’s monthly nature notes from The Times are due to be published this November.A much underrated and unnoticed part of the natural world are fungi, according to the biologist Merlin Sheldrake. In Entangled Life he celebrates the ingenuity, extravagance and strangeness of fungal networks. Neither plant nor animal, fungi are found throughout the earth, in the air and in our bodies. They can live on a speck of dust or spread over miles of underground mazes. While fungi gives us bread and life-saving medicines, they have also transformed our understanding of the way plants communicate with each other via the ‘Wood Wide Web’.Producer: Katy Hickman

Tom Sutcliffe discusses racism, the traps of history and the Black Lives Matter movement with the American author Brit Bennett and the British academic Gary Younge. Racial identity, bigotry and shape-shifting are at the centre of Brit Bennett’s new book, The Vanishing Half. The novel focuses on twin sisters who flee the confines of their southern small town, and the attempts by one of the sisters to escape her background completely by passing as white. The social unrest in the US in the 20th century pervades her latest work, but Bennett is hopeful that today’s protests mark the beginning of real change.Gary Younge lived in the US for 12 years working as a journalist, before he returned home and became Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. He discounts the attempts by some in Britain to claim moral superiority over America in terms of racism. He argues that Britain’s colonial past meant the most egregious racist acts often took place abroad, and so rarely became an integral part of the country’s story. Producer: Katy HickmanPhotograph by Emma Trim

James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature. It is both celebrated and commemorated annually on the 16th June – Bloomsday – the day on which the novel is set. The traditional celebrations held in Dublin since the 1950s have been curtailed this year because of COVID-19, but Andrew Marr discusses the legacy of Joyce with the writers Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín and Mary Costello. Edna O’Brien first encountered Joyce’s work in the 1950s, and his writings of ‘the rough and tumble of everyday life’ spurred her extraordinary writing career. She has written a biography of Joyce, and her portrait of his marriage, James and Nora, has just been reissued. Colm Tóibín encounters the spirit of Joyce and his creation, Leopold Bloom, constantly as he walks the streets of Dublin. In his collection of essays, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, he looks at Joyce in relation to the writer's father.Mary Costello is a self-confessed Joyce obsessive. In her latest novel, The River Capture, she pays homage to Ulysses.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Coronavirus pandemic and ongoing protests in America have shone a spotlight on the power of the modern State. In Britain we find ourselves locked in our homes, following government instruction; and yet the authority for that coercion comes from the consent we give. This doubleness was captured by Thomas Hobbes in his political text, Leviathan, and it is the starting point for political scientist David Runciman's popular lockdown podcast on politics: the History of Ideas. He tells Amol Rajan how Hobbes, Gandhi and Frantz Fanon could help us understand our uneasy times.Humiliation is one way in which governments and authorities can make us do their bidding. And it also something we now do to each other in the court of public opinion, argues German historian Ute Frevert. In her new book, The Politics of Humiliation, she looks at how humiliation has been used to persuade and to control, everywhere from international diplomacy to British boarding schools. And she explains why the sight of someone taking to their knee has such incredible resonance.Producer: Hannah Sander

‘The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ – to misquote LP Hartley. Andrew Marr talks to Riel Miller, an economist at UNESCO, about the difficulties of understanding and predicting what happens in the future. Miller argues that individuals, institutions and governments fail to grasp its profound unpredictability, where the only certainty is radical change. He’s calling for a programme of future literacy, designed to challenge present complacency and improve preparedness for what’s on the horizon. But given what we know about the world today, and what we can guess about the future, is it okay to have a child? That is the question posed by Meehan Crist, writer-in-residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She tracks the resurgence of Malthus and his powerful, terrifying idea that if the global population grows too large, we are all doomed. Crist unpicks the argument that responsibility for stopping climate change and safeguarding the future rests solely with the individual. Producer: Katy Hickman

The classics have never been solely the preserve of the British intellectual elite, according to the classicist Edith Hall. In A People’s History of Classics, Hall and her co-writer Henry Stead examine the working class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. This history challenges assumptions about the elitism surrounding the study of ancient Greeks and Romans, and Hall hopes it will expand the debate around the future of classical education for all.An understanding of the classics could also help people reinvigorate cynicism: from the jaded negativity of today, back to its initial idea of fearless speech. In his latest book, Ansgar Allen, returns to the Greek Cynics of the 4th century BCE, a small band of eccentrics who practised an improvised philosophy that challenged all social norms and scandalised their contemporaries. In the centuries that followed this exacting philosophy was hugely watered down. Today’s cynics, who lack social and political convictions, would be barely recognisable to their bold and shameless forefathers.Producer: Katy Hickman

The prize winning writer Richard Ford talks to Andrew Marr about his latest collection of short stories, Sorry for Your Trouble. Irish America is Ford’s landscape, and his characters contemplate ageing, grief, love and marriage: ‘great moments in small lives’. Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi and has spent many years living in New Orleans – his characters, like himself, live far from the political centre of America.Professor of 19th Century Literature and Thought, Ruth Livesey, is also interested in life away from the centre in her study of provincialism in Britain. Condescension towards small town life can be traced back to the Victorian period. But the writer George Eliot, who spent her early life in Nuneaton in the Midlands, argued that ‘‘art had a responsibility to show a provincial life could be just as full of insight and moral courage as one on the great world stage.’Producer: Katy Hickman

The writer Olivia Laing has long used art to make sense of the world. Over the last five years she has written a series of essays using art and artists to understand different political crises and emergencies around the globe. She tells Tom Sutcliffe how art can help to change the way people see the world, and how it can be a force for resistance and repair. In a new collection , Funny Weather, Laing presents her own idiosyncratic guide to staying sane during the current coronavirus pandemic.The novelist James Meek set his last book, To Calais, In Ordinary Times, in 1348 as the Black Death swept into England from Northern Europe. In his medieval universe, aspects of society that had once appeared fixed and natural – faith, class and gender – are upended and challenged, as the plague destroys more than just lives. Meek looks to see if such cataclysmic moments of human history have any lessons for us today.Producer: Katy Hickman

Andrew Marr discusses the origins and growth of globalisation, and the impact of the coronavirus on the global world order with Valerie Hansen and Gideon Rachman.In her latest book, The Year 1000, the historian Valerie Hansen challenges the idea that globalisation began in 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. She argues that it was 500 years earlier when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe. New archaeological finds show how goods and people travelled far and wide from this earlier period, marking the beginning of an era of exploration, trade and exploitation. The last 500 years or more has seen an explosion in global interactions, with a huge growth in multi-national companies, as well as international trade, ideas and culture. But the economist Gideon Rachman says today’s worldwide pandemic has seen the nation state making a comeback. The emergency has revealed the fragility of global supply chains and increased demand for local production and tougher border controls. Rachman also believes that the geopolitical effects of the coronavirus on the world order will linger long after travel restrictions have been lifted.Producer: Katy Hickman

Why do some people get involved while others stand by looking on? What makes people act for the sake of others? Kirsty Wark discusses the psychology of behaviour with Catherine Sanderson and David Halpern.In the Bystander Effect, Catherine Sanderson argues that the question of why some people act badly while others are heroic is not simply about good and bad. Our brains are hard-wired to conform and to avoid social embarrassment. But there are practical measures that can help create a sense of personal responsibility, turning a silent bystander into a model of action. The psychologist David Halpern is also interested in how to change behaviour. He is advising the UK Government on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on how to get the public to adopt new social norms, including increased hand-washing and social distancing. Halpern is the Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, unofficially known as The Nudge Unit. Producer: Katy Hickman

A year ago French people looked on with horror as the great Notre-Dame went up in flames. The journalist Agnès Poirier tells Andrew Marr that the cathedral with its 800 year history represents the soul of the nation. Even before the fire was out President Macron was promising that it would be rebuilt. But in Notre-Dame: The Soul of France, Poirier recounts how its current reconstruction has been mired in controversy – political, social, artistic and religious. Poirier also looks at how the French government and people have reacted to the coronavirus pandemic.In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government has been voted sweeping new powers to rule by decree for an indefinite period, to deal with the coronavirus crisis. The academic Martyn Rady is keeping a keen eye on how different countries in Central Europe respond. He argues that the region has been shaped by the formidable power and influence of the Habsburg dynasty. In his latest book, The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power, Rady shows how from modest origins in the 9th century the family soon gained control of the Holy Roman Empire, stretching from Spain to Hungary and beyond. Producer: Katy Hickman