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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...