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BBC Radio 4


Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday


Start the Week

What do animals mean to us? Naomi Alderman explores how animals shape human understanding, from ancient burial rites to modern science.

The psychologist Justin Gregg specialises in dolphin social cognition. He introduces his new book, Humanish, a witty and provocative look at anthropomorphism — our habit of seeing human traits in animals, objects and machines — and how it helps us make sense of the world and increases empathy.

Peter Fretwell is a leading scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, and author of The Penguin Book of Penguins. He celebrates the charm and complexity of penguins, from their evolutionary quirks to their cultural symbolism, alongside the threats they face today.

Marianne Hem Eriksen is Professor of Viking Studies at the National Museum of Denmark and part of the BBC / Arts and Humanities Research Council scheme of New Generation Thinkers. She draws on archaeological evidence to show how Viking societies had a complex relationship with animals, seeing them not just as pets or food, but as extensions of human identity and mythology.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Animals and Meaning

How much can we truly know about the inner lives of others? Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Miles Leeson and Karen Leeder to reflect on the challenge of interpreting the minds and motivations of poets, both past and present. 

Editor Miles Leeson presents Poems from an Attic, a newly published collection of Iris Murdoch’s previously unseen poetry. Found in a box long after her death, these intimate verses offer fresh insight into the desires of a writer better known for her novels and philosophy.

Professor Karen Leeder has spent much of her career studying the poetry of East Germany. Her recent translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 won this year's Griffin Poetry Prize 2025. Grünbein has written about the wartime bombing of his birth city Dresden and as a translator of classical authors, including Aeschylus and Seneca, his work features reflections on the relevance of the past and of antiquity in the present. 

Nick Makoha's latest volume of poetry The New Carthaginians draws on an eclectic range of artistic, historic and cultural sources from the politics of 1970s Uganda to the myth of Icarus and the exploded collages of the neo-expressionist art movement. He writes employing symbols and traditions in startling ways to transform what we might think we know into something completely new. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Poetry - reading, writing, editing and translating

Three visions of darkness as the days draw in. Adam Rutherford's guests for Radio 4's Monday discussion programme are a poet, a photographer of night-time and a National Gallery curator. 

Night Vision is the latest book from the award-winning poet and writer Jean Sprackland exploring our complex relationship with the dark: what we fear and what we wish to banish. In the dark she finds a place of possibility and she asks what might we discover in the dark if we free our imagination. 

The photographer Jasper Goodall has been taking photographs in the dark for many years, mainly in forests and woodlands. In 2025 in exhibitions on show at Nottingham, Brighton, Cornwall and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition he has displayed works which draw on classical myth, European folklore and animistic belief systems. 

Christine Riding, Director of Collections and Research, talks about the images of scientific experiment and industrialisation in England on show in the National Gallery's exhibition showcasing the candlelight paintings of Wright of Derby (1734-1797). Wright of Derby: From the Shadows in the Sunley Room at the National Gallery runs until 10 May 2026 and there is an entrance fee. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

The Dark

Three prize-winning authors in today's discussion programme hosted by Tom Sutcliffe:

The German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of peasants rose up to demand a new, more egalitarian order—only to be crushed in a brutal counterattack that left up to 100,000 dead. The historian Lyndal Roper argues that this rebellion was far from chaotic: it was a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical ideals of the Protestant Reformation. Her book Summer of Fire and Blood is the winner of the 2025 Cundill History Prize. 

The neurologist Masud Husain explores the human mind through the stories of seven patients. In asking what it is that makes us who we are, he explores how our identity can shift when we lose just a single cognitive ability. He examines the stories a man who ran out of words, a woman who stopped caring what others thought, and another who, losing her memory, believed she was having an affair with her own husband. His account of the science of identity, Our Brains, Our Selves, won the Royal Society's 2025 Trivedi Science Book Prize. 

The historian Hannah Durkin explores the stories of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on her original research she uses first hand accounts to tell the stories of the enslaved in their own words. Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade is the winner of the 2025 Wolfson History Prize. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Histories, emotions and identity

What can the cosmos tell us about our past and future? Tom Sutcliffe and guests look skyward and deep into the quantum world to ask how much we can really know about the universe - and about ourselves. 

Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, presenter of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, shares her passion for inspiring the next generation to think big, as she explores the wonders of our solar system and the questions that still puzzle astronomers. 

Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies introduces his new book Quantum 2.0, charting the strange and revolutionary principles of quantum mechanics and how they are reshaping technology, science, and our understanding of reality itself. 

From the Natural History Museum, Caroline Smith brings insights from meteorites — fragments of ancient worlds — and explains how these cosmic messengers help scientists search for life beyond Earth and piece together the story of our solar system’s origins. 

Together, in Radio 4's weekly ideas discussion programme Start the Week, they consider the limits of knowledge: whether in decoding quantum mysteries, interpreting rocks from space, or imagining the motivations of those who first looked to the stars.

Producer: Ruth Watts
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Space, Quantum Frontiers and Cosmic Clues

What can genetics and palmistry tell us about how we understand identity, character and health? Adam Rutherford is joined by Professor of Zoology Matthew Cobb; the historian Professor Alison Bashford and the geneticist Charlotte Houldcroft.

Matthew Cobb discusses his biography Crick: A Mind in Motion. From the discovery of DNA’s structure to Francis Crick’s later work on consciousness, Cobb reveals a restless thinker whose collaborations — with scientists, artists and poets — shaped some of the most profound ideas of the 20th century.

Alison Bashford turns to palm reading in her new book Decoding the Hand, a history of palmistry and its surprising entanglement with science, medicine and magic.

The geneticist Charlotte Houldcroft's research uses ancient DNA to work out how DNA viruses - such as smallpox and herpes - change over time and the consequences of this evolution for our immune systems.

Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Genes and hands: mapping character and health

How can we reclaim the internet? Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss the digital age - its supporters and discontents. 

Tech critic Cory Doctorow introduces his new book Enshittification, a blistering diagnosis of how online platforms have decayed — from innovation to exploitation — and what we can do to make it better for ordinary users. 

Novelist and broadcaster Naomi Alderman draws on history in Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, arguing that we’ve lived through information crises before, and that lessons from the invention of writing and the printing press can help us navigate today’s digital turbulence. 

Journalist Oliver Moody, the author of Baltic: The Future of Europe, discusses Estonia’s radical embrace of digital governance, and what it reveals about the possibilities — and limits — of a truly connected state.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Digital Futures and Information Crises

Threats to the natural world are the focus of today’s conversation. Adam Rutherford talks to wildlife biologist Jonathan Slaght, novelist Juhea Kim and criminal psychologist Julia Shaw.

Jonathan Slaght discusses Tigers Between Empires, his account of the international effort to save the Siberian tiger from extinction in the wake of the Cold War. 

Juhea Kim’s short story collection A Love Story from the End of the World imagines lives lived in precarious balance with nature, from biodomes in Seoul to landfill islands in the Pacific. 

Dr Julia Shaw’s Green Crime investigates the psychology behind environmental destruction, profiling the perpetrators of ecological harm and the people fighting to stop them.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Saving Tigers, Green Crime and Cli-fi

In her latest novel, One Aladdin Two Lamps, the writer Jeanette Winterson takes inspiration from the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights. But she calls on the reader to look again at stories we think we know, unpick how fiction works, and have the courage to challenge and change the narrative.

The saxophonist and presenter Soweto Kinch will perform his new album, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, with the London Symphony Orchestra (at the Barbican, London, on Friday 14th November), combining British jazz, hip-hop and orchestral music. This is the finale of his acclaimed trilogy of politically charged, genre-defying works that tell different stories of the past, present and future. 

The former MP Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade in Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and Borders, and wrote a column for a local newspaper. In Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders he’s collected together these fragmentary moments from rural life and local politics to capture a wide-ranging portrait of life and stories from the Cumbrian countryside. 

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Storytelling: Jeanette Winterson, Rory Stewart and Soweto Kinch

The internationally renowned choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor swaps stage for gallery in a landmark exhibition exploring his multifaceted career at Somerset House (from 30 Oct 2025–22 Feb 2026). ‘Infinite Bodies’ investigates how Wayne McGregor has combined body, movement and cutting-edge digital technologies to redefine perceptions of physical intelligence. Throughout the gallery space he draws together designers, musicians, engineers and dancers to bring the artworks to life.

The Booker prize winning novelist Anne Enright is in the studio to talk about her latest work, ‘Attention, Writing on Life, Art and the World’. Unlike her fiction, in these essays, Enright speaks directly to the reader, elucidating her thoughts on everything from family history to Irish politics and the control of women, to new perspectives on literary legends. 

There’s a screen idol at the heart of Tanika Gupta’s new play, Hedda (at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, until 22nd November). Inspired by the life of Anglo-Indian film star Merle Oberon, Gupta sets her play just after India’s independence and transforms Ibsen’s classic into a story about power, identity and representation.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Crossing genres with Wayne McGregor

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 Hickman

Image credit: Asmik Grigorian in Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee’s Rusalka, The Royal Opera ©2023 Laura Stevens

Ancient knowledge

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