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BBC Radio 4


Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday


Start the Week

What can chemistry reveal about what it means to be human? On Radio 4’s weekly conversation programme, Tom Sutcliffe leads a conversation that ranges from the molecules within us to the experimental pioneers who transformed our understanding of the material world.

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu discusses Chain Reaction, her vivid and deeply personal journey into the chemistry underpinning everything we touch, consume and inhabit. She brings to life the chemical bonds that hold our bodies together and the reactions that sustain all life, while recounting her own story, from childhood in post war Nigeria to a groundbreaking career designing treatments for blindness.

Science historian Kit Chapman introduces The Age of Alchemy, tracing the long, global evolution of chemistry before it became a modern science. Travelling from ancient Sri Lankan steel forges to Egyptian alchemical texts and Chinese herbal laboratories, he reveals how early experimenters, merging mysticism, medicine and metallurgy, laid crucial foundations for scientific method and discovery.

Professor Mark Miodownik set up the Institute for Making at University College London and is Royal Society Professor of Public Engagement with Science. He is a leading materials scientist who has led work on plastic waste and biodegradable plastics. He discusses the latest research on the chemical composition of the things we are making, and the things we throw away. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Chemical Reactions

What can the things we create, keep and bury tell us about who we are? On Radio 4's weekly discussion programme, Adam Rutherford explores material culture – the power of objects you can touch – and how they connect us to the past.

Classicist Mary Beard discusses her book Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, arguing that everyday remnants of antiquity, from bread to paint pots abandoned at Pompeii, still matter. And that Ancient Greece and Rome continue to shape how we see our own world.

Theatre director Greg Doran set himself the task of tracking down the surviving copies of Shakespeare’s First folio, after the death of his husband the actor Antony Sher. He recounts his worldwide quest in Walking Shadow: Love, Loss and Shakespeare, which also reveals the importance of the enduring physical presence of Shakespeare’s work.

Dr Sophia Adams, curator at the British Museum, discusses the extraordinary Melsonby Hoard, the largest collection of Iron Age metalwork ever found in Britain, and what its burnt and buried objects reveal about power, ritual and life before the Roman conquest. The exhibition, Chariots, Treasure and Power: Secrets of the Melsonby Hoard, will go on display at the Yorkshire Museum, York from 15th May 2026.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Why Stuff Matters: Objects, Power and the Past

Is radical change possible to solve some of today’s most intractable problems? In Radio 4's weekly discussion programme, Tom Sutcliffe is joined by three journalists to discuss the challenges of trying to live differently. 

John Kampfner has travelled the world to find examples of places and people bravely and imaginatively confronting some of our most pressing problems – from climate change to health, housing and education. His book is called Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t.

But Nicolas Niarchos questions how we live sustainably when the hidden costs of the green transition can be so devastating. In The Elements of Power he investigates the global supply of rare earth metals, essential for decarbonisation, and the terrible, bloody human cost for those involved in their extraction.

Natasha Walter explores how activism is being reshaped in the era of climate emergency. In Feminism for a World on Fire, she reflects on the movements fighting for justice, and asks what forms of solidarity and resistance are needed when the planet itself is under threat.

Together, the panel consider the innovations, compromises and moral dilemmas that come with trying to live well on a warming planet.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Challenges and solutions

How have the evolutionary forces that shaped animal sex and behaviour influenced the ways humans conserve, study and coexist with other species? As the Zoological Society of London, the precursor to the zoo, celebrates its 200th anniversary, Adam Rutherford is joined by three guests whose work uncovers the scientific, historical and ethical threads connecting humans with the wider animal world. 

Biologist Lixing Sun introduces his new book On the Origin of Sex - the Weird and Wonderful Science of how our Planet is Populated, uncovering how mating strategies and reproductive behaviour evolved across species. From Californian Condors to clownfish, the dazzling array of ways in which the animal kingdom procreates is both baffling and astonishing.

Cultural historian Elsa Richardson, from the University of Strathclyde, discusses her latest research into the archives of Edinburgh Zoo, revealing a rich and little‑known record of early zoological observation, public spectacle and the shifting moral landscapes of how people have imagined, displayed and interpreted animal behaviour.

And Sarah Forsyth, Curator of Mammals at ZSL, reflects on the history of the organisation and offers insights into the crucial conservation work that the Zoo is involved in today. From field programmes to breeding initiatives, Sarah explores how modern zoos can help safeguard species and shape our understanding of animals in a rapidly changing world.

Producer: Natalia Fernandez 
Senior Producer: Katy Hickman

Zoos, sex and conservation

What can past and present struggles over work and power tell us about the future of labour? Tom Sutcliffe and guests examine tensions between workers, employers and the state, from the upheavals of the early twentieth century to today’s shifting workplace.

Constitutional specialist David Torrance explores the economic, political and social forces that shaped the General Strike of 1926. His new book The Edge of Revolution explains how Britain came to the brink of constitutional crisis and what the confrontation reveals about national identity, political authority and collective action.

Professor Jane Holgate, a long time trade unionist and community organiser, reflects on the dynamics of solidarity. She is the co-author of Changemakers, a study of radical strategies for social movement organising, the evolving role of unions, and what effective action looks like in a fragmented modern economy.

The Financial Times journalist and editor of the Working It brand Isabel Berwick looks ahead to the future of work, assessing how technology, demographic change and shifting employee expectations are reshaping the workplace.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Industrial action: from 1926 General Strike to today

How do the stories we inherit, and the ones we tell, shape our journey from childhood into adulthood? In Radio 4's weekly discussion programme, Naomi Alderman and guests examine the shifting boundaries between youth, experience and societal expectation across memoir, history and fiction.

Booker Prize winner David Szalay talks about Flesh, his stark, propulsive novel tracing one boy’s path from adolescence in Hungary to adulthood among London’s super rich, exploring desire, power, class and the ways childhood experiences reverberate across a lifetime. 

Filmmaker and writer Penny Woolcock grew up in a British enclave in Argentina. Her coming-of-age memoir, The Man Who Gave Me a Biscuit: Love and Death in Argentina, interweaves memories of teenage rebellion with the buried histories of genocide, authoritarianism and a society built on repression. 

The historian Laura Tisdall discusses We Have Come to Be Destroyed, her vivid account of growing up in Cold War Britain, revealing how young people challenged the world adults made for them - from activism and anxieties about the future, to everyday resistance against narrow expectations.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Growing Up

What makes us who we are? In Radio 4's discussion programme to start off the week, Tom Sutcliffe and guests explore consciousness and identity, and whether the face reveals our inner thoughts and character.

American science writer Michael Pollan is celebrated for his work on food and psychedelic drugs. His new book A World Appears, is a sweeping investigation into consciousness - examining where our sense of self comes from, how it is experienced across species, and what new theories from neuroscience, philosophy and plant biology reveal about awareness.

Cultural historian Fay Bound-Alberti traces the long, complex history of the human face, showing how it has been used to define identity, moral character and social status, and how new technologies – from photography to facial recognition – shape our understanding of selfhood in the modern world.

Mary Costello’s latest novel A Beautiful Loan, focuses on the life of Anna Hughes, a woman looking back across decades of love, loss and betrayal as she tries to understand the choices that shaped her and the deeper self she learns, slowly, to claim.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Consciousness and Identity

What lies beneath the world's oceans? From the phenomenal infrastructure of telecoms cables to shipwrecked galleons and treasure and the sea creatures of the literary imagination - we explore the mysteries of the deep. Adam Rutherford chairs Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week. His guests are:

The writer Julian Sancton is the author of Neptune's Fortune which tells the story of Roger Dooley, a diver who went in search of a lost ship. An accidental discovery in the archives led the unlikely treasure hunter to search for the shipwreck of an eighteenth century galleon, the San José. Laden with riches on its way to the New World, it was sunk in a fierce battle and its location was forgotten for centuries. The pursuit is a tale of maritime archaeology, rival treasure hunters, legal and political obstacles and the challenge of narrowing the search to a small area of the sea bed. 

We think of the internet as wireless, but it is connected by nearly 900,000 miles of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the ocean, stitching whole continents together. In The Web Beneath the Waves, the journalist Samanth Subramanian explains the secretive cable-laying operations behind the world of undersea infrastructure. He discovers the environmental risks to them, corporate interests over them and the acts of “grey zone warfare” when ghost ships cut the cables of other countries.

Joan Passey is a senior lecturer in English at Bristol University and a BBC Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker. She is the co-founder of the Haunted Shores Network and a leading researcher in literary study of coasts and seascapes, combining an understanding of folklore, myth and technology. 
 
Producer: Ruth Watts

Under the sea

The UK government has declared 2026, the National Year of Reading. The numbers suggest that reading needs all the public relations it can get. Under a third of school children say they read for pleasure and the number going on to read English Literature at University has shrunk by over a third in the last fifteen years. Their parents are not doing much better, with some surveys suggesting that any where up to half of adults have not read a single book in the last year. So, how can the case for the value of reading and the simple pleasure of picking up a book cut through? Tom Sutcliffe chairs Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week. His guests are:

Margaret Busby was Britain's first Black woman publisher who has enjoyed a 50 year career at the centre of cultural life and the book trade. Among her achievements she founded a publishing house, edited the ground-breaking international anthologies Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa and championed authors marginalised by the mainstream. Her new book Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century features her own literary output from between 1966 and 2023. 

Sarah Dillon, Professor at the University of Cambridge, has looked at the question 'what are you reading?' The books we encounter shape the choices we make and when it comes to scientists, it appears that ideas from imaginative literature influence their thinking. Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Dr Claire Craig, former Director of the UK Government Office for Science, makes the case for the value of attention to stories in decision making.

Lottie Moggach is an arts journalists and writer of literary thrillers - she's also edited, researched and taught writing. Her latest novel, Mrs Pearcey, is Victorian true crime novel. She reflects on historical fiction, her own reading and working as a writer today. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Reading and storytelling

How do we think about war? How do we imagine it, picture it and explain it? Adam Rutherford hosts Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week, asking what we can learn about ourselves from our varied intellectual and cultural responses to conflict.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is one of the world's leading scholars of warfare. In his new collection of essays, On Strategists and Strategy, he considers some of the key strategic thinkers of the last century and thoughts about the significance of political calculation, military tactics, organisational behaviour, character and psychology.

A new exhibition opens in March at the Imperial War Museum, London titled Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art. The curator Rebecca Newell explains what we learn from the ways in which artists recorded changes to the city during the Second World War in paintings, drawings and film.

The Hôtel Lutetia, the grand hotel on Paris's Left Bank, has over the years drawn bohemians and great artists, including Matisse and Picasso. However, for a short period around the Second World War, the hotel was witness to significant events. Jane Rogoyska's new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War peoples the hotel with the intellectual and refugees gathering there in the 1930s, the men of the German military intelligence service who made it their headquarters and the deportees returning from concentration camps.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Thinking about war

Andrew Marr is in Perth in Australia for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, to discuss mining, money and the monarchy. He talks to the Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, Danny Sriskandarajah, about the future of an organisation, headed by the Queen, that's been criticised for being impotent and irrelevant. Compared to many Commonwealth nations, Australia is going through an economic boom time. At its heart is the mineral-rich land of Western Australia, and ABC's morning show presenter Geoff Hutchison explains how the growth in mining has affected the lives of his listeners. The Minister for Mines and Petroleum in WA, Norman Moore, lambasts the federal government over its plans for a carbon tax. And the economic advisor to the former Labor leader, Andrew Charlton, says the debate about the environment has become so vicious and polarised that it has the power to bring down party leaders.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

31/10/2011

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