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BBC Radio 4


Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday


Start the Week

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

When society, financial systems and human beings fall short, how can we repair the damage? Tom Sutcliffe hosts Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week, exploring the social, moral and political contradictions of the world we face today, with US novelist George Saunders, Turkish writer Ece Temulkuran and investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, 

The Booker Prize winning novelist, George Saunders new book Vigil deals with the moral ambivalence of a greedy oil executive; the death bed reckoning of a man who resists facing his life and legacy. 
 
The Turkish writer, Ece Temulkuran's new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding a Home in the 21st Century explores the rising global displacement of people who will need to forge stronger connections amid political and social upheaval. 

In an investigation of money laundering, Oliver Bullough's Everybody Loves Our Dollars sets out the scale of the problem and why we are failing to tackle the global systems that allow illicit money to move freely using sites as varied as Bicester Shopping Village in Oxfordshire and a casino in Vancouver, Canada. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Breakage and repair

Games are supposed to be fun — so what happens when the logic of games, points and competition escapes the playground and starts reshaping everyday life? The novelist and games-writer Naomi Alderman and her guests explore how the joy of play collides with the pressures of a gamified society.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen introduces The Score, his examination of how ranking systems and numerical targets can both sharpen and warp our values, revealing how life becomes less playful when everything is reduced to points.

Journalist and critic Keza MacDonald discusses Super Nintendo, her cultural history of the iconic console, tracing how its games, aesthetics and innovations transformed the medium and helped define what play means for generations of players.

The Financial Times' commentator Stephen Bush examines the growing role of games and game like incentives in public life, exploring how the techniques of play — from reward structures to competitive framing — are reshaping political behaviour and communication.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Fun and games

A lawyer, artist and curator discuss different examples of censorship and self censorship in Radio 4's weekly discussion of ideas to kick off the week. Tom Sutcliffe's guests are: 

Ai Weiwei: a major name in contemporary art and for decades a leading voice for freedom of expression in his native China – and the wider world. In 2011 he was detained for eighty-one days in a secret location, unable to communicate with the outside world. His new book, On Censorship moves from authoritarian regimes to the pervasive influence of corporate power, social media and dominant interest groups in democracies. 

Baroness Helena Kennedy has written the introduction to collected writings of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered outside her home in Moscow twenty years ago. With continued attacks in Russia on press freedom, the way she spoke truth to power remains inspirational for Baroness Kennedy. 

The figure of the Samurai is often associated with ideas about discipline, sacrifice and war but a new exhibition at the British Museum (on until May 4th) looks at the way this warrior class became consumers and patrons of culture. Rosina Buckland has co-curated the show. 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Censorship

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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