Rebecca Stott is on a quest for a decent tasting apple. Along the way she discovers a revival of interest in wonderful heritage varieties: the rough textured russets like Ashmeads Kernel, the rich, aromatic Saltcote Pippin or the sharp tanginess of the Alfriston. Rebecca asks why - given the UK has an impressive two and a half thousand varieties of apple - we can only buy four or five in the average supermarket.Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan on the allure of New York and the city's 'main character' syndrome. The city is, she says, 'the place that makes me happier to be alive than anywhere else - not in spite but because of its thoroughly human hopelessness.''Nature is nature, permanent and without moral taint,' writes Megan, 'but cities are paeans to the marvellous filth of the human spirit.''The real challenge is being moved by the effort to remain open to one another despite being consoled by surroundings made not of beauty and relief, but of cement and strife.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Patients care apps - which give patients unprecedented access to their health records - are being rolled out by NHS trusts across the country. You might imagine, says Will Self, that 'this previously unimaginable access to such a wealth of medical data should empower me, make me feel I have a choice, and enable me to assist those treating me by being what every conscientious statistic wants to become: a good patient.' Will argues that, on the contrary, this 'revolution in healthcare' only makes us more impotent, reduces patients to the status of customers and undermines the authority and expertise of medical professionals. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Caleb Azumah Nelson on why anger is no longer a stranger to him, but a friend.He talks of a childhood in which he tried to navigate a world which was 'already coding a young black man as dangerous, threatening. Angry.' 'As I've grown older,' writes Caleb, 'the question is not whether I should be angry, but do I love myself enough to be angry, to object when I feel wronged or faced with injustice.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher: Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler reflects on the experience of being a sibling to her brother who has a lifelong disability. "Posting on social media on National Siblings Day, which fell on a Wednesday this year, brothers and sisters like me express pride. 'You love them more, not less' is a common thread. Because what all this is really about is the sibling's acute awareness of the lack of empathy routinely shown to the disabled - after all, childhood gives us, the siblings, a unique perspective. It's 'Does he take sugar?' times ten - ignoring the point of view of the disabled person and not even trying to stand in her shoes. Ask us. We know." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Penny Murphy

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the extraordinary experience of ‘crossing the rubicon separating non-motherhood from matrescence’. ‘I had never quite put aside an abiding ambivalence about having a baby, even during pregnancy,’ writes Zoe. But in the space of thirty minutes - and the delivery of a baby girl by C-section - Zoe says, ‘my hop over the long-tended, long-contemplated border with motherland rapidly resolved as her tiny features came into focus and a sense of interestingness became a sense of desperate affection and even of familiarity.’Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

A L Kennedy argues that, as a country with low productivity, we must urgently address our unhealthy relationship with work. But creating more workaholics like herself, she says, is the last thing we should be doing. 'Toxic work doesn't just blight our business hours - it wearies our affection, steals our time for each other,' Alison writes. 'We rely on free moments and free energy to invent, to recharge, to create. An exhausted, stressed population is docile, but doesn't solve problems well.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray assesses what's going wrong for liberals in the US election. 'It's not chiefly Joe Biden's alleged faltering mental powers that lie behind Trump's march to the White House', John writes. 'Far more, it's the evident inability of American liberals to learn from their mistakes.'And he believes they are displaying a 'reckless hubris' for which they risk being severely punished come November. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik warns of our tendency to normalise evil behaviour. What may pass for entertainment in Mafia movies, must be seen through a different lens in real life. "The risk of crime is not crime alone, but the abyss that opens at our feet when once we have decided that the rules that count for other people don't count for us." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self believes we are reaching a state of 'peak envy'. 'Is it any surprise,' Will writes, 'that in this, arguably the second century of self, when for the most part humans see nothing around them but images of those better off than themselves, envy should be quite so epidemic: a greenish toxin - the very mustard gas of modernity.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sarah Dunant reflects on martyrdom past and present. As Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is laid to rest, Sarah looks to history to ponder what his legacy might be. And she turns to the work of the 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: 'The tyrant dies and his rule is over...the martyr dies and his rule begins'. 'History is a long game,' Sarah writes. 'And the shelf life of martyrs in particular is impressive.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Penny Murphy

Following a recent incident in a London theatre where, it appears, Jewish Israelis were targeted by a comedian because they wouldn't stand for a Palestinian flag, Howard Jacobson reflects on the power of mockery and the liberation of laughter. 'Do the best comedians truly turn the world upside down', Howard asks, 'or do they merely strap us into a fairground roller-coaster so that we can feign fear and scream in unison?' He argues that the norms of outrage have been jettisoned in the reaction to events in Israel on October 7. 'Once the world is turned upside down,' he writes, 'humanity and justice fall like loose change from our pockets.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott says the idea of 'going down a rabbit hole' is often characterised as a bad thing - here, she makes the case for what's to be gained."These days we invariably use the phrase 'down the rabbit hole' to describe a negative experience...where people get lost, then become overwhelmed, ensnare themselves in conspiracy theories and can't get back out," she says. "But I don't believe rabbit holes are bad in themselves. If we avoid them altogether we lose the chance to experience their joy and excitement." She recalls her own experience of discovery - and tells the story of how Charles Darwin once spent eight years distracted by barnacles. Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare reflects on the 'endangered skill of handwriting.''The most ambitious thing I author,' writes Tom, 'is the shopping list on my fridge. And several times a week I scrawl with my index finger when something is delivered'.His handwriting, he says, has gone to pot. He knows he's not alone. So he resolves to put that right and get more practice.Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Taking a lead from Confucius - a man who loved a good ritual - Sara Wheeler explores the continuing fascination of rituals. 'Two and a half millennia ago,' writes Sara, 'Confucius famously fiddled about moving his mat so it was exactly straight before he crossed his legs and sat down on it.' He believed that ritual improves character and that, in turn, benefits society as a whole. Sara delves into her favourite rituals and ponders the role of ritual today. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As the size and capability of the Royal Navy is thrust into the spotlight with events in the Red Sea, Stephen Smith reflects on whether this will put an end to speculation of planned cuts to the oldest arm of the British armed forces. And with a spot of naval history in his family, Stephen examines why Britain's relationship with the sea, for all its flaws, is fundamental to who we are. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

AL Kennedy on the recent theft of her backpack and how misfortune can help us reclaim who we really want to be.She reflects on how an an accident of birth - being white, able-bodied, heterosexual, being baptised a Christian and having English as a first language - has put her in 'a position of completely unearned privilege' when asking for help.But 'in a decade when so many people, in so many places, have lost everything,' Alison ponders the role we all have in helping people whose needs aren't being met. 'I believe in helping', she writes. 'I didn't lose that worldview in my backpack.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Mark Damazer says we need to find a different vocabulary to define political leadership and achievement. 'The rhetoric that accompanied Alistair Darling's death,' Mark writes, 'raises some age-old questions about the way we think and judge our political masters'. He questions why 'this torrent of respect, admiration and affection' can only happen when a politician dies. 'You simply don't talk this way about any living politician', he says, 'unless you're a cultist'. The present way of judging politicians, he believes, gives us little idea who is any good at getting the job done. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel explores our relationship with sugar - from the days of the 12th century chronicler William of Tyre when sugar was regarded as 'very necessary for the use and health of mankind' to the 'sugar is evil' attitude of today. And she reflects on sugar's power to bind generations together and keep history alive. 'My grandmother and I would often bond over a plate of pfeffernusse... powdered gingerbread stuffed shapes from Germany', Zoe writes. 'Recipes for cakes - we are a family of women who love cake - were passed down on yellow, lined paper in stained scrapbooks and closely guarded'.'And so here I am, 41, and still unable to give up the white stuff.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Alex Massie delves into Hogmanays past and present. 'The traditional 'first footing' gifts of the New Year - a lump of coal and a black bun - linger on,' Alex writes, 'though with diminished take-up and not just because few houses are coal-heated now and few people truly appreciate the black bun.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Janet Staples Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Michael Morpurgo reflects on why Christmas is the perfect time of year for 'taking your time.' In a special edition of A Point of View, recorded on a walk near his home in Devon, Michael invites us to enjoy with him the crispness of a frosty morning, the dry leaves crunching underfoot and the 'frantic flurry of splashing and quacking ducks'. He takes us to his favourite wood, past the hill he used to roll down, his children rolled down and now his grandchildren, and on to the River Torridge where, a few days ago, he sighted an otter for the first time in 50 years - 'the best Christmas present I've ever had'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Recording and sound design: Andy Fell Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith.

In a pew in Edwin Lutyens' ecclesiastical masterpiece, St Jude on the Hill in North London, Will Self ponders the contemporary power of the sermon.'Dearly Beloved,' he begins, as he explains the appeal of a good sermon! And he reminds us that 'the sermon was instituted, in part, to correct the fake news of an age before the media that now disseminate it.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray argues that the power of the imagination fuels the worst kind of politics. 'Nobody', he argues, 'is in overall charge of events. There are patterns in history, but particular human events are mostly random. We prefer an illusion of order to the brute fact of chaos.' But, he says, pessimism may be the key to changing our fate. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Weekly reflections on topical issues from a range of contributors.

Adam Gopnik tries to rationalise what lies behind his new obsession - of walking 10,000 steps every day. With the help of his daughter, Darwin and the Cynics of ancient Greece, Adam concludes that, in our search for meaning in life, 'meaning bound around by a number is easier to grasp than meaning left to meander where it will.' 'The act of taking 10,000 steps a day,' he says, 'brings with it a sense of conscious accomplishment that the phrase "a good long walk" cannot'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From clay tablets in Mesopotamia two and a half thousand years ago to the stuff of dreams today, Sarah Dunant examines the continuing mystery of the function and meaning of dreams. 'As science digs further into every nook and cranny of our brains,' writes Sarah, 'the elusive, individual nature of dreams is possibly the most magical element of human existence that remains.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel is turning her sights from artsy academic interests to much more concrete ones. Cultural warfare and events in the Middle East have left her feeling, she says, as if she's in a 'ceaselessly enraged world'. So instead of her usual contacts in sociology, anthropology and political science, she's seeking out engineers, agriculturalists and silversmiths - 'people who actually know something about the everyday things we all depend on and how it all works.' 'I find this far more dazzling these days than a new insight on cultural Marxism, and also less depressing,' Zoe writes, 'in a world that feels as if things are in freefall, and increasingly subject to entropic and evil forces.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Connell reflects on how rain has shaped Irish culture. 'Over the centuries, the Irish - most days anyway - have learned to accept, sometimes even love, the rain,' writes John. But, he says, that is now beginning to change. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: James Beard Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Sara Wheeler challenges the idea that there's an equivalence between loving nature and being a good person. 'This queerly opaque idea has embedded itself in the collective subconscious since Granny Smiths ripened in the Garden of Eden,' writes Sara, 'but recent concerns have raised its stock.' She argues that the logic of that is flawed. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Graham Puddifoot Production coordinator: Katie Morrison Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Edwin Landseer's famous painting of a majestic Highland stag, 'Monarch of the Glen', has been given pride of place in the newly opened galleries at the National in Edinburgh. Alex Massie ponders the role of the deer - and deer stalking - in the Scottish psyche. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self on why - for the past eight weeks - he's lived an almost entirely news-free existence. After a lifetime of keeping up with events and - in recent years - obsessively toggling between news apps 'with all the real cogitation of a commuter playing Candy Crush,' Will has decided to stop paying attention to the news. 'I realised I'd been reading about - and listening to - politicians and pundits for quite possibly months of my life, without really caring one jot or tittle about them.' He reflects on how the British became the news consumers par excellence in the 19th and 20th Centuries and on growing up in a household where following the daily go-round of news constituted a 'civic virtue.' In the aftermath of events in the Middle East, Will has a new guiding principle for his news consumption. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sarah Dunant argues that the patriarchy of the classical music business is finally starting to change. Reliving her early relationship with music - from excruciating piano lessons to rebellious dancing in the mosh pit - Sarah reflects on the remarkable changes in classical music. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: China Collins

Stephen Smith on why HS2 is such a cause of national hand-wringing. 'We get railways, we do railways - ever since Stephenson's Rocket in the nineteenth century. We gave railways to the world', writes Stephen. He argues that there would never have been the same sense of dismay if we were talking about a road or a runway. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Peter Bosher Editor: China Collins

'Russell Brand winked at me in the street once', begins Howard Jacobson. He reflects on that chance encounter many years ago and the dishonourable role we all play in the creation of celebrity. 'We watched too much television; we rubbed the lamp and set the extremely egregious genie free; we saw a blank slate and wrote the words ourselves.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: China Collins

AL Kennedy discusses the addictive nature of hate. 'Religion', she writes, 'was once called the opium of the masses; hate is now the Oxycontin of the masses. That low thrum of resentment, spikes of rage, hate gives them a logic, an addictive rush.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Zoe Strimpel discusses the thrills and psychic satisfactions of the spooky. She argues that the disorientating nature of contemporary society creates the ideal breeding ground for our resurgent interest in things supernatural. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound; Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Will Self reflects on the spread of the craze for so-called 'bucket lists'. He argues that 'far from introducing the ecstatic into our necessarily ephemeral existence, the bucket list reimposes the clock-watching go-round most of us have endured for most of our lives'. 'What gives life to life is death - nothing else,' he writes, 'while to live that life to the full is to realize this fully'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Editor: Bridget Harney

Megan Nolan explores the concept of the 'trad wife'. She argues that 'the failings of mainstream girl-boss feminism' are leading to a resurgence of the sort of women's lifestyle associated with the 1950s. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

John Gray puts the case for the monarchy in modern Britain. 'Those who campaign for the abolition of a royal head of state in Britain,' he says, 'seem to me to be in thrall to a simple-minded idea of reason, and fail to grasp the subtler rationality embodied in monarchy.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Rod Farquhar Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Sara Wheeler reflects on the concept of limbo as a way of helping us deal with current uncertainties but she recognizes this will not be easy. 'Limbo is a borderless, undefined, in-between state that is neither one thing nor the other and therefore it is hard to label and harder to accept.' She believes though that an acceptance of unknowability may be increasingly important since 'the rules and certainties on which we built our lives have altered beyond all recognition.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

This week, UNESCO recommended that Venice should be added to its list of World Heritage in Danger, citing its failure to adequately protect the city from overwhelming tourism and the impact of climate change. As unprecedented numbers of tourists are visiting Europe, Sarah reflects on how historic cities can manage the challenges of overtourism. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Stephen Smith on our fascination with the belongings of the rich and famous... or infamous. 'Years ago, after the fall of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu,' writes Stephen, 'I entered his by now ransacked hunting lodge and made off with the late president's ....coat hanger. That's right: Ceausescu's coat hanger.' As the possessions of the altogether more savoury personality, Freddie Mercury, go on show next week before they are auctioned, Stephen ponders why we aspire to have and to hold something which belonged to a notable figure. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Sabine Schereck Editor: Bridget Harney

As a seasoned protester, Trevor Phillips explores what’s wrong with protest today. After getting his first taste for protest as a schoolboy in Guyana (which led to detention in an army barracks and an audience with a government minister) Trevor remembers his days of student activism in the 1970s - which he describes as 'the start of a long and undistinguished career of being a pain in the backside of authority'. Reflecting on the campaigns of groups like Just Stop Oil, he argues that many of today’s protesters simply choose the wrong target. He concludes that there is still a point to protest, even though success might not be immediate - because victory may come later, and in a way that's often unpredictable. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

While viewing a 16th Century painting of St George slaying a dragon, Adam Gopnik reflects on how we all, in life, attempt to slay ‘the dragons of our disorder.’ He concludes that 'dragon and saint are permanently entangled, as our demonic forces are with our better nature.’ Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Michael Morpurgo reflects on age as he approaches his 80th birthday. 'The truth is,' writes Michael, 'that older people are increasing in numbers and will very likely continue to do so. This is clear. But the place - or the role - of older people in society is far from clear.' He says in a 'civilised society' we have to find better ways of bridging the gap in understanding between young and old. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy explores how we get information without an overload of negativity. 'Sadness, rage, anxiety...our media use them to hook us, withhold the good news, exhaust us with the bad', she writes. She reflects on why 'selective news avoidance' is on the increase. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Penny Murphy

Will Self reflects on mirrors, past and present. 'The imperfect mirrors of the past', he writes, 'were objectified metaphors of human imperfection, rather than the perfect ones that give contemporary humans the delusion that they too can achieve such earthly perfection.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Graham Puddifoot Editor: Penny Murphy

Rebecca Stott reflects on the colours of Midsummer as she attempts to find a paint for the hall in her new home, With an array of paint charts laid out on her kitchen table, she looks to Darwin, Joseph Conrad and the former paint guru of Lewes for inspiration. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Sabine Schereck Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

The trend for expensive age-defying treatments is 'an insult to youth itself' says Zoe Strimpel, as she argues against treating youth as a commodity that can be bought. After admiring the seemingly ageless beauty of 41-year-old singing superstar Beyoncé at her recent stadium show in London, Zoe reflects on her own experience of getting older - and the people desperate to avoid it. She hones in on 45-year-old American tech mogul, Bryan Johnson, who is attempting to transform his body into that of a teenager in a highly scientific quest for youth. His mission is to regain the body of an 18-year-old - albeit with the help of 30 doctors and experts, extreme diets (exactly 1,977 vegan calories a day), gruelling workouts and an array of medical procedures. While an extreme case, Zoe reflects on how the possibilities of looking and feeling younger are intensifying with each new development in cosmetic technology or the science of diets. She argues that however distasteful we might find such projects, what is more unsettling 'is the thieving, plundering nature of this quest - the insult to youth itself - as if it is nothing but a product to be had at any time, rather than a transient stage of life, whose splendour is in that very transience.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Connell reveals how his love for a pristine lawn gave way to letting the grass grow wild. A leaflet urging the adoption of 'No Mow May' led him to set aside his urge to 'rip and tear and snip' to let nature take its course, above all for the sake of wild bees. 'My lawn is long now, but the green desert is no more. In exchange for neatness there are wildflowers and weeds growing side by side in a riot of colour.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Howard Jacobson deplores the recent vandalising of Eric Gill's sculpture at BBC Broadcasting House as a failure to understand the meaning of art. 'Art, we go on protesting, is not the artist, but some will always believe that whatever is fashioned by evil hands must itself be evil,' he writes. 'If art and the artist were not distinct, the word art itself would have no meaning. For it denotes manufacture and artifice... not simple equation or reflection.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Tom Shakespeare bemoans the fashion for being asked to rate everything we buy or do. "The theory is that this drives up quality for everyone, because we won't tolerate terrible products or services - but have they really improved since these ratings became so commonplace?" Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

When the world's first state pension was introduced in Prussia in 1889, the qualifying age was 70 and the average life expectancy was 40. Half a century later, in 1935, many countries lowered the retirement age to 65, but still barely half the population lived long enough to claim it. Now, it's clearly a very different story. With the help of PD James, Sarah Dunant looks at how the UK can tackle the demographic nightmare it currently faces - an ageing population but falling birth rates. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott ponders the nature of dust, as Spring sunshine sharpens the sight of it gathering in the old house she is restoring. She reflects on the social history of Spring cleaning as traditionally women's work, and sees in the complex substance and symbolism of dust a reflection of our own mortality. "We don't come to dust alone, we come to dust together and in history. And the dust we make as we move slowly through life into old age, mingles with the historic dust that the much loved houses we pass through and its previous occupants have made through time - in my case the dust of horsehair and deathwatch beetles and lead and lime." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

The coronation in 1953, which heralded a new Elizabethan age, was accompanied by that most famous of mountaineering exploits - the conquering of Mount Everest. 'This weekend,' writes Sara Wheeler, 'we are not, perhaps regrettably, expecting celebratory rocket-runners from Mars announcing touchdown on the red planet.' But, Sara suggests, the new Carolean age should be about collective effort rather than focussed on individual achievement. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Sabine Schereck Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

The philosopher Michel de Certeau characterised space as ‘the practice of place’, Will Self argues that, in order to appreciate the places we inhabit, we have to indulge in 'that most unfashionable and unproductive of things: abide". 'To be in a place', he writes, 'is not to be distracted by the possibility of other places, but absorbed by the particularity of the one you're in.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Living in New York during lockdown, Adam Gopnik spent his time enjoying the escapism of foreign TV shows - like the BBC's W1A and 2012. While these shows were unapologetically British, chock-full of alien cultural references to Frankie Howerd and Dad's Army, Adam says these shows helped him appreciate the universal language of satire. 'I'd say we enjoy satire more when we don't know the things being satirized' he writes, 'and so cannot protest their portrayal'. He says we 'depend on the satirist for all our information, both for the ground and for the graffiti he scrawls upon it.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Sara Wheeler finds writing a biography to be a humanising process, in which learning to see the world through someone else's eyes is more important than rushing to judge them. 'We are quick to judge - quicker than ever in grotesquely polarised times. But if we can't know another person, how can we judge them?', she writes. 'I am suggesting that we use the biographer's craft as a tool for understanding. And a tool for avoiding generalisation, compartmentalisation and judgement.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Megan Nolan says millennial adulthood feels just as uneasy as her teenage years. Short term job contracts and expensive housing has left her generation with a permanent sense of insecurity. As a teenager, Megan struggled to find her identity and place in the world, and felt 'wrong and different in the most profound and private of ways'. She was told these feelings would pass. Now as an adult, however, the anxiety about her place in society has returned. 'Not knowing where your body will be from one year to the next, once you're out of your younger, wilder years, conjures a feeling not dissimilar to the nameless dread of adolescence,' she writes. This leaves Megan and her peers 'in a state of constant insecurity, certainly now, but in a deeper sense, always.' Producer: Arlene Gregorius Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Brenda Brown Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray makes the case for proportional representation as a means to revive British politics and fuel new political ideas. He argues that, for the last thirty years, government in Britain has been 'Thatcherism on autopilot'. He says that the 'cult' of the free market has been pursued by both main parties but it has long since run its course. He believes a change in the electoral system is now urgently needed, to encourage a greater variety of parties entering government and truly present voters with a choice. 'A seesaw between two parties,' he writes, 'can only accelerate our ongoing slide into becoming a poor country in which nothing works.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

After being given an amaryllis as a gift, Howard Jacobson wonders why he's never stared at a flower...until now. He ponder his life-long ignorance of flowers. Growing up, the family garden was a dumping ground for his dad's old trucks; seeds were something you fed to a budgerigar. 'And wasn't there a flower called An Enemy?' Howard asks. 'There you are then. I've had enough of those in life without finding more in the garden'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel explores what lies behind her new-found impulse to collect art to fill the blank spaces on her walls - and how collecting means something different for men and women. "It is perhaps no surprise to discover that the greater the instability outside our walls, the more we may want to create a secure and beautiful world inside, or on, them." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound engineer: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

AL Kennedy finds echoes of the movies of her childhood in our current state of affairs. "Jaws, like many disaster and horror movies contain the core lesson - whenever there's a problem, greedy people will ignore it - corporations, local authorities, politicians, contractors - people who love money more than, well, people.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound engineer: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Trevor Phillips argues that Britain, in its desperation to eliminate inequality, risks destroying the very principles that have drawn people here for generations. He points to its eccentricity, its easy going tolerance and its spirit of non-conformity, but he believes 'zealots' are slowly demanding a new sort of 'group-think' that has all the features of a repressive sect. 'I, for one, hope that the rough spirit of British eccentricity, the awkward squad, of putting two fingers up to the establishment, endures.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sarah Dunant says the rediscovery of ideas from the past can help with 'the toxicity of the present'. Just as the Renaissance master Donatello drew from the classical world to create revolutionary art, so we can find a moment in history to inspire progress in our time. 'On the surface it seems like an impossible task' says Sarah, 'not least because like everything else in this angry, polarised moment, the past itself has been commandeered as a weapon...but the wonderful thing about ideas, is that while they can travel weightlessly through history, they still pack a punch.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound engineer: Peter Bosher Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self on the pleasure of walking without purpose, with no final destination in mind, and the freedom that comes from getting lost once in a while. He reflects on the rising perception that our public spaces are becoming ever more threatening - especially for women. 'Our movements about this wide and wonderful world are for the most part painfully constrained,' he writes. 'Comfort zones have become more and more constricted'. He argues that there are many reasons for this, including the grim revelations in recent years about the criminal activities of police officers. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik challenges the idea that the artistic and literary creations of artificial intelligence can match human endeavour. Although impressive in their ability to produce pastiche, he thinks AI programmes fail to produce anything 'newly memorable'. 'They are not smart at all in the sense that we usually mean it, capable of constructing creative ideas from scratch,' he writes. 'But rather they're sorts of cognitive scavengers with immense capacity - like whales scooping up all the shrimp and algae from the sea bed, and then churning on it, cud like, until asked to spit up one particular bit.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Rebecca Stott ponders if a move to more communal living could be key in solving some of our most pressing problems. 'I've begun to wonder whether our current crises of social care, childcare, energy, climate, housing could be the catalyst that makes some of us rethink the solitary ways we live,' she writes, 'to search for more practical, affordable and sustainable alternatives to the nuclear single-family household?' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel looks at the history of masculinity and its moments of crisis, from Emile Durkheim at the end of the 19th Century to self-professed misogynist, Andrew Tate, today. 'The contemporary manosphere', she writes, 'doesn't appear to have any positive idea of what men should be, apart from rich, priapic and nasty - and within the long history of masculinity in crisis - this feels new'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan ponders a bizarre alignment between her life and that of Prince Harry. 'Sure, I was taught by nuns in an Irish convent school while he was dragged up through the mean streets of Eton' but - reading Harry's memoir, 'Spare' - Megan calculates that the comparisons between them go beyond their iconic reddish hair and devil-may-care attitudes. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare looks to some DVD classics and the Japanese concept of ikigai to provide some light relief from the doom and gloom of January. 'The definitive guide to ikigai,' Tom writes, 'says ikigai is what allows you to look forward to the future, even if you're miserable right now.' And yes, Morrissey makes an appearance too! Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Janet Staples Editor: Penny Murphy

Howard Jacobson reflects on why we look to comedy to see one year out and a new year in. Reflecting on the misbehaviour of a mischievous Australian cockatoo and a 'great mocking Rigoletto chorus' of shearwaters in the Canary Islands, he considers whether he may himself have been a bird in an earlier life, as he celebrates the way animals rescue us from self-importance - and help us imagine a funnier, fairer world. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Connell looks forward to becoming a father for the first time, with the help of three poets: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. As he collects the turf and attends to his organic farm, he ponders what of this he'll pass onto his child. And he wonders if his new son or daughter will have any truck with Heaney's 'cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As meteorologists tell us that the chance of snow is decreasing year on year, Sara Wheeler reflects on a future where younger generations may never get to experience snow - and what that means for a season so ingrained in our lives and culture. 'Winter is deeply embedded in the English language - the white stuff of metaphor', she writes. 'But if climate change blanches the seasons, one wonders what the as yet unborn writers will reach for when they try to put the unsayable into words.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the new sexual conservatives changing the face of feminism. 'The sexual revolution bequeathed us choice: to shag as voraciously as we wanted or to get married and have a baby at 30,' she writes. But, she says, the landscape of sexual politics today has changed dramatically. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self says there are distinct downsides to being tall. At six foot, four and a half inches, Will ponders the drawbacks of a lofty stature. 'The very ideal of beauty is the small', writes Will, 'so how awful it is to realise that you will never fulfil this artistic ideal with your enormous person which, far from being an artwork, is simply a scale model of gigantism!' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik, recently recovered from his first bout of Covid, explores the profound impact of the pandemic on our whole belief system. 'Covid acted as a kind of universal solvent,' Adam writes, 'dissolving pretty much everyone's expectations of what could happen in the world'. He looks in particular at the concept of ‘trusting the science’ and argues that ‘science is not a transaction of faith but of accumulated confidence’. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

David Goodhart argues that our politics is stuck, not for want of clear ideas about what to do, but because of the inability to get important things done. 'Politics has always been about herding cats', he writes, 'but is the current generation of politicians less good at herding? Or perhaps the cats are even less herdable than usual.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare weighs up his options to avoid being crushed by the tottering pile of books on his bedside table. 'Shutting the blinds a few weeks ago,' Tom writes, 'I was hit on the head by three or four falling Terry Pratchett books'. So act he must...and he came up with a plan to ensure no book goes unread. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As Americans prepare to go to the polls in the US midterm elections and the COP27 environment conference gets underway, AL Kennedy takes the temperature of debate and of the environment from a barn in upstate New York. And she reflects on being a Brit these days in the US. 'In the normal course of events,' she writes, 'it's Brits who like to make fun of Americans. Now, Americans are bewildered by us'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As warnings are sounded of possible power cuts and lights going out this winter, Rebecca Stott reflects on our relationship with darkness. She looks at how our ancestors experienced the dark and our enduring fascination with celebrating the dark season of winter. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self ponders the close connection between man and dog, as his dog nears the end of his life. He reflects on lessons learnt: 'You've taught me such a lot these past fifteen years, I wonder, old friend, what you have to teach me now that you're dying?' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From cancel culture - ancient Greek style - to the binary politics of today, Sara Wheeler argues that the perils of entrenched positions have been clear for a very long time. In ancient Greece, once a year, citizens gathered in the forum to scratch the name of the person they most wanted removed from the political arena on an ostrakon, a shard of broken pot. Too many appearances, and you got banished to a faraway province for a decade...ostracised by the ostraka. 'Once you were out of Athens in the fifth century BCE', Sara writes, 'you were cancelled good and proper'. History, she says, ought to teach us the importance of listening to each other and the value of nuance. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Howard Jacobson ponders greed, wealth and horse-and-sparrow, or 'trickle down', economics. From King Lear and Deuteronomy to bankers' bonuses and universal credit, Howard extols the concept of sufficiency and concludes that trickle down economics simply doesn't work. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Bernardine Evaristo reflects on notions of blackness in the aftermath of comments made this week by the Labour MP, Rupa Huq, who described the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as 'superficially' black. 'If one of the most egregious features of racism' Bernardine writes, 'is to reduce people to stereotypes, to homogenise and generalise the qualities of people according to their racialised identities, then what does it say about us when we describe a person as not really being black or Asian because they do not behave according to our values, cultural codes or political interests?' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As Vladimir Putin warns he is willing to use any military means necessary in the war with Ukraine, Zoe Strimpel - a recent convert to chess - examines how Mr Putin is likely to play his next hand. 'The future of the world once more hangs in the balance of moves between the West and Russia,' she writes. 'The question of whether Russia really does have a strategic grandmaster at the helm - and whether the West can outmanoeuvre him - has become a matter of horrible urgency'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Michael Morpurgo reflects on the remarkable life of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 'The crown and the jewels were costume, the Palace was a stage. She knew that, we knew that', writes Michael. 'It was a charade, but one that worked wonderfully well, because she was centre stage in our national drama, because enough of us believed in her'. As the world changed around her, Michael argues, the Queen at all times looked to the future, helped us find our place in the world and discover who we are as a people. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan questions why women writers still struggle to be taken seriously. 'The appearance of the woman writer', she says, 'is often clumsily welded together with her work in an effort to make the two inseparable, or indeed to act as a sort of explanation of her work, that she is able to create it at all'. Megan discusses the pressures this imposes. Photo credit: Sophie Davidson Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Penny Murphy

Will Self reflects on success...and failure. 'Ours is a society', he writes, 'in which that hoary old saying, 'Nothing succeeds like success', has been elevated to the status of a political, philosophic and indeed moral credo.' But, Will argues, this is a world typified by hyperbole and exaggeration, where the successful, 'with plenty of cake to eat, have no need to partake of the true bread of life, which is, of course, failure'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Penny Murphy

Linda Colley argues that President Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a wake-up call which should remind people that the days of empire are far from over. And these enduring imperial habits, she says, are evident in some unexpected quarters - not just in places like Russia and China. 'When Donald Trump floated the idea of the US purchasing Greenland in 2019, this was widely dismissed as just another Trumpian eccentricity', she writes. 'But this 'real estate deal' as the former president characteristically described his Greenland project, was actually in line with large portions of American history'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Rod Farquhar Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Connell goes fishing in northern Spain, home to one of the oldest populations of Atlantic salmon in the world. But he discovers a world on an ecological edge - with water at dangerously low levels, distraught fishermen and virtually no fish. 'What is a fish without a river?' he asks. 'Indeed what is a river without a fish?' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Neil Churchill Production Coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler has just been appointed the authorised biographer of the travel writer, Jan Morris. But she faces a dilemma. She's concerned that she is 'effectively appropriating the story of a woman who appropriated hundreds of other stories'. How, she wonders, can she navigate this tricky territory. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From boyhood, through young adulthood, to the present day, Howard Jacobson ponders his relationship with dancing. As summer festivals get underway across the UK, Howard tries to understand the attraction. 'I didn’t dance to Paul McCartney in the 60s, and I’m not going to start now... dancing isn’t what I do,' he says. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare decided several years ago he was no longer going to fly for pleasure. But his father's cousin - who lives in the US - has just turned 90 and he'd love to see her again. He describes his fraught decision - as he grapples with his environmental conscience. Reading from WH Auden's poem, 'Musée des Beaux Arts'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

As the Tory leadership election highlights questions of social mobility, David Goodhart looks at why some people seem to have more luck than others. To what extent can we create our own opportunities, regardless of background? What role does personality play? And is it really possible to engineer and cultivate our own luck by being open to chance encounters? Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

'We're witnessing a major change in British politics,' writes John Gray. 'But to what?' With Boris Johnson on the way out, many Conservatives, he says, believe the party needs a new 'big idea'. But that is a fundamental error, he believes. 'What the party needs is not another new philosophy but a healthy dose of pragmatism...new thinking, but not some grand new theory'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Penny Murphy

Zoe Strimpel argues that wealth creation should be the bedrock of politics. She says that while she loathes the arrogance sometimes displayed by the super rich - especially in the present climate where millions are sinking into poverty - it's not billionaires who are the problem. 'My view is that we need not fewer billionaires but more, the richer the better,' she writes. 'In fact, the more rich people the better'. Hatred of billionaires, she believes, is perplexing at a time when government can't, or won't, fill huge gaps in funding. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith.

Sarah Dunant relives a road trip she took 50 years ago, travelling across the USA at a time when Roe v Wade was the talk of America, and revolution was in the air. 'I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman living in America this week, she writes in the aftermath of the decision by the US Supreme Court - a decision which almost instantly makes abortion illegal in more than 20 US states. She takes us back to 1972 and her travels across America in a beat-up car, when radical lawyers were honing their arguments to first present the case to the country's highest court. 'America's post-war abundance and energy, its style, its movies and its music saturated our youth', she says. 'We had the time of our lives - even the bad bits were good, we were living the dream'. And, fifty years on, she reflects on what has happened to 'the fabric of this extraordinary country'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

'It's time to acknowledge', writes Will Self, 'that we don't really feel nostalgia at all - only something far more worrying and debilitating: a condition I've named no-stalgia'. Will argues that the West is particularly in thrall to rose-tinted nostalgia and looks to Japan - and its concept of 'mono no aware' - as an alternative and healthier way of thinking about the past. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Howard Jacobson reflects on his upcoming 'significant birthday' and why he's become a willing participant in the ways of personal trainers. 'I say trainer but I am past training,' writes Howard. 'He's more my stretcher. My wife's stretcher, actually, but she doesn't want to be stretched while I shrink. I refused to have him at first. But I capitulated. It was either that or watch my wife by stretched to twice my length'. So down on the floor he goes, 'hoping someone - anyone - will think I'm a weekend younger than I actually am'. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith.

Adam Gopnik grew up in Canada, where he saw the Queen age gracefully on the country's bank notes - though he says the royal connection often felt vague. Arriving in London this week amid union flags and flowers, Adam reflects on the constancy of the Queen's reign. "What lasts for seventy years," he writes, "and never takes a turn into indecency or becomes cruel or sordid in any of the obvious ways has my vote. Well, not my vote, obviously....my allegiance. Well, okay, not my allegiance... my admiration." Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Nigel Appleton Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

After recently discovering the secret of her local meadow, which hides the ruins of World War Two, Rebecca Stott reflects on how we rebuild lives and landscapes, from 6th Century Britain to post-war Berlin to Beirut. She reflects on the damage currently being inflicted on Ukraine, and highlights recent discussions held by the Mayor of Kharkiv to plan the rebuilding of his city. 'It struck me as remarkable that despite the war, despite seeing his city in ruins... the mayor had the capacity to start thinking about the future.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith.

'Over the centuries', writes Michael Morpurgo, 'we have been a safe haven to so many, and they have helped make us the people we are today - at our best, a deeply humanitarian people. I fear we are not at our best today'. Michael argues that, although we need to address the issue of people smuggling and deaths from dangerous Channel crossings, we must not lose our capacity for kindness and 'generosity of spirit' towards those who need our help. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Hugh Levinson

'We must never underestimate the power of words to shape public opinion and politics', writes Bernardine Evaristo. This comes in the aftermath of a call from a school authority in South Dakota for the banning of her novel, 'Girl, Woman, Other' on the grounds that it - and four other novels - are unsuitable for seventeen and eighteen-year-olds. Bernardine argues that we should avoid vocabulary that fosters outrage and try instead to find words that convey our exact, and reasoned, argument. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

In the aftermath of recent headlines coming out of the Commons, Sarah Dunant explores sexual equality through the ages. She looks in particular at the idea that 'women are temptresses who cannot - by definition of their sex - be trusted'. "So ingrained is this within Christian culture," Sarah writes, "that it defined attitudes towards women for millennia". Biblical accounts, renaissance sculpture, fairy tales and politics are all put under the spotlight. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self presents a very British solution to the issues surrounding the legalisation of marijuana. Considering the pervasiveness of cannabis in the UK, he says the question that should currently be preoccupying us as a society is not whether marijuana should be legalised, but how. "My model here would be the old Tote," he says, "a form of nationalised gambling that for many years mitigated its worst effects by limiting opportunities and hence possible losses." He says that we must avoid the "commercialised free-for-all that's emerging in the US and parts of Canada." Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

"It is a terrible thing to be in possession of a truth that people don't want to hear," writes Howard Jacobson. By way of Primo Levi, the great chronicler of the Holocaust, Coleridge's 'The Ancient Mariner' and stories emerging today from Ukraine, Howard argues that stories of truth must be listened to, no matter how uncomfortable or challenging we find them. "No deceit is ever so perfected," he says, "that it doesn't require the connivance of the deceived". Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel asks the seemingly simple question 'what is a woman', but finds no simple answer as she explores the question through a brief history of feminist thought. She explores the ongoing controversy over trans women in women's competitive sport, and the reluctance of public figures to define what a woman is. while revealing her own views on the issue. "As the history of feminism itself makes clear, gender and sex are genuinely complicated. That overconfident or oversimplified definitions of woman - which apparently we're all supposed to be able to produce - can be limiting and crude. Not just in relation to trans women but biological women too," she writes. She continues: "The bitter debate about trans women versus women is a debate about the meaning and realness of biology. And yes, biological difference matters, sometimes hugely. It is certainly real. But there is room for nuance: indeed, there is a necessity for it. Without it, I fear a relapse into arguing that women are defined by their biology beyond the swimming pool or the cycling track or the locker room." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Janet Staples Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

The everyday repression of life in Russia, as experienced by an anonymous dissident playwright. In this essay, she reflects on the war in Ukraine and asks what role she and her fellow Russians might have played in it, what they might have done to stop it - and what Ukrainians must think of them now. In turn, she explains how the Russian state is actively controlling the narrative about the war - and reveals the harsh consequences for those who dare veer from the approved 'truth'. "They arrest protestors for carrying blank sheets of paper. It doesn’t matter what’s written on it, only that you are carrying it. If you are suspected of opposing the government, then you must be guilty." Reflecting on Russia's history, she weighs up how life today both mirrors and is profoundly different to the harshest days of Stalinist rule, while pointing out the numerous violations of the country's constitution. The essay is translated and read by poet and translator Sasha Dugdale. Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

'Perhaps, like me,' writes A L Kennedy, 'you can now only picture Cabinet meetings as gatherings where ministers and staff sing la-la-la with their fingers in their ears while dancing between the wine fridges.' In the midst of a lot of bad news, Alison finds some room for cheer. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Vadon

Adam Gopnik seeks enlightenment for our time in Tolstoy's War and Peace, finding parallels in Tolstoy's thinking for today's war in Ukraine. Reflecting on how Russian characters in the book converse in fluent French, Adam considers how mixed identities should not undermine national integrity, writing that the composite nature of Ukrainian identity does not cast doubt on its integrity as a country. He also explores Tolstoy's debunking of the 'great man' theory of history, and a reminder that 'history lies outside the control of any one hero, or heroine' while conceding that heroism is in itself a plausible concept, and 'if great men and women do not cause history, they surely make history. We seem to be seeing it made in action right now.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

"When war smashes its way into our living rooms as it did three weeks ago", writes Sarah Dunant, "it is pictures rather than words that hit hardest". Sarah discusses the impact of images from war through the centuries and the history they write. And she ponders which image from Putin's war will represent this moment in the future. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Hugh Levinson

For the past five years, Rebecca Stott and a Russian friend have spent time together... digging heavy soil, planting hawthorn trees and pruning wild roses. Veronika is a translator and a university lecturer, with a talent for gardening. She's helped Rebecca in her garden; Rebecca has discussed translations with Veronika. Now, in the light of events in Ukraine, Rebecca talks about their friendship. Producer: Adele Armstrong Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Penny Murphy

Will Self tells the story of Vasily Arkhipov, the commander of a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine, who during the Cuban Missile Crisis refused to fire his vessel's nuclear weapon and averted, many believe, a Third World War. In the light of President Putin's actions this week, Will argues that the threat of nuclear apocalypse has never really gone away, however much we've tried to convince ourselves otherwise. Producer: Adele Armstrong Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Rod Farquhar Editor: Hugh Levinson

Sara Wheeler reflects that the attack on Ukraine is not the war of the Russian people she has known. "The calamitous news eroding any remote sense we might have nurtured of peace in our time is, we now know, not going to cease any time soon. Yet while the image of a villainous Russia dominates the news agenda, I remember Russians I have met over the years on my travels in their land. This is not their war." Producer: Sheila Cook Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Penny Murphy

John Connell reflects on planting trees on his family farm in Ireland as reparation for the years he has spent flying round the world, and also as an intrinsic good. "For so many the planting of the tree for nature itself, not for politics, or development or climate change or remembrance of some brutal war but for the contribution of life is never thought of....We do not measure success in knowing the way of the earth because for the most part, the greater part of society is cut off from the political act of growing something to produce oxygen and sequester carbon." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Hugh Levinson

Sara Wheeler reflects on the harm done by seeing the world only from our own point of view. "At the heart of both day-to-day thoughtlessness and internecine slaughter lies a failure to see things through the eyes of another. If we all tried to see clearly rather than selectively - well, you know, I think the planet would get on quite a lot better." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Penny Murphy

Will Self deplores the British attitude to children, seeing a mix of sentimentality and cruelty, and a culture which for decades allowed child sex abuse to hide "in plain view". "I'd argue that under cover of a positively Dickensian level of sentimentality that sees every child as a Tiny Tim, our cruelty and disdain for actual children continues to hold sway....The nauseating oscillation between outrage at the news of another child murdered by its parents or carers, often as a result of poverty and its drunken, drugged abusive sequels; and the prosecution of some benighted young soul for this or that 'crime' - in almost all cases actions themselves determined by exactly the same kinds of deprivation - has been a constant in my life...And then came the pandemic and its associated social measures - and exposed once more the fundamental British misopedia... A pervasive addiction to screen based work, entertainment and now education marches in lock-step with a view of children not as vitally distinct - and so necessarily in need of nurturance - but merely as little adults in waiting with all the troubling appetites that this implies." Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Producer: Sheila Cook

As she leaves academia, Rebecca Stott says an audit culture is stifling universities. "Once universities had been turned into businesses and forced to compete with each other for students and fees, scores and league tables followed. And now we are assessed and monitored all the time too. It has eroded trust....When a seminar works you can feel the electricity crackle...You can't bottle this or record it or give it a score or sell it because it happens in the moment and in the room. " Sound Engineer :Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Producer: Sheila Cook

Sarah Dunant asks if we should judge the past by the standards of the present or future, as shifting social attitudes colour our view of how the past is portrayed. "What current historians share with those historians of the past whose vision we vehemently decry, is that they too thought they were right at the time...If we now find their views abhorrent and unjust then how about us; what might there be about our present moral certainty that the future might take issue with. What might we be missing?" Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman

David Goodhart rejects what he calls the 'Eton conspiracy myth' of a cabal of his old school's alumni at the top of politics and welcomes its declining influence as a sign of growing equality. "The Eton obsession not only overlooks progress made in slowly detaching our elite institutions from privilege, it also distracts from a hard-headed discussion about what we want from our elite." Producer: Sheila Cook

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the impact of rapid home delivery on the way we live our lives, and asks what our human experience might lose from this democratisation of laziness. "A whole generation is about to come of age experiencing goods and service as simply things you can have delivered to your doorstep, fast. Will their brains cease to distinguish between different types of desire and demand?...Will they lose the capacity to form plans and commit to them, plans as minor as what to cook later that night?" Producer: Sheila Cook

Adam Gopnik on why a visit to get his phone repaired resulted in an unlikely revelation. Watching those waiting alongside him, Adam comes to the realisation that we have poured ourselves so completely into our phones that the devices, paradoxically, are the one place where we can picture ourselves as selves. They have become the equivalent of the confession booths of old, or the diary in the 18th century. "We all need some box to hold our fears and desires as the winds of the world threaten to blow us away," he concludes. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson ponders why he's always associated Christmas with the sea. Strange, he reckons, given he's not exactly maritime by temperament. 'Long ago at Blackpool,' he writes, 'I was lifted onto a donkey and afterwards told to make a sandcastle, but I fell off the donkey and wilder boys in Brillo-pad swimming trunks trampled over my battlements'. He looks to Matthew Arnold for an explanation of this 'mysterious nexus of sea and Santa'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self reflects on his B&B renaissance. From early memories of B&Bs with his parents...to the anonymous isolation of corporate hotels...to the 'pseudo-hygge' of Airbnbs, Will looks at our changing relationship with property. Producer: Adele Armstrong

A junk shop, a wooden chest, and some old newspapers from 1941 get Sarah Dunant pondering how we can deal with a world turned upside down. "The last time the world shook", Sarah writes, "there was an element of learned resilience". But today, she believes, most of us don't have the benefit of that. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Landscape made us', writes Sara Wheeler, 'and now, in the dying phase of our divorce from our environment, we are unmaking the landscape'. Sara discusses the importance of place names in linking us to the land. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Tom Shakespeare explains why he can't get enough of University Challenge. Starter for ten, picture round and music round.....it's all here! But thirty-five years after he first appeared on the show, he asks if Britain is a better country. Producer: Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy attempts to work out why, and how, everything these days seems to annoy us. But, she says, it's up to us to resist the work of 'the crisis engineers, political extremists and paid agents who turned up our emotional thermostat'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zoe Strimpel on the difficulty of deciding whether to have, or not have, children. She describes the 'paralysis of ambivalence'. But this ambivalence is surely, she writes, 'a natural response to the idea of setting in train the most unknowable outcome on earth'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sarah Dunant argues that if we can't agree on wearing masks in a crowded space, this doesn't bode well for our ability to adapt to the monumental changes we'll soon have to make to avert the climate crisis. She reports from the Italian city of Mantova where she finds a rather un-Italian attitude to all of this. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self argues that the car is anything but a source of freedom. While drivers think it gives them the ability to go anywhere, in truth 'they're shackled to a grotesque and Sisyphean go-round: they have to make the money, to pay for the car, to sit in the traffic jam, to make the money to pay for the car'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Who owns a story?" asks Adam Gopnik. "The storyteller? The subject? Or do all stories in some sense own themselves?" Adam explores the drama being played out in the US in two stories of feuding writers, caught up in the ethics of artistic appropriation. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"In the 1880s," writes Sara Wheeler, "the scientific community began to recognise and categorise neurodiversity." We've come a long way since then, she says. But there's a long way to go. And as neurological research presses on, she argues that we, as a society, must try to keep up with its findings. Producer: Adele Armstrong

David Goodhart discusses why integration is a permanent dilemma for multi-ethnic societies. And he wonders whether, "if there is no solution to the issues that it throws up, then not talking about it much might be a rational strategy". Or, he asks, is that too complacent? Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Tomorrow's world," writes Zia Haider Rahman, "will be shaped still more by finance, tech, and the minds of the mathematically disposed." He argues that we ignore maths at our peril. Producer: Adele Armstrong

In the aftermath of the recent report on religious groups in the UK carried out by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Rebecca Stott ponders the tension between defending the right to religious freedom and defending the rights of the child. "Maybe it is time," she writes, "to admit that closed, highly-controlling environments , that refuse or escape scrutiny in the name of religious toleration... might not be safe places to entrust the hearts, minds and bodies of children." Producer: Adele Armstrong

As thousands of Afghan refugees look to make their home in the UK, Michael Morpurgo tells the story of one child refugee, Little Amal. "Surely," he argues, "just as we now fully acknowledge our global responsibility to restore the world about us, the world we ourselves have damaged, so we must play our part as one of the richest nations on earth, to welcome in as many refugees as we can, to give them safe haven with us, to treat them right, as we know we should." Producer: Adele Armstrong Recorded by James Vickery of Radio Devon

John Gray on how former British Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, identified a weakness in the idea that science and faith are opposites. "Beyond our narrow corner of things, there may be limitless possibilities, or else primordial chaos," he writes. "Our belief in the uniformity of nature is not a result but a presupposition of science - in other words, an act of faith." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler looks at the emotional power of food. "It's regrettable", she writes, "that the link between food and happiness has been broken by the epidemic of obesity that bedevils the developed world." Producer: Adele Armstrong

'I don't want to find an eight-part drama more interesting than my life', writes Zoe Strimpel. Zoe reflects on the power of TV as a coping mechanism at the height of the COVID pandemic. But she argues that the creep of the on-screen narrative must now be slowed down in order for us to fully re-engage with our lives. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Rebecca Stott responds to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And she reflects on how our ancestors dealt with dramatic weather events - and the gods they believed were responsible. "Our ancestors would have sacrificed everything they owned to appease those gods.....they would have prayed together, sacrificed together". "But what," she wonders, "will we in the west sacrifice to save our species? Our cars? Our meat-eating? Our air-conditioning? Our foreign holidays?" Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik reflects on the ever-increasing accessibility of the past. He ponders what effect it has when "everything in the world that we can ever remember, everything that has accidentally haunted our imaginations for even a moment" is available online. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson turns his thoughts to the unlikely subject of present wrapping. He delves into "Expectation Disconfirmation Theory" which, he claims, "will explain why you are less happy than you ever thought you'd be with your new trainers, and more happy than you ever expected you'd be listening to this programme!" Producer: Adele Armstrong

'In the dog days of the pandemic,' writes John Connell, 'I decided the place to recharge my spirit was the mountains and oceans of Ireland's west coast.' John sets off in the footsteps of the famous Irish monk and journeyman, St Brendan, in an attempt to recover a sense of 'wonder'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Bernardine Evaristo argues that the racist abuse levelled at England players after the final of the Euros has troubling ramifications. She says it's the kind of "vile, in-yer-face bile many of us thought we'd left behind decades ago." The essay contains very strong racist language. Producer: Adele Armstrong

'I object to the demotion of the noble art of indoor swimming,' writes Sara Wheeler, 'in the current frenzy to leap into the nearest river.' Sara explains why she has little time for the new fad of wild swimming and sings the praises of those gorgeous pools that sprang up around the UK from the nineteenth century. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Tom Shakespeare argues that red tape should be regarded as a force for good. From Charles Dickens' famous mention of red tape until today, making fun of red tape has been virtually a national pastime. But Tom cautions that as Britain prepares to set aside rules and regulations surrounding COVID, we shouldn't act too hastily. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Niall Ferguson argues that a post-pandemic 'Roaring Twenties' is far from certain. 'There are good reasons to doubt that the 2020s will be roaring in any sense at all, good or bad', he writes. 'Rather the remainder of the decade may prove distinctly boring.' Reflecting on his own teenage boredom, he believes - for young people - a boring decade would be the biggest disappointment of all. Producer: Adele Armstrong (Image: Niall Ferguson. Credit: Dewald Aukema)

Zoe Strimpel argues that the culture war is no fake or proxy war - but rather ideas about what is acceptable to know, to teach and to think. Thirty years after the US sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote his book 'Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America', Zoe looks at how those ideas are playing out around the world today. 'There is a sense of menace about,' she writes, 'of pent-up, complicated grievance. I worry that the culture war could tip into something far more deadly.' Producer: Adele Armstrong

"To locate Zionism's origins," argues Howard Jacobson, "we must leave historical for spiritual time." Howard ponders whether a hint of the tragic world view would change perceptions today in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Bernardine Evaristo argues that, as we move out of lockdown and rebuild our creative infrastructure, we must cherish the country's arts culture. She criticises disinvestment in the arts and the notion that school children should be, at every stage of their education, steered towards science and maths subjects. 'Creativity infuses every aspect of society and how we function as human beings,' she writes. 'Without creativity everything stagnates, including advances in STEM subjects.' Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler rereads her youthful diaries and ponders lessons learned. 'Discarding perished rubber bands that once sheaved the slim volumes,' Sara writes, 'I read the story of my own life.' She wonders if accepting and understanding the past can help us escape 'the three rs of lived experience - regret, remorse and recrimination.' Producer: Adele Armstrong

'I have to concede: I am a fervent eavesdropper', writes Will Self. He ponders eavesdropping etiquette, the hard and fast rules of the game, and whether - in our straitened times - there can be any future for the eavesdropper. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Rebecca Stott reflects on why we should be looking to the Romans, and our other ancestors, for imaginative ways of building. "People who walked the planet long before us knew more sustainable ways to build their homes", she writes. With concrete responsible for 8% of the world's carbon emissions, Rebecca argues that we urgently need to find alternatives. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"The Venetian Republic," writes Adam Gopnik, "built one of the greatest and most beautiful churches in the world, Santa Maria della Salute, to celebrate the end of one of their plagues in 1630." Adam examines why today - as we attempt to put the pandemic behind us - any sense of exaltation is notable by its absence. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zoe Strimpel questions some of the dominant gender narratives around the Me Too movement. 'The problem,' she writes, 'is that there is no space in all this for the lives and experiences of the many straight women who don't have this problem, who do not live in fear of men, and who are not sexualised at every turn.' Producer: Adele Armstrong

David Goodhart reflects on group identities in the aftermath of the Sewell report and argues that the mere existence of a difference is not evidence of unfairness. He calls for a more nuanced understanding of group difference and the challenges this poses in an egalitarian age. Producer: Adele Armstrong

'While self-righteousness loosens the tongues of fools,' writes Howard Jacobson, 'self-censorship ties the tongues of the wise.’ Howard argues that it's not autocracy that has bedevilled us in the past twelve months, it is levity. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Michael Morpurgo reflects on meeting the Duke of Edinburgh when he was 16 and the indirect effect that meeting had in shaping his views later in life. 'He realised', writes Michael, 'that investing in our young people is the most important investment we can make as a society' . He says the Duke's passion for helping young people will be needed more than ever in the difficult months ahead, as we come out of the pandemic. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"The K beater, the whisk and the dough hook are rattling around in the bowl, and I am tasting butterscotch Angel Delight on my lips." Rebecca Stott relives memories of her 1970s childhood with one kitchen device taking centre stage. And she sees a lesson for today. Producer: Adele Armstrong (This episode was previously broadcast on the 9th October 2020.)

Adam Gopnik on the intricacies of the generation gap. It's highlighted, Adam argues, by what he calls the ‘Florida Phone Call’ - the call you get from your children ‘announcing that not only are you no longer fully competent to grasp contemporary life and its technology...but there is no longer any chance that you will grasp contemporary life and its technology!’ Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler explains why online packages arriving at her house are now addressed to 'The Right Reverend Sara Wheeler'! Sara looks back at the surprising history of the Mrs-Miss distinction and concludes it has no place in contemporary Britain. Producer: Adele Armstrong

'There is a theory,' writes Sarah Dunant, 'that we needed to pull back from too much face-to-face conversation...because we had all got so damn angry with each other.' The past year has certainly put a stop to much conversation, angry or otherwise. Sarah imagines how conversation will be - once we're finally able to talk to each other again, face to face. Producer: Adele Armstrong

'The spell of the cities is now being broken,' writes John Connell. On his family farm in Ireland - where he's returned after many years abroad - John reflects on the new wave of migrants to rural areas and how the pandemic is changing the face of rural communities. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"So far," writes Tom Shakespeare, "the pub has weathered the tides of history and adapted to every change...so far." But Tom argues that, in the aftermath of months of closure, this great British institution is now in peril and we all have a role in saving it. Producer: Adele Armstrong

As a psychotherapist, Susie Orbach spends her working days helping people find words to express their emotional dilemmas. But the seesaw of the pandemic presents particular challenges. "We are not simply able," she writes, "to breathe into a difficult situation, roll up our psychological sleeves or dig ourselves in without the emotional cost of feeling constrained, nervous, watchful, touchy." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self reflects on a year of not travelling on the London underground... and why he's starting to miss it. "On winter days," writes Will, "when it's dark first thing, then twilight, then dark again, the tube achieves its most magical state." And he says that, without the tube, the city seems to have lost its foundations. Producer: Adele Armstrong

As the government announces a tightening of Britain's borders, Zoe Strimpel tries to understand her very personal reaction. "As a Jewish descendent of German Jewish refugees," she writes, "I have felt - for the first time in my life - a sharp edge of panic and fear." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sarah Dunant finds chilling parallels between recent events in Washington and the Sack of Rome in 1527. "Both seemed to feel," Sarah writes, "that whatever the threat, 'God's Holy City' or 'the seat of American democracy', were somehow, by their very nature, inviolate. I mean nobody would dare, would they?" Powerful first-hand accounts, the crowd fired up by wild stories and the use of new technology are all there. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Rebecca Stott on why stories told over time seem so fitting for lockdown. "In this third lockdown," Rebecca writes, "now that my grown up children have gone back to their flats, I am living alone for the first time. I miss our conversations over the dinner table. I miss mulling over the day with them." But, she says, the cumulative power of slow storytelling is a perfect antidote. And, in particular, The Archers! Producer: Adele Armstrong

John Gray argues that the social media bans on Donald Trump pose many risks. "The country is already divided between political tribes that hardly speak to one another," he writes. "More than any other advanced country, American has developed a dangerously binary type of public life. " He fears curbing free speech - in the way the tech giants have done with Donald Trump - risks threatening America's very stability. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik attempts to make sense of events in Washington this week and argues that the attack on Congress was predictable. And he explores "the fascinating mismatch between the cult leader and the cult". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik, cycling around Central Park in New York, explains why going round in circles suddenly appears not futile, but fortunate. In the midst of the pandemic, Adam - like thousands of other New Yorkers - has taken to cycling round the park on a daily basis. "The truth, revealed at the end of one more revolution is simple," he writes. "We feel lucky to be alive. That may be the one truth we didn't know before, or didn't know enough." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Bernardine Evaristo reflects on spirituality and syncretism. "There are many people," she writes, "who are rock solid in a particular faith...but others are more flexible or live with multiple belief systems." Bernardine tells us why she loves the idea of the African-American celebration of Kwanzaa, founded in 1966 and designed to give African-Americans a winter festival that is uniquely theirs. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler loves maps. Taking her cue from a 1755 map on her desk, she asks how maps can help us navigate our contemporary crisis. And she argues that - from cholera to covid - public health cartography has played a crucial role. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson reflects on hugging, past and present. He casts his mind back to his school days and one of his favourite plays, Moliere's The Misanthropist. Howard decides that the play's hero, the misanthropic Alceste, is "the perfect citizen for our times - one who respects social distancing, stays out of pubs and similar places of entertainment, and compromises no other person's health." And he believes that, were more of us to follow Alceste's lead, then the virus would have "nowhere to travel to and must at last give up and turn into a recluse itself." Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Unusual conditions produce novel responses" writes Will Self. And Will's response is what he calls "edible architecture". Pounding the pavements with his son during lockdown, they imagine which of London's edifices would be most edible...were they to be made out of food, rather than masonry. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Bernardine Evaristo discusses body image and the fashion industry. Why, she asks, do fashionable clothes still need to be marketed by "long-limbed, boy-hipped young women whose silhouettes have no womanly curves and whose body parts have no jiggle-factor?" Producer: Adele Armstrong

In the week where his appointment to the Equality and Human Rights Commission has come in for criticism, David Goodhart defends objective facts over personal experience. "Our knowledge of the world is usually some sort of balance between personal experience and abstract ideas," he writes. "But the focus on the primacy of subjective experience....can go too far." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler reflects on lockdown for her brother - profoundly learning disabled - and others like him. Books, she writes, "teach us that my brother's isolation and society's inability to embrace him as he deserves to be embraced have always been with us." But she wonders if, in these times, books can also teach us to be kind. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson with his personal reaction to a monumental week in US politics. In an attempt to define what's at stake, Howard turns his attention to Basil Fawlty, the Garden of Eden and Jonathan Swift's Big and Little-Endians. And he has a brush with concussion along the way! Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zoe Strimpel examines why so many people have become passionately obsessed with dogs. "We have moved," she writes, "beyond affection, beyond dog-is-person's-best-friend love, into a passionate confusion whereby we now seem to think and feel that there is literally no difference between pets and people." She examines the roots of our attachment to dogs and argues that we need to re-discover a more "pet-appropriate variety" of love in relation to our pooches. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"My mother tended to do it in shops and on public transport - my father favoured pubs..." Taking a leaf out of his parents' book, Will Self advocates a novel "practice" for our times. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Big as it looks, it is nothing but gas and more gas, imposing its will on the sky by sheer bluster." On a night walk through Manhattan, Adam Gopnik reflects on the appearance of Jupiter high in the sky... and muses on the significance of this gassy planet today. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"The K beater, the whisk and the dough hook are rattling around in the bowl, and I am tasting butterscotch Angel Delight on my lips." Rebecca Stott relives memories of her 1970s childhood with one kitchen device taking centre stage. And she sees a lesson for today. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"As a fully fledged luvvie," writes Bernardine Evaristo, "practically every greeting and farewell is accompanied by a kiss or hug." But these days hugs feel like a distant memory and, she argues, wearing a mask is the least we can do. "It's an act of compassion, self-protection and a commitment towards the survival of our fellow humans, our country, our world." Producer: Adele Armstrong

With widespread unease over the government 's handling of the pandemic, Tom Shakespeare proposes that ordinary citizens should be allowed a greater say in what rules we should be following. "Then there would be no elites to blame," he says, "because the people making the decisions would be you and me, and our deliberations would be public." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Facts have lost their meaning," writes Sarah Dunant. "In their place, belief has taken over." Sarah discusses QAnon, widening social divisions, and her conversations with her hairdresser. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"As the culture war has heated up," writes Zoe Strimpel, "every word and tweet is vested with the insignia of identity, and neutrality is no longer an acceptable carpet under which to hide." Zoe discusses how subjects which were, until fairly recently, little more than sources of minor disagreements now form "the basis of warring social groups." Producer: Adele Armstrong

As children return to school, Michael Morpurgo questions whether we are educating our children....or programming them. "The pandemic has found us out," Michael writes, "shown us how ridiculous and absurd and sad" is the rigidity of a system of education so dictated and dominated by endless data gathering and exams. He argues that we must use this opportunity - where so much is up for grabs - to take a serious look at what needs to change. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"At no time, in modern times," writes Adam Gopnik, "have we endured so much and understood so little." But Adam reminds us that plagues have often, in the past, preceded times of plenty - the Jazz Age, for example, following closely on the heels of the 1918 flu pandemic in the US. "So what lies before us may be parched austerity and continuing depression... or champagne at midnight in Gatsby's garden." Producer: Adele Armstrong

"The strange kind of liberalism that is currently in fashion," writes John Gray, "has rejected tolerance in favour of enforcing what it is sure is the truth." He says these new "illiberal liberals" who allow freedom of expression only to those they regard as progressive, risk smothering "the contradictory and enlightened ideas that make us human." Producer: Adele Armstrong

The writer, Katherine Mansfield, was diagnosed with TB in 1917. She travelled across Europe - trying all sorts of therapies - until her death. But it would be another twenty years before a cure was actually discovered. Will Self questions whether - if it takes years to find an effective vaccine or treatment for COVID 19 - we will still manage to maintain our faith in human progress. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"If we accept that gender is something imposed on us," writes Bernardine Evaristo, "as opposed to intrinsic to who we are as humans, then what does it matter if people want to switch genders?" Bernardine discusses the "gender revolution" and our attitudes to the disruption of traditional gender roles. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There's nothing wrong with ambition," writes Linda Colley, "but coming to terms with our inescapable geographical smallness would be helpful." She says historically there's been a tendency to kick against this awkward fact and an obsession with the idea of a global Britain. Linda argues that we should recognise the advantages of smallness - nourishing a nation's innovation and agility. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Once in a blue moon," writes Rebecca Stott, "new technologies become available that make it possible to open up ancient, long-shelved historical mysteries." Rebecca tells how modern science has explained the events of 536 AD when the sun 'disappeared' and a devastating pandemic followed. And she ponders what scientists - hundreds of years from now - will be able to tell about our current pandemic and our environmental crisis. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self on why a novelty bottle opener - with little plastic seahorses floating in an acrylic handle - is his idea of a perfect inheritance. "The security that financial inheritance may convey is merely relative - and divisive," he writes. So, instead, Will suggests leaving behind something ordinary....and useful. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"In the absence of sports, sports radio thrives," writes Adam Gopnik, "and churns and heaves and roils on a diet of pure abstraction, stays awake all night on the caffeine of accelerated nothingness." Adam examines the American fascination with call-in shows about sport - and the paradox that although they have absolutely no sport to talk about right now, the shows have never been more argumentative or more alive. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"We need to challenge how we historicise the past and give it a thorough spring clean," writes Bernardine Evaristo. Bernardine discusses the UK's response to Black Lives Matter, "a necessary moment in our political history." Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There is a piece of advice that my white British friends seem never to receive but which I have had the good fortune to be given on many occasions - 'If you don't like it here, you can always leave'". Zia Haider Rahman reflects on what lies behind the comment. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Mary Beard asks if the iconic university lecture might have had its day, in the aftermath of the pandemic. "I reckon that over my career I've done getting on for 2000 of them....I doubt I'll be doing another before I retire." Producer: Adele Armstrong

"It seemed to occur to nobody in the Cummings hunt that the greater good would almost certainly have been served by down-playing the story". David Goodhart examines the accountability and transparency requirements of modern institutions and the impact they've had on the government's handling of the pandemic. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I put myself under lock and key a week before everyone else after a clammy jogger in a pink velveteen suit panted in my face in Hyde Park". Howard Jacobson takes a wry view of life under lockdown. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"However different our days are, we are all waiting," writes Rebecca Stott. Via Samuel Beckett, a walk in Norfolk and a discussion of the three stages of twilight, Rebecca reflects on the waiting of lockdown. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Others may thrill to the serendipity of bacon-and-eggs," writes Will Self, "but it's the determinism of dustpan-and-brush that I exalt". Dusting, wiping, vacuuming and sweeping in lockdown, Will ponders the Great British Wipe-Up. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"She'd been waiting for the catastrophe to end catastrophes all her life and now it was here she seemed not to give a fig about it". Howard Jacobson reflects on his mother's life - and death. Producer: Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy ponders why we're bad at assessing risks. "We prioritize them according to emotion and information," she says, "but our emotions cloud our judgement and our information may be patchy, absent or misleading." She argues that one risk though is incontrovertible - the risk to the planet - and we need to find a way to ensure its survival. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I can't have been alone among those quarantined these past few weeks," writes Will Self, "in seeking out the greatest imaginative spaces with which to counterpoint my confinement." Courtesy of Google Earth, Will sets out to simulate a trip he was planning to make to central Australia and ponders what lessons Aboriginal culture might have for the days of pandemic. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zia Haider Rahman describes the "profound moral questions" facing society as it starts to discuss how the COVID-19 lockdown might, eventually, be ended. We have to face up to the fact, he says, that our choices will have huge impacts for which we must take responsibility. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I’ve been thinking about projects left unfinished," writes Rebecca Stott. " I’ve got the pages of two unfinished novels on my hard-drive, and a pile of sewing projects, seams pinned, pins rusting, in my sewing basket." With the help of Leonardo da Vinci, "a notorious non-finisher," Rebecca ponders the meaning of our imperfect and incomplete projects. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I can see her on my phone, I can even hear her on my phone, but I can't feel her weight in my arms and her wiggling warmth," writes Tom Shakespeare about his new-born granddaughter. With everyone in lock-down, Tom talks about his longing to meet his first grand-daughter. And he knows it's a sadness he shares with many other grandparents. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Having been alone in the apartment now for almost three weeks," writes Adam Gopnik in New York, "I have become aware of the countless fine shades of solitude". Adam describes the daily roller coaster ride of anxiety and normalcy - from the solitude of morning coffee with the dog to the solitude of the Manhattan street late at night. With each day that passes, he finds that "the hues and shades of solitude are defining themselves, with a distinction that gives at least a shape, and sometimes the hint of a meaning, to our time inside". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"As our physical reality is reduced down to a few rooms or a view from a window," writes Sarah Dunant, "our ability to conjure up things we're not able to experience is going to be vital to feed our imaginations." Sarah argues that - given social distancing - imagination is going to be an exceedingly powerful inner muscle when it comes to our mental survival. She offers us a few of her stand out images to get us started. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I have come to think of the virus as that monster from the ancient Norse legend of Beowulf, Grendel," writes Michael Morpurgo. "He's out there now, threatening my home, my village, my family and friends". Michael talks about what it feels like to be hunkered down in his little cottage in Devon - waiting for coronavirus to pass. Recorded by Hamish Marshall from Radio Devon. Produced by Adele Armstrong.

"There is nothing some of us enjoy more," writes Adam Gopnik, "than finding analogies to our own paltry and predictable lives in scenes from famous gangster movies." As his children move away from home and he becomes an "empty nester", Adam finds himself, too, doing just that. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There are some things that one just has to put up with," writes Tom Shakespeare. "Sometimes over-thinking is the worst response." Tom reflects on how we can best respond to difficult situations. Producer: Adele Armstrong

To recline....or not to recline your aeroplane seat? Adam Gopnik ponders the question of “recline-gate” in the aftermath of the recent American Airlines incident that went viral. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I am holding history in my hands," writes Sarah Dunant. "The date on the letter is February 1490...the place, the city of Mantua in Italy". As she delves through the Mantuan State Archive, Sarah reflects on the task of understanding and writing history. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"We have been here before, many times" writes Sarah Dunant as she charts some key moments in history when the world has been gripped by fear over the spread of disease. From Columbus and the outbreak of syphilis in 1495, to cholera at Mecca in the 1860s ....and Wuhan today. She ponders what insights this present crisis might bring. Producer: Adele Armstrong

From the “pernicious fife-footlers polluting the sooty Victorian cities” to the “fiendish electronic cacophony” of today, Will Self bemoans the ever-increasing difficulty of finding a bit of peace and quiet. He wonders why we tolerate this growing noise pollution, even though we know that high levels of ambient noise cause stress, insomnia and even, if persistent, poor mental health. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Of all the men I never wanted to grow old into", writes Howard Jacobson, "this is the man I wanted to grow into least: the prepared-for-all-eventualities shopper". Howard describes his hours of neatly folding plastic bags on his hands and knees on his living room floor...in order to let him shop responsibly. Gone is his old profligacy. "The wild", he says, "have become the watchful". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"All racism is a species not only of unreason... but of unreason enthusiastically embraced", writes Howard Jacobson. Howard discusses why anti-Semitism should trouble us all, regardless of our background. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Following the death of the philosopher, author and self-professed Wagner fan, Sir Roger Scruton, this is one of our favourite talks he did for the series. As Wagner’s Ring – that huge and controversial cycle of operas - went on tour around the UK, Roger talked about why The Ring is absolutely a story for our time. "I have loved The Ring and learned from it for over 50 years and for me, it is quite simply the truth about our world - but the truth expressed by means of music of unquestionable authority and supreme melodic and harmonic power". The talk was first broadcast in 2016. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self explores what he sees as a growing sense of collective hypocrisy. He looks at why we're often so reluctant to use the word "hypocrisy" and argues that we accept hypocrisy in part because "civilisation as currently constituted would be quite impossible without a whole panoply of carefully evolved rituals designed to elide incompatible acts and beliefs". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"After months of hearing about the climate emergency", writes Rebecca Stott, "I thought it would be a good thing to spend some time around a species that was doing really well". She decided to become a seal warden...but the job is rather different from what she was expecting. "This wild, old, slithery, stinking world of the sand dunes really isn't cute" she says. "But there are some things in nature, dare I say it, that are a lot more interesting than cute". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I've long been fascinated with taxidermy", writes Rebecca Stott, "but it disturbs me". She explains why - after many years - she's made her peace with taxidermy. "After all, can we really be all high-horse-ish about the way our ancestors shot, classified and stuffed everything in their path, given how much damage we've done to species and their habitats in the last fifty years alone?" Producer: Adele Armstrong

“Whatever humans do, the world is not going to end”, writes John Gray. “Humankind cannot destroy the planet any more than it can save it”. John Gray ponders why the belief that the human world can be completely and suddenly transformed, never really goes away. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I can no longer force myself", writes Will Self, "to make choices that appear quite meaningless to me". He outlines why he decided - for the first time in his life - not to cast a vote in the election. Producer: Adele Armstrong

John Gray tells the story of Archy and Mehitabel, a newspaper column created in 1916 by the US journalist Don Marquis. It chronicles the conversations between a cockroach and a cat and was a phenomenal success with a readership who "mistrusted politicians and intellectuals who talked grandly of a radiant future". John Gray reflects on the lessons for today. Producer: Adele Armstrong ,

Following the death of the brilliantly funny Clive James - one of the first presenters of "A Point of View" - this is one of his early talks for the series. In this programme - first broadcast in 2007 - Clive ponders what makes us happy. In his own pursuit of happiness, he sits on a bench in Central Park, relives his first slice of watermelon and considers the wise words of Lawrence of Arabia. Producer: Adele Armstrong Originally produced by Rosie Goldsmith

"In all things erotic", writes Adam Gopnik, "morals and manners run at right angles to each other". Adam argues that the much discussed "sex recession" in the US is primarily a question of misunderstanding between generations - and is certainly not a cause for moral panic! "We misread the sex because the signs change, and we misread the signs to mean that the sex is changing...or even that the sex is vanishing". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Only when I wander, usually by accident, into my spam box", writes Adam Gopnik, "do I find anything resembling actual affection - prose that captures the spark of human sympathy, the language of exquisite deference, that the Enlightenment philosophers insisted was the necessary mucilage of human societies". The excessive courtesy of spam letters is, of course, designed to entrap the reader but why, Adam wonders, have the decencies of human correspondence disappeared from virtually all other forms of communication these days. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Finding, promoting and revaluing women artists through the ages", writes Sarah Dunant, "has been one of the great – albeit still ongoing – cultural success stories of our time". Sarah discusses the undervalued women of art who are being rediscovered in large numbers - and the very modern stories they tell. Producer: Adele Armstrong

For many, three or four years away from home at a residential university is "a kind of rite of passage into adulthood", says David Goodhart. But - given most other countries seem to do fine without it - is it time to think again about this very British tradition? Producer: Adele Armstrong

"It is the most extraordinary thing about humans", writes Sarah Dunant, "that along with our - albeit limited - ability to prepare for an unknown future, we find it very hard to accept the unassailable fact of our own end". Sarah describes her experience talking with a group of strangers one evening at a Death Cafe. Producer: Adele Armstrong

David Goodhart discusses the rise of new "tribes" in British political life. "The old tribes were scarcely visible because they had become so familiar", he writes. "The new ones seem noisy and jarring and all too visible". He calls this new anti-left/right package the "hidden majority" package. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Margaret Heffernan argues that, in the world of technology, there's nothing inevitable about the future. "I'm not saying that automation isn't a big trend or that driverless cars aren't a possibility", she writes, "but there is nothing about them that is inevitable". She believes all these assertions of inevitability have agendas. "If we let Silicon Valley hijack our future", she says, "we gain the comfort of certainty, but lose our freedom". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Childhood really should be the happiest days of our children's lives," writes Michael Morpurgo. "But for so many of them today it is not". Michael Morpurgo reflects on the damage being caused to increasing numbers of children by stress and anxiety. He makes an impassioned plea to schools to do much more to alleviate stress. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Michael Morpurgo reflects on growing old. "You find you are now amongst the last old trees in the park", he writes, "wary of wild winds of fortune that might weaken you or uproot you". But he finds his mentors - the young and the very old. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Let me tell you about dwarfs and being stared at". With a hint of stand up comedy, Tom Shakespeare writes poignantly about what it feels like to be stared at. "The English," he says, "who were once known everywhere for their politeness and decorum, no longer hold back...we do what we want because we consider we have a right". Tom appeals for a rediscovery of "the chain of mutual dependency in which we are still all linked together." Producer: Adele Armstrong

The economist, John Maynard Keynes once said to someone, "When my information changes, I change my mind. What do you do?" Tom Shakespeare argues that we need to reconsider our view that changing your mind is a weakness. "Sticking to your guns", he says, is of little benefit in today's complicated, fast-changing world. Producer: Adele Armstrong

For the September blues, writes Sarah Dunant, "usually time is the healer...you buckle down and get on with it...and by the end of October, things are on track for winter". But not, she thinks, this year. Sarah describes why she feels this year's September malaise has a different quality to it. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Rebecca Stott is fascinated with abandoned or ruined cities. She knows she's in good company - along with the millions of people who've been drawn to the recent mini-series, Chernobyl... or the video game, Metro Exodus. She believes that, in these precarious times, they give us what H.G. Wells once called 'a sense of dethronement'. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"For several centuries", writes Rebecca Stott, "the dominant Western version of Nature has been Mother Nature, benevolent, ever-giving, nurturing, bountiful and compliant". This was later replaced by a less compliant and benevolent image....but we've always perpetuated an idea of Nature as something outside us, something to be mastered. Rebecca argues that we need to rethink our relationship with nature - and see ourselves as in nature and part of nature, not outside of it. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"No matter how many times you see the sun rise", writes Will Self, "it doesn't mean it will definitely rise tomorrow - or, indeed, that you'll be there to see it". Will sets out why he has a problem with theory of all sorts and the negative effect “theory addicts” are having on our contemporary intellectual culture. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Christianity has a lot to answer for," writes Will Self, "when it comes to our estrangement from our bodies - making our evacuations, quite as much as our sexual acts - an anathema in polite society". Will argues that our infantilism in this regard detracts from our engagement with the world. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"That culture can be - and is - being commoditised in the private sector, is a truth universally acknowledged with every ticket and book sale," writes Will Self. But, he argues, the conflating of cultural and financial value has now spread well beyond the private realm. The National Lottery is head of his blame list. "I think of the National Lottery as a sort of reverse Midas-touch, turning everything gold it finances to....rubbish." Producer: Adele Armstrong

"It's well within living memory," writes Sarah Dunant, "that tourism and travel was a wondrous thing." But times have changed: "It feels as if every unnecessary journey we make now has the dull drumbeat of global fragility and climate change in the background." Sarah ponders where foreign travel goes from here. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Could it be that the only way out at this point is a no deal Brexit of the kind that so many dread?" asks John Gray. He argues that it is the logical conclusion of present events. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Of late, words have foregone their meaning or been given meanings they never had", writes Howard Jacobson. Starting with "betrayal" and ending with "the will of the people", Howard sets out to take back sovereignty....over words. "I can't complain", he admits, "of some parties to our great national debate being Little Englanders if I'm a little Languager.....but if each party to a discussion doesn't know what the other is talking about, we might as well not have language at all". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Taking his lead from Duke Ellington, Amit Chaudhuri ponders what we mean by “my people”. He asks whether we need to create new, more inclusive, categories fit for modern times in order to describe the groups we belong to. Producer: Adele Armstrong

David Goodhart argues that earlier eras have much to teach us about group solidarity. He explores the changes that have led to our post-industrial disenchantment. "We cannot and do not want to go back to a past when social horizons and life chances were far more limited", he writes, "but a recognition of some of the merits of earlier eras might help us to see more clearly the pathologies of today's achievement society". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Linda Colley argues that we all have a role to play in resolving our present political difficulties. In tough times, she says, there's a long history of people searching for a "modern man on horseback, a populist hero, who they hope will come and rescue them and make the bad things go away". But she says there are many problems with this - the most obvious one being that "leaders of this sort never properly deliver and usually do immense damage". She concludes that all of us must get involved in the work of effective democratic politics. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Monica Ali discusses the UK's use of immigration detention centres and, in particular, indefinite detention. She argues that, although detention or deportation are sometimes necessary, the policy of indefinite detention is "callous and dehumanising". She believes - as the only place in Europe that allows indefinite detention - the UK should adopt the recommendations of a recent parliamentary report and introduce a 28 day limit. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"If you're a writer of colour", writes Monica Ali, "you're only supposed to write about what people imagine to be your self". "That self might be labelled as Asian writer, or Bangladeshi writer or BAME writer, but it is never labelled simply 'writer' - that would be the true privilege". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that - at a time when public discourse is so polarised - it's vital to keep our public libraries open. "A library card is a powerful weapon to change lives", Val writes. "With it, we learn how to value what we have, to mourn what we have lost and to dream of what we might become". She says that whatever we may hear about the death of libraries, we must ensure their future because they are "one of the few remaining places where a genuine diversity of voices can still be encountered". Producer: Adele Armstrong

David Goodhart argues that recent events show that democracy - far from being in crisis - is actually thriving. And in the aftermath of Teresa May announcing her resignation, David writes, "I think there is a great political prize for a politician or a party, old or new, that can speak across the liberal/small-c conservative value divide". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that if homelessness was classified as an illness, we'd be demanding a cure. She takes a walk round her home city to try to imagine what it would look like through the eyes of a homeless person. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Rebecca Stott imagines a conversation with Darwin about our environmental concerns

"While I would love to find a poetic way into this", writes Sarah Dunant, "I think it best just to spit it out. I'm angry. And I have been angry for quite a while now". Sarah says she doesn't see herself as an angry person - but wonders why aggression and outrage seem to have become so much part of our emotional diet. She proposes some solutions - including an National Anger Day - a great moment of catharsis to help us all be a little less....angry! Producer: Adele Armstrong

"For many Parisians, it's Notre Dame's constancy that's so reassuring" writes Joanna Robertson. "Pass by before dawn, she’s waiting there. Or late at night, amidst the deserted streets, her dark form is holding steady. Notre Dame was inviolable". Joanna Robertson reflects on how the fire is changing that taken-for-granted sight. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"If you have ever tried to scan a bio-metric passport, an e-ticket or just a packet of frozen peas", writes AL Kennedy, "you'll know that using technology can turn, within moments, into a bizarre ritual of presenting, rubbing, re-presenting, murmured prayers and computer generated instructions which lead either to complete defeat or the intervention of human assistance that could have been there all along". She argues that automation must be governed by human needs and strengths. Personal contact, she believes, is more important than ever. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There's one thing I can't bear", writes Rebecca Stott, "and that's being talked AT". Having grown up in a separatist fundamentalist Christian sect called the Exclusive Brethren, she says she's probably rather uniquely sensitised to this. She listened to her father and grandfather holding forth for hours - "3000 hours of male monologues before I was six" she reckons! Rebecca reflects on the art of good conversation. Producer: Adele Armstrong

John Gray reflects on where British politics goes from here. "Whether Brexit is a good or bad idea," he writes, "is no longer the central issue that Britain is facing." "Instead, the question is whether our political system can survive the damage a mishandled Brexit has inflicted on it." Producer: Adele Armstrong Correction: The 1975 referendum took place on the 5th June that year on the UK's continued membership of the European Economic Community which it had joined two years earlier.

Sarah Dunant looks at the queasy relationship between art, finance and corruption. Recent protests by the photographer Nan Goldin and others over "dirty money" have hit the headlines. But Sarah argues that without some of this rather dubious funding, the art world would look very different. "What do you want", she asks. "A clean church and white walls? Because there's no doubt that without all of this lamentable corruption we would not have many of the greatest works of art the world has ever seen." Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zia Haider Rahman on why Brexit has made him feel closer to Britain. He says the referendum has revealed deeper schisms in British society than the lines between native and immigrant. "The sociological explanation", he argues, "might be that by confronting everyone with the variety and complexity of native British identities, Brexit has created space for other British identities". Producer: Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy on why - even with apparent chaos all around us - we can’t afford to despair. "Despairing of justice, positive change, even kindness", she writes, "begins to rob our minds of the capacity to produce those things”. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Tom Shakespeare on why we’re in urgent need of a bit of plain speaking. "I don't mean here to exalt the obnoxious, the downright rude", he writes, "but while civility is a virtue, I think we could do with a little more directness". Producer: Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy questions her love of cookery shows. "That's when I start to feel uneasy, sitting at home staring at entremets and buttercream, three-foot-high cakes made with pints of fresh eggs, because I have this theory...that television tends to memorialise things, just as they fade away. Producer: Adele Armstrong

AL Kennedy reflects on how the British sense of humour is standing up to our present political woes. "Don't get me wrong," she says, "it's nice to make people smile...but possibly Britain is now too funny". She wonders if the rest of the world is still laughing with us. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Will Self asks why our relationship with our bodies - our corporeal self - has become such a distant one. "One thing that becomes screamingly obvious the second we fall ill - and which remains with us day after day, if we're chronically so - is that we are our bodies", he writes. He warns of the dangers of exalting our minds above all else. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"For a long time we forgot about the sea", writes Stella Tillyard. "But it did not forget us. It was always there, like a jilted lover waiting to make a move. And now it is back". She says the seemingly empty and tranquil space of the Mediterranean has been abruptly reanimated, not by nature, but by man. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that referendums have had a devastating effect on our political system. "I am by nature an optimist", she writes. "But I'm really struggling here. We've broken our democracy. I don't know how to fix it and I'm afraid nobody else does either". She says the bottom line is that our political system isn't designed for the polarization that referendums inevitably bring. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Linda Colley reflects on an historic week in British politics. She turns to Lawrence Stone's famous book, "The Causes of the English Revolution", to cast light on the present turmoil. And she asks if the bitter fractures over Brexit could eventually turn out to be the modernizing force the UK needs. Producer: Adele Armstrong

As many Christmas presents start making the surreptitious trip to the charity shop, Stella Tillyard argues that many of us appear to be freeing ourselves from the unfulfilling grip of "things". She asks if - as the earth is dying under the weight or our excesses - we're "reaching a wider, bigger moment: a weariness with acquisition itself". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There is little more infuriating", writes Tom Shakespeare, "than some quotidian website which demands you devise a new 11 letter password, including a capital letter, a lowercase letter, a number and a non-alphanumeric character, just to buy a tee shirt." Tom muses on the near impossible task of remembering an ever-growing number of online passwords. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on the joys of city parks. "I am, and always have been, a lover of city parks", he writes. "A park finishes, that's its beauty. It is circumscribed. If you want more you can walk it twice. If you want less you can slip back out into the city". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Is our taste for righteous self-blown indignation so indurated and inwrought" writes Howard Jacobson, "that we will never again be able to shrug our shoulders, forget who we are and what we believe and embrace people who believe differently?" Howard explores the destructive nature of the Cult of Self. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I listen to Money Box on Radio 4 as others might to a recording of Indonesian gamelan music", writes Will Self, "thrilling to the intricacies, even as I find them altogether alien". Will ponders why personal finance is such an alien concept for him. But his thoughts move to “those hundreds of thousands out there for whom the words ‘personal finance’ are, quite simply, terrifying”. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Two things seem incontrovertible about the mounting environmental catastrophe", writes Will Self.. "It's genuinely unprecedented - and we really are in it together". Will wonders what we should say to our children about global warming and our role in it. He says we have to hope that some sort of collective wisdom can emerge "because the alternative is frankly terrifying: a degraded, dystopic and nakedly Darwinian future". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Roger Scruton argues that political correctness, far from being the cure to our conflicts, is actually the ultimate source of them. The "isms" and "phobias", he says, have been used in order to "put some complex matters beyond discussion, so that only one perspective can be publicly confessed to". "In the world of political correctness", he writes, "there is no presumption of innocence, but only a hunger for targets". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"For most of my adult life", writes Stella Tillyard, "I have had a template which I have used not only to understand myself but also to interpret the world around me. History has been my guide". But today, she says, history appears inadequate "to describe the chaos that now seems to surround us". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Stella Tillyard on how we bury and remember our dead. The idea of immortality, she believes, is taking hold in a new form. "Surely it will not be long before a new form of cemetery is created...a virtual space where all the digital remains of a person will be gathered, curated and tended". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on a very tricky dilemma - which of his possessions can he throw away or put into storage...and which must he keep? "I inhabit a simple moral universe when it comes to sheets of paper", he writes. "Paper with words on, good. Paper with numbers on, bad". But it's more complicated with some other things "How can I release the evidence of me to a storage company somewhere on the North Circular Road!" Producer: Adele Armstrong

Michael Morpurgo reflects on our future connection with the First World War. "How will we pass it on, this torch of history?", he asks. "Those missing men, those wounded, those who lived to count the cost, their story is our story and we must tell it again, keep it alive" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson discusses the politics of dress - form religious clothing ....via too short trousers...to ripped jeans. And why are men so reluctant these days, he wonders, to put on a "little finery"? Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on the end of mooching as a way of life. "Rooting around, doing nothing in particular, walking but not knowing where I was walking to....I can only regret the happy mooching hours of earlier times", writes Howard. He ponders whether our present age of mass anger and disgruntlement is partly a result of our expectations of instant gratification. "We sit, like so many privileged Aladdins, rubbing our smart lamps in full confidence that the cyber genie will appear in ripped trousers and give us all we ask for". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson reflects on maleness in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh story. "With every sniff and grimace" Howard writes of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "it wasn't sorrow or confusion we witnessed but petulance and menace, as though a prize bull had been cornered and in its fury knew only to kick out". "This is not a good time to be a man", he says. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that the sheer scale of tourism on a shoestring is destroying the very thing we crave when we travel. "Our great cities are year-round destinations", she writes, "but when the hordes arrive, cultural simplification is seldom far behind". She says we've grown used to cheap and cheerful instant gratification in many areas of our lives without any thought for the consequences. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid asks if Sadiq Khan’s plan for a Glasgow-style crime reduction unit can have the same transformative effect in London as it did in Scotland. "If we change the script people live by", writes Val, "then surely we should be able to alter our outcomes". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that crime fiction isn't really about murder at all. "We shift people out of their comfort zones and make them squirm", she writes. "But not because we kill people". "It might be murder that sets the wheels in motion, but it's the time and place that lead us through the labyrinth to answers that are not always comfortable". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik examines the issues raised by the row between Serena Williams and an umpire. "The question everyone is asking", writes Adam, is "would he have done the same to a man?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik on why the prefixes we use speak volumes about us. The "pregnant prefix", Adam writes, "is now the giveaway of class identity - and class bound condescension. The "um"s, "like"s, "look"s, "well"s and particularly "so"s of the world tell all". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"To stand in the corridor of a crowded locked ward in a contemporary British mental hospital" writes Will Self, "is still to feel oneself closer to Hogarth's hellish vision of Bedlam, than any enlightened healthcare". Will tells the disturbing story of what happened to a friend, recently detained in a London psychiatric hospital. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare is downsizing. But what to do with his books? He points out that he has nothing like the magnitude of problem faced by the Argentine-Canadian author, Alberto Manguel, a few years ago when he downsized from his medieval presbytery in France to an apartment in New York and had to deal with 35,000 books! Or even the 3,000 books Penelope Lively wrote about recently. But Tom ponders how few of his thousand or so books will be enough to live with. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare on why he rejects the idea of a bucket list. He proposes instead an idea dreamt up by one of his mates - a list that rhymes with bucket but begins with an F. "Let's call it a Forget-it-list" he says. Tom shares the top ten items on his Forget it List this week. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

As we near the end of four years of collective reflection on the First World War, Michael Morpurgo talks of the importance of never taking peace for granted. "We have been looking back, remembering, or trying to", he writes, "because remembering a time and a war that none of us can remember is hard". He discusses one particular plan - the dream of a WW1 soldier - to make a new pilgrims way in No Man's Land. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Michael Morpurgo argues it's time to think again over Brexit. "It is surely time to accept that we have made a mistake", he writes, "that whichever way we voted, things are not turning out the way we expected". "Or are we too proud?" he asks. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Michael Morpurgo on a new initiative to help refugee children. Michael says "it shames us" that Britain in recent years has done so little to help child refugees. "There are fine examples of how our predecessors have shown great kindness towards the suffering of child refugees", he writes. He argues that we now need to follow their example. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray argues that in the Brexit debate, few Remainers seem to have noticed the illiberal and fragmented Europe that has recently come into being. "Illiberal forces are advancing across the European continent", he writes, with hard right politics strengthening their hold in many countries. He says the idea that staying in the European Union is a way of protecting liberal values is simply an "illusion". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Sarah Dunant on her uneasy conundrum over inheritance tax. "Like most intelligent beings", Sarah writes, "I'm passionate about addressing climate change for future generations. But my urgency of commitment also comes from an attachment to one in particular - the next". The desire to hand something on has always been with us, but it raises big moral dilemmas. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik sets out to determine the difference between cliche and universal truth. Via Homer, Shakespeare and the Beatles, Adam observes that "the deepest statements in literature are very near relations to the dumbest statements in life". How can Homer get away with writing twenty lines about laundry?! And end up with an epic poem of great beauty. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self argues that the past is not "a foreign country". He says we often have delusions about the past because of our "failure to grasp how our present shapes our hindsight". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"What would it be like to consciously feel you were nothing but a robotic phenotype", asks Will Self, "pre-programmed to replicate its own integrated genotypic code then become...obsolete?" Taking the contemporary TV series "Westworld" as his starting point, Will explores consciousness, humanity and artificial intelligence. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self once wrote that he could no longer identify as a Jew at all. As anti-Semitism once again comes back to the centre stage of British political life, Will says he's had cause to rethink his position. "Once societies contain a certain proportion of active bigots", he writes, "all rational debate on such matters begins to shut down as everyone reverts - tediously, ineluctably - to type". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Cute mobile machines with arms, hands and big friendly eyes reminding you to take your next pill... or lifting people in and out of wheelchairs" - is this the way to look after a growing elderly population? Sarah Dunant reflects on the crisis in care for the elderly and wonders if artificial intelligence can provide a satisfactory answer. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

On 5th June 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In one of the most famous editions of Radio 4's "Letter from America" - Alistair Cooke gave an eye witness account of the assassination. This is an edited version of the original talk - broadcast on Sunday 9th June 1968.

Amit Chaudhuri on why he believes modern movies have a "spiritual glumness". "Digitisation's subterranean agenda", he says, "is to repress natural light." Unlike old black and white films which were flooded in natural light, he sees the light of digitisation as a grey light. "We're meant to be distracted by drama, violence and special effects; but, crucially, enchantment is withheld from us." Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Sarah Dunant gives a personal view on Ireland's abortion referendum. She remembers one of her first jobs after university - working in a Pregnancy Advisory Service in London as a counsellor - and seeing many young women from the Republic of Ireland who'd come to England seeking an abortion. And the day, some years later, when she went back there, that time as a client.

"Calcutta was born old", writes Amit Chaudhuri. But restoration work of old buildings in the city, he says, "is now often based on the assumption that an old building...must have once looked new, or should have". He says restoration in Calcutta - and in many other cities around the world - must stop fetishizing the new.

"My problem with words is something I have never written down or spoken out about". The writer, Stella Tillyard, talks about her "battle" with dyslexia - from her childhood to now. She vividly describes the "gremlin that takes me by the hand, pulls my confidence away, and makes my heart beat too fast when I have - as now - to read aloud". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare ponders why disabled sexuality is still so often taboo. "Sexuality is a human right", he points out....and says we must set aside the notion that disabled people have "special needs" when it comes to sexuality. "We have all the normal needs of non-disabled people". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"The past is concretised and solidified in things", writes Stella Tillyard "and they vibrate with the experience of their use". Stella tells the story of a small Italian Museum - the Museum of Deportation and Resistance - and reflects on how we remember the past. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare on why we need to rethink our use of the mental illness metaphor. Is President Trump really "mad"?, he asks. Is Brexit "bonkers"? Or is the latest government policy "schizophrenic"? He says we all do it. "Within five minutes of starting to write this talk, I find I'm doing it myself!" But he says we need to break the habit since it shows a profound lack of understanding towards people with real mental health conditions. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Western liberals", writes John Gray, "are horrified by the rise of Xi Jinping". But as China's parliament votes to allow him to be President for life, John Gray argues that the future of the liberal West ironically depends on the continuing success of the world's most powerful authoritarian state. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray says the idea that empire has had its day is one of the delusions of our age. Old empires, he says, are being replaced by new ones - in China, Russia and - he argues - in Europe. He examines the idea of a European "empire of the good" - one that is liberal and democratic throughout. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

There was Chick Lit, then Grit Lit....now it's "Up Lit" - uplifting stories about kindness and community that we all seem to be reading. Kamila Shamsie says she, too, has been carried along with this wave of escapism from "dark times". But she says the idea that "upliftment" should be marketed to the reading public as the only fictional response to difficult times strikes her as problematic. "The best fiction always makes us look at - rather than away from - the world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

At a time when the word "civilisation" is the subject of great debate, Kamila Shamsie explores the meaning of the word through the prism of Indian art. "If you really want to understand how the world's civilisations interact and meld", she writes, "go and look at the art of Gandhara". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare tells us why he believes the phrase "going forward" is an inelegant and negative replacement for "in future". When you talk about the future, he says, you are using a temporal concept. It's a different time from now - the time to come - and "invites us to open out our imaginative space". It offers the possibility that things might be different. "Going forward", on the other hand, is a spatial concept - "nothing but the present, infinitely extended". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"We're in one of those recurring periods in history", writes John Gray, "when the idea of revolution has become appealing again". In this context, John says we should dust off the work of Teffi - one of the best known writers in Russia before the revolution. "I doubt", he says, "if anyone has written with such luminous clarity of what it means to live in a time of chaos". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray argues that, throughout history, highly educated people have often made the worst decisions. Taking George Orwell as his starting point "There are some ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them", he asks why we're still so reluctant today to give credence to the views of ordinary people. He examines the role of universities in teaching critical thought in the humanities and social sciences and wonders if students who have "swallowed this mishmash" really have a better understanding of the world around them. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

In 1967, the philosopher Philippa Foot developed a thought experiment about a runaway trolley. It involved countless dilemmas designed to illustrate human behaviour. But whatever the scenario, the rhetoric was always the same....the overwhelming desire was for the trolley to kill fewer people and save more. AL Kennedy argues that today that rhetoric is in danger of being turned on its head. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Death's not great for selling yoghurt" writes AL Kennedy, "but making Death dance through a culture seems to do more than reinforce dominant ideologies....it can lend power to the powerless". She says for millennia, the human race has searched for everlasting life. Instead of resisting our mortality, she argues that it's empowering to reflect on it. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Winning - isn't it great?" asks AL Kennedy. But she argues that our "winner takes all" mentality is suffocating democracy. "On both sides of the Atlantic, in regimes around the world", she writes, "we can watch the chaotic dissolution of administrations based on winning at any price". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy on why Hollywood has never been a nice place. In 1919, barely three decades after the advent of moving pictures, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and others thought things were bad enough in the studio system to break away and form an independent creative producing collective, United Artists. There are many other examples of Hollywood's woes in the C20th. But in this time of political instability, Alison writes, "don't we need entertainment to get everybody through, aiming higher?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"How long", asks Howard Jacobson, "before the protocols of looking forbid our looking appreciatively at anyone?" He explores the enormous difficulties surrounding the language of appreciation, "no matter whether the viewer in question is a mechanic ogling a pin-up in his workshop or an art critic pausing at a wall of French nudes in the Wallace Collection". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson ponders why misanthropy is out of fashion. "Where have they gone?", he asks, "such great haters of mankind as Juvenal, Swift, Flaubert". Mankind, he believes, has not grown less tribal over time. But instead of a general enemy, he says, "we each have our own individual tormentor - a private phobic for every one of us". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson on why we need to preserve Bohemia. London's Soho, he says, is the nearest the UK has to a Bohemia but "you don't sniff aesthetic licence in the streets of Soho as you once did". But one day recently, writes Howard, Soho recovered its spirit - at the funeral of the leopard-skin jacketed "Prince of Soho". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"It isn't just because they have become platforms for propaganda and interpersonal odiousness that we should declare war on the social media", writes Howard Jacobson. "It is because they reduce all discourse to a shout". Howard appeals for a re-discovery of the subtlety of language and explains why he believes we should leave behind the "frozen wastes of Emojiland". "A thumb up or thumb down culture has given up on the idea that difference of opinion comes in shades, that thought is gradual and graded, that argument is more about adjustment than it is about assertion". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson on the art of the feuilleton....and the joy of the ordinary. He says the feuilletonists - those writers of short observational pieces - show "you don't have to be tendentious to be of consequence". He asks us to step back and seek what's important around us...and even question whether there's such a thing as importance at all. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels", writes Zia Haider Rahman "and taking with it many excellent writers". He says that many novels have already moved in the direction of the televisual - written with an eye to a film or TV adaptation. "If novelists are relinquishing the very things that are exclusively the province of the novel", he writes, "then they are complicit in the demise of the novel".

"It's not merely facts that are under assault in the polarised politics of the UK, the US and other nations twisting in the winds of what some call populism" writes Zia Haider Rahman. "There's also a troubling assault on reason". He argues that authoritarian tendencies know that warping the facts is only a start. "Warping reason and logic and clarity of thought is the holy grail". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"On my computer", writes Zia Haider Rahman, "I have a folder of exchanges with organisations and corporations, a folder called 'Hope'". Zia describes the letters he's written to some of Britain's foremost institutions on their lack of diversity. He says empirical research of cognitive scientists points ever more clearly to the immense difficulty of changing minds. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self reflects on the epidemic of sleeplessness. He explores the "heady cocktail" of modern life that's keeping us awake and argues that we all need the imaginative sustenance of dreams. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self on how wearing glasses has become something that is entirely unremarkable. "Nowadays the acquisition of glasses", he writes, "is simply another opportunity for the conspicuous consumption we've all become so very expert at". But he says there are drawbacks to seeing too clearly. He suggests that a National No Glasses Day might be an idea "so we can all wander about the place in blurry bliss". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"As the years have passed", writes Will Self, "so gnawing on a bloody piece of cow rump has come to seem, to me, more and more...well, vulgar". Via Leviticus and Arcimboldo, he charts his conversion to vegetarianism. And he explains why it's not just personal morals that are "propelling me headlong towards the horror of Quorn"! Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self says we need creative solutions to end institutional misogyny and abuse. "Rather than addressing - as parliamentarians currently are - the business of shutting the stable door after the stallions have run amok", he writes, "we should be thinking about how to keep it closed in the first place". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self on why he loves space.... From childhood dreams of being "strapped into the command module of a Saturn 5 rocket about to blast off from Cape Kennedy" to contemplating 1000-million-star mega-clusters in the sky today, Will describes why space is - for him - "both sublime and restful". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard ponders why email is governed by so few rules and conventions. "Fifty years ago, when I was at high school", Mary writes, "we spent many hours learning how to write a letter". She wonders why no one today seems to be teaching the art of writing a persuasive email. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Andrew Sullivan says a type of "cultural Marxism" is sweeping through American universities. Conservative ideas, he says, are increasingly being banished from campuses and free speech is seen as a delusion. "It's an ideology that is fast resembling a new religion". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Andrew Sullivan says Donald Trump is teaching a generation that the key to advancement in society is to bully, lie, slander and cheat. He examines the long-term effects of the Trump Presidency. "It may be that in the future", Andrew writes, "his appalling conduct will mark a cautionary tale - and future candidates and presidents will learn not to follow in his steps". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Andrew Sullivan on how America has become "a truly tribal society". "I've lived here since the Reagan era", he writes, "and there have been plenty of divides. But none quite as tribal or as rooted in non-negotiable identity as this one". He warns of what the outcome might be and reminds the listener that a liberal democracy is always a precarious enterprise. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Monica Ali with a personal take on why she believes the history of the British Empire must be taught in our schools. She recalls a conversation with her father where he told her that at primary school he'd been taught about the Black Hole of Calcutta and how the British gave India railways. At secondary school - post Independence and Partition, her Dad's history curriculum changed dramatically...it ceased to cast a rosy glow over British rule. When she was at school, Monica was taught nothing about Empire. And with her children, the subject barely got a look-in. "Post Brexit, when the fantasy of a small nation decoupled from the world has never been greater", she writes, "it is time to put the British Empire firmly into the school curriculum". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Authenticity, writes Monica Ali, has become the yardstick by which we measure the value of much of our day-to-day lives. "In this hyper-mobile, hyper-connected world" she says, "the cult of authenticity is flourishing". But what does it mean to be "authentic"? Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Monica Ali describes her desire for vengeance after her son was robbed by two boys on mopeds. She reflects on the recent surge in moped crime and what can be done to stop it. She says the criminals involved in this new brand of crime are nearly all children and, whatever our desire for justice, "crackdowns on children can never provide the entire - the right - solution to the problem". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"European society", says Sir Roger Scruton, "is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and has found nothing to put in its place save the religion of human rights". But, he argues, this new "religion" delivers one-sided solutions since rights favour the person who can claim them - whatever the moral reasons for opposing them. He says Europe needs to rediscover its Christian roots. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Roger Scruton asks: "What does the Tory Party really stand for?" He says the Conservative party at present is muddling along without a philosophy. But he argues that, far from being the 'nasty party', the most fundamental belief underpinning Conservative policies historically is the idea of responsibility towards others. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Roger Scruton looks at the impact of Harry Potter on our world view. "People are starting to live in a kind of cyber-Hogwarts", he says, "a fantasy world in which goods are simply obtained by needing them, and then asking some future Prime Minister to wave the magic wand". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik muses on the art of parenting and the challenges of getting it right. "Too much praise... or too little?", he wonders. "You have to be hands off, smiling" but at the same time "engaged, unsparing in honesty". He concludes that raising children is an art, not a science or a craft. "They are the artists of their own lives but we can, we must, teach them the art of living". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik reflects on why musical theatre makes its makers miserable. He should know - he's just finished an eight week run of a musical he wrote. He concludes that while films, for example, have a "natural author" in the shape of the director, a musical doesn't and "a seven-person creative team of equals", he says can never be harmonious. But there's a lot of fun to be had along the way.... Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"I have lived long enough now", writes Adam Gopnik, "to see several absolutely horrific epochs come and go...looking much less absolutely horrific once they're gone." He reflects on how Donald Trump's presidency will affect our sense of what constitutes normality. "Are we every day normalizing behaviour", he asks, "that will bring an end to normalcy itself". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik reflects on why he turned to marijuana to relieve his pain during a recent bout of shingles. His 17 year old daughter was horrified. But Adam concludes that wise drug policy accepts the existence of intoxicants and says "this tale of unshaven debauchery" has made him realise, for the first time, how much his own "hyper disciplined, driven life" had taken out of him. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"You can't call him crazy, because it isn't fair to crazy people", writes Adam Gopnik. "You can't compare him to a four-year-old because four-year-old children are not in fact tyrannical or egotistical". Six months into Donald Trump's presidency, Adam Gopnik searches - almost in vain - for a descriptive category to fit. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"I will now pause for a full two seconds to allow you to throw things at the radio", begins Adam Gopnik. He's working hard, he claims, at a literary festival in Capri. While there he goes in search of a white staircase - the subject of his favourite painting in the world. As he searches, he reflects on art, life and "the sketchbook of the twenty first century", the iphone. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"It seems indisputable, to me", writes Will Self "that what makes it possible for our attractions to each other to be as deep and profound as they are, is some sort of difference - whether it be given, or something we create". Will reflects on what a truly gender-fluid society might look like. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self gives a very personal view of high-rise buildings in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster. "As a commentator on the built environment", Will writes, "I've been too wry, too cynical and too disengaged over the past twenty years". "Grenfell Tower", he says, "was the bonfire of any remaining civic vanity in London ". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson reflects on the political ironies that are emerging following the election. What should our response be to losing politically?Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"The election has left many people wondering if politics has morphed into a wholly new condition" writes John Gray. He reflects on whether politics really has been turned upside down by a momentous election. He argues that the situation is not unprecedented but says "the election has punctured what was the ruling illusion of our age - the belief that we'd left behind the ideological antagonisms of the past". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"It's late in the year to be making a resolution I'm probably going to break, but the words have to be spoken" writes Howard Jacobson. "I hereby renounce Middlemarch". Howard reveals what lies behind his obsession for George Eliot's greatest novel and why he can't stop hymning its praises and quoting chunks of it from memory. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson reflects on his home city's response to the Manchester attack. What confronts the city now, he says, is dealing with the fact that the perpetrator came from within itself. "All our cities shelter the same boy", he writes, "studiously immersed in the same story. And if we didn't know it before, stories can kill". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

As the season of literary festivals gets underway, Howard Jacobson tells us not to be lured by their appearance of being civilized. "The prevailing tone of sweet concord shouldn't be allowed to disguise the violent nature of creativity", he says. They're a fiercely competitive business for writers, he believes. "To write is to reconceive the world and only a God, or someone acting like a God, can do that...You don't want some other two-bit deity coming along and bagging the credit for what you've done". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson speaks up in defense of the metropolitan liberal elite. He ponders why the word "elitist" has acquired such negative connotations in some fields - but not in others. "It makes no sense to me to love the best when they are footballers or the SAS, but not when they are thinkers or even politicians".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson argues that talk of the dangers of artificial intelligence is premature. "The idea that if we feed enough lines of literature into a computer it will eventually be able to write its own Iliad", he writes, "is as preposterous as the old fancy that if a sufficient number of monkeys were given a sufficient number of Olivettis they would eventually hammer out a monkey Macbeth". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

A L Kennedy commends paying attention to voices as a way to discern truth telling. "Listening to our media, our public voices, as if we're listening to people in our everyday lives, holding them to that standard and not their own can help us to know when we're being driven towards the sound of a faked emotion or spun a tale."Producer: Sheila Cook.

A L Kennedy reflects on the way our past shapes our present and our future. "As groups we get trapped in our pasts, not quite repeating them, but sometimes forcing our futures out of shape for the sake of their ghosts."Producer: Sheila Cook.

AL Kennedy extols the virtues of reading and its power to encourage respect for the value and sovereignty of other people's existence. "It allows you to look and feel your way through the lives of others who may apparently be very other - and yet here they are - inside your head."Producer: Sheila Cook.

AL Kennedy says we should reject the media outlets that peddle only bad news whether real or fake in ever shriller voices, depicting a world of unremitting awfulness."Fake facts - let's just call them lies - and deceptively selective coverage have to be peddled with greater than average outrage and shock just to keep their frailty from being examined too closely."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare argues that viewing dementia as a disability could help those living with the condition win greater rights. In the last few decades, he writes, we have seen many impairment groups unite to demand a better deal from government. "But when it comes to dementia, we are still thinking in terms of disease and tragedy and passivity". He believes treating dementia as a disability - with all the legal ramifications that involves - may help us change our attitudes and our policies. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare reflects on how all the political populists who now occupy our imaginations are master story tellers.People need stories and these stories appeal to us, he says. But he argues that as well as persuasive stories, more than ever we need facts."The plural of anecdote is not data, as a professor used to tell me", he writes.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare on why - in today's world of uncertainty and fear - it may give us some political consolation to remember that while everything positive in life is short-lived, so too is everything negative. He argues that believing that the best is behind us stops us making the most of present opportunities. "To wallow in the past is to be sentimental, to seek an impossible return", he writes. "Our task is to create something different but equally fulfilling in future".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Stella Tillyard looks at the phonomenon of the "idling brain" - when the brain is supposedly at rest. She ponders what it means that we have no idea what's running through the minds of the people closest to us and argues that - in an increasingly fractured world - knowing what's going on in each other's minds might help us understand each other. Scientists, she points out, have taken up the challenge. One group of psychologists estimate that people spend somewhere between 25 and 50% of their waking hours engaged in thoughts unrelated to the here and now. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Human beings shape their perceptions according to their beliefs", writes John Gray, not the other way round. He says people "will persuade themselves to believe almost anything, no matter how far-fetched, if it enables them to preserve their view of the world". He asks how we can best come to terms with the realisation that the world is frighteningly unpredictable. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray look at the history of populism. He argues that modern-day populism has largely been created by centre parties who have identified themselves with an unsustainable status quo. He looks at how populism is likely to play out in the upcoming elections in France and Holland. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray assesses why experts failed to predict recent seismic events. He says they operated under the long-held but mistaken belief that history unfolds according to predictable patterns. "Human events have no overall direction", he writes, "and history obeys no laws". He discusses how we can prepare ourselves for the "unknowable future". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"I haven't been visiting schools and drowsing during headteachers' PowerPoint presentations for nothing this past quarter century", writes Will Self. "I know full-well that the purpose of both British education and British employment is the same: to keep us busy and purposive from cradle to grave". Will Self explores how the worlds of work and education have become seamlessly merged with each other. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray examines what lies behind our desire to protect our "way of life". "If people are forced to choose between insecurity and a promise of stability through tyranny", he writes, "many will opt for tyranny".He argues that spending vast amounts of money on "grandiose wars while large sections of our own people languish in neglect and despair can only leave our societies more vulnerable to extremist demagogues". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self argues that, at a time when we're observing "our so-called leaders, fretting and strutting on the world stage", it really is a worthwhile exercise to spend time worrying about why we're here. "I'd argue", he writes, "that to engage fully with the weird mystery of being is to at least take the helm of your own ship - even if its course is determined by some automatic pilot". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self says it's time for schools to stop "teaching to the test". He argues that in the contemporary wired world, "it seems obvious that young people need more than ever to know how to think outside the boxes, rather than simply tick them". There's no reason, he says, to shackle children "to the go-round of memorization and regugitation". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self explores the significance of the art work that adorns the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. He asks what such public art projects represent in this "festival of ephemerality our society seems to have become". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"We're constantly being reminded that this is a democracy", writes Will Self "one, indeed, which we should take back control of". But in the arena of national defence, he says, the role of the citizen "is relegated to that of a guilty bystander, his fate in the hands of the state's hirelings". Will Self argues for the re-introduction of National Service to invigorate British democracy. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik revisits a much explored subject - the differences between patriotism and nationalism. In the light of the events of the past year, he questions why the politics of nationalism appear irresistible today. He wonders "if we cannot now see that patriotism and nationalism have a more fluid, a more organic, a more connected relationship that we might want to imagine". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Perhaps we should try, before the year's out", writes Howard Jacobson, " to agree on the International Word of 2016 - the word that most describes where we've been these last 12 months". "Post-truth", "Trump" and "Farage" are all in the running. But in the end, Jacobson's chooses "people" as in "the people have spoken" for his Word of the Year. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The Christmas song "Baby It's Cold Outside" has become the cause of intense controversy in the US where it's been described as a "hymn to rape" . "As the father of a teenage daughter" writes Adam Gopnik, "I will stand down to no one in the fight against sexual assault of all kinds". But, he argues, the worst thing liberal minded people can do is "allow their liberalism to become infected with puritanism". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"I work hard so that my teenage daughter can have holes in all her clothes", writes Adam Gopnik. He reflects on the greater significance of designer holes in jeans...and why it's a trend to be celebrated. "I know what you are asking", Gopnik says. "How can you be rattling on about torn jeans...when our world, by your own account, may be coming to an end?" ! "Liberty large is what we fight for, but the little liberties of life - and the arbitrariness of fashion is one of life's most engaging little liberties - are part of the way we recognize that the larger liberty exists". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik - a lifelong fan of Bob Dylan - muses on Dylan's "utterly predictable lack of gratitude" towards his Nobel Prize."The terrible and intriguing truth", he writes, is that "people are tragically impressed by indifference...and pitifully contemptuous of the charming". The Dylans of this world, Gopnik says "impress us as the true egotists we secretly are". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik muses on liberals and liberalism - and why liberalism is so despised. "At a moment when it seems likely to be drowned out in America" he writes, "I shall make a small forlorn effort to speak its truths". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik asks what hope is there of a liberal, open society in America during the next 4 years. He argues that Americans must hold to the faith that liberal politics really do rise from the ground up.

Roger Scruton assesses some of the reasons behind Donald Trump's victory. And he asks why many who intended to vote for Donald Trump would not have confessed to their intention. "They wanted change," writes Scruton. "A change in the whole agenda of government".

Adam Gopnik reflects on why he believes a victory for Donald Trump would be a disaster for America. The American Presidential election "posits a simple eternal human confrontation between sensible and crazy", he writes. He says we must not pretend that the rise of Trump is essentially a "people's revolt" or a movement of the dispossessed. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson argues that dissatisfaction with life is essential for the health of the human spirit. "It might come to outweigh other emotions to the point where it is detrimental to the vigour of an individual or a society, but without it there is no vigour at all." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson applauds the granting of an appeal by Shylock in a mock trial in Venice as a symbolic revoking of a bad decision in Shakespeare's play. "It's natural to rage against wrong decisions, miscarrriages of justice or the inclemencies of nature, but the more fanciful of us go further and imagine that some power will intervene and make things right again." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson applauds the playwright Tom Stoppard's attack on the ignorance of the average audience, arguing we should not only aspire to be educated ourselves but should not be offended by the evidence of education in others."We are an entangled species; we are not to be unknotted easily. When we turn our backs on difficulty in art, we turn our backs on who we are."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson deplores the fashion for "whooping" as a mark of approval, and sees it as a species of social blackmail."The whoop is on an errand to keep things simple. That which strikes audiences as true because it is what they think already, elicits a whoop." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray reflects on the controversial "safe spaces" policy being pursued by some universities.It may have been devised to ensure that people of all identities are entitled to a tolerant environment ...but John Gray argues that the policy not only threatens a fundamental liberal value but represents a demand to be sheltered from human reality. He says the point of education used to be to learn how to live well in full awareness of the disorder of life. "A lack of realism ...was considered not just an intellectual failing but also a moral flaw". He says we ignore this lesson of history at our peril. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray assesses what lies behind the Trump phenomenon and the remarkable political upheaval that could - possibly - see Donald Trump propelled into the White House. From the start, he says, Trump's campaign has been an audacious experiment in mass persuasion. "His uncouth language, megalomaniac self-admiration and strangely coloured hair....all deliberately cultivated" to help him profit from the popular resentment against the elites of the main parties. "Whatever happens", writes Gray, "there will be no return to pre-Trump normalcy". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Wheelchair user, Tom Shakespeare, reflects on what it feels like to be dependent on others. He says care often leaves the recipient in a devalued state. He calls for society to respond to the challenge of delivering help "without creating domination and infantilisation" and for care to be funded properly. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray muses on what his idea of heaven is....and why it shouldn't be a perfect world. History teaches us that trying to create a perfect society leads to hell on earth, he writes. "But dreams of a perfect world don't fail because human beings are incurably flawed. They fail because human beings are more complicated and interesting that their dreams of perfection".

Tom Shakespeare - a new dog owner - reflects on what dogs can teach us about contentment. Remembering his childhood obsession with the Peanuts cartoon, he quotes Snoopy "My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm Happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?" Dogs, writes Tom, have a much greater capacity for contentment than people and we can all learn from this.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self reflects on the joys of genealogy - truffling in census returns and parish records and establishing "our genuine links to multiple generations of nonentities"! "As a passionate Londoner", he writes, "I wanted to establish when the first Self had arrived in the city". Entire family sagas, he says, are today vanishing into thin air, in an era of nuclear families. Gone are those generations of extended families where over a cup of tea, the same old stories were told about the same old relatives. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self explores what's wrong with modern art. "I've been responsible for a fair amount of absolutely total nonsense in my time", he writes, but says most contemporary art is little more than "overvalued tosh and useless ephemera". Instead of a world where Russian oligarchs "buy artworks by the metric tonne and plaster them on the walls of their vulgar houses", he calls for a genuine understanding of art where - once again - we become "capable of conveying and explaining the subtle ambiguities of genuine art". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self explains why he finds it hard to always act his age."To alternate between being an errant child and a corrective adult must, I think, be intrinsic to the human condition." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare gives a very personal view of the implications for society of a prenatal screening technology due to be announced shortly. Tom inherited the genetic condition, achondroplasia, or restricted growth from his father and passed it on to both his children. Soon we will have to decide, he writes, what sort of people we are prepared to accept in our families and in our society. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Via steak and kidney pie and a spot of Morris dancing, AL Kennedy reflects on Englishness...at a time, she writes, "when Englishness is struggling to decide what it can be". She appeals to England - with all its different views, customs, history and opinions - to "treasure yourself, all of yourself". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy ponders the importance of facts... in a world dominated by opinion. "The Chilcot report highlights how a war can conjure the demons it promised to suppress", she writes "because facts were dodged or massaged and fantasy outcomes were taken as certainties". While facts may be grim, "avoiding them puts us all at increased risk". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The historian Mary Beard presents the last in the series in which some of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit". Mary Beard asks whether the referendum result will change our cultural identity. And as she sits at a David Gilmour concert in the ancient amphitheatre at Pompeii, Mary reflects on the "New Europe that we British seem to be about to lose". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Peter Hennessy sees the UK's vote to leave the European Union as the biggest strategic shift in British history since the Second World War, rivalled only by the disposal of the British Empire. As a consequence, we need a serious national conversation using a new political vocabulary to tackle "multiple and overlapping anxieties". "If we do hold that national conversation, rise to the level of events and draw on those wells of civility and tolerance, we may yet surprise ourselves - and the watching world - by the quality, the care and the foresight of what we do and what we say." Producer: Sheila Cook.

In these special editions of A Point of View, five of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become.Today, the philosopher Roger Scruton reflects on democracy after Brexit and explains why he feels it is the ordinary people of this country who care about democracy, not the urban elites."The referendum gave these people a voice", writes Scruton, "and what they have told us is that their country, its laws and its sovereignty are more important to them than the edicts of anonymous bureaucrats striving to rule from nowhere".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

In these special editions of Radio 4's long-running essay programme, A Point of View, five of Britain's leading thinkers, give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become.Today, the philosopher John Gray who has presented on Radio 4 for many years, argues that Britain should look to Brexit as a new beginning in which it "can throw off the dead weight of a failing European project". He says we should now accept the new opportunities given to us and "make our home in a more spacious world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The philosopher Onora O'Neill criticises the standard of public debate on both sides of the European Union decision and asks how this democratic deficit can be repaired. "The disarray that we now witness, and the retractions, revelations and recriminations that spill out on a daily basis, show that large parts of each campaign failed to communicate with the public, did not offer adequate or honest accounts of the alternatives, and did not provide the basic means for voters to judge the real options, the real opportunities or the real risks." This is the first of a series of special editions of Radio 4's long-running essay programme, A Point of View, in which five of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become. Producer: Sheila Cook.

"Transitions shake us" writes AL Kennedy. "and you don't need me to tell you that as a nation we're sharing one". Alison reflects on how disturbing transitional times can be ...and writes of her own personal experience and that happening in post-Brexit Britain. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The philosopher John Gray argues that Brexit will have a greater impact on the EU than it will on the UK. And he predicts the British experience is likely to be repeated across much of continental Europe over the next few years. But, he says, rather than recriminating about what is past, we should be looking to the future. "We find ourselves in a new world", he writes. "Why not make the best of it?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy reflects on how being able to communicate clearly is the work of a lifetime. She argues that the present school testing regime could have a catastrophic effect on our children's ability to find their voice.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Roger Scruton says the fashion for government by petition is out of step with representative democracy in which representatives are not elected to relay the opinions of their constituents but to represent their interests. "The common good, rather than mass sentiment, should be the source of law, and the common good may be hard to discover and easily obscured by crowd emotions.".

Roger Scruton says we should protect the English countryside by making beauty our priority when we build new houses while in towns we should reverse the damage done in previous decades. "Surely the time has come to tear down the post-war estates, and to recover the old street lines that they extinguished." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self argues that instead of holding onto money until old age, we should give children their inheritance when they're most in need of it. "Forget the old right/left, rich/poor division" he says, "nowadays the greatest divergence lies between the old and the young". And he asks how can we in conscience go on denying the young the opportunity to clear up the mess we've ? for the most part quite inadvertently ? created for them. "Give it all away!" is his plea. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self - with a nod to the "valetudinarian pop-person, Morrissey" - poses the question "Does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind?" Before 1960, he says, "a Briton could probably go their entire life without encountering a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst - let alone a modish psychotherapist". But not any more. Will ponders what role these "psy-professions" play in contemporary Britain. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Self-confessed "digi-drunkard" Will Self on predictive texting, spellchecking and algorithms. Will tries to convince himself - and us - that his use of technology is considered and practical, not the "glug-glugging of the cyber sozzled"! But, he admits, "a great river of denial runs through me...as I fidget and tweezer my way through the glassy looking-glass and into the virtual world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

50 years after one of the worst floods in Florence's history, Sarah Dunant reflects on the events of 1966 and the work still going on to save some of the greatest art in the world. She talks to some of those who were there about their memories of the human and cultural catastrophe. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

On a visit to her local flea market in Florence, Sarah Dunant stumbles across a love letter. The date: November 1918. There's the challenge of the Italian of course....but the biggest hurdle, she says, was the handwriting. It was "as if a conscientious ant had climbed out of the ink pot and then wound its way across every millimetre of the page".Admiring the tiny handwriting with hardly any space between the lines, Sarah reflects on the modern day demise of handwriting. "Regimented key strokes in various type fonts" are no substitute, she argues, for the beauty and emotion contained in handwriting. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Taking a tour of some recent blockbuster art exhibitions, Sarah Dunant reflects on the importance of context for us to properly appreciate art.She argues that increasingly we're sold art as a list of superstars. "To grab the headlines, put big numbers through the turnstiles, means focusing on the stars" she writes. But understanding the great Renaissance masterpieces demands an understanding of the intellectual climate that produced them. A scantily clad Ursula Andress emerging from the sea holding a conch will not really help us understand Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Sarah Dunant takes an historical look at avarice. She argues that the revelations in the Panama Papers are just the latest proof that man's greed is woven into the human psyche. Dante gave it a harder time than lust...two centuries later, it's one of Machiavelli's central themes and many of the greatest works of art exist only because they were paid for by rich, often corrupt, figures, many within the church. And - Sarah asks - aren't many of us, to some extent, guilty? Can any of us really say that when it comes to money we know when enough is enough? Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self reflects on our sense of the meaning of time and the changes in our perception brought about by new technologies."Obviously the world wide web and the internet have played a key role in making each and every one of us a little hot spot of Nowness: over the past twenty years as more and more people have chosen to spend more and more of their time in this virtual realm, so we've sought to furnish its fuzzy immensity with our memories, individual and collective."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self draws no comfort from an alleged drop in violence in the real world, as he sees us increasingly expressing our innate tendency towards violence in the virtual and online worlds. " I don't think watching violence drives us to commit violent acts - I think it is a violent action in and of itself."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Finding himself on a restricted diet, Will Self reflects on the rise of food allergies and intolerances which used to fail to invoke his sympathy. "It's not so much that I doubt the physiological component of all this tummy rumbling and grumbling, it's more that the social and cultural aspects of the malaise have grown still louder in the past half decade.".

Adam Gopnik struggles to keep his New Year's resolutions to find a "monastic moment" in the day to meditate and listen to good music. "What gets in the way of our dream of practising detachment..is our daily practice of attachment, which may be the most human thing about us." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik deplores the fashion for attacking so-called "cultural expropriation" as in the recent fuss over American students wearing sombreros at a Mexican theme party. "Cultural mixing - the hybridization of hats, if you like - is the rule of civilisation not some new intrusion within our own. Healthy civilisations have always been mongrelized, cosmopolitan, hybrid, corrupted and expropriated and mixed.".

Adam Gopnik thinks future generations will be as appalled by some practices that are accepted today as we are by aspects of the past."Even as we condemn our moral ancestors, we need to hold our ears to the wind, and listen for the faint sounds of our descendants telling their melancholy truths about us."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik says the secret of happiness lies in unexpected pleasures, like finding yoghourt is vanilla when you expect it to be plain."Are the intrinsic qualities of something more powerful than the context in which we perceive it, or are what we call intrinsic properties really only the effect of expectations and surprise?" Producer: Sheila Cook.

Helen Macdonald has made her name writing about nature and birds of prey. So why has she become so fascinated with the recent Star Wars movie that she's been to see it six times? In her first "A Point of View" she tries to get to the bottom of her obsession and wonders whether it's all down to nostalgia or something else. Producer: Richard Vadon.

After hearing a former political prisoner in South Africa and a holocaust survivor tell their stories, Tom Shakespeare concludes that personal experience is the most powerful form of expertise."Hearing their testimonies affected me more deeply than any lecture, book or film. They were unforgettable authentic encounters."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare is concerned by the growth in cosmetic procedures and the pressure more and more women and girls, in particular, feel to conform to a face and body type. "My anxiety is about the society that first generates body dissatisfaction and then provides surgery as the solution to that cultural problem".Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare argues that we need a new national anthem, one that celebrates what's great about the whole country, reflects the diversity of the population and the values of modern society. He suggests that existing anthem-like hymns such as Jerusalem, or the likes of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory won't do. Jerusalem, for example, talks of walking on England's mountains green, excluding the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish. A new anthem, written and composed for the purpose, would actually mean something and would make us proud of what's great about the United Kingdom. It would be in tune with our times. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Tom Shakespeare argues the House of Lords should be completely reformed and turned into a Senate of 300 members (down from over 800). He suggests they should consist of 100 politicians, selected in proportion to parties' showing in the previous general election, 100 cross-benchers, chosen for their expertise, and 100 members of the public, selected from the electoral roll like juries. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Howard Jacobson does not feel complimented when someone describes him as "wise". He would sooner have understanding, akin to that of Shakespeare."What's wrong with wisdom is it implies stasis, as though our greatest faculties of cognition and intuition are at their journey's end, have attained a peak of complacency from which they gaze down imperturbably on the small vanities of man.".

Howard Jacobson would sooner see Radio 4's Thought for the Day more not less religious and argues that humanists and the religious can meet in sermonizing when it's of the majesty of a great preacher like John Donne. "I fall to wondering what exactly non-religious needs are, and whether, by insisting on a distinction between the religious and the non-religious, humanists aren't making an unpardonably limiting assumption about both." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson recalls the healthy mongrel mix of traditions in his Jewish family's festivities at Christmas."Let's rejoice in the eclecticism, I say, and find in the varieties of ways people choose to mark or miss the point of Christmas the universal love that is its message."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Sarah Dunant reflects on the nature of protest against the threat of terrorism and the threat of climate change and their coming together in the city of Paris."How do we find a sense of potency in the face of terror, how do we embrace life when threatened with death, how do we champion our future against those who claim they will just carry on dying until they win? Perhaps what is needed is mental as much as military action." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Sarah Dunant welcomes Canada's plans to fully legalise marijuana and sees the benefits of a booming cannabis products industry in the American states where it's already legal."It costs society too much, in all senses, to criminalise so many people - and disproportionately young black or Latino men - for doing something, which legalised could create jobs and help balance the budget."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Sarah Dunant sees a new crisis in the Catholic church as a result of unchanged policy over divorce, homosexuality, celibacy and the role of women. "Men may truly believe in God but for most of them chastity is too big an ask and if enforced leads, at worst, to abuse and at best to a clergy and hierarchy ignorant of, and often unsympathetic to, the problems of being human. From there it's but a skip and a jump to the role of women and their exclusion from the heart of the church."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton deplores the tyranny of banal and ubiquitous pop music. Young people, above all, need help to appreciate instead the great music of our civilisation."Unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognize the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton says we must feel free to express opinions and to make jokes that others may find offensive; censoring them them only leads to a loss of reasoned argument. "The policing of the public sphere with a view to suppressing 'racist' opinions has caused a kind of public psychosis, a sense of having to tip-toe through a minefield, and to avoid all the areas where the bomb of outrage might go off in your face." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton argues that the law on freedom of speech ought to protect those who express heretical views and not be used to close down debate. "Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on our relationship with gardens and gardening.

Will Self says we can't pretend that looks don't matter or that everyone is beautiful, including the obese."That different cultures, during different eras, have found different aspects of the human form beautiful is another straw the sub-gorgeous clutch for." Producer:Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the significance of names, including his own. "We desire to be recognised for who we really are, and seek out in our very ascription the means of uniting our intimate identities with our social selves.".

Will Self sees our love of habit as a shield against the unexpected in life."For us, custom, and its bespoke application, habit, are integral to our lives; because - or so we sort of reason - if we fill up our days with oft repeated actions, we can shut our ears to the siren song of contingency."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the various reasons for his inability to sleep soundly any more."I concede there is something about our contemporary existence, especially in big, bustling cities, which seems altogether inimical to a good night's rest."Producer: Sheila Cook.

P J O'Rourke sizes up the candidates aspiring to be the President of the United States. "Who are all these jacklegs, high-binders, wire-pullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of our nation's highest office?" Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray warns about the dangers of science that attempts to enhance human abilities. He says such knowledge can jeopardize the very things that make us human. More than 70 years after C.S. Lewis wrote "The Abolition of Man", John Gray argues that Lewis' questions are even more relevant today than they were then. "The scientists of Lewis's generation were dissatisfied with existing humankind" he writes. "Using new techniques, they were convinced they could design a much improved version of the species". But Gray says that while the scientific knowledge needed to remould humanity hardly existed then, it is rapidly developing at the present time. He believes that the sciences of bioengineering and artificial intelligence carry serious risks. "If at some unknown point in the future it becomes feasible to remould ourselves according to our dreams" he writes, "the result can only be an impoverishment of the human world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray looks to history to argue that it's time to rethink today's narrow view of atheism. He ponders the lives of two little known atheists from the past - the nineteenth century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and the Somerset essayist and novelist Llewelyn Powys. He says their work shows how atheism can be far richer and subtler than the version we're familiar with. "The predominant strand of contemporary unbelief , which aims to convert the world to a scientific view of things, is only one way of living without an idea of God" writes Gray. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray recalls the life and work of the thriller writer Eric Ambler and finds uncomfortable echoes of today's society in the pages of his novels. "What they reveal is a world ruled by financial and geopolitical forces that care nothing for the human individual. Most unsettlingly, this world is unmistakably European." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray sees the European currency as a misconceived project from the outset and thinks the austerity policies imposed on Greece are destructive and self defeating. "Attempting to maintain the euro at any cost can only result in mounting desperation, which will seek expression in violence if no practicable policies are on offer to ameliorate the situation." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik reflects on the reason for our obsession with long - form television series and sees a link to the current brevity of all our other forms of discourse. "As communication, public and political and spiritual, becomes ever more condensed - as newspapers close and are replaced exclusively with Instagram feeds, as texting becomes ever more enciphered and as the demotic slang of teens, which we will all speak sooner or later, becomes ever more abbreviated then we can expect, or dread, ever longer compensatory popular narratives." Producer: Sheila Cook.

A weekly reflection on a topical issue.

Peter Aspden thinks the powerful influence of Greece, both ancient and modern, on European sensibilities makes the current economic crisis full of emotionally charged symbolism. "I often think that the hostility between Greece and its harshest current antagonist Germany, for example, is best seen as a furious tiff between former lovers." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Although he loves to read collections of private letters by public figures, Adam Gopnik feels disturbed and offended by the lip-smacking ease with which people thumb through Hillary Clinton's or Amy Pascal's once private e-mails and asks what are the proper limits of privacy in the Internet age. Are we putting at risk part of the future historical record? "The practice of showing what life is really like later depends on keeping some parts of life clandestine while they're happening". Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik wonders why religious people are feeling "persecuted" following the US Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Can a religious person free to practice their religion actually feel persecuted? Are they just offended by the practices of a pluralistic society, or do they have a point? "Their complaint is, in its way, one that seems fixed in the political choices of the late Roman Empire: the only alternatives they can recognise as real are either power or persecution. Either you are the magistrate making rules, or else you are the martyr being sacrificed to them." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik's ten-year family reunion brings into focus the passage of time. "The inescapable material of any family reunion, British or American, Jewish or Celtic, is always the same: each offering a hair-raising or hair-losing seminar on the effects of time on the human body and soul, and especially on the difference between aging and growing." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik's experience of writing a libretto casts light on the mysterious relationship between words and music. "Sung words belong more fully to the world of ritual and routine, of incantation and mother's murmurings, than to the fully lucid and well-lit world of argument." Producer:Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik found himself supplanted as his family's waffle maker while he was away on a trip and concludes there are no indispensable people in any organization (or family) anywhere, though we all like to imagine that there are. There are only instructions on the side of the box, which anyone can follow. Producer: Sheila Cook.

"A school's core strength is that it's a school" writes AL Kennedy. She argues that the "monetisation" of learning - where its value is assessed in purely monetary terms - risks destroying the very essence of learning. She says we need to rethink this "quiet mess" before it's too late.

"I'm getting old. Not older, just old" begins AL Kennedy. Through childhood memories of drinking Creamola Foam, her grandfather's voice ...and being kicked by a boy in the shin during playtimes, she reflects on how age changes our perception of the past and the future. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy takes the recent death of a friend - the screenwriter Gill Dennis - as her starting point in an exploration of courtesy. "When courtesy walks into a room," she writes, "it seems to turn a light on". She contrasts this with a striking example of discourtesy she encountered on a train journey. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy says the election results in Scotland reflect a surge in political engagement in which people continue to feel they have the power to make a difference. "A significant percentage of Scotland's voters on both sides of the independence question currently seem intent on reverse-engineering a democracy by beginning with hope." Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine says when Barack Obama's critics accuse him of acting like a king they're forgetting the origins of the office of President. "From the outset, the American presidency was vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant that it really was a form of elective kingship." Producer: Sheila Cook.

The American writer PJ O'Rourke gives his view of the UK election. "In the once solidly red-rosette glens and braes and lochs and heather the Scottish National Party snatched the sporran, ripped the kilt off and walked away in the ghillie brogues of Labour"Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the merits of youth and age in our political leaders and finds the current set taking their parties into next week's election strikingly young. "It's a curious and unexplained paradox that in earlier times, when life expectancy was much lower than it is today, politicians were generally much older; whereas nowadays, when life expectancy is much greater, it's widely believed, at least in some quarters, that politicians ought to be younger". Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine compares the enthusiasm for national commemorations in Britain with the more understated syle in the United States. "It's easier for Britain, which is a relatively small and unified nation, with a strong central government, to stage nationally inclusive displays of commemoration than it is for the United States, which is a country with a relatively weak federal government, that many people dislike and distrust, and which oversees a vast transcontinental empire extending from one ocean to another and beyond." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson explains why he prefers art to ideology, especially at election time, and always has. "I consider myself fortunate enough to have been brought up in a state of dogma-free grace." "...the point of art is to refute whatever it is we've made up our minds about." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson explains why he dislikes the narcissism of the selfie."It's always possible that there's some Rembrandt of the selfie out there, using his 'phone to investigate the ravages of age, the incursions of melancholy, and even the psychology of self-obsession itself, but commonly the selfie performs a less self-critical function, putting the self at the centre of everything we see, marking the landscape with our faces, as though the only possible interest of the outside world is that we're in it."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Howard Jacobson thinks the current focus of male fashion on the ankle region or "mankle", revealed by the trousers of skimpily cut suits, shows men are suffering from a self-image crisis. "It would be a brave person who argued that what we wear counts for more than what we say, but in an image-driven culture our attention is always liable to drift away from words, however well chosen, to tailoring."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare says that disabled people's right to independent living is under threat as a result of the imminent winding up of the Independent Living Fund. "I hope that whichever parties are in government after May will have a rethink about social care. The ILF may...have been an anomaly, but one of the glories of living in Britain is that we have a high tolerance of historical anomalies." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare thinks our reformed Select Committees have revitalised Parliament but he warns against the temptation to play to the gallery and to cross examine unfairly. "Their main business is the worthy task of holding the government and the civil service to account, even if it's more fun holding unpopular public figures' feet to the fire." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare says increasing wisdom in middle age is at least some compensation for declining cognitive powers. "Wisdom is not the amount you know, it's how you see and how you interpret what you see." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the unsettling nature of time. "What gives our human cultures any sense of cohesion at all is an almost relentless effort to shore up our collective memory of the past against the remorseless depredations of time." Producer: Sheila Cook.

A weekly reflection on a topical issue.

Will Self reflects on the power of our relationship with fictional characters. "People need people whose lives can be seen to follow a dramatic arc, so that no matter what trials they encounter, the people who survey them can be reassured that when the light begins to fade, these people - to whose frail psyches we've had privileged access - will at least feel it's all meant something." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self finds himself driven to reconsider the nature and purpose of satire in the wake of the murders at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. "The paradox is this: if satire aims at the moral reform of a given society it can only be effective within that particular society; and furthermore only if there's a commonly accepted ethical hierarchy to begin with. A satire that demands of the entire world that it observe the same secularist values as the French state is a form of imperialism like any other.".

Will Self reflects on the growing and vexed divide between people with and without children. "The real indication that we don't know what value parenting currently has is that to either valorise or demonise this state of being seems as ridiculous (if not offensive) as doing the same in respect of childlessness". Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self regrets our growing lack of physical contact with one another and with the natural world as a result of the rise of technology. "What the touch screen, the automatic door,online shopping and even the Bagladeshi sweatshop piece-worker who made our trousers are depriving us of is the exercise of our very sense of touch itself, and in particular they are relieving us of the need to touch other people." Producer: Sheila Cook.

AL Kennedy reflects on the importance of the beauty and creativity of art to sustain the human spirit."Art is a power and most of its true power is invisible, private, memorised and held even in prison cells and on forced marches, so you can see why totalitarians of all kinds dislike it."Producer: Sheila Cook Editor: Richard Knight.

AL Kennedy reflects on the importance of learning languages and listening to one another. "More words give me more paths to and from the hearts of others, more points of view - I don't think that's a bad thing." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnick reflects on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. "The notion that what some have called France's 'stark secularism' - or its level of unemployment, or its history of exclusion, that imposed invisibility - is in any way to blame or even a root cause for this, depends on being ignorant of the actual history of France." Producer: Sheila Cook Editor: Richard Knight.

A L Kennedy reflects on what it means to pursue happiness in a world where "not having enough money can be utterly miserable" and indulging our desire to acquire is also unsatisfying. The answer may lie in seeing that happiness is, "not so much a condition as a destination - it can inspire journeys ...better made in company". Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the history of the Queen's Christmas message. Following the success of the first broadcast in 1932 by the Queen's grandfather, King George V, "what had begun as a one-off innovation" soon "became an invented tradition". "There can be no doubt," says Cannadine, "it brought the King closer to his subjects than had been true of any monarch who had gone before him."Producer: Sheila Cook.

In the last of his three talks on art Roger Scruton asks what constitutes real art, as opposed to cliche or kitsch.He says we must ignore the vast quantities of art produced as commodities to be sold, in contrast to symphonies or novels that cannot be owned in the same way as a painting or a sculpture.Real art has to have lasting appeal, he argues, and for that it needs three things: beauty, form and redemption. The production of such art, he says, takes immense hard work and attention to detail, but it can give meaning to our modern lives and show love in the midst of doubt and desolation. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Philosopher Roger Scruton looks at kitsch in the second of his three talks on art. Kitsch, he says, creates the fantasy of an emotion without the real cost of feeling it. He argues that in the twentieth century artists became preoccupied by what they perceived as the need to avoid kitsch and sentimentality. But it's not so easy. Some try being outrageously avant-garde, which can lead to a different kind of fake: cliche. So a new genre emerged: pre-emptive kitsch. Artists embraced kitsch and produce it deliberately to present it as a sophisticated parody. But is it art? Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Philosopher Roger Scruton reflects on the difference between original art that is genuine, sincere and truthful, but hard to achieve, and the easier but fake art that he says appeals to many critics today. He argues that original artists from Beethoven and Baudelaire to Picasso and Pound tower above those contemporary artists whose pieces push fake emotion - and who, by focusing on avoiding cliche, end up cliches themselves. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

John Gray argues that "thinking the unthinkable" as a way of making policy does nothing more than extend conventional wisdom to the point of absurdity and fails to take account of the complexities of reality. "Capitalism has lurched into a crisis from which it still has not recovered. Yet the worn-out ideology of free markets sets the framework within which our current generation of leaders continues to think and act."Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray points to lessons from the novels of Dostoevsky about the danger of ideas such as misguided idealism sweeping away tyrannies without regard for the risks of anarchy. "Dostoevsky suggests that the end result of abandoning morality for the sake of an idea of freedom will be a type of tyranny more extreme than any in the past." Producer: Sheila Cook.

The new food substitute Soylent allows you to give up eating meals in order to have more free time. But John Gray argues that human beings crave busy lives. We want to be distracted, he says, so we don't have to think too much.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray reflects on why the advance of capitalism is not - as is widely believed - inevitable. He argues that social evolution is often unpredictable and that the "seemingly unstoppable advance of market forces" could well be halted by political decisions and the "random flux of human events".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik identifies four different types of anxiety that afflict modern people and suggests ways to cure them. "The job of modern humanists is to do consciously what Conan Doyle did instinctively: to make the thrill of the ameliorative, the joy of small reliefs, of the case solved and mystery dissipated and the worry ended, for now - to make those things as sufficient to live by as they are good to experience."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik draws a poignant lesson on the nature of true love from the eyesore of love locks in Paris. "Love should never be symbolised by a shackle. Love - real love, good love, love to grow on rather than be trapped in - is a lock to which the key is always available."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik explains why the English are better at watching football than they are playing it and why the Americans are better at talking about democracy than they are at practising it. "Call this the Constructive Fallacy of the Secondary Activity - or, perhaps, The Delusion of Mastery through Proximity."Producer: Sheila Cook Editor: Richard Knight.

Adam Gopnik thinks we fail too often to let people die with dignity at the end of their lives and believes the answer lies in showing deference. "Dignity, I think is an exceptional demand, one that depends on at least an illusion or masquerade of an anti-egalitarian, indeed pre-modern - indeed an essentially feudal sense - of deference." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik thinks there's a simple reason for the recent findings that short men enjoy stable marriages. It's not that they are desperate to please, but are desperate to prevail. "In every area of life, we underrate the merits of desperation, and persistently overrate the advantages of free choice."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine reflects on the rich history of time-pieces and the power of clocks and watches. "Each watch on display in the British Museum's Clocks and Watchers galleries speaks to me of a world galvanized by scientific innovation, whose horizons were expanding through voyages of discovery and the new objects and ideas brought back." Producer: Sheila Cook.

This season's fashion for red prompts Lisa Jardine to reflect on the past power of the colour."In Tudor England successive monarchs tried to define social status by dress. A strict code governed the wearing of 'costly apparel', and red was one of the colours most rigidly controlled."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine says while documenting and commemorating the First World War we should not lose sight of its horror. "Wars are not heroic, even if they prompt acts of heroism by soldiers and civilians. Our young people, raised in a Britain at peace for 70 years, need to know that."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine explores how fiction can be more useful than fact in helping us understand the past.She examines two works of fiction (a recent radio play "The Chemistry Between Them" and Michael Frayn's celebrated stage work, Copenhagen) to show how they often cast far more light on their respective subjects - and particularly the emotions and personal convictions involved - than that found in the history books.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self takes on one of the nation's best loved figures, George Orwell.....and braces himself for the backlash! "Not Orwell, surely!" he hears the listeners cry.He uses Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" to make his point. This - he says - is often seen as "a principled assault upon all the jargon, obfuscation, and pretentiously Frenchified folderol that deforms our noble tongue". That - in Self's view - couldn't be farther from the truth.Describing Orwell as a "Supreme Mediocrity", Self gets to work.....Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self reflects on comedy, asking why we laugh and whether there's too much of the wrong type of humour in our culture.Producer: Caroline Bayley.

Will Self reflects on the power of modern day consumption and the effect it is having on us.Producer: Caroline Bayley.

Will Self offers a weekly reflection on a topical issue.

Will Self reflects on what the changing nature of utopias says about us, from Thomas More's sixteenth century Utopia to the recent TV series of the same name. The utopias and dystopias of the past offer a range of different futuristic scenarios but, argues Will Self, they actually all have one thing in common: they're about each writer's present, not future. The late 19th century saw something of a craze in the publication of utopian fiction. Many novels were implicitly optimistic in that they imagined better futures, and some even spurred political movements as was the case with Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward 2000-1887'. But nowadays, at a time of man-made global warming, this optimism has dissipated, and our utopias are reduced to fairytales of the non-human, or involve less environmentally destructive species like fictional apes. Where we do imagine a human future, such as in the current TV series, it looks suspiciously dated.Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Republican or royalist we all need something or someone in which to invest our loyalty. Will Self reflects on what really lies behind our sense of patriotism. In Britain we invest the idea of sovereignty in an individual, namely the Queen - or rather, it is an idealisation of who she is decoupled for the living reality. The Queen, says Will Self, is unfailingly wise, calm, pacific - a true mother of the nation; and if her Government happens to do things that are at variance with her goodliness, that is only because their power is contingent upon an evanescent electoral mandate, while her shadow-power-play is founded upon time-out-of-mind heredity - and at least residually, upon the Lord's will. Patriotic Britons may be reluctant to admit to all of this, argues Self, preferring to be seen as modern and up-to-date, but if they examine their consciences carefully they're likely to concede that a discrete love-of-country object is required for full patriotic attachment.

Some critics of religion see having faith as being childish. But John Gray argues that believing that human beings are rational is more childish than believing in religion. The belief in the power of reason to improve humankind rests on childishly simple ideas he says. One of the commonest is that history's crimes are mistakes that can be avoided as we gain greater knowledge. But if history teaches us anything, Grey asserts, it's that behaviours and attitudes like cruelty and hatred are permanent human flaws. To imagine that we can become more rational is an example of magical thinking and an expression of the belief in the omnipotence of the human will that psychoanalysts identify as the fundamental infantile fantasy. John Gray believes that we'd all be better off if we saw ourselves as we are: intermittently and only ever partly rational creatures, who never really grow up.

Philosopher and author John Gray argues that the Sunni extremist group Isis (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) is actually more of a modern revolutionary force than a reactionary one intent on a reversion to mediaeval values. Surprising as this may sound says Gray, Isis is thoroughly modern. It's organised itself into an efficient company, and has become the wealthiest jihadi organisation in the world. And while it invokes the early history of Islam, the society it envisions has no precedent in history. Some of the thinkers who developed radical Islamist ideas are known to have been influenced by European anarchism and communism, especially by the idea that society can be reshaped by a merciless revolutionary vanguard using systematic violence. Isis is part of the revolutionary turmoil of modern times warns Gray, and until the West grasps that uncomfortable fact, it won't be able to deal with the dangers Isis presents.

AL Kennedy argues that the British have much to gain from - in the words of Robert Burns - "seeing ourselves as others see us".Referring to last week's row over the appointment of the new European Commission President, she writes: "the EU's view of Britain might be that we're always yelling in a corner about chips!"An entertaining exploration of the down-sides of personal and national introspection.

It's a tale of "shadowy white-hatted hackers, more shadowy black-hatted hackers and the possibility that the pricey electronic equipment lurking in our homes may not have our best interests at heart".AL Kennedy reflects on the current spate of high-profile viruses that are threatening our computers ...invasive software that may be sending our bank details to criminals every time we connect to the internet.She says as more sophisticated computers become part of more appliances, the potential for virus infection increases. So is it time, she asks, for us to rethink our devotion to these machines?Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy argues that our obsession with gossip is affecting our public discourse, and corrupting its content.She traces the history of gossip, explores how gossip is edging out real news and how it's taken over our political lives. "Gossip obscures truth" she writes, "sours our outlooks on each other and can trivialise any debate". She concludes that "we really could do with a lot less of it". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Humanity's past thoughts are my inheritance" writes AL Kennedy. "I need them in order to learn how to prosper in the long term". As more and more public libraries close their doors, AL Kennedy argues that we must reassess the importance of books.She says library closures, culled GCSE reading lists, moves towards reducing prisoners' access to books are part of a "perfect storm" which means we're losing books on all sides. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Scotland could become independent. So, asks Tom Shakespeare, should England consider returning to an earlier order - a heptarchy of seven independent jurisdictions?

Many people assume that disabled people must be unhappy. But the empirical evidence doesn't back this up. In A Point of View, Tom Shakespeare argues that disability is nothing to fear.

A growing number of people are describing themselves as spiritual but not religious. This is not a trend of which Tom Shakespeare approves. In this week's Point of View he argues, rather, that we should be religious but not spiritual.

As hundreds of thousands of young people get ready to sit exams, Mary Beard reflects on exam season - past and present.The Cambridge don describes how the "tough, engaging and intelligent young people" she has taught for years "suddenly morph into nervous wrecks, hanging a bit pathetically on your every word, as they have never, quite rightly, done before".She talks about the extraordinary similarities between exams in the 1800s and today...the "curmudgeonly gloom that greeted the students' efforts" sounds very familiar.Michael Gove and his friends - she suggests - might like to take note that complaints about poor performance have been around for quite some time!Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard reflects on recent TV programmes and newspaper articles about what's going on in care homes for the elderly.She says she believes that in a few hundred years' time, "our treatment of old people will be as much of a blot on our culture as Bedlam and the madhouses were on the culture of the 18th century".But she also argues that our view of dementia is a sanitized one. She says we have to recognize that dementia can make its sufferers truculent and aggressive...something that most of us - not just care workers on a minimum wage - would find very difficult to deal with.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"The archaeological wonders of today" writes Mary Beard "don't come from heroic subterranean exploration, still less from the efforts of teenagers with their spades and trowels in damp Shropshire fields. They are much more often 'virtual'".Mary reflects on the new face of archaeology - far removed from the days of Heinrich Schliemann who famously claimed "to have gazed on the face of Agamemnon".She traces the history of virtual archaeology from the early 1900s and admits "part of me thrills to the magic of the technology, and to the sheer bravura of displaying the plans of lost buildings, even lost towns, at the touch of a few buttons". She recognises it's far cheaper, quicker and leaves ruins where they are safest: under the ground.But she also admits a feeling of nostalgia for the old ways. When she sees an exciting new discovery, "my heart just itches to get out my spade and my trowel and go and actually dig it up".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard looks forward to the 60th anniversary of the first "four minute mile". But in the midst of the celebrations, she argues that we should also remember that Roger Bannister's victory was a "glaring display of class division". Maybe appropriate then that this month also sees the return of that "wonderful working-class... comic-strip hero, Alf Tupper". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

William Dalrymple celebrates the writing of Peter Matthiessen who died this month, comparing him with another of his favourite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor. "Both were footloose scholars who left their studies and libraries to walk in the wild places of the world, erudite and bookish wanderers, scrambling through remote mountains, notebooks in hand, rucksacks full of good books on their shoulders." Producer: Sheila Cook.

William Dalrymple reflects on the current pivotal elections in India and Afghanistan where religion, identity and economics will all help to determine the outcomes. Feeling a mixture of unease and optimism, he celebrates, nevertheless, the good news that "democracy is an unstoppable force in south and central Asia." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Taking Lent as his starting point, William Dalrymple contrasts the Christian view of Lent - with all its self-discipline and self-deprivation - with that represented in great Indian art.He visits the painted caves of Ajanta, dating from the 2nd century BC, and seen as one of the most comprehensive depictions of civilised classical life that we have.He describes their monasteries, adorned with "images of attractively voluptuous women....because in the eyes of the monks, this was completely appropriate decoration".But Christianity - he says - "has always seen the human body as essentially sinful, lustful and shameful".He charts how - throughout India's history - the arts have consistently celebrated the beauty of the human body seen, "not as some tainted appendage to be whipped into submission, but potentially the vehicle of divinity".He argues that history can make us aware of "how contingent and bound by time, culture and geography so many of our preconceptions actually are".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Sarah Dunant reflects on fame and the cult of celebrity following the recent success of the film "20 feet from Stardom".The film about backing singers - the unsung heroes of pop music - scooped best documentary at the Oscars. Sarah discusses how celebrity culture has given us a society where the dream is no longer to be the backing singer, but to take centre stage. "Andy Warhol" she writes "with his fifteen minutes of fame, has turned out to be a prophet as much as an artist".But "in a world where everyone wants to be the lead singer" she asks "who is left to swell the sound? Or more importantly to appreciate it".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Sarah Dunant compares our reaction today to climate change with responses in the seventeenth century to extreme weather.Producer: Sheila Cook.

Sarah Dunant reflects that today's harsher judgement of some of the sexual behaviour prevalent in the 1970s springs in part from the freedom forged in that decade. "Without the seventies, we would never have had the debate, the public awareness, the sense of outrage or even the occasionally blunt tool of the law to judge the present and the past."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton believes the way to improve our schools is through tapping into the time and talents of middle class volunteers. "The philanthropic middle classes, who created our education system and made it one of the best in the world, have been for too long excluded from it". Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton thinks we get our priorities wrong when we favour pets at the expense of wild animals."We must recognise that by loving our pets as individuals we threaten the animals who cannot easily be loved in any such way." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Roger Scruton argues for a voice for the English in the debate over Scottish independence. "As an Englishman I naturally ask why my interests in the matter have never been taken into account."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik explains why he thinks the pictures on our banknotes matter. "The iconography of money is more than just decor - it displays the true convictions of the commonwealth that intends to support its value." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik explains his indifference to Twitter and social media. "After the introduction of a new device, or social media, our lives are exactly where they were before, save for the new thing or service, which we now cannot live without". Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik reflects on the value of sportsmanship ahead of the American Super Bowl following controversy over a player's supposedly unsporting comments. "Sportsmanship is this day's triumph's salute to time...We will not always be the winner." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik hails the development of the self-drive car as the way to rescue his male identity after years as a non driver. He also muses on the need for such cars to have "ethical engines" capable of moral judgements. Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik reflects on the attitude of the French to the sex lives of their statesmen and gives his opinion that the price of privilege is prudence. "Puritanical societies are less morally alert than ones like France that aren't, because the puritanical societies have the judgments prepackaged and their hypocrisies, too. Instead, in France, the moral rights and wrongs, I've learned, are adjudicated case by case."Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray reflects on "unknown knowns" - what we know but prefer not to think about, whether it's the truth about the invasion of Iraq or the failures of the financial system that led to the banking crisis. "We humans are sturdy and resilient animals with enormous capacities of creativity and adaptability; but consistently realistic thinking seems to be beyond our powers."Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray reflects on the damage that can be caused by evangelical belief in a religion or in a political idea. "Whether they are religious or political, evangelists seem to me a blight on civilisation. For them as for those they persecute or bully, belief is an obstacle to a fulfilling life."Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray gives only two cheers for human rights. We are in danger, he argues, of turning them into a "comforting dogma through which we try to escape the painful dilemmas of war and politics.""Rather than thinking of rights as a militant creed that can deliver the world from its conflicts, we should recognise rights for what they are - useful devices that quite often don't work.".

In the week when Prince Charles has drawn attention to violence against Christians in the Middle East, William Dalrymple says it's time to remember the "old and often forgotten co-habitation of Islam and Christianity"."Christmas time is perhaps the proper moment to remember the long tradition of revering the nativity in the Islamic world. ...There are certainly major differences between the two faiths, not least the central fact, in mainstream Christianity, of Jesus' divinity. But Christmas - the ultimate celebration of Christ's humanity - is a feast which Muslims and Christians can share without reservation.".

John Gray gives his own theory for the cultural longevity of Charles Dickens, celebrating his view of life as a theatre of the absurd. "Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them: unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects that our modern, secular society has silenced the voices of the dead. As a result, he argues, we fail to appreciate the sacred buildings, art and literature of the past. "Having purged them on the basis that they can furnish no proof of their existence, do we not begin to undermine the capacity of that which they have left behind to also speak to us?"Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self warns against politicians' superficially attractive policies which turn out to be Trojan horses. "It all comes down to gifts - presents that we save up for through the countrywide Christmas club we call progressive taxation, and which are then handed out by the jolly, hoho-ing Government in the form of public services."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects from the top of the new One World Trade Center in New York on the challenge of rebuilding after the destruction of 9.11."The downtown site, mired in ground sacred to mammon, has mixed into it a complex mulch of private rights and public responsibilities: to harmonise these competing interests in the frozen music of architecture has proved a gruelling compositional task.".

Will Self argues for greater British cultural self confidence in the debate over the wearing of the veil.Apologies are not needed for an insistence on uncovered faces in court, he says, and the best safeguard against extremism is engagement with the Western philosophic tradition and its multicultural influences."Of course British culture will be changed by the cultures of our recent immigrants, but surely our greatest desideratum is precisely this: to be the heirs, possessors and transmitters of a legacy that is ready and able to adapt."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on America's view of the assassination of JF Kennedy, fifty years on. After years of talk of conspiracy, cover-up and doctored film footage, he concludes, "It isn't so much that the Kennedy assassination has transitioned smoothly into a commonsensical past; it's rather that it was the first instance of a peculiarly modern variant of the historic event: its media simulation". Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the malign influence of the older generation on the young as the population of Britain ages. "In my darker moments - of which there are quite a few - I often envision the baby boomer generation as a giant and warty toad squatting on the youth of our society".Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine reflects on the sensitive questions surrounding IVF as she comes to the end of her term as Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. "I would have loved to have been able to have spoken more often and more publicly, with more words of caution for those preparing to undertake IVF, or postponing their family because IVF seems a reliable option should natural conception fail." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine compares the contributions of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing a century later to computer science and contrasts their views on the potential of and limits to machine intelligence.Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine reflects on the internationalism that underpins the progress of science in a week when individual nations celebrate their Nobel prize winners. "Science has always ignored national borders, in pursuit of the fullest possible understanding of nature."Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine learned the story of Leo Szilard from her father who regarded him as an exemplary figure in science. Szilard, an Hungarian physicist, helped to develop the atom bomb, but later fought against its use. His story provides lessons about the relationship between science and human values - even though the version of the tale Lisa was taught turns out not to have been entirely true.Producer: Sheila Cook.

Stephen King says "Love creates horror." AL Kennedy agrees. "As someone who often says 'I think' and almost never says 'I feel', I don't personally welcome love's ability to make me fear not only for myself, but others," she writes.But love makes us altruistic, humane. "We would find it bizarre if a parent was more worried about dropping a vase than dropping their baby - even a Ming vase and an ugly baby. An absence of love within a family or a relationship is taken as a sign of something having gone very wrong," she says."But an absence of love in the world we help construct around us, that's regarded as a form of common sense. We are used to making decisions - or having them made for us - which would save the vase and not the baby."Producer: Sheila Cook.

AL Kennedy reflects on our tendency to behave badly when we think no-one's watching or when we follow the wrong crowd."When psychologists test how people behave with and without oversight, it becomes depressingly clear that if we think nobody's looking, we don't even remotely always let our consciences be our guides," she writes. "Even very normal, pleasant people can delegate their morality to other people who appear to be in charge, even of bizarre and disturbing scenarios."Producer: Sheila Cook.

AL Kennedy reflects on the stuggle to establish truth in what she regards as an age of lies. Lies, she says, are proliferating on TV, in politics, in business and throughout public and private life. Extracting truths in moral and effective ways, she argues, is an ever greater challenge.Producer: Sheila Cook.

Fear of change can lead us astray. It can keep us from mercy. It can be used by authorities as an excuse for sticking with the status quo. It's a barrier to happiness. AL Kennedy doesn't like change. But she thinks perhaps she should change her mind.

Roger Scruton concludes his series of talks on the nature and limits of democracy. "We in Europe are moving not towards democracy but away from it," he says."There is no first-person plural of which the European Institutions are the political expression," he argues. "The Union is founded in a treaty, and treaties derive their authority from the entities that sign them. Those entities are the nation states of Europe, from which the loyalties of the European people derive. The Union, which has set out to transcend those loyalties, therefore suffers from a permanent crisis of legitimacy.".

Roger Scruton continues his series of talks on the nature and limits of democracy. This week he argues that nations should be defined by language and territory rather than by party or faith. And, looking at examples across the Middle East and in particular in Egypt, he explains why - in his view - a modern state cannot be governed by Islamic law.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Roger Scruton continues his series of talks on the nature and limits of democracy. Roger Scruton argues that democracy works only if we are prepared to be ruled by our opponents, however much we may dislike them. We need to accept politics as a process of compromise and conciliation. And for that, he says, the state must be secular.

Roger Scruton argues that democracy alone is not enough for political freedom. Democracy, freedom and human rights do not necessarily coincide."In the underground universities of communist Europe ... my friends and colleagues prepared themselves for the hoped for day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of all rational input, would finally give up the ghost," he says. "And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.".

It's exactly 500 years this summer since Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his famous book 'The Prince', on how to gain and retain political power. Sarah Dunant takes us back to the hot Tuscan summer when Machiavelli put down his thoughts, including the view that in politics, virtue must be tempered by expediency.He based his thesis on what he'd witnessed during his career as a diplomat and adviser in Florence, and also on lessons learned from Ancient Greek and Roman historians.While fortune had smiled on him during the fourteen years he served the Florentine Republic, it stopped doing so when the Medicis were restored and he was imprisoned and tortured. Released into exile on his family's estate south of Florence, he started writing the book that became a foundation of political theory. In a further twist of fortune, his exile, far from being his ruin, made his name for posterity. He was never completely rehabilitated in Florence, but ended up writing one of the most provocative and influential political works of all time.Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Sarah Dunant says Pope Francis should use his Twitter account to demonstrate that he's prepared to deal with the 'mess' inside the Catholic Church. Perhaps, she says, with this Tweet, he's already started: 'If we wish to follow Christ closely, we cannot choose an easy, quiet life'.

The recent New Yorker cover showing Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie as a gay couple, delighted by the American Supreme Court ruling that the Defence of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, prompts Sarah Dunant to reflect on the power of cartoons to convey social messages. "Those cartoon characters - or their puppet equivalents - which touch us at our most formative moments of early childhood will become part of the bedrock of our cultural belonging." Producer: Sheila Cook.

As Britain basks in post-Wimbledon glory, amid the Ashes, Sarah Dunant reflects on how sport has - throughout history - been used by the authorities to help populations let off steam.In Florence, in the late 1500s, townspeople played a form of football that allowed them to wrestle, punch and immobilize their opponents in any way they liked. Venice had a spectacularly violent sport of bridge-fighting where opposing teams "armed with sticks...dipped in boiling oil beat the hell out of each other".Civic sporting therapy - past and present - has for centuries, Sarah argues, "proved a creative alternative to our recurring tendency to kill each other".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

At a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the feminist press Virago last week, writes Sarah Dunant, the current head of the company told the story of how one night she asked one of Virago's founders why she had started the company. "To change the world of course" was the reply.Forty years on, Sarah, a Virago author herself, wonders just how much Virago has changed the world.She talks about how, a few weeks ago, as she waited for an hour in the studio of the Today Programme to be interviewed for a piece about female characters in fiction, she didn't hear a single women's voice.She tells how last month, the Australian writer and academic, Kathryn Heyman, got into a very public spat with The London Review of Books because of a dearth of women writers in its pages.And the ousting of Julia Gillard as Australia's Prime Minister last week is the most striking example that Virago's mission is not yet complete.But Sarah takes some comfort from the fact that Kevin Rudd, the new PM, has an unprecedented six new women in his cabinet.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Isn't it time to democratize art? Shouldn't we, the public, be allowed to borrow works of art from our national collections? That way we could have an affair with art, rather than a one-night stand. Tom Shakespeare presents the last of his four essays.

In Britain many of our holidays and festivals are rather dull - bank holidays for example. Tom Shakespeare, presenting the third of his four essays, says that when he looks at other cultures he feels a strong sense of festival envy. He wants Britain to have better festivals. To start with, shouldn't we celebrate Midsummer?

"When I was a child, one of my favourite books was Bear, Mouse and Water Beetle," says Tom Shakespeare. "Today, I want to tell you a contemporary story, which you could call Fly, Fish, Mouse and Worm."These 'model animals' help scientists to understand the basic processes common to all living creatures. But while model animals epitomize the success of the scientific strategy of reductionism, they may also illustrate the downside.

Tom Shakespeare presents the first of his four essays. There have been several recent scandals in the health service, with appalling cases of abuse and neglect coming to light. Not surprisingly, this has led to calls for people in the medical profession to be taught compassion. But Tom is sceptical. This week he asks whether compassion can and should be taught.

John Gray finds new resonance for our own age in the story of "the Great Gatsby". "Just as in the Roaring Twenties, we've lived through a boom that was mostly based on make-believe - easy money, inflated assets and financial skulduggery." "We want nothing more than to revive the fake prosperity that preceded the crash. Just like Gatsby, we want to return to a world that was conjured into being from dreams."Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray argues for another way of perceiving the world inspired by the fantasy fiction writer Arthur Machen. Instead of believing that meaning in life can only be found by changing things around us, "Some of the most valuable human experiences, Machen observed, come about when we simply look around us without any intention of acting on what we see. He thought of the world as a kind of text in invisible writing, a cipher pointing to another order of things" Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray turns to the writer Patricia Highsmith and her character Tom Ripley for a perspective on the meaning of evil. "For me she's ....one of the great twentieth century writers with a deep insight into the fragility of morality." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray draws on the novels of Mervyn Peake to argue it's a mistake to imagine that modernity marks a fundamental change in human experience. "The modern world is founded on the belief that it's possible for human beings to shape a future that's better than anything in the past. If the Gormenghast novels have any continuing theme, it's that this modern belief is an illusion." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray draws on a story by Walter de la Mare to argue that the prevailing creed of scientific materialism is a "simple minded philosophy", preferring de la Mare's unsettling portrayal of everyday existence as insubstantial and unknowable. "Even if there are such things as laws of nature, there's no reason to think they must be accessible to the human mind." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray wonders what the rise of the cyber currency Bitcoin tells us about our human need for freedom and protection, "The dream of finding some kind of talisman, a benevolent tyrant or a magical new technology, that can shelter us from power and crime and protect us from each other." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Adam Gopnik's son is about to leave home. His suitcase is already packed. It's not a day Adam is looking forward to. Why is love between parents and their children so asymmetric, he wonders? Why do parents love their children infinitely - while children feel about their parents, at best, a mix of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness?

What is the difference between magic and science? What is the difference between Galileo and his contemporary, the famous Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist John Dee? According to Adam Gopnik it's the experimental method - the looking and seeing and testing that goes with true science. But when he wrote about this recently he found that fervent members of the John Dee fan club disagreed.

Every nation has a core irrationality - a belief about itself which no amount of contrary evidence can shift - says Adam Gopnik. Adam tries to uncover the core irrationality of the four nations he knows best: the United States, France, Canada and the UK.

Adam Gopnik reflects on what makes a happy marriage. Darwin, Gopnik writes, when first thinking about marriage, made a list of pros and cons. Cons included the expense and anxiety of children and the odd truth that a married man could never go up in a balloon. On the plus side, he noted, marriage provided a constant companion and friend in old age and, memorably, that a wife would be better than a dog.Gopnik's own formula for a happy marriage is lust, laughter and loyalty.Via Samuel Beckett, Monty Python and The Big Lebowski, Gopnik concludes that loyalty is a much-underrated quality. Loyalty is not, he argues, a passive state that holds two people together when all else has failed.Rather, he explains, loyalty is a wholly active state, as a new family dog has demonstrated. Dogs are there, he writes, "to remind us that loyalty is a jumpy, fizzy emotion - loyalty leaps up at the door and barks with joy at your return, and then immediately goes back to sleep at your side".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Turk", writes Adam Gopnik. He's talking - not of the Ottomans - but the famous chess playing machine constructed in the late 18th century.A mechanical figure of a bearded man, dressed in Turkish clothing, appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent. It was - in fact - a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine.It was a sensation. But the players inside were nothing more than good chess players."We always over estimate the space between the uniquely good and the very good", Gopnik writes. "We worship one tennis player as uniquely gifted, failing to see that the runners-up, who we scoff at as perpetual losers, are themselves fantastically gifted and accomplished, that the inept footballer we whistle at in despair is a better football player than we have ever seen or ever will meet".As some of the world's top chess players battle it out in London in the Candidates Tournament for the World Chess Championship, Adam Gopnik reflects on why we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

When two spectacular comets appeared in the night sky in 1664 and 1665, many feared they were harbingers of doom. Not long afterwards, the Great Plague and the Great Fire were visited on London.Lisa Jardine has been looking upwards this week in an attempt to catch sight of the Pan-Starrs comet, which is thought to have been hurtling towards the sun for millions of years. Later this year, another comet is expected to grace our skies.Her concern is not that they might bring with them a modern day plague, but whether we have learned the lessons early astronomers taught us about sharing scientific information.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of the mathematician Dame Mary Cartwright, the first woman mathematician to be elected to the Royal Society.During World War Two, she responded to a request from the British government to address an issue with early and still-secret radar systems. Together with her colleague Professor J. E. Littlewood, they were able to help war-time radar engineers circumvent a problem that was making radar unreliable.Her findings were not fully understood by her peers at first. It would take a generation before mathematicians realised that her discoveries were the foundation of what became a new field of science: chaos theory.Dame Mary Cartwright was very modest and did not want eulogies at her funeral, but Lisa Jardine takes the opportunity of International Woman's Day to blow Dame Mary's trumpet on her behalf.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the influence of art connoisseur Sir Denis Mahon and reflects on the impact of wealthy art collectors on public taste and government policy. "Art collectors with a fortune to spend inevitably exert an influence on artistic taste and on the art market. The question is: Is a collector who wins public praise for having a "good eye" or "flawless taste" being celebrated for their critical astuteness in identifying a neglected work's lasting aesthetic value and its importance within the artistic tradition? Or are they simply establishing a high competitive price for that artist or artistic school?" Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the "Winter Queen", and sees her relegation to the margins of history, "despite the pivotal role she played in international politics throughout much of the seventeenth century", as a reflection of our failure to recognise and value powerful women. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine defends his home city of Birmingham against a slur in Jane Austen's "Emma" as, "not a place to promise much", by celebrating its heritage and its current cultural renaissance. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine celebrates the saving of New York's now century old Grand Central Terminal and regrets the destruction of the city's other great beaux-arts station. "Many New Yorkers... had initially opposed, and subsequently regretted, the wanton destruction of Penn station as a deplorable act of civic irresponsibility and cultural philistinism." Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the enduring appeal of the teddy bear in contemporary culture. Why, he wonders, have they been such popular toys and featured so prominently in literature and song since they were first named after Theodore Roosevelt over a hundred years ago. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the history of American presidential inaugurations since Abraham Lincoln's, and compares presidents' speeches at the start of their first and second terms in office. "Second inaugurals...are often less up-beat and up-lifting, since it's no longer possible for a president, having already been four years in office, to offer a new deal or to proclaim, as President Obama did in 2009 that 'change is coming to America'".Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self laments what he sees as an absence of rational urban planning in our big cities and a fashion for dramatic skyscrapers driven by short term commercial values. "It occurred to me that the contemporary metropolitan skyline is really only a fireworks display of decades-long duration: a burst of aerial illumination intended to provoke awe, but doomed eventually to subside into darkness." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self wants to "nudge society in the direction of considering suicide acceptable" when the alternative is a slow and painful end. "I don't say any of these things idly," he writes, "like many of us in middle age, my last few years have been heavily marked by an increasing awareness of both my own mortality and that of those who I love." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self looks back over 2012 and reflects on the confused relationship between Britain and the US. Love and hate, he argues, are there in equal measure. Taking as his starting point the Tom Stoppard plays his American mother took him to see in the 1970s, he says our relationship with our friends across the pond has changed little in 40 years. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst?" asks Will Self as he appeals to the post-Christmas glutton to consider a major lifestyle change in the year ahead."What I think we should all do", he says, "is throw up our very obsession with food itself, and enter the New Year purged". He takes us on a tour of foodie history, and explores how we've gone from being a culinary backwater to "the most food-obsessed nation in Europe - if not the world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self warns against the false prophets of the new priesthood of economics who base their analyses and predictions on "spurious notions of human behaviour". "In place of the vulgate we require the holy books of economics to be written in the language we actually speak, and along with this we should actively seek a liberty of individual conscience, so that we communicate directly with Mammon, freed from the intercession of a priesthood who, when not arguing about how many angels can be fitted on the head of a pin, are spending our money producing elegant but utterly spurious mathematical models of possible future angel-on-pin scenarios." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the effect of digital technology on his perception of the passage of time. "Perhaps the reason I feel quite so liberated from the present while more and more attached, not to the individually recalled 'good old days', but to a collectively attested and ever-present past, is because the hard drive of my computer is overloaded with digital images of the places I've been and the people I've met, all of them time-coded to within a tenth of a second." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Onora O'Neill reflects afresh on questions of trust, a decade after her Reith lectures on the subject. She argues that rather than asking, "how can we restore trust" in general, following recent scandals and failures, we should ask specific, practical questions about how better to measure trustworthiness. "Placing and refusing trust intelligently is not a matter of finding guarantees or proofs; we often have to assess complex and incomplete evidence, which the masters of spin and PR may be massaging to make things look better than they are." Systems of accountability or transparency can be ineffective or even counter-productive whereas easily assessable communication is "important and often indispensable." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Mary Beard reflects on why universities are being consumed by "customer satisfaction" surveys. "When you're paying up to £9000 a year for the privilege of being at university, you want to make it pretty clear if you feel you're not getting your money's worth", she writes. But the deluge of forms - asking students for their views on the content, presentation, organisation of the course and the quality of the handouts will - she argues, do little to improve "the learning experience". She admits having a "tweak of nostalgia for that old era before the tick-box, when brave students would tell their famous professors to their face that their lectures were rubbish"! Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Last weekend I spent a couple of hours with the remains of one of the human victims of the eruption of Vesuvius" writes Mary Beard, as she wanders through the rooms of a new exhibition about Pompeii, the "City of the Dead". The display at the J Paul Getty museum in Malibu is one of several Pompeii exhibitions running in different museums around the world - and very similar to one coming to the British Museum in the spring. As she makes her way through the bodies - or "anti-bodies" as she refers to them - she ponders questions of privacy, archaeology and restoration. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard on the long history of the rich looking down their noses - sometimes with a hearty Roman snort - at the poor.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today.In his final talk, he asks how the undemocratic Chinese state can enjoy legitimacy and authority in the eyes of its population. He argues that the Chinese state is held in such high esteem because it is seen as the embodiment, protector and guardian of Chinese civilization. The state is seen as an intimate, a member of the family indeed - in fact, the head of the family. It is a remarkable institution which will come to exercise interest and fascination outside China.Martin Jacques is the author of 'When China Rules the World'.Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its history, development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today.In this third talk, he explores the nature of race in China. Over 90 per cent of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, the Han. This is a stark contrast to the multi-racial composition of the world's other populous states. Chinese ethnic identity stems from a process of integration and of cultural identity. What defines the Chinese above all is a sense of cultural achievement. Martin Jacques argues that the Han identity has provided the glue which has held China together and has given the Chinese people an admirable confidence. But this strong sense of pride in who they are can also have a downside: a tendency to look down on others.Martin Jacques is the author of 'When China Rules the World'.Producer: Nina Robinson.

In this second talk, he examines the tributary system, the historical China-centric network of international relations which involved other parts of East Asia accepting the principle of Chinese superiority in return for protection and access to the Chinese market, an arrangement distinct to European forms of colonialism. He asks whether a system of this kind is now re-emerging.Martin Jacques is the author of 'When China Rules the World'.Producer: Rosamund Jones.

Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today.In this introductory talk, he argues that we cannot make sense of China by looking at it through a Western prism. China is not like a Western nation-state and never will be. Western nations are countries constituted on the basis of nation, China is a country constituted on the basis of a civilization. The consequences are profound and far-reaching.In his second talk, he examines the tributary system, the historical China-centric network of international relations which involved other parts of East Asia accepting the principle of Chinese superiority in return for protection and access to the Chinese market, an arrangement distinct to European forms of colonialism. He asks whether a system of this kind is now re-emerging.In his third talk, he explores the nature of race in China. Over 90 per cent of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, the Han. This is a stark contrast to the multi-racial composition of the world's other populous states. Chinese ethnic identity stems from a process of integration and of cultural identity. What defines the Chinese above all is pride in their culture and a sense of cultural achievement. The advantage of the Han identity is that it is the cement that has held China together. The disadvantage is a weak understanding of and respect for ethnic and cultural differences.In his final talk, he asks how the undemocratic Chinese state can enjoy legitimacy and authority in the eyes of its population. He argues that the Chinese state is held in such high esteem because it is seen as the embodiment, protector and guardian of Chinese civilization. The state is seen as an intimate, a member of the family indeed - in fact, the head of the family. It is a remarkable institution which will come to exercise interest and fascination outside China.Martin Jacques is the author of 'When China Rules the World'.

Sarah Dunant reflects on the role of history in society - and how it changes over time. Research and archaeology, as well as the views of the times in which historians live, change their perception of the past. Dunant also asks what historical fiction takes from academic study - and what it, in turn, can teach those who study the past. She also asks whether the humanities are as valued as they should be. Do we underrate them at our peril? Producer Rosamund Jones.

"For moneyed Americans", writes Sarah Dunant "perfect dentistry is a matter of course". For Europeans- and she counts herself within that number - the situation is rather different!Sarah takes a sideways look at teeth through the ages...and dentistry in times of austerity. And for those whose chief loathing is a mouthful of shining American teeth, she offers hope. "Yaeba", the latest craze to hit Japan where young fashonista girls are getting their teeth cosmetically altered to appear more crooked!Producer Adele Armstrong.

"Much of what some would call my eccentric wardrobe derives from charity shops...By temperament, I'm a historian and the sense of an object with a provenance somehow ties me more securely to the present" writes Sarah Dunant.As she rummages for bargains in her local charity shop, Sarah reflects on the history of charity shops and their growing importance in times of austerity.Producer Adele Armstrong.

As the Man Booker shortlist is published, Sarah Dunant explores how new writers and readers find each other. "While an unhappy 19th century Russian marriage which leads to a fatal adulterous affair may be irresistible to one reader" she writes, "a man who wakes up as a beetle may be what presses the button of another. That is both the wonder and nightmare of selling novels". Sarah explores how - in the "brutal climate" facing the publishing industry (with the onslaught of supermarket and internet price wars) - literary prizes provide a much needed boost for authors. But these prizes, she warns, are a kind of lottery. Producer Adele Armstrong.

"Once again the snake pit of policing sexual behaviour and the conflict between men and women's attitudes of it have become news" writes Sarah Dunant.She discusses the remarks by the American would-be senator who claimed that after "legitimate rape", women's bodies protect them from pregnancy. She looks at George Galloway's assertion that what Julian Assange did or didn't do in bed was simple bad sexual etiquette. And she discusses the controversy surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey.She starts from a very personal perspective, and broadens the debate on attitudes to sex by looking at it from an historical perspective. She concludes that a storm of female outrage serves only to stifle debate and that men must be involved in the discussions.Producer Adele Armstrong.

John Gray explores the role of memory in giving meaning to our lives. Through the writings of J.G. Ballard, he reflects on how we struggle to preserve our past but at the same time sometimes long to leave it behind. Gray praises the power of Ballard's imagination - and his enchanting fables - to make good all this. His conclusion is upbeat. "Through the alchemy of memory the leaden buildings in which [Ballard] wandered as a boy became the golden vistas of his fiction, and the traumas of his childhood were transmuted into images of fulfilment". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"We like to tell ourselves an uplifting story in which freedom expands whenever tyranny is overthrown" writes John Gray. "We believe that...when a dictator is toppled the result is not only a more accountable type of government but also greater liberty throughout society". But Gray believes otherwise. Using the nineteenth century liberal John Stuart Mill and his god-son Bertrand Russell, he advances his argument that liberty is one thing, democracy another. "The reality" he says "is that when a tyrant is toppled we can't know what will come next". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray reflects on the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes at a time when we've lost confidence in the power of reason alone to solve problems. "Seeming to find order in the chaos of events by using purely rational methods, he actually demonstrates the enduring power of magic." Producer: Sheila Cook.

John Gray reflects on the climate needed for culture to thrive, recalling Orson Welles' quote from the film "The Third Man" that despotism in Italy produced the Renaissance whereas democracy in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock."We know that art can flourish under despots but we're reluctant to admit it: if creativity and tyranny can co-exist, the value of freedom seems diminished." Producer: Sheila Cook.

The philosopher John Gray wonders what bulk buying of stamps ahead of the price rise tells us about economic gloom. "The relative security that many people enjoyed in the recent past is fading from memory". Producer: Sheila Cook.