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Private PassionsEpisodes
Episodes of Private Passions
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Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we
Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English b
Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.”Her painstaking work and experti
David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six inter
John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at f
Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable paint
Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to
Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events.He’s made three films based on the novels of Th
The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bel
Raymond Blanc is one of the finest chefs in the world and he is completely self-taught. He grew up in post-war France in Besancon in the Comte region of eastern France between Burgundy and the Jura Mountains with his four brothers and sisters.
Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Tri
Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied ran
Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-p
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in our bodies
Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Re
Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat. In his latest film, One Lif
Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant genetics and as Regius Professor of Botany at the Uni
Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the past half century – The Godfather
Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the age of eleven. He went on to dance with Sadler’s W
The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Viole
The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years. She was born in Wales and studied at the University of Newcastle, where the Pop Art pioneer Rich
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent. He was born in 1948 on the island of Zan
Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director. You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless junior Whitehall adviser in The Thick of It, the politic
A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music written or performed by black women, and who have made
Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last sixty years, working with the most esteemed theatre companies and renowned Hollywood and TV directors.Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an early ag
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