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Why One Story Is Never Enough, With Deepa Anappara And Taymour Soomro
Human beings have been telling stories for thousands of years, but what actually makes for a good story? Authors have been trying to settle on the great principles of compelling writing for as long as people have been writing. Yet, as Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro argue, something has gone am...
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The Future of Being Human: Is gene editing the next great health revolution?
Ever since the discovery of DNA scientists have been on a quest to understand the secrets of the human genome. This quest has not only involved analysing the role genes play in making us who we are – the history of genetics has also been shaped by a desire to explore how far our genes can be alte...
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How The Global Food System Is Killing Us With Henry Dimbleby And Alice Thomson
In 1950 less than 1% of British people were obese. Today that figure is 28%. We spend £3.9 billion each year on confectionery compared to £2.4 billion on fruit and vegetables. Diet-related disease is now the biggest cause of preventable illness and death in the developed world.
How did we get t...
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The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women With Victoria Smith and Hadley Freeman
Why are middle-aged women these days subject to so much rage and hatred? Why are they so often portrayed as entitled, selfish and morally inferior – frequently by people who see themselves as progressive and kind?
As writer Victoria Smith approached middle age, she made her peace with her saggi...
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In Defence of the Unmodified Body with Clare Chambers
Our bodies are never good enough. And the social pressures to change them are overwhelming. We strive to defy ageing, build our biceps and conceal our quirks. Surrounded by filtered photos and surgically-enhanced features, we feel we must contort our physical selves to accepted standards of beaut...
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Can Russia Escape Its History? With Acclaimed Russian Novelist Mikhail Shishkin
‘We rebuilt the same barracks, we rebuilt the new dictatorship, we rebuilt the same regime that we used to live in and now we have another regime, and the question is the same: How to preserve our human dignity, if everything is humiliating?’ – Mikhail Shishkin
Mikhail Shishkin is one of the mo...
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Carlo Rovelli and Tom Holland on Anaximander, Radical Scientific Thinker
‘In my opinion this idea of Anaximander’s [that the Earth is suspended in space] is one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.’ – Karl Popper
Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s best known scientists. A theoretical physicist, his boo...
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What Exactly Is Western Civilisation? With Naoíse Mac Sweeney
We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread connecting ancient Greece to modern Europe, from Plato to NATO. The idea of the West is deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness and we often refer to it without much consideration. But what if the idea itself is deeply flawed?
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An Alternative History of Rome with Peter Stothard (PPV)
The annals of ancient Rome’s first emperors have been recounted countless times. However, in his new book, Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars, former editor of The Times Peter Stothard presents a fresh perspective. Stothard shifts the focus to the individuals who orbited around figur...
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Digestible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World
When world-renowned economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in Britain in the 1980s he recoiled in horror at how dull and dreary British food was. But it was not just the food – which has much improved since then – that caused him to despair: it was mainstream economic thinking too. Neoclassical li...
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The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, with Francesca Peacock
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Eve: How The Female Body Drove Human Evolution, with Cat Bohannon
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How To Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, with Adam Nicolson
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The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, with Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung
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How to Repair a Broken Republic: Nabila Ramdani on Fixing France