Start the Week

By BBC Radio 4

Society & Culture

What's Start the Week about?

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

4.7

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Start the Week episodes:

04.29.2024
Alien life and gravity
The astrophysicist Professor Lisa Kaltenegger is like an explorer of old, but her voyage takes her far from earth, planet hunting across the universe. She is Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at...
04.22.2024
City living
London, and the river that runs through it, is at the heart of the new play London Tide, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Ben Power has adapted the novel and co-written original songs with the singer-songwriter PJ...
04.15.2024
Power to the people
2024 has been dubbed the year of elections, as at least 64 countries – including the UK – are heading for the polls. Tom Sutcliffe and guests explore the state of democracy. The political philosopher Erica Benner reflects on the...
04.08.2024
Music and poetry
Humankind’s relationship with music can be traced back millions of years and across continents. In Sound Tracks the archaeologist Graeme Lawson unearths some of the oldest instruments, from water-filled pots in Peru from AD700 that chirp like a bird, to...
04.01.2024
The war between science and religion
The historian Michael Taylor looks back at the past tug of war between religion and science, and how the discovery of ancient bones challenged religious orthodoxy. Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion is the story...
03.25.2024
Crossing borders and belonging
The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded the Pulitzer prize for his debut novel The Sympathiser in 2016. Now he turns his attention to memoir, in A Man of Two Faces. He was four when he was forced...
03.18.2024
Intrigue and disinformation from the Russian Revolution to Ukraine invasion
Andrey Kurkov is Ukraine’s most celebrated novelist. When Russia invaded Ukraine he turned his writing to journalism and memoir, but his latest book is a work of fiction set amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution. The Silver Bone (translated...
03.11.2024
Time passing: ageing, memory and nostalgia
The Nobel prize winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan explores how time affects our bodies, brains and emotions in his new book, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality. As he explains the recent scientific...
03.04.2024
Mysterious Plants
The plant Rafflesia has the world’s largest flowers and gives off one of the worst scents; it’s also something of a biological enigma, a leafless parasite that lives off forest vines. For the botanist Chris Thorogood, an expert in parasitic...
02.26.2024
Weighty issues
Over the past 50 years, worldwide obesity rates have tripled, and now headlines increasingly shout of a public health crisis, even an obesity epidemic. Tom Sutcliffe explores the consequences of using such negative and emotional language to describe weight and...
02.19.2024
Arts: changing the world?
The journalist and broadcaster Ellen E. Jones explores the immense potential of film to challenge the status quo in her book, Screen Deep: How Film And TV Can Solve Racism And Save The World. She explores different genres from superheroes...
02.12.2024
Global influences
Ancient Greece and Rome loom large in the understanding of the roots of Western Civilisation, but the Professor of Ancient History Josephine Quinn wants to challenge that simple narrative. In How The World Made The West – A 4,000 Year...
02.05.2024
Opium trade to synthetic opiates
The trade in opium formed a backdrop to Amitav Ghosh’s best-selling novels, The Ibis Trilogy. In his latest work of non-fiction, Smoke and Ashes, he investigates the impact of that trade on Britain, India and China, and follows the money...
01.29.2024
Made out of glass
The history of glass-making dates back to at least 3,600 years ago in Mesopotamia, and both manufactured and naturally-occurring glass have been used in a wide variety of objects across the world. The curator and director of the Stained Glass...
01.22.2024
War crimes justice
The legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of ‘aggressive war’ came out of the international war crimes tribunals after WWII – in Germany and Japan. In Judgement at Tokyo the academic and writer Gary J. Bass...
01.15.2024
Climate resolutions
The data analyst Hannah Ritchie challenges the doomsday climate scenarios dominating the headlines to argue for a more hopeful outlook. In Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet she...
01.08.2024
A century of Labour
The Labour Party first took office on 22nd January 1924. In the century that followed it has only had six prime ministers and been in power for a total of 33 years. The Labour MP Jon Cruddas looks back at...
12.18.2023
AI, states and corporations
Artificial Intelligence will be the focus of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by the Oxford Professor of Computer Science, Mike Wooldridge. In his series of lectures (broadcast on BBC Four in late December) he will attempt to disentangle the...
12.11.2023
Small states: global impact and survival
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the theoretical physicist Armen Sarkissian returned home and became first the Prime Minister and then the President of the newly reformed state of Armenia. In his book, The Small States Club: How Small...
12.04.2023
Playing games
It’s play time on Start the Week. The mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy looks at the numbers behind the games we play, from Monopoly to rock paper scissors. In Around The World in 80 Games he shows how understanding maths can...
11.27.2023
Space – the human story
Tim Peake was the first British astronaut to visit the International Space Station, and is one of only 628 people in human history to have left the Earth’s atmosphere. In Space he tells the human story of space exploration –...
11.20.2023
Monet and machine vision
The Impressionist painter Claude Monet wrote that he was driven ‘wild with the need to put down what I experience’. In his long career he revolutionised painting and made some of the most iconic images of western art. The art...
11.13.2023
Music – from page to performance
The award-winning composer Errollyn Wallen offers an insight into what it’s like to write a piece of music. In her memoir, Becoming a Composer, she also looks back on how a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham...
11.06.2023
China – its poetry and economy
In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, ‘Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me…/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?’ Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces...
10.30.2023
Soundtrack to life
The American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant often uses fictional or mythological characters in her songs, to capture contemporary and political concerns. Her latest album, Keep Your Courage, is a song cycle composed entirely of love songs. She tells Kirsty Wark she...
10.23.2023
Infected blood - from scandal to inquiry
The plasma product Factor VIII was heralded in the 1960s as a miracle treatment that helped those with haemophilia to live fuller lives. By the 1980s it was killing them in their thousands, as the product from the US was...
10.16.2023
Unruly bodies
The writer and academic Emma Dabiri encourages unruliness in her latest book, Disobedient Bodies. She puts the origins of western beauty ideals under the spotlight and explores ways to rebel against and subvert the current orthodoxy. The book is accompanied...
10.09.2023
Israel
This programme was set up before the violence broke out in Israel. Tom Sutcliffe will also be joined by the BBC's Diplomatic Correspondent James Landale. The Israeli novelist and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen describes the shock felt by the attacks on...
10.02.2023
The Iliad and the right to rule
After her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey the classicist Emily Wilson tackles his epic, The Iliad. She brings to life the battle cries between the Greeks and the Trojans, the bellicose leaders, the political manoeuvres and the deals with the...
09.25.2023
Contains Strong Language Festival in Leeds
In front of an audience at the Contains Strong Language Festival in Leeds the poets, Lemn Sissay and Lebogang Mashile, and the curator Clare O’Dowd explore the transformative power of language, and the quest to break down barriers. Each morning...
09.18.2023
Homo Sapiens +/-
The French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak has spent three decades uncovering evidence of ancient human life. In The Naked Neanderthal (translated by David Watson) he explores the last great extinction of a humanity that died out at the very moment Homo...
07.03.2023
The NHS at 75
To mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS Kirsty Wark looks back at its formation, its current health and future prognosis with the medic and broadcaster Kevin Fong, historian Andrew Seaton, political commentator Isabel Hardman and GP Phil Whitaker. ...
06.26.2023
Materials that shape our world
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium are the stars of Ed Conway’s book, Material World. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how they built our world, from the Dark Ages to the present day. And how much the battle to secure...
06.19.2023
Sums, stories and musical scores
Kirsty Wark celebrates the artistry of numbers with three mathematicians Eugenia Cheng, Sarah Hart and Emily Howard. Eugenia Cheng asks Is Maths Real? in her new book, which offers a new way to look at the subject by focusing on...
06.12.2023
Hacking and cybercrime
Just how safe is the online world? Yale Professor of Law and Philosophy Scott Shapiro delves into cybersecurity in his book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing. The book’s title derives from the exploits of ‘Fancy Bear’, an elite unit of the...
06.05.2023
Allergies and the Microbiome
Billions of people worldwide suffer from some kind of allergy and this is the focus of Theresa MacPhail’s book, Allergic. As a medical anthropologist and allergy sufferer herself she looks back at the history of diagnosis and treatment and...
05.29.2023
Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century
In front of an audience at the Hay Festival Tom Sutcliffe asks what Dickens would say about the world today. The prize-winning Barbara Kingsolver discusses her retelling of David Copperfield, in which her eponymous hero, Demon Copperfield, must struggle to...
05.22.2023
Birds and moths
The exhibition Animals: Art, Science and Sound at the British Library (until 28 August 2023) reveals how animals have been documented across the world through history. Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sound, explores how people have tried to...
05.15.2023
Virtuous bankers?
The economic historian and former trader Anne Murphy looks back at the Bank of England in the 18th century. In Virtuous Bankers she shows how a private institution became ‘a great engine of state’ and central to Britain’s economic and...
05.08.2023
Monster artist/monstrous art?
What to do with the art of monstrous men? That’s the question Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She wonders whether she can or should continue to love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway...
05.01.2023
Life behind the iron curtain
Adam Rutherford asks what ordinary life was like in the Soviet Union and how far its collapse helps to explain Russia today. Karl Schlögel is one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union. In his latest book, The...
04.24.2023
Ancient trees
Trees have the remarkable ability to pass knowledge down to succeeding generations and to survive the ravages of climate change, if only we’d let them alone, according to the German forester Peter Wohlleben. In The Power of Trees (translated by...
04.17.2023
A place called home
Why is it so difficult to find a place to call home? By the age of twenty five the journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses, from council estates in London to a car showroom in rural Wales....
04.10.2023
Ai Weiwei and design values
The artist Ai Weiwei has always enjoyed ignoring the boundaries between disciplines, fusing art, architecture, design, collecting and social activism. He’s now taken over the Design Museum in London (from 7th April – 30th July 2023), filling it with his...
04.03.2023
Mastering a new skill
How do people learn new skills and become real experts? These were the questions the author Adam Gopnik wanted to answer in his new book, The Real Work – a term magicians use for their accumulated craft. He apprenticed himself...
03.27.2023
Climate - past, present and future
The world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Kirsty Wark talks to an historian, scientist and novelist about how to convey the story and impact of climate change. Floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and solar...
03.20.2023
Humanism - what is it good for?
The writer Sarah Bakewell explores the long tradition of humanist thought in her latest book, Humanly Possible. She celebrates the writers, thinkers, artists and scientists over the last 700 years who have placed humanity at the centre, while defying the...
03.13.2023
George Eliot and married life
George Eliot was a leading novelist who scandalised Victorian society by eloping to Germany with a married man and living in unlawful conjugal bliss. She dedicated her books to ‘her husband’ and wrote of 'this double life, which helps me...
03.06.2023
The Iraq War – 20 years on
It’s twenty years since the US and UK invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kirsty Wark discusses the lead up to the war, the impact on the lives of Iraqis and the legacy. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad left his job in Baghdad...
02.27.2023
Democratic capitalism – marriage on the rocks
It’s Ok To Be Angry About Capitalism is the title of the new book by the US politician Bernie Sanders. In it he castigates a system that he argues is fuelled by uncontrolled greed and rigged against ordinary people. He...

What's Start the Week about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Start the Week episodes:

Alien life and gravity

City living

Power to the people

Music and poetry

The war between science and religion

Crossing borders and belonging

Intrigue and disinformation from the Russian Revolution to Ukraine invasion

Time passing: ageing, memory and nostalgia

Mysterious Plants

Weighty issues

Arts: changing the world?

Global influences

Opium trade to synthetic opiates

Made out of glass

War crimes justice

Climate resolutions

A century of Labour

AI, states and corporations

Small states: global impact and survival

Playing games

Space – the human story

Monet and machine vision

Music – from page to performance

China – its poetry and economy

Soundtrack to life

Infected blood - from scandal to inquiry

Unruly bodies

Israel

The Iliad and the right to rule

Contains Strong Language Festival in Leeds

Homo Sapiens +/-

The NHS at 75

Materials that shape our world

Sums, stories and musical scores

Hacking and cybercrime

Allergies and the Microbiome

Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century

Birds and moths

Virtuous bankers?

Monster artist/monstrous art?

Life behind the iron curtain

Ancient trees

A place called home

Ai Weiwei and design values

Mastering a new skill

Climate - past, present and future

Humanism - what is it good for?

George Eliot and married life

The Iraq War – 20 years on

Democratic capitalism – marriage on the rocks