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".

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"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".

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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."

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."

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".

The philosopher John Gray reflects on the nature of immortality as expressed by the writer Theodore Powys, 'The longest life may fade and perish but one moment can live and become immortal.' "Powys captures a paradox at the heart of our thinking about death and the afterlife: there's a kind of immortality that only mortals can enjoy."

John Gray takes a fresh look at the thinking of John Maynard Keynes and wonders what he would have really thought about the current economic crises and how to solve them. "It's still Keynes from who we have most to learn. Not Keynes, the economic engineer, who is invoked by his disciples today. It's Keynes the sceptic, who understood that markets are as prone to fits of madness as any other human institution and who tried to envision a more intelligent variety of capitalism".

John Gray reflects on the nature of violence which he sees as an inevitable part of the human condition. He analyses the impulses which drive us to fight one another and takes issue with the philosopher Hobbes' view that violence can be tamed principally by the use of reason. "The vast industrial style wars of the last century may have been left behind, but they have been followed by other forms of human conflict, in their way no less destructive".

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