Four Thought

Tom Fletcher, former British Ambassador to Lebanon and known as the 'naked diplomat' for his direct, unvarnished approach, argues that the future of diplomacy will be citizen-led.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, the 'ex-Excellency' explains how in the digital age most people doing diplomacy - what he describes as a basic human reflex to find common ground - will never have crossed the threshold of a Foreign Ministry. Instead, they will be working for NGOs, the media, in business, elsewhere in government or in communities.

Producer: Giles Edwards.

Adnan Sarwar, who spent ten years as a soldier, describes how the Army respected his identity as a Muslim, even though he is not religious.

"I was a Pakistani kid in the Army recruitment office in Burnley swearing an oath to the Queen. The Sergeant told me to wait while he went to find a Koran. I said the Bible would do, but he told me that they did things properly in the British Army. People had warned me before I joined that the Army was racist. People still say that to me. People who have never worn that uniform. They can't see that when we did wear that uniform, that it made us all the same."

Producer: Sheila Cook.

Simon Zagorski-Thomas thinks we fail to treat the study of popular music with the seriousness it deserves because we overvalue classical music studies.

"It seems to be up to the younger universities to take the lead in analysing musical forms that live outside of the world of the classical score and to create a musicology that is more relevant to our experience of music now."

Producer: Sheila Cook.

Stuart J. Cole, a writer and drugs counsellor - with past personal experience of addiction and prison - warns of a crisis in our prisons caused by "spice", a synthetic cannabis. He advocates a controversial way to tackle the problem. "Lower the punishment for cannabis," he says, "until a means of detection can be put in place along with punishment."

Producer: Sheila Cook.

Rachel Kelly draws on her experience of depression, and the healing power of poetry, to explain why she believes we need a more nuanced approach to treating mental illness.

The first in a new series of thought-provoking talks linked to personal experience recorded in front of a live audience.

Producer: Sheila Cook.

Alex Beaumont questions the meaning of 'The North'.

Growing up in the North of England, in his youth Alex wanted nothing more than to leave for the South. Now he lives in one part of the North, and works in another, but he questions whether 'The North' is a meaningful concept at all. How does it relate to the North of Scotland, or Ireland, and what might the UK government's plan for a 'Northern Powerhouse' mean in practice?

Producer: Katie Langton.

Another chance to hear three of the best recent episodes of Four Thought, each addressing hinge moments in the history of war and terror, and re-assessing the response of the West.

Hashi Mohamed re-interprets a recent British response to an act of terror on our own streets, arguing that the episode tells us a great deal about our nation that we take for granted.

Benedict Wilkinson challenges how we think about terrorism more generally, asking us to seriously reconsider how we confront terrorists on a global scale.

And drawing on his personal experience of advising Poland and Russia at the end of the Cold War, world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs urges us to remember lessons of the past when taking action in the present.

Producer: Katie Langton.

Charlie Howard argues that public services should find their users, not wait to be found.

Charlie started the charity MAC-UK to provide specialist mental health services to gang members and other at-risk young people. As she began to work with them, she found more and more people who would never have accessed traditional services, but were in desperate need of them.

She makes the case that this is also a better, more efficient way to help service users, and argues that other public service providers - from teachers to job advisers - should consider how they can adopt the same approach.

Producer: Katie Langton.

Lucy Allen argues that the way in which medieval society is often presented - as indifferent to sexual violence against women - is wrong.

Lucy is an academic at Cambridge University, and she recounts a disagreement with a colleague about the realism of violence depicted in the TV show Game of Thrones. In fact, she says, medieval monarchs were passing laws against sexual violence in wartime, and some medieval literature reflects a nuanced understanding of trauma caused by rape.

Producer: Beth Sagar-Fenton.

Charles Leadbeater argues that we are living in a whirlpool economy, where we are moving faster but seem to be standing still. And he suggests some changes we could make to break out of it.

Producer: Katie Langton.