Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a love of books until much later in life. Her bestselling first novel, My Name is Leon, written in her 40s, draws on her own childhood experiences and her early career as a legal worker in the foster care system, and she devoted some of the proceeds to setting up a scholarship for aspiring authors from working class backgrounds.  Her music choices include tracks from classic film scores - her father was an avid film buff - including Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway version of Carmen, alongside Bach, Chopin and Miles Davis. Producer: Graham Rogers

Kit de Waal

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Music

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.   Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the Science Museum in London – one about the Hadron Collider, another about the Sun, and his first book was called How To Make An Apple Pie from Scratch, a title which draws on a comment by the astronomer Carl Sagan: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". His most recent book Space Oddities looks at some of the strange things – anomalies - that are currently confounding scientists, and transforming our understanding of physics.

Harry Cliff

Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.  Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black.   Alison probably knows better than most what it’s like to be a young woman in the spotlight, as the mother of a high-profile star herself: the singer Lily Allen.   Her music choices include Beethoven, Coltrane, Ravel and Puccini.

Alison Owen

The American writer Percival Everett is enjoying a moment in the spotlight: his novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022; an earlier book, Erasure, was adapted into the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction; and his latest novel, James, is already a best-seller in the United States. It’s a powerful re-telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim.  In the past four decades he's published two dozen novels, and another dozen books of stories and poetry, but he's just as happy away from the world of literature, fly-fishing or painting. He's also worked as a horse trainer, a cowboy and a jazz guitarist. Jazz and blues feature among the music he shares with us, along with Dvorak, Schoenberg, Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

Percival Everett

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 write and think today.  She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World.  Her writing and teaching are based on decades of scholarship, with a focus on ancient Greek drama, and she’s also a familiar voice as a broadcaster, on programmes such as In Our Time. Her most recent book is Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks and Me - a deeply personal account of the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, drawing parallels between her own family history and characters from Greek tragedy. 
Edith's music selection includes Schubert, Beethoven, Gluck and Handel.

Edith Hall

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 but he went to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature. He started out writing for newspapers, winning the Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002. He now writes for The Times. In 2008 he published his memoir of his early life called The Boy With the Topknot. More recently he has focused on our colonial history. In 2021 he published Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, which was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards. Then came Empireworld: How British Imperialism has shaped the Globe, which quickly became a best-seller.
Sathnam's musical choices include Bach, John Coltrane, Debussy and Jasdeep Singh Degun.

Kit de Waal

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