Asif Khan is a world-renowned architect and designer whose work inspired a recent headline – ‘is there anything Asif Khan can’t transform?’.

His current projects include the re-invention of the former Smithfield meat market into the new London Museum, and the extensive renewal of the Barbican Centre. Further afield, in Kazakhstan, he’s turned a vast former Soviet cinema into a new cultural centre.

He opened his own studio in 2007, and has designed exhibitions, temporary pavilions and installations around the world. He views architecture as a multidisciplinary field, bringing together design, science and art.

His musical choices include Chopin, Shostakovich, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Brian Eno.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Philippa Gregory has been called the ‘Queen of Historical Fiction’. The English royal court has inspired many of her best-selling titles, and she’s written sixteen novels about the Plantagenets and Tudors. One of them – The Other Boleyn Girl – became a BBC TV drama and a Hollywood movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

This success probably surprised her A level teachers: she says she found history ‘insanely boring’ at school, but her passion was fired at university. She’s also written non-fiction, notably seeking the stories of what she calls ‘normal women’ over 900 years. More recently she’s returned to the Tudors, with a novel called Boleyn Traitor, focussing on the intrigue surrounding Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane.

Her music choices include Mozart, Philip Glass, Scott Joplin and the Mazurka from Coppelia by Leo Delibes.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The botanist Dr Sandra Knapp is a senior researcher at the Natural History Museum - but that title doesn’t convey the sheer adventure of her work. She’s a kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, travelling to remote regions of Central and Southern America and beyond. Her speciality is the Solanum genus, which includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines – and she has found and named more than a hundred new varieties.

The rainforests, where she has worked for more than 40 years, are a long way from the dry rural deserts of New Mexico, where she was born.

Her music choices include works by Mozart, Brahms, Hindemith and Holst, as well as music inspired by the biodata of some of her beloved plants.

Presenter Michael Berkeley

Paul Chahidi is an actor whose versatility shines through in prize-winning performances from Shakespeare to satire. He delighted West End and Broadway audiences as Maria in Twelfth Night and won acclaim from filmgoers as the hapless Nikolai Bulganin in The Death of Stalin. On TV, he’s played a well-meaning vicar in the BAFTA-winning This Country, an archangel in Good Omens, and he’s currently a spook in the BBC thriller The Night Manager.

Such shape-shifting came early: Paul was born Ghiv Khatib-Chahidi in Iran before moving as a child to the Oxford countryside. He studied Arabic and Persian at university with an eye to becoming a foreign correspondent, before the lure of Shakespeare and Sondheim won him over.

His choices include music from Iran, as well as Vaughan Williams, Chopin, Beethoven and Palestrina.

Presenter Michael Berkeley

Vanessa Williams is musical theatre royalty. She’s worked with Stephen Sondheim on Broadway and is currently commanding the London stage as the fearsome fashion editor Miranda Priestly in the musical The Devil Wears Prada. She’s also topped the American pop charts, starred in Hollywood movies with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played key roles in prize winning TV series including Ugly Betty.

And before all that she was crowned Miss America 1984 - the first Black American to take the title – although she was later forced to relinquish it in controversial circumstances.

Her choices include music from her homeland by Samuel Barber, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, as well as works by Bach and Delius.

Presenter Michael Berkeley

The best-selling writer Alison Weir knows precisely what sparked her interest in history: at the age of 14 she read what she calls a ‘really trashy novel’ about Katherine of Aragon – and a lifelong passion began.

Since then she has written 38 books, selling more than three million copies around the world. Her non-fiction titles include biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth of York. She has also written many historical novels – including a book about each of Henry VIII’s six wives.

In her most recent novel, The Cardinal, she focuses on the rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey, who enjoyed a prominent and powerful role in the court of Henry VIII.

Alison's music choices include Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and Purcell.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the poet Pam Ayres, who shares the music that matters most to her, including some seasonal favourites. It’s now 50 years since Pam first won a vast national audience on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, with poems including her much-loved wintry verse 'Sling another chair leg on the fire, Mother!'

Her musical choices include Rachmaninov, Elgar and Johnny Mathis.

The Canadian crime fiction writer Louise Penny has sold more than 18 million books around the world – and she was a late starter: she was 45 when her first book appeared, after working for two decades as a broadcaster and journalist.

Success as a fiction writer came quickly: her first novel Still Life won numerous awards, and introduced Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who works in rural Quebec.

Louise's music includes works by Beethoven, Michael Nyman, Bach and Neil Young.

Presenter Michael Berkeley

Lea Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, grew up in Albania under communism, when it was the last Stalinist outpost in Europe.

She was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and a year later she saw the collapse of communism in Albania. Statues of Stalin and Enver Hoxha, the country’s leader for 40 years, were toppled. Democratic elections followed - but so did civil unrest.

Lea wrote about these turbulent years in her book Free, which won prizes and widespread acclaim: 'essential - just as much for Britons as Albanians' according to one critic.

She has delved further into her family history, looking into the past of her grandmother, in her book Indignity.

Lea's musical choices include Beethoven, Wagner, Dizdari and Bach.

Hugh Bonneville is one of the most familiar faces on British TV and film. You might know him as the Earl of Grantham from Downton Abbey, or the long-suffering Mr Brown in the Paddington films, or the baffled Ian Fletcher in the London Olympics sitcom Twenty Twelve and its BBC-centred sequel W1A.

Hugh was captivated by acting from an early age, staging his own plays at home and even making the tickets to sell to his family.

More recently he’s has branched out into writing, with a memoir Playing Under the Piano and a children’s book Rory Sparkes and the Elephant in the Room, which is inspired by some of the events of his childhood.

Hugh's selection of music includes works by Beethoven, Strauss, Elgar and Faure.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley