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In the music business, Brian Eno is a name to conjure with. He’s been the producer of tremendous hits by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Coldplay, and many other top artists. But he’s also a conceptualist, nicknamed Professor Eno in the British music press, and a foundational figure in ambient music—a genre whose very name Eno coined. Amanda Petrusich speaks with Eno about his two new albums that just came out, “Luminal” and “Lateral,” and his new book, “What Art Does.” “One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings,”  Eno says. “Its main point is to make your feelings change—is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn’t have before or did have before and want to have again or want to experiment with. So it seems very simplistic to say, ‘Oh, it’s all about feelings.’ But actually I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn’t do art.”

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.
What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

At the age of 10 Dervla Murphy was given an atlas and a bicycle, and so began an adventurous life. Her account of a journey to India became a classic called Full Tilt but she also went to Cuba, Ethiopia and the Andes where our guest first met her in a doss house. Hilary Bradt is the founder of the Bradt Travel Guides and is picking Dervla Murphy as a great example of the adventurous female traveller, never afraid of a little hardship. Joining her in studio is Rose Baring who edited Dervla's last three books. A joyful episode which includes some excellent archive of Dervla Murphy plus the writer Antonia Quirke.

The producer for BBC studios Audio in Bristol is Miles Warde

Professor Frank Close looks at how the quest to understand radioactivity and the atomic nucleus was initially fired by scientific curiosity and then by more human motives. What began as collaboration between scientists in the pursuit of atomic energy was overwhelmed by politics and opened the way to the possibility of nuclear war. Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 shows how scientific knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships and takes us into the rooms where discoveries and decisions were made.

Nuclear energy is the most promising tool that we have to tackle the climate emergency, so argues Tim Gregory in his new book Going Nuclear How the Atom Will Save the World. He says it is time to debunk the myths about nuclear waste and radiation and that nuclear power is reliable and safe. Harnessing the atom is our best hope of providing abundant and clean energy to ensure an equitable and prosperous future.

For Baroness Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party, nuclear has been a continual disaster. As an energy source nuclear it has been impractical, inflexible and unreliable; a dinosaur technology whose use has declined. She believes that the continued appearance of nuclear in policy debates is a distraction from renewables and energy conservation. She believes that we have not found an adequate solution to the problem of nuclear waste. And in the field of defence, the majority of countries want a ban on nuclear weapons.

Sebastian Junger came as close as you possibly can to dying. While his doctors struggled to revive him, the veteran reporter and avowed rationalist experienced things that shocked and shook him, leaving him with profound questions and unexpected revelations. In his book, In My Time of Dying, he explores the mysteries and commonalities of people’s near-death experiences.

In this episode, which originally aired in May 2024, he joins Sean to talk about what it’s like to almost die and what quantum physics can tell us about the afterlife.

Host: Sean Illing (⁠⁠@SeanIlling⁠⁠)

Guest: Sebastian Junger, journalist and author of ⁠⁠In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of an Afterlife⁠

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Winston Churchill was an extraordinary presence on the world stage, and among his strengths, he had a tremendous gift with words. Here are just a few of the powerful, insightful, or hilarious observations he made.

Resources & links related to this episode:

• Secrets of Adulthood
•  Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill
• Episode of “A Little Happier on one of Winston Churchill's most famous lines
• Painting as a Pastime by Winston Churchill (Amazon, Bookshop)
• Winston Churchill Didn't Hesitate to Show His Emotions

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Ian McMillan's guests celebrate hedges, with poetry from Alison Brackenbury and Testament, singing from Sam Lee, Michael Symmons Roberts explores a poem with a nightingale at its centre, and hedgelayer Paul Lamb records himself walking a hedgerow that's rich in wildlife.

This hedge-themed special features a haunted hedge from poet Alison Brackenbury, part of the anthology 'Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined' (ed, Anna Milon and Rory Waterman). Alison's hedge started off life as a talking hedge in her non-fiction book 'Village' which is all about her childhood home in Lincolnshire (to be published online in July)

Testament, a world record-breaking beatboxer, rapper and poet, performs a poem called 'The Lig', based on his experiences observing three generations of farmer hedge-layers in Cumbria. Testament is a member of the Hot Poets Collective which explores climate change through spoken word poetry.

Sam Lee's most recent album is 'Songdreaming' - and he sings, not only in front of human audiences, but also with and alongside nightingales. Sam takes musicians and small groups of people into woodland for annual 'Singing With Nightingales' events - events which celebrate this vulnerable bird and our creative connection with it. Sam sings 'Bushes and Briars' on the show and explores the poetry of 19th century poet John Clare.

Poet and professor Michael Symmons Roberts chooses a 'neon line' for The Verb's ongoing series about stand-out lines in poems . His choice is from a poem that features a 'deconstructed hedge' and a singing blackbird. Michael listened carefully to the blackbirds in his garden whilst writing his new book 'Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong', - inspired by his relationship with the music of the composer Olivier Messaien.

Ian also dips in and out of a very long hedge with the help of Paul Lamb, a hedge-layer who walks the Gower Peninsula to bring us hedge language. Paul's new memoir is called 'Of Thorn and Briar - A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer'

Born in Budapest and brought up in England after coming to the UK as a refugee in 1956, George Szirtes has remained one of the country’s most interesting poets since his first prize-winning collection, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. That wasn’t the last trophy he was to take home; he won the T S Eliot Prize for his 2005 collection Reel.

The SPL caught up with Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to read from his collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe), he spoke to Colin Waters about memory, photography, Twitter and 1960s garage pop.

Photo by Caroline Forbes.

Edwidge Danticat joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” by Zadie Smith, which was published in The New Yorker in 2016. Danticat, a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the Vilcek Prize in Literature, has published six books of fiction, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” “The Farming of Bones,” “Claire of the Sea Light,” and “Everything Inside.” Her memoir “Brother, I’m Dying” won the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. She has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 1999.

Louise Erdrich reads her story “Love of My Days,” from the June 2, 2025, issue of the magazine. Erdrich is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the novels “The Round House,” which won the National Book Award in 2012, “The Night Watchman,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, and “The Mighty Red,” which was published last year.

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