Why did humans start to live together in cities as opposed to villages and why did they fail? Professor of Ancient History and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London Greg Woolf explores these questions in his book that has the subtitle a natural history as Greg believes that this is the key to answering these questions.

It’s been 75 years since one great power has been to war with another directly. That’s the longest interval in several thousand years, but historian Gwynne Dyer believes we could soon see this change if we don’t take time to examine our relationship with war.

Twenty years after its humble beginnings, Wikipedia has become an indispensable tool. In a world of misinformation, it has been described as the ‘last bastion of idealism’ on the Internet. How did Wikipedia come to realise such unlikely success, and what are the challenges it faces as it enters the next phase of its life?

Former Ambassador to China Geoff Raby says you can't be an idealogue and you need to have a great memory to be a successful diplomat. It also helps if you are widely read, have a good personality and can keep up with some of the more extensive dinners! Geoff discusses the current situation with China and how it should be handled, the best foreign affairs ministers he has worked with and his greatest challenge as a diplomat.

Vera Deakin was the youngest daughter of Australia's second Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. She was well educated, musically gifted and spent time in Germany and Hungary studying music in 1914. She was in London when Great Britain declared war on Germany and she was desperate to join the troops but was of the wrong gender. But the Great War did offer her a chance to change the course of her life and to leave a lasting legacy. She headed up the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry office, first in Cairo and later in London. Her reports are still used today to find missing soldiers.

America's youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman recently reminded us of the intersection between the political and the personal, and the power of poetry to express this. This was something that resonated with Australia's wartime prime minister John Curtin, who read poetry every Sunday evening and declared it 'good for the soul'. Not only was poetry a great love for Curtin, it informed his politics, prose and even his relationships.

The Sackler’s are one of the richest families in the world and for years they were lauded for their philanthropy, while the source of their fortune remained a mystery. Then it was revealed that they were the developers of OxyContin, the drug at the heart of the opioid crisis that crippled America, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Spanning three generations, the story of the Sackler family is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second gilded age, and a parable of twenty-first century business.

What needs to be done to ensure the future of liberal democracies.

As a young diplomat Sue Boyd was summoned to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam where he asked about her posting in Portugal “what's going on, what does it mean for Australia and what do we do about it." This is the mantra Sue says that a good diplomat has to be able to answer. And so began her long career as a successful diplomat. Sue talks about the struggles for equal opportunity for females in DFAT, that Canberra was often the hardest place to be a female in this field compared to the rest of her overseas postings, and how you do your job when you disagree with the directive given by the government. The example Sue discusses is that of the Pacific Solution under John Howard, where she had to find Pacific countries willing to set up refugee processing centres.

New York Times bestselling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the incredible true story of the all-female Kurdish militia that defied the odds, and became part of the world's best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria.