Start the Week

The internationally-renowned artist Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his creativity and political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father. In 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, translated by Alan H. Barr, he looks back at the blighted life of his father Ai Qing, once China’s most celebrated poet before he was banished during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei tells Tom Sutcliffe about his own journey to becoming an artist and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.

The Professor of Political Theory, Lea Ypi, understands only too well growing up in a repressive Communist state – she was born in Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe. In her memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History she describes how the isolated world of her childhood was swept away. But also how the promised freedoms after the fall of the Berlin Wall quickly turned sour.

The pianist Kirill Gerstein was born in the former Soviet Union, but is now an American citizen based in Berlin. His career and musical heritage is similarly international, and he plays all around the world. Gerstein considers what creative freedom has meant to some of his favourite composers – from Viktor Ullmann to Shostakovich – who produced great art during times of intense political upheaval.

Producer: Katy Hickman

‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening’, wrote George Orwell in 1940. In Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit explores how the writer’s love for growing things, especially flowers, seeps into his work. She reflects on how he uses pleasure, beauty and joy as powerful acts of resistance. And how far these can counter the political and environmental challenges we face today.

The father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was also driven by a desire to reform the society he lived in at the turn of the 20th century. The biographer Claire Tomalin brings to life his early years in The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World. He was born into poverty and achieved international fame, but never lost his boundless curiosity for the world around him, and the possibilities of science to change it.

The journalist Peter Hetherington asks why land reform is not higher on the government’s agenda. In Land Renewed he looks at the competing elements in the reshaping of the countryside and aiding nature’s recovery, including protecting valuable farmland, encouraging more local food production, re-wilding and ‘re-peopling’ remote places. But he argues it needs a wider vision to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all.

Producer: Katy Hickman

In his new book, Rationality, the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human beings have the power to think, act and behave rationally, if given the right tools to do so. He asks why rationality so often plays second fiddle to opinion, bias and prejudice. And he believes that in order to ensure our survival as a species we need to learn how to apply rational thought to our daily lives.

Our attitudes towards sexual desire may not always be regarded as rational. Amia Srinivasan is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University and in ‘The Right to Sex’ she considers this universal topic from a modern feminist perspective – a collision of pleasure, ethics and gender politics.

If physical relationships are often the result of irrational decisions, then the belief in ghosts takes the human scope for irrationality to a whole new level. In The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, British Museum curator Irving Finkel goes right back to the beginning and shows how the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians believed in the spirit world and considers why this enduring belief in ghosts is something that spans diverse cultures and historical periods.

Producer: Natalia Fernandez

‘Devil-Land’ – that was how foreign observers viewed England in the 17th century: a ‘failed state’ torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. The historian Clare Jackson recounts this stormy and radical era through the eyes of outsiders across the Channel. But she tells Andrew Marr that the country’s turbulence also bred great creativity and curiosity about the wider world.

The Anglo-French journalist Benedicte Paviot is the UK correspondent of France 24. She explores how the French view Britain today. From Brexit to the government’s pursuit of ‘Global Britain’ and the new Australia/UK/US defence pact, contemporary French neighbours often look on with hostility and bemusement.

Fintan O’Toole is an Irish journalist and polemicist who has spent much of his career commenting on Britain from the other side of the water. But in his latest book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, he turns his attention to Ireland since his birth in 1958. It’s another story of great turbulence and rebellion, from underdevelopment, domination by the Church and a sectarian civil war in the North, to struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms.

Producer: Katy Hickman

What does the face of power look like? It’s a question the academic Mary Beard explores in her latest book, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. She tells Kirsty Wark how the depiction of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture and the presentation of power for more than two thousand years.

King George III was condemned in the 18th century as ‘the cruellest tyrant of his age’ and depicted as a diminutive and pompous figure in the 21st century musical, Hamilton. These are images the historian Andrew Roberts seeks to counter in his new biography of the King. His revisionist account argues that far from being a tyrant or incompetent he was one of the country’s most admirable monarchs.

Modern political leaders are no strangers to the importance of public image. As the Conservative government holds its party political conference in Manchester the political commentator and sometime-stand-up comedian Ayesha Hazarika looks at how leaders of different parties have tried to stage manage their hold on power.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The prize-winning author Colm Tóibín recreates the life and work of one of Germany’s most famous and acclaimed writers Thomas Mann. The Magician is a deeply intimate portrait of a private man, revealing both his suppressed homosexuality and complex family ties, and of a public writer who sought to explicate the soul of Germany in the 20th century.

When Hitler came to power Thomas Mann fled his homeland and went into exile in America, and in Switzerland, never to return to live in the country that inspired his creativity. Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature at Oxford, considers how German writers have become embroiled in the major events of history, and the impact on their writing. She has translated the lectures of the poet Durs Grünbein, For the Dying Calves, to be published in November.

Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the story of the decline of a wealthy bourgeois merchant family. As a family saga it’s been likened to Jesse Armstrong’s 21st century creation, Succession. As the television drama reaches its third series Armstrong explains why the back-stabbing, power-grabbing antics of a superrich, dysfunctional family has so caught the public imagination.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Richard Powers’s prize-winning Overstory was an impassioned evocation of the natural world and a call to arms to save it. In his latest novel, Bewilderment, a father and son navigate a world seemingly bent on destruction. Powers tells Andrew Marr how the father, an astrobiologist, models planets in far away galaxies searching for life, while his nature-loving 9 year old struggles to understand why earth’s life forms are so thoughtlessly destroyed.

Mya-Rose Craig, aka ‘birdgirl’, is a young British-Bangladeshi ornithologist and activist. From a deep love of bird watching she has gone on to become a prominent environmentalist. In ‘We Have A Dream’ she speaks to 30 young indigenous people of colour to find out how their environments have been affected by climate change, and why young people are so involved in protecting the natural world.

The journalist Simon Mundy argues that climate change is affecting more than just the environment: everything from energy, farming, technology and business, as well as migration. In Race for Tomorrow, Mundy has travelled the world talking to the people at the front line of this transformation, from those battling to survive the worst impacts, to those eager to reap the financial rewards.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The neuroscientist Anil Seth is a leading researcher into consciousness. In his book, Being You, he explores why we experience life in the first person. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how our perceptual experiences are less a reflection of an objective external reality, and more a kind of controlled hallucination. He argues that perception is a brain-based ‘best guess’ – including our core sense of self – designed by evolution to keep the body alive.

Tiffany Watt Smith is interested in how the individual self can feel swept up and subsumed in crowds, and the tension between ‘feeling yourself’ and ‘losing yourself’. This has taken on added significance during a pandemic when collective experience has become tinged with anxiety. As Director of the Centre of the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, she has also looked at how far being able to name an emotion makes it more real.

Emotional turmoil, from revenge to love, are writ large in Rigoletto – the season opener at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It’s the first production by the company’s Director, Oliver Mears, and the first new show since the opera house closed because of Covid-19. Mears sees Verdi’s masterpiece as a modern morality play that pits power against innocence, in a pitiless world of decadence, corruption and decay.

Producer: Katy Hickman

(Photo: Gilda) Lisette Oropesa (c) ROH 2021. Rigoletto Studio Rehearsal. Photograph by Ellie Kurttz.)

Ali Smith talks to Andrew Marr about Summer, the finale to her ambitious, ground-breaking Seasonal quartet of novels. Since 2016, the prize-winning writer has been working on a cycle of novels that not only explore the changing seasons, but reflect the times we are living in. With the tightest turnaround from manuscript to book, Smith’s ambition was to create real contemporaneous ‘state of the nation’ works. She reflects on a country voting on its future, people and families on the brink of change, and now living through a pandemic, while also understanding how art, nature and landscape speak of a deeper truth.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Scotland’s former National Poet Jackie Kay celebrates the tempestuous life of the great blues singer, Bessie Smith. Born in Tennessee in 1894 Bessie was a street singer before she made it big at a time of racial violence and segregation. Jackie Kay remembers growing up as a young black girl in Glasgow and she tells Kirsty Wark how she idolised this iconic singer.

In Time’s Witness the historian Rosemary Hill explores the historical shift in focus from the grand sweeping narratives of kings and statesmen to a new interest in the lives of ordinary people. She argues that the turn of the 19th century and the age of the Romantics ushered in a more vibrant and serious debate about the importance of oral history, clothes, music, food and art.

The artist Michael Armitage is exhibiting his latest work at the Royal Academy in London until September. Born in Kenya in 1984 but based between Nairobi and London, Armitage is influenced by contemporary East African art and politics, as well as drawing on European art history from Titian to Gauguin. His exhibition Paradise Edict showcases 15 of his large scale works painted on lubugo bark cloth, a material traditionally made in Uganda.

Producer: Katy Hickman