Start the Week

Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics at University College London, tells Amol Rajan it’s time western governments took a braver approach to the biggest problems of our time – inequality, disease and environmental crisis. In her book, Mission Economy, she argues that capitalism has foundered. Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s decision in 1962 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, she calls for a greater sense of purpose from governments and a bolder public-private cooperation.

The former cabinet minister and Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable looks back over the last 250 years to understand the power politicians have to transform their countries’ fortunes, for better or worse. In Money and Power – The World Leaders who Changed Economics he ranges from Thatcher to Trump, from Lenin to Bismarck to examine the interplay of economics and politics.

But what happens when people begin to feel the economy is broken. In Why You Won’t Get Rich the journalist Robert Verkaik aims his ire at capitalism and the failure to treat people fairly. He argues that for too many people hard work is no longer enough to keep them off the breadline. While economic statistics place the UK as the sixth richest economy Verkaik believes too few reap the benefit.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Francis Bacon is one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists – a painter who captured and exposed the darker, stranger sides of life. He is the subject of a new biography, Revelations, by Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens. Swan tells Andrew Marr how Bacon often fashioned his own autobiography, revelling in story-telling while immersed in the Soho nightlife.

Francis Bacon never hid his homosexuality, even at a time when it was illegal in Britain. The celebrated script writer Russell T Davies is well-known for his depiction of the gay scene in Manchester with his 1990s series, Queer as Folk. He now turns his attention to what happened in the decades of the HIV/ AIDs crisis in the Channel 4 series, It’s A Sin.

The composer Mark-Anthony Turnage took inspiration from a Francis Bacon’s triptych in his work Three Screaming Popes, combining expressionist complexity with English lyricism. 2020 was planned as a celebratory year for Turnage’s 60th birthday with several premieres scheduled. All were cancelled due to Covid-19. The composer discusses these works and what is inspiring him in the new year.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The Acts of Union 1707 brought together England and Scotland, ‘United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain’. But the historian Karin Bowie tells Andrew Marr that in the years preceding a growing number of pamphlets and demonstrations showed that many people were divided on the issue. In ‘Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland c.1560–1707’ Bowie charts the growing debate across society. The failure of Scotland’s trading ambitions in the Darien Scheme also hit the country hard, both financially and emotionally.

However the idea of an independent Scotland emerged surprisingly recently into public debate, according to academic Ben Jackson. In his book The Case for Scottish Independence he argues that an influential Scottish nationalism only began to take shape from the 1970s onwards. It was at heart a political project, born out of opposition to the Thatcher government.

The political scientist Ailsa Henderson will be watching the coming elections closely too as she’s an expert on voting behaviour and attitudes to both Scottish and English nationalism. A number of Scots felt a deep sense of grievance against their neighbours at the formation of the Union. Now more than three hundred years later Henderson shows, in her forthcoming book Englishness – co-written with Richard Wyn Jones – that English nationalism contains a strain of grievance about England’s place within the United Kingdom.

Producer: Katy Hickman

2020 has been disastrous for the arts in Britain and many people have lost their jobs as Covid-19 has swept through the country. Sir Nicholas Hytner has been working in the theatre for nearly four decades and he tells Andrew Marr about the unprecedented challenges that now face his industry.

Hytner made his name and fortune in the 1990s with the musical Miss Saigon. Further successes came with theatre and film productions of The Madness of King George and The History Boys, and the sell-out One Man, Two Guvnors.

He ran the National Theatre for twelve years before setting up his own commercial venture – with his business partner Nick Starr – the Bridge Theatre. During the year of the pandemic Hytner has sought to keep the theatre afloat with performances of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a specially adapted, socially distanced, but joyful, version of A Christmas Carol.

Producer: Katy Hickman

As the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket approaches Andrew Marr explores the dynamic between church and state and what happens when the most powerful political friendships turn sour.

The academic Laura Ashe explains the background to the murder in the cathedral on 29th December 1170. King Henry II had promoted the lowly born Thomas Becket to the highest positions in the land – first Lord Chancellor, then Archbishop of Canterbury. But their growing animosity and conflict over the rights and privileges of the church led to his infamous assassination by four of the King’s knights.

In recent years the former librarian Christopher de Hamel has succeeded in identifying the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which Becket cherished in his lifetime and may even have been holding when he died. In The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket, de Hamel looks at what this book reveals about the life of Becket. He also compares the veneration for relics of the saints in the Middle Ages, with our relationship today with historical artefacts.

In Britain the Anglican Church still has an establishment role within the state, with Bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch regarded as ‘defender of the faith’. But across the Channel in France a formal separation of church and state, laïcité, was enshrined in French law in 1905. The cultural historian Andrew Hussey, who is based in Paris, looks at the devastating fault lines that have emerged in 2020 in the country’s secularist ideals.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Look into the night sky in the coming days and Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer than they’ve been since the early 17th century, according to the astronomer Stuart Clark. He tells Tom Sutcliffe it’s a beautiful great conjunction that happens once every 20 years, but this year is especially rare. In his book, Beneath the Night, Clark explores how the stars have shaped the history of humankind, inspiring awe and fascination throughout the centuries.

It was the extremity and majesty of whales that inspired the writer Rebecca Giggs. In her latest book, Fathoms: the world in the whale, she fuses natural history, philosophy and science to look at our relationship with this most magnificent of mammals. She asks how far the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas, and the impact of climate change.

Artists have long taken inspiration for their work from the heavens and the natural world around them. In Shaping the World: Sculpture from Pre-History to Now, the world-renowned sculptor Antony Gormley explores this art form, alongside the art critic Martin Gayford. Gormley argues that the desire to make objects can be found in every culture throughout the world, and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.

The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK.

John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Amol Rajan explores different ways of thinking, and how far humans can be seen as unique for their ability to invent.

In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen shows how humans have evolved remarkable ingenuity in every area of their lives – from the arts to the sciences – by using complex systemizing mechanisms. He says this ability to formulate if-and-then processes has driven progress for more than 70,000 years. He goes on to argue that the areas of the brain important for systemizing overlap with those for autism. As the Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen wants to challenge people to think differently about an often misunderstood condition.

The archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Skyes is also seeking to challenge people’s perceptions. In Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, she builds a picture of an ancient ancestor who was far from being a brutish thug. She depicts the Neanderthals as curious and clever connoisseurs of their world: technologically inventive and artistically inclined. Humans may have been the survivors but Wragg Sykes argues that we are not necessarily uniquely special - we share many traits and DNA with our Neanderthal relatives.

Susan Carvahlo started her career as an archaeologist with a fascination for human evolution, but her interest in uncovering knowledge of our ancestors led her to become one of the main founders of the field of Primate Archaeology. For decades she has been studying stone-tool use by wild chimpanzees in West Africa. Alongside another project in the Rift Valley, she’s looking to use the knowledge gained from non-human primates to expand understanding of human origins and behaviour.

Producer: Katy Hickman

‘A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible’. So wrote the superstar philosopher Jacques Derrida. But what does it mean to question and deconstruct everything we think we know? In a new biography of Derrida titled An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon explores the life and works of one of the most enigmatic of thinkers. He questions how far Derrida’s ideas have led to today’s ‘post-truth’ age?

Virginia Woolf's essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ posed the question: ‘‘Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?’ The English professor Alexandra Harris looks at whether Woolf’s answer stands the test of time.

Bernhard Schlink’s literary career took off in 1995 with the publication of his novel The Reader, which became an international bestseller. His latest work, Olga (translated into English by Charlotte Collins), is a story of love set in Germany against the backdrop of the traumas of the 20th century.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Ireland itself is a main character in Kevin Barry's new short story collection, That Old Country Music. He brings the western regions to life in stories set firmly in Ireland's present day but with an ancient, magical past lingering in the background. A pregnant teenager waits for her robber boyfriend, a factory worker falls for a Polish waitress, and a police officer seeks a known criminal, in stories set amidst wild and flourishing countryside.

The concrete walls and tower blocks of Peckham in south London are not often the subject of poetry. For his debut collection, Poor, Caleb Femi pays tribute to the streets that shaped him as a child. He brings to life the schoolboys, rappers, artists, pastors and gentrifying neighbours of Peckham, an area where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without a single step on the ground.

Daisy Johnson became the youngest ever Booker Prize nominee with her debut novel, Everything Under, and quickly established herself as a master of creepy locations. Her new novel, Sisters, is a gothic tale set on lonely Yorkshire moors, while her short story series The Hotel, available now on BBC Sounds, looks at the unsettling, waterlogged Norfolk Fens, a place where dead bodies float back up to the surface.

Producer: Hannah Sander