Dr Joshua Mezrich is a leading transplant surgeon. He tells Andrew Marr how death and life are intimately connected in his field of expertise. And he explains the extraordinary breakthroughs that have emerged in transplant surgery, along with the ethical questions that arise when choosing who will be given the chance of a new beginning.

Caroline Criado Perez exposes the gender biases in medical and scientific research. She argues that women have often been excluded from the data which has had a huge impact on the efficacy of the pills prescribed, and the treatment offered.

The latest promise of better healthcare is personalised medicine, which aims to get the right dose to the right patient at the right time. But Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Biomedical Ethics, cautions that grouping patients by their genetic constitution may well create new forms of inequality.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Kerry Hudson grew up in all-encompassing and grinding poverty. She is now an acclaimed author, but tells Tom Sutcliffe why she returned home to explore the impact and trap of being lowborn.

Howard Brenton’s latest play is loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and features a clever, ambitious young woman fighting for an opportunity, yet held back by her background.

Will Tanner, director of the think tank Onward, looks at what social mobility - or a lack of it - means in the political sphere. The age at which voters are more likely to vote Conservative than Labour has risen rapidly, and Tanner sees this as both a challenge and an opportunity for all the main parties.

The musician and activist Billy Bragg has written about the Three Dimensions of Freedom in which he argues that without equality and accountability, freedom is a mere shadow.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Chaucer is renowned as the father of English literature. But in a new biography Marion Turner argues he is a far more cosmopolitan writer and thinker than we might assume. She tells Andrew Marr how the 14th-century author of The Canterbury Tales moved from the commercial wharves of London to the chapels of Florence, and from a spell as a prisoner of war in France to the role of diplomat in Milan.

The academic Emma Smith challenges audiences to look with fresh eyes at the plays of Shakespeare. In a series of essays she reveals how his plays have as much to say about PTSD, intersectionality and #MeToo as they do about Ovid, marriage and the divine right of kings.

When Charles Dickens started his writing career, his ambition was global: to speak to ‘every nation upon earth’. And he succeeded. His stories reached Russia, China, Australia, even Antarctica, and he was mobbed in the street when he visited America. Juliet John, co-curator of the exhibition Global Dickens, examines how Dickens’s work could travel so far, when the settings of his novels were much closer to home.

Producer: Katy Hickman

'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced', wrote the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. His new biographer, Clare Carlisle, explores the life experiences that moulded Kierkegaard's ideas as he struggled to understand how to be a human being in this world. She tells Amol Rajan that Kierkegaard was very much a philosopher of the heart.

DeRay Mckesson’s reality became one of struggle and action after he quit his job as a school teacher and became a key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. He spent 400 days on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, often walking day and night after a new law was introduced making it illegal to stand still. In his memoir, On the Other Side of Freedom, he explores the intellectual and political framework of the liberation movement that has dominated American life in the 21st century.

The award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams’s latest work also explores freedom and power, but in a world where fate and vengeful gods hold sway. His epic poem The Half-God of Rainfall begins with a game of basketball in Nigeria with the Yoruba gods looking on, and ends with a demonstration of female revenge – both human and mythological.

While Kierkegaard was focused on the subjective experience of being a human, and how we create ourselves through our action, the writer Elizabeth Day is interested in what happens when those actions go awry. ‘How To Fail’ is a painfully honest exploration of things going wrong, and what we can learn from our mistakes.

Producer: Katy Hickman

We underestimate how difficult it is to live in remote areas, says travel writer Dan Richards. He tells Kirsty Wark how he trekked to high mountain huts and distant snowy cabins for his new book, Outposts. Richards followed in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl and Jack Kerouac, who all found inspiration in the wilderness. But just as Kerouac went temporarily mad living on a remote mountainside, so today’s tourists in the Scottish Highlands and Nordic isles underestimate “hard nature’s indifference”.

Icelandic model turned sheep farmer Heida Asgeirsdottir knows how challenging countryside life can be. After an early career as a model in New York, she returned to Iceland to take over her parents’ sheep farm in a region of volcanoes and elemental storms. But even this distant region needs modern power and infrastructure, and this means a new hydro-electric plant whose owners want to flood her farm.

A family feel stuck in the middle of nowhere in Chekhov’s searing play Three Sisters. Rebecca Frecknall is directing a new production at the Almeida Theatre, exploring the thwarted ambitions and dreams of a provincial Russian town. Sisters Irina, Olga and Masha long to return to Moscow, but become bogged down in dead-end jobs and trapped by mortgages and marriage.

Chekhov’s play could easily be set in a British town today, says Sarah O’Connor from the Financial Times. She looks at the stark problems facing our seaside resorts and post-industrial towns. In her Orwell Prize-winning study of Blackpool, she challenged the idea that our seaside towns lack aspiration and are destined to fail. Now she explains why terms like “the Left Behinds” are dangerously misleading.

Producer: Hannah Sander

Ian McEwan talks to Andrew Marr about his new novel, Machines Like Us, and reflects, at the age of 70, on a career which began more than four decades ago.

Machines Like Us is set in an alternative Britain in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher has lost the Falklands war and the scientist Alan Turing has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence leading to a series of synthetic humans. The love-triangle at the heart of the book forces the reader to confront ideas about what makes us human and what happens when we lose control of our creations.

Ian McEwan published his first book, a collection of short stories called First Love, Last Rites, in 1975. It won critical acclaim, as well as comment about the sometimes shocking subject matter. Since then, he has published 15 novels, and won the Man Booker Prize in 1998. He is a literary writer who has also enjoyed great popular success, with his novel Atonement selling well over a million copies in the UK alone.

Producer: Katy Hickman

850,000 people in the UK are thought to be living with dementia. The writer Nicci Gerrard tells Andrew Marr about her father’s slow death from the illness. She explores issues around memory, language and identity, as well as asking how society will cope as the population ages and the number of people suffering with dementia rises into the millions.

But why and how do we age? The science journalist Sue Armstrong has been investigating what happens to cells when the body gets older, and whether ageing really can be treated like any other disease waiting to be cured. Life expectancy has risen sharply in the last half century globally, but can it keep on rising?

The street theatre performance, Bed, involving elderly actors lying in beds in town centres around the country, was devised by older members of Entelechy Arts who wanted to make a statement about isolation and invisibility. The Artistic Director David Slater says the arts have an important role to play in improving people’s lives no matter how old.

The poet John Agard is 70 this year. In his latest collection, The Coming of the Little Green Man, he explores the world from the stance of the outsider. In a series of mischievous, satirical fables he gives voice to the political and spiritual, comic and poignant.

At the Free Thinking Festival at Sage, Gateshead Tom Sutcliffe presents a special edition exploring the art and science of communication. The American diplomat William J Burns played a central role in American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War to the collapse of relations with Putin’s Russian, and including secret talks with Iran. He explores the language of diplomacy.

Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She reflects on how as a teenager she stopped speaking for almost a year. In her book Unspeakable she considers the power of silence.

The musician and composer Kathryn Tickell roots her work in in the landscape and people of Northumbria. She is the foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes, and tells the story of Northumbria with - and without - words.

Thomas Dixon studies emotional outbursts as the director of the Centre for the History of Emotions. He unveils the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of anger and weeping.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The prize-winning author Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of a fellow Norwegian artist, Expressionist Edvard Munch. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that Munch’s work extends far beyond his iconic painting The Scream. Knausgaard brings together art history, biography and personal memoir to reflect on what it means to be an artist.

Munch is known as a painter of the inner life and even his landscapes are infused with personal reflection. But at the turn of the twentieth century, while he was looking inward, art schools across Europe were forging new philosophies and were engaging with the wider world. In Germany the Bauhaus movement, founded by Walter Gropius, stood for experiment and creative freedom. Fiona MacCarthy’s new biography of Gropius re-evaluates his intellectual and emotional life. She depicts him at the heights of Bauhaus fame and through his post-war years in London to his architectural successes in America.

Back in the UK, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was at the centre of a movement based at the Glasgow School of Art. Curator Alison Brown explains how that city became the birthplace of the only Art Nouveau ‘movement’ in the UK. The style and influence of Mackintosh and his disciples has since spread throughout the world.

Both Bauhaus and Art Nouveau designs became commercially successful and mass produced. But the earlier Arts and Craft Movement of William Morris championed the principle of handmade production. In an extraordinary find, the social historian Tamsin Wimhurst, came across a terraced house in Cambridge owned by a working-class Victorian decorative artist who reproduced the work of Morris for his own pleasure at home. The David Parr House is opened to the public later this year.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The Chinese journalist and activist Xinran tells the story of China since the start of the 20th century through four generations of one family. She tells Andrew Marr how the family lived through enormous social upheaval, and reveals how traditional values started to unravel with the tide of modernity.

The academic Roel Sterckx looks back beyond the last century to ancient Chinese philosophers and thinkers. He argues that in order to understand modern China we need to understand its past. The practice of power, government and social harmony has a long tradition.

It is seventy years since Mao founded the People’s Republic of China and Julia Lovell re-evaluates Mao's philosophy both at home and abroad. For decades Maoism has been dismissed in the West as an outdated historical and political phenomenon, and yet his ideas remain central to China’s Communist government - and continue to influence people around the world.

Not only Chinese ideas have spread throughout the globe: the latest play from director David K S Tse is based on the lives of Chinese people who moved to the UK. From Shore to Shore is staged in Chinese takeaways around the country and blends English, Mandarin and Cantonese, to tell the story of three journeys to find a home.

Producer: Katy Hickman