Start the Week

Start the Week is at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage, Gateshead where Tom Sutcliffe explores the pace and rhythm of life - from the heart-stopping moments to the sleep of the innocent.

His guests include Russell Foster whose work on circadian rhythms sheds light on the mechanisms of our body clocks and sleep.

The crime writer Denise Mina is more interested in counting the bodies than counting sheep, as she revels in the psychological undercurrents in her latest thriller.

The cardiac surgeon Stephen Westaby understands the delicate balance between life and death: he has saved hundreds of lives, holding each heart in his hand and feeling its beat.

The mathematician Eugenia Cheng considers what it means when that beat goes on forever, with her study of the infinite.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses the future of politics with David Goodhart and Oliver Letwin MP. In his latest book Goodhart looks at the fractious state of the west and the rise of populism, while Oliver Letwin asks what the government can do to reach those who feel marginalised.

The playwright Richard Bean reaches back to another time of internal conflict, the beginning of the English Civil War, and finds humour in the desperate attempts of one man to retain power.

Machiavelli is always associated with unscrupulous scheming, but his latest biographer Erica Benner argues that he was a man devoted to political and human freedom.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: Rowan Polonski as Prince Rupert and Martin Barrass as Mayor Barnard in The Hypocrite by Richard Bean, a Hull Truck, Hull 2017 and RSC co-production. Photograph by Duncan Lomax (c) RSC.

Andrew Marr talks to Paul Auster about his latest work, 4 3 2 1, which weaves together four versions of his hero's life alongside the monumental events of mid-twentieth century America.

The turbulence of the last six decades in US history, from JFK's assassination to Vietnam, to the AIDS crisis, racism and gender politics, is also presented through artists' prints in a new exhibition at the British Museum, co-curated by Catherine Daunt.

In the 1960s and 70s, Robert Evans became one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood only to fall spectacularly from grace a decade later. In The Kid Stays in the Picture, the theatre director Simon McBurney brings his rise and fall to the stage.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flags I. Colour screenprint, 1973. Gift of Johanna and Leslie Garfield, on loan from the American Friends of the British Museum.

On Start the Week Kirsty Wark explores what it means to live either side of a wall, and whether barriers are built to repel or protect. Supporters of the US President urge him to 'build a great wall' along the Mexican border but the journalist Ed Vulliamy points out that there is already a wall and border guards, supported and funded by US Presidents for decades. And yet still drugs, guns, money and people continue to move north and south. Israel has been building its own separation barrier since the turn of the century, but Dorit Rabinyan is more interested in psychological barriers that drive Palestinians and Israelis apart. The map-maker Garrett Carr travels Ireland's border to explore the smugglers, kings, peacemakers and terrorists who've criss-crossed this frontier, and asks what it will become when the United Kingdom leaves the EU. The historian Tom Holland looks back at the successes and failures of wall-building from Offa's Dyke to Hadrian's Wall and asks whether they work more as statements of power than as insurmountable barriers between people.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the poet Elaine Feinstein about her work from over half a century of writing, from her early poems of feminist rebellion to reflections on middle age and marriage, to wry amusement on the fallibility of memory. The curator Rebecca Daniels looks back at the life and work of one of Australia's most celebrated modern painters, Sidney Nolan, and challenges the audience to look beyond his early depictions of the outback and the outlaw Ned Kelly, to see a world artist. The theatre director Trevor Nunn finds the comedy in pitting idealistic Hamlet-esque youth against a wealthy businessman in his production of Rattigan's Love in Idleness. The composer Ryan Wigglesworth has produced a new operatic interpretation of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's study of love, loss and reconciliation.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: A section of 'Myself' by Sidney Nolan, 1988.

On Start the Week, Tom Sutcliffe considers the relationship between play and creativity. Steven Johnson examines how the human appetite for amusement has driven innovation throughout history. Writer and theatre maker Stella Duffy has revived Joan Littlewood's 1960s concept of The Fun Palace- a 'laboratory of fun' for all. The economist Tim Harford advocates embracing disorder in every area of our lives, from messy desks to messy dating. Journalist and former cricketer Ed Smith believes that creativity in sport is a combination of skill and luck.

Producer: Kirsty McQuire.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores how childhood experiences affect later life.

The screenwriter Paul Abbott famously put his early life into the television series Shameless. Although his later work, including his latest police drama No Offence, moves far beyond his own experiences, he excels at finding the comedy in the tragic.

In France the writer Édouard Louis has caused a storm with his brutal autobiographical novel about class, violence and sexuality. The book is his attempt to bury his childhood.

The psychiatrist Gwen Adshead spent years working at Broadmoor Hospital studying the nature of human violence and looks at the moral choices people make.

The poet Paul Farley is interested not in the early life of poets but in their dying. From Shelley's drowning to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide their deaths have become the stuff of myth casting a backward shadow on their work, creating a skewed image of the poet's life as doomed and self-destructive.

Amol Rajan discusses Turkey past and present with the authors Elif Shafak and Kaya Genç, Chatham House's Fadi Hakura and the historian Bettany Hughes.

Shafak's new novel, The Three Daughters of Eve, moves between Turkey and Britain, and is a tale of friendship, faith and betrayal. It portrays Turkey as a country riven by deep divisions in society, politics and religion.

Kaya Genç reports from across Turkey, exploring the lives of the country's angry young people on both sides of the political divide, while Fadi Hakura from Chatham House considers Turkey's changing relations with the outside world amid increasing nationalist feeling and isolationism.

Bettany Hughes's biography of Istanbul is the story of three cities - Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul - and reveals a city that's been at the heart of political life between the East and the West for the last eight thousand years.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe discusses what Islam means in the modern world. Graeme Wood has spent his career getting to know Islamist fundamentalists to try to understand the apocalyptic ideology and theology at the heart of the so-called Islamic State. Sara Khan campaigns to reclaim her faith from extremism, while Ziauddin Sardar argues that Islam demands reason and critical inquiry from its believers. Loretta Napoleoni 'follows the money' to uncover the millions made by those exploiting the destabilisation of Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS.

Photo: Sara Khan Credit: Joe McGorty.

Andrew Marr talks to the best-selling author Martin Sixsmith about his latest book which tells the story of a daughter's search for the truth about her beloved father. Secrets, corruption and political intrigue are uncovered as they travel from Britain to Pakistan. There's more political scandal and family drama from the Nigerian author Chibundu Onuzo in her latest novel, Welcome to Lagos, and the playwright Oladipo Agboluaje imagines a political revolution in 21st century Nigeria and the moral compromises made in the pursuit of power and political change. Laurence Cockcroft is the co-founder of Transparency International in the UK and in his latest work turns his attention to the flavour of corruption in the West.

Producer: Katy Hickman.