Start the Week

Anne McElvoy explores the roads not taken with the historian Richard Evans. Counterfactual history began as an Enlightenment parlour game and has become a serious academic pursuit, but Evans argues against endless speculation as to what might have been. The final meeting between Lawrence of Arabia and Faisal I of Iraq was an anti-climax which belied their history. The biographers of these two leaders, Scott Anderson and the former Iraqi politician Ali Allawi, place these men at the centre of the making of the modern Middle East. The writer Malu Halasa offers an alternative view of the violent events in Syria as she curates a book of political posters, comic strips, blogs and plays.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe discusses how we make decisions with the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Moral choices in politics can be a complicated business, according to the academic and former politician Michael Ignatieff, who explores whether the age of international intervention is over. Doctors work under the oath 'do no harm', but the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh says the decision whether to operate on a brain is rarely that simple. High emotion can cloud your judgement and the writer Lisa Appignanesi looks back at sensational crimes of passion to ask how far the perpetrators were responsible for their actions.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe talks to Andrew Hussey about the often fraught relationship between France and its Arab ex-colonies, and how that plays out in the banlieues of Paris. The psychotherapist Gabrielle Rifkind recounts her experience of conflict resolution in the Middle East. While Rifkind emphases the need to understand what's happened in the past, the writer Ziauddin Sardar tries to imagine what the world would be like if we explored the future in a more systematic and scientific way.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe talks to the historian Michael Wood about the spirit and adventure of the Vikings who travelled all over Europe and as far east as Central Asia. The Vikings sailed close to the coast whenever possible, David Barrie celebrates the invention of the sextant three hundred years ago which made open water navigation and exploration possible. The majority of foreign goods we buy are transported by sea and Rose George charts the murky world of today's international shipping. The mystery and danger of the sea is a recurrent theme in the latest crime novel from the Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdadottir.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe discusses money with the American economist Charles Calomiris, who looks back at the history of financial disasters and argues that they're caused more by government failures, than individual bankers. The former head of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, might agree on the need for structural changes, but famously said 'heads should roll' in the banking industry, and has damned much of the banks' trading activities as 'socially useless'. If there has been a moral vacuum at the heart of the banking industry, are there lessons to be learnt from Islamic banking? The financial advisor Harris Irfan believes it's a system that is more equitable and transparent. Seventy five years ago Steinbeck's great depression novel, Grapes of Wrath, was published and Maggie Gee explores its legacy and asks where the wrath is now?

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr discusses the history of confession with the writer John Cornwell, from its origins in the early church to the current day. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach explores whether the confession, both secular and religious, provides psychological relief, and the presenter Vanessa Feltz celebrates its public manifestations, the talk show and radio phone in. The former high-flying Wall Street trader, Turney Duff, is looking for absolution, as he reveals his life of excess.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe looks at the role of the expert. The curator Irving Finkel decodes the symbols on a 4,000 year old clay tablet and discovers the instructions for the building of an ark. Harry Collins asks why attitudes towards scientific expertise have changed and looks to reassert the special status of science. Colin Blakemore is an expert in neuroscience and vision and he reflects on his part in the documentary, Tim's Vermeer, which explores the relationship between art and science. The playwright Hattie Naylor tells the story of an astronomer going blind who learns to see the wonder of the universe in a different way.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Last year The Guardian ran a series of scoops about the extent of mass surveillance by the security services here and in the USA. Anne McElvoy talks to the journalist Luke Harding about the inside story on the whistle-blower Edward Snowden and what motivated him to commit one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history. The former director of GCHQ, Sir David Omand, fears the leaks have done untold damage and endangered state security. Claims that America hacked the phone of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel caused uproar in Germany, and the journalist Annette Dittert argues that the memory of the Stasi's spying machine is still raw. There has been little outcry among the British public and the philosopher Alain de Botton explores the nature of news and the 'noise' it generates.

Tom Sutcliffe talks to the celebrated composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on the eve of the premier of his tenth symphony. His latest work creates a musical structure based on architectural proportions, inspired by the 17th century architect Francesco Borromini. Waldemar Januszczak turns to the 18th century and Rococo for his inspiration, and looks at how this artistic movement spread from painting and interior design, to music and theatre. The environment, both built and natural, is key to Trevor Cox's study of sound as he listens intently to the cacophony around us. While the psychologist Victoria Williamson explores our relationship with music, including why we're prone to earworms, certain rhythms repeating endlessly in our heads.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe talks to the neuroscientist Dick Swaab who argues that everything we do and don't do is determined by our brain. He explains why 'we are our brains'. The philosopher Julian Baggini doesn't dispute the pre-eminence of brain processes but believes it doesn't tell the whole story. As a writer Helen Dunmore must get into the minds of her characters - the latest a war-damaged soldier from the trenches. Natalie Abrahami only has the heads of her characters to play with as she directs Samuel Beckett's Happy Days about the amazing ability of a woman to survive by denying her ever-diminishing world.