THE MIRACLE OF SHAKESPEARE: Fiona Shaw (actor, theatre and film director) and James Shapiro (scholar and author) explore the inventiveness and transformative nature of Shakespeare's language and its changing resonance for each generation. Readings by Fiona Shaw.

This week, four award-winning war correspondents - Christina Lamb (I Am Malala and chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times), Lara Marlowe (The Things I Have Seen and correspondent with The Irish Times) and Lindsey Hilsum (In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin and International Editor for Channel 4) and Ben Anderson (No Worse Enemy and conflict reporter for Vice) - discuss the challenges, ethics, insights and consequences of covering conflict zones. These are some of the bravest writers working today, with a common cause to drive them on: telling the world about injustice, so that the injustice will stop.

Listen to the free podcast here: https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

Writer and activist Sinead Burke discuss the importance of how our individual rights should inform fashion design, and how plenty of other life choices also need a rethink, with Sinead Gleeson

Listen to the free podcast here: https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon chew the cud on the 'the good things in life'. It was Sunday Morning, June 2019, and it felt like the right time to discuss how to avoid poisoning one's friends in the kitchen, the reverential love of music by writers, rare herbs that grow in people's hedges, and so on.

Listen to the free podcast here: https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

DALRYMPLE'S INDIA: William Dalrymple has been for some years the most eloquent chronicler of Indian history. This talk draws from his recent book The Anarchy: The Fall of the Mughal Empire and the Rise of the East India Company, a gripping parable of gore and deceit, of unimaginable opulence and intolerable starvation, a cautionary tale of the rise of the East India Company and a supreme act of corporate violence in history.

Listen to the free podcast here https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

In one of the most exceptional meetings of the 2019, conflict reporter Ed Vulliamy meets Hothouse Flower guitarist and broadcaster Fiachna Ó Braonáin. Vulliamy's book When Words Fail explores the music that he turns to - Hendrix, Shostakovich, Patti Smith, BB King, Dylan, Planxty, among others - when the war zones or places away from home that he has set up camp become hard to bear.

Listen to the free podcast here: https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

Journalist Roisin Ingle discusses Rosita Boland's travel writing, fresh perspectives and her continuing need to be elsewhere.

Podcast available here 

https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

Historian and prolific commentator Simon Schama and cybersecurity investigative journalist Misha Glenny (also author of McMafia) discuss whether democracy can survive in a world run by algorithms, with Fintan O'Toole.

Podcast available here 

https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/

Actor, writer and comedian Simon Farnaby faces a grilling from a (largely) young audience of Horrible Histories and Paddington fans.

Podcast available here:

https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/podcasts/