Poet Fiona Sampson, conductor Alice Farnham, and broadcaster Tom Service join Ian McMillan to explore the maths, metaphors and musical terms that make up the language of conducting. Plus comedy writer Jack Bernhardt takes a sideways look at Hollywood's take on the tortured genius.

Ian McMillan presents poets reading from all the collections shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, awarded by the T.S. Eliot Foundation for the best collection of the past year, and gives his take on the year in poetry.

This is a special edition of the show recorded at the annual prize reading at the Royal Festival Hall in London (hosted by Ian) a day before the announcement of the winner - Joelle Taylor.

Ian celebrates the impact and achievement of Joelle's collection 'C+nto' and of the other shortlisted collections.

Poets featured:

Ian McMillan explores the language and imagery of sea myths and folklore from Mermaids and Selkies to Shapeshifters and other mysterious sea creatures, both real and imagined.

Ian's guests include the poet Steve Ely whose book The European Eel is an epic poetic odyssey following the imagined journey of a single eel from the Sargasso Sea to the rivers of Europe, and back to its birthplace, to mate and die, Robin Robertson whose new collection Grimoire is a series of retellings and imaginings of Scottish folktales that are often brutal, but with a strange beauty, the film maker Alastair Cole who takes us into the Gaelic language and its stories of the tide and waves, and Imogen Hermes Gowar whose novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, set in 18th-century London, explores the destructive sexual power of the mermaid, combining myth and legend with the harsh realities of the past.

Producer: Cecile Wright

Ian McMillan's guests, John Hegley, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathryn Williams, and Jay Rayner join our virtual audience in a literary Christmas dinner - revelling in the poetry, prose and linguistic satisfaction of Christmas food, in lyrics, recipes and in poetry.

John Hegley gives us the taste of a French Christmas and of thick skinned roast potatoes, Kathryn Williams and Carol Ann Duffy present brand new Christmas songs from their new album 'Midnight Chorus', Jay Rayner gives us Yule commandments (including the advice that gravy solves everything, and more controversially 'don't serve Christmas pudding'). Ian McMillan channels the New York poet Frank O'Hara to write a special Christmas poem (featuring tangerines and the mystic Julian of Norwich). As usual, Radio 3’s cabaret of the word is stuffed full of language play.

Come and warm your hands at The Verb’s fire – the words are sparkling!

Ian McMillan explores space in language and writing. Space can be explicit or implied through the space between words, between lines, at the margins of a page, or with pauses and gaps and silence.

This week on The Verb we're thinking about the language of repair. Ian McMillan and guests discuss poetry's ability to heal, putting literary puzzles back together again, finding what was once lost, and the often impenetrable vocabularies of 'getting stuff fixed'.

Ian is joined by Chris McCabe, poet and National Poetry Librarian. During lockdown the Southbank Centre's National Poetry Library ran the 'lost quotes' service, reuniting remembered fragments of poems with the rest of the text. His latest book is 'Buried Garden', in which he searches for the lost poets of Stoke Newington's Abney Park Cemetery, hoping to revive their forgotten words. Mona Arshi has just published 'Somebody Loves You', a poetic novel about a young girl who chooses silence as a protective mechanism when everything around her feels fragile. The poet William Letford used to be a roofer, and he's written a brand new poem especially for The Verb about returning to his old profession to help out family. And Kate Fox considers repair and the meaning of home.

Presenter: Ian McMillan

Ian McMillan explores diaries and writing inspired by day-to-day life with Michael Rosen, whose book 'Many Different Kinds of Love' recounts his experiences in hospital with coronavirus and features extracts from the diaries of his nurses, doctors and wife, Lauren Elkin, whose book 'No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute' consists entirely of notes made in her smartphone, and Christopher Green, whose immersive digital project The Home evokes day-to-day life in care homes in the UK and Japan. Plus poet Suna Afshan on her translations for the Tape Letters project - uncovering the Pothwari audio messages sent home on cassette by Pakistanis who migrated and settled in the UK in the 60s and 70s.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Ian McMillan explores and delights in pretentiousness - in language and in writers. What do we mean when we say a piece of writing or a performer is pretentious?

Ian's guests include the poet Luke Wright who shares a tour de force poem in defence of pretentiousness and pretentious things (eg children called 'Hopscotch and Entwhistle', 'carpaccio of stoat' smeared across a brick, 'tweedy too-short trousers' ). Also on the programme, the spoken word poet Jenny Lindsay delves deep into the art of the humblebrag (the pretence of self-deprecation, most frequently spotted on social media ) with a brand new poem. Angie Hobbs, (Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield) takes us back to Ancient Greece to talk about pretentious sandal-wearing on the part of great philosophers' acolytes - and she explains how Plato, the founding father of Western philosophy shows his teacher Socrates dealing with pretentious orators. And finally writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade explores the advice given by George Orwell on how to avoid pretentious prose - and finds out whether Orwell always followed his own advice.

Ian McMillan meets Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo to explore her poetry, her essays and her fiction - to find out about her writing process and how it has evolved, her sources of inspiration and her influences.

As energy prices rise, electric cars charge, and the COP summit in Glasgow burns the midnight, er, electricity, we turn up the voltage on the language generated by that invisible force and think about our relationship with it. Ian's guests are the novelist and poet Ben Okri, the lexicographer Susie Dent, the futures ethnographer Laura Watts, and the actor and podcaster Kerry Shale, as Bob Dylan...