All Episodes

John Berger and another way of seeing

Napoleon’s marshals and President Trump’s civil servants

Inheritance – from stories to genetics

Jon Ronson: men unravelling

Contains Strong Language Festival in Salford

Carlo Rovelli: complexity and value

Living with uncertainty

Gordon Brown: The Future Starts with Us

Life Online: Power, Risk and Resistance

Working-Class Lives: Identity and Political Fractures

Scientific discovery and misunderstanding

Searching for economic solutions

Mythmaking at Hay: from Medea to Rasputin

Farming, food production and rural life

German history

Laurie Anderson: Strange and Disorientating Landscapes

Chemical Reactions

Why Stuff Matters: Objects, Power and the Past

Challenges and solutions

Zoos, sex and conservation

Industrial action: from 1926 General Strike to today

Growing Up

Consciousness and Identity

Under the sea

Reading and storytelling

Thinking about war

Breakage and repair

Fun and games

Censorship

Biology, technology and the future

Rethinking politics

The arts and health

Animals and Meaning

Poetry - reading, writing, editing and translating

The Dark

Histories, emotions and identity

Space, Quantum Frontiers and Cosmic Clues

Genes and hands: mapping character and health

Digital Futures and Information Crises

Saving Tigers, Green Crime and Cli-fi

Storytelling: Jeanette Winterson, Rory Stewart and Soweto Kinch

Crossing genres with Wayne McGregor

Maps – lost, secret and revealing

Endangered languages and vanishing landscapes

Yanis Varoufakis on Greece’s civil war

Steven Pinker on common knowledge

Contains Strong Language Festival, Bradford

Afghanistan and the DRC

Arundhati Roy and maternal inheritance

Sanctuary, refuge and exile

The Idea of Genius

Hidden spaces and dangerous places

The uses and abuses of the atom

Hay Festival: exposing the secrets of rubbish

Mathematics, Symbiosis and Japanese art

History: private, personal and political

Smell – the underrated sense

Advocating for nature

Christianity and British society

Impunity and fighting for justice

Untangling fact from fiction

Delusions of grandeur and freedom of speech

Abdulrazak Gurnah on family and resistance

Lockdown and the Covid generation

How political ideology affects the brain

The Great Auk meets Victorian explorers, and zombie ponds

Community and industrial decline

Writing and rewriting history

Wages for Housework – then and now

Manufacturing and sustainability

Climate Crisis: truth, lies and compromise

Music and movement; mind and body

Socrates, optimism and racism

Human intelligence and imagination

Animals – up close and talking

Acoustics, music and architecture

Security threats and future prospects for Britain and the EU

The story of British art - from cave paintings to landscapes

The high street

Rise and fall of the political fixer

Sex and Christianity

Ancient crafts: feathers, leather and thatch

Female ambition and control

A duty of care

From Sapiens to AI

Oceans and the game of evolution

Ancient India and China: from golden to silk roads

Chance and fortune

On Freedom

Weaving magic in words, clay and paper

Animal communication

Politeness and civility

‘Left behind’, but not forgotten

Hay Festival: ancient wisdom and ecology

Reading the Bible

Art: market, money and malfeasance

Bees – culture and survival

Protest and patriotism

Alien life and gravity

City living