Episode summary: This week we discuss the government’s post-Budget economic strategy and the new dividing lines in British politics. Have the Tories stolen Labour’s clothes? Is there a new consensus emerging on tax and pend? What can Keir Starmer do to carve out a distinctive economic position? Plus...

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Episode summary: From Blake Edwards and Paul Mazursky, to Audrey Hepburn and the history of Improv, Sam Wasson tackles distinctive creators and seminal moments in Hollywood history. Alec loved Sam Wasson’s latest, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. In this fascinating conver...

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Episode summary: Two incredible environmental writers and thinkers take part in this special event for 5x15 on Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future. This is the first time David Wallace-Wells and Elizabeth Kolbert have spoken together at a public event. Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Unde...

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Episode summary: Tim Harford explores the chances of becoming a saint, inspired by a throw away comment by the detective on the TV drama ‘Death in Paradise.’ Plus, a listener has a question about the recent Europa League Draw for the final knockout round. He spotted that none of the teams face a riv...

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Episode summary: In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. H...

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Episode summary: Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back her public health campaigns. Her chart...

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Episode summary: Dan Saladino looks at the future role of genome editing in food and farming. A public consultation is underway on technologies such as CRISPR. What could it mean for farmers and consumers? Unlike transgenic technologies (in which DNA is moved from one species to another), genome edi...

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Episode summary: Josie Long presents short documentaries and adventures in sound about mothers and motherhood. We hear a story of a recurrent dream about searching for an absent mother, Heather O’Neill delves into the ways her mother and her own experience of motherhood have threaded through her lif...

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Episode summary: Amelia Gentleman is a reporter for the Guardian. She was named Journalist of the Year at the 2019 British Journalism Awards and won the 2018 Paul Foot journalism award for her reportage on the Windrush scandal. She has also won the Orwell Prize and Feature Writer of the Year at the...

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Episode summary: The story of the West African diaspora in the American South is the story of the Transatlantic slave trade. But one of its staple foods, black-eyed peas, can be read as a symbol of resilience and hope.