Frank Gardner talks to Rosie Boycott
The Arabist, BBC Security Correspondent, gunned down in Riyadh, whose deep engagement with Islam and the Middle East offers a unique perspective on The War On Terror.
Peter Carey talks to John Walsh
The double Booker Prizewinner (True History of the Kelly Gang, Oscar and Lucinda) discusses his lewdly funny new art world novel with the Independent writer.
Melvyn Bragg
Shakespeare, Newton, Wollstonecraft, Wilberforce, Darwin.. so (far so?) good.. The Rule Book of Association Football? The culture and science champion marks out Britain’s turning points in books.
Niall Ferguson
The 20th Century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history, with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong?
Chaired by Hamish Mykura.
Karen Armstrong talks to Melvyn Bragg
Between 800 and 300 BC there was an explosion of new religious concepts fundamentally transforming our understanding of what it is to be human. But why did Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu and others all emerge in this 500-year span? And why do they have such similar ideas about humanity?
Rageh Omaar talks to George Osbourne
The Somali-born journalist discusses his own experience, and that of other British Muslims with the shadow Chancellor.
James Lovelock talks to Rosie Boycott
The visionary Earth scientist, inventor of Gaia, adopts an increasingly radical manifesto for how we can still save the planet, including a passionate and controversial advocacy of nuclear power.
Alain de Botton
From the humble terraced house to some of the world’s most renowned buildings, the writer and thinker considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel; and how we could learn to build in ways that would increase our chances of happiness.
Jonathon Porritt
he author of Capitalism as if the World Matters assesses the implications for the way we use money while there is still time to change our systems, avoid disaster, and maintain prosperity. Porritt is programme director at Forum for the Future, and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Liz Smith talks to Sandi Toksvig
From the WRENS, the plastic bag factory, her first film with the young Mike Leigh, and on through a glittering career (pretty much every Dickens and The Royle Family), the actress has remained wonderfully amused.
Jilly Cooper talks to Phil Rickman
The high mistress of Rutshire sex comedy takes on the education system.
Raymond Tallis
In his trilogy handkind the inspiring lecturer and physician and philosopher attempted to describe and account for the unique nature of human conciousness. His work in progress - Unthinkable Thought; The Significance of Parmanides builds on the theory of knowledge advanced in the trilogy.
Lisa Jardine
The biographer and broadcaster will argue that in every age poetry has the capacity to take us beyond our intellectual limitations in our grasp of our relationship to our history. She will take as her example Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck and suggest that Rich's exploration of history and gender still has the power to make us think deeply.
Robert Winston
The eminent medic and broadcaster discusses the relationship between religion and science from primitive times to our multi-faith world.
John Stevens
The much-admired Met Commissioner (2000-2005) discusses shoot-to-kill, terrorism, corruption, Blunkett, and Ongoing – his investigation into the death of Princess Diana.
Maureen Lipman
The actress, writer, widow of the perrless Jack Rosenthal, and national treasure.
Chris Patten
Free from office the former Hong Kong Governor and EU Commissioner speaks out on the players and interests driving world politics.
Robert Irwin
Irwin makes an impassioned case for ardent scholarship against the allegation of western imperialism from ancient Greece to the present day.
Tim Stowe
The RSPB's Director Wales investigates the impact that climate change is beginning to have on our natural surroundings, from the challenges of managing water resources to changes in migration patterns and populations of birds.
Jeremy Leggett
The global marketplace is built on the notion of a stable supply of cheap oil and gas. But that bedrock is about to crumble. As geologists, civil servants and the oil industry knows, the end of oil is a lot closer than we think. Leggett is Chief Executive of Solarcentury.
Graeme Gibson
Folktales, stories and excerpts from a naturalist's journal where creation myths, recipes, and the most stunning illustrations lace Gibson's own graceful and erudite essays telling of the pleasure, fear, confusion, or hope that birds inspire, and their imperiled place in nature.
Carter, Hitchens & Younge
Graydon Carter, Christopher Hitchens and Gary Younge
The Vanity Fair editor, author of the savagely critical What We’ve Lost, joins the Hitch and the Guardian’s US correspondent Gary Younge who launches Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States to consider the state of the union.
Holmes & Gen Sir Rupert Smith
Richard Holmes and General Sir Rupert Smith
Holmes reports from his regiment’s frontline tour of duty in Iraq, on the day to day experience of infantrymen in 2006 in his Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War. His experience commanding in the Gulf War, UNPROFOR and Kossovo informs The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Smith’s radical exploration of conflicts fought no longer as industrial absolute war, but as war ‘among the people’.
Steve Jones
From chaos in the heavens to the fight against creationism, from optical illusions in tartan to the mathematics of elections to what rules the sex lives of cats, the biologist takes a turn around the world of science.
Seamus Heaney
The poet reads and discusses his new collection District and Circle.
Margaret Atwood
A conversation and reading from her new short story collection.
Howard Hodgkin, Simon Schama
To celebrate his forthcoming retrospective at Tate Britain, and to mark the publication of the catalogue raisonnés of his paintings and prints, the artist talks to Simon Schama.
Christopher Hitchens
The contrarian traces the history of The Rights of Man from the publication of Part One in 1791 in London and its rapturous reception across the Atlantic. He analyses the meaning it has acquired since its creation, and its significance as the cornerstone of contemporary debates about our basic human rights.
Sheila Hancock and Joan Bakewell
The actress and RSC Artistic Director discusses her portrait of her own marriage The Two of Us: My Life With John Thaw.
Will Self, Alexander Linklater
The superverbal and imaginatively thrilling novelist and journalist launches his The Book of Dave, based around the rants of Dave Roth, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, who writes his woes down and buries them only to have them discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remanents of London.
The Guardian Debate
Joan Bakewell, Madeleine Bunting, Ziaudin Sardar, Philip Hensher, Reza Aslan and Anthony Julius
How are both religious sensibility and freedom of expression to be accommodated in pluralistic societies? Is offence the price believers must pay for living in a free society? Or do those who advocate free speech have to accept that in some circumstances other beliefs and principles may have to take priority?
Andy McNab & Phil Rickman
A rare interview with the author of Bravo Two Zero, Firewall, Last Light and Aggressor. Chaired by Phil Rickman.
The Poetry Gala
Margaret Atwood, Tishani Doshi, James Fenton, John Fuller, Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson, Owen Sheers, Hugo Williams, hosted by Wales’ Poet Laureate Gwyneth Lewis.
Chaired by Paul Blezard
Sebastian Faulks & Geordie Greig
The novelist (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, On Green Dolphin Street) discusses his new work Human Traces with Tatler editor Geordie Greig.
Clare Short, Michael Codner
Clare Short MP and Michael Codner, director of Military Service, chaired by Stephen Tindale Is there a rationale for continuing Britain’s nuclear force in the twenty-first century?
Terry Jones
This isn’t the imperial version of the Caesars’ conquests, this is the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. And suddenly the Romans don’t look at all familiar…
Germaine Greer
In her annual poetry masterclass, Greer explores the idea that ‘Literature is a masculinist invention; poetry in particular is a spectacular form of male display. Women have to adapt a language which objectifies them absolutely to become the speakers, the verbal aggressors.’
Margaret Atwood
The Canadian poet gives us her inversion of Homer’s Odyssey, retold by Penelope and the twelve handmaids Odysseus slaughtered on his return from Troy, Dido and 20 years away from his palace.
Simon Jenkins
The Guardian’s political columnist discusses the US strategy in the Middle East.
Zadie Smith, George Saunders
Smith (White Teeth, On Beauty) in conversation with the American short story master of blackest comedy, and author of Pastoralia.
Reza Aslan
Can an Islamic state be founded on democratic values?
Aslan believes we are now living in the era of 'the Islamic Reformation'. He examines the roots of this reformation and the future of the Islamic faith.
Craig Brown & Eleanor Bron
‘If there were a Parodist Laureate, Craig Brown would step up unchallenged to the title’ - The Observer. In this, his own one-stop literary festival, Brown conjures up forgotten works by, among many others, W.G. Sebald, Graham Greene, Jeanette Winterson, Martin Amis and Jilly Cooper. ‘We love Craig Brown!’ - Sir Elton John.
Bettany Hughes
The historical quest for the most desired and destructive woman that myth has ever known.
Hitchens, Tharoor
Christopher Hitchens and Shashi Tharoor, chaired by Joan Bakewell
Vigorous late-night debate around the Danish cartoons, David Irving, and contrarian culture. Tharoor is Under-Secretary General for Communications at the UN and a novelist.
Simon Callow
The actor introduces the 2nd volume of his biography taking the American wunderkind through the career-disaster years from Citizen Kane to Macbeth.