Private Passions

The actor, comedian and writer Nick Mohammed hasn’t followed an obvious career path. His youthful obsessions included performing magic and playing the violin, followed by a first-class degree in geophysics. He even began a PhD in seismology – before his love of comedy took him in a very different direction.

He’s ended up on the red carpet at the Emmys, thanks to his role as Nate the football coach in the much-acclaimed TV series Ted Lasso. He’s starred with David Schwimmer in the sitcom Intelligence, which he wrote and co-produced.

For his live shows he created the much-loved Mr Swallow, a peevish and pedantic magician – who has also attracted millions of views on social media.

Nick's musical choices include Copland, Beethoven, Dvorak and Prokofiev.

Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey, grew up in care, and when she left school, she worked first for the gas board, then as a social worker and as an actor on stage and television. The idea that she would one day sit in the House of Lords never crossed her mind.

When she was in her early 30s she decided to study for a degree. That led to a PhD, academic posts and eventually a Professorship in Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. She entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer 20 years ago, where she has campaigned for change in areas such as modern slavery and fast fashion. She recently wrote a memoir called Eight Weeks, in which she pieces together her upbringing, drawing on care records and her own reflections on her childhood.

Her music choices include works by Ravel, Errolyn Wallen, Philip Glass and Puccini.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Rupert Everett left school at 16 to train as an actor and first shot to wider fame in 1984 as a dashing public schoolboy in the film Another Country.

Since then his career has been defiantly unpredictable: he’s starred in Hollywood films, taken leading roles on stage in the West End and on Broadway, and directed, written and played the lead in a passion project about Oscar Wilde’s final years.

He’s made documentaries and written three candid and acclaimed memoirs. Most recently he’s turned to short stories with a collection called The American No, drawing on ideas he had pitched to film producers, all of which were rejected.

His musical passions include works by Handel, Purcell, Wagner and Mahler.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock readily admits that her childhood television viewing played a vital role in her eventual choice of career: she loved Star Trek and The Clangers - the animated children’s show featuring little whistling mice living on a moon-like planet. Along with coverage of the Apollo missions, they helped to inspire a journey which led her to become one of the UK’s leading space experts. She’s also a passionate science communicator, and a familiar face on our screens, as co-presenter of The Sky at Night.

Maggie is an authority on telescopes and space imaging, and was part of the James Webb Space Telescope team, launched by NASA in 2021. This telescope used ground-breaking technology to produce strikingly clear pictures of stars we’ve never seen before, changing how we understand the universe.

Her musical passions include works by Bach, Dvorak and Purcell, as well as music inspired by the moon and by distant planets.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Bryan Ferry has been a very familiar voice for more than 50 years, as the co-founder of Roxy Music and as a solo artist and songwriter.

When Roxy Music first appeared on Top of the Pops in 1972, millions of viewers suddenly saw something new: an extravagantly dressed band, featuring an early synthesizer, an oboe, and Bryan leading from an upright piano, wearing a sparkling black and green jacket. 'This one definitely arrived from Planet Mars', according to one critic. It was a performance which helped to propel Bryan to stardom, and a career which has produced two dozen studio albums, and numerous international hits, as well as explorations of jazz and the songs of Bob Dylan: his most recent release, Retrospective, includes a new version of Dylan’s 1965 song She Belongs to Me.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Bryan reflects on his early days in County Durham, the role of his art school education and his approach to song writing. His musical choices include works by Prokofiev, Elgar, Mahler and Charlie Parker.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last 60 years.

Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an early age and when he left school he worked behind the scenes at Dundee Rep theatre. He soon fell in love with the life he saw there and moved to London to train as an actor. Over the years he’s never been afraid to take on difficult, unlikeable characters, including Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, Hermann Goering in Nuremberg and most recently the terrifying media tycoon and patriarch Logan Roy in the TV series Succession, for which he won a Golden Globe.

On stage Brian has played King Lear at the National Theatre and won Olivier awards for his performances in Titus Andronicus and Rat in the Skull. In 2023 he portrayed the composer J S Bach in a play called The Score at the Theatre Royal, Bath.

His musical choices include Bach, Mahler, Verdi and Joni Mitchell.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

(This is an extended version of a programme first broadcast in 2023.)

The American writer Garth Greenwell won widespread acclaim for his first novel, What Belongs to You, including the British Book Award for the Debut of the Year in 2016. This success would have surprised his high-school teachers in Kentucky. As a teenager, he failed English and decided to follow a very different path: he turned to singing and eventually trained as an opera singer.

Studying music led him back to literature – writing poems, novels and working as a teacher in Bulgaria. His most recent novel, Small Rain, focuses on a severe medical emergency which leads to deep meditations on our vulnerability, life and love.

Garth's musical passions include works by Mahler, Britten, Richard Strauss and the 16th century English composer John Taverner.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Sarah Ogilvie is a lexicographer and a proud and self-confessed word nerd: languages are her passion and are at the heart of her writing and scholarship.

She worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and went on to write a book about the thousands of volunteers around the world who submitted words for its first edition. She has researched endangered languages in Australia, North America and most recently Indonesia.

She is also the co-author of Gen Z Explained, where she analysed how 16-25-year-olds communicate with each other, in words, images and emojis. She’s currently a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford.

Her musical choices include Monteverdi, Allegri, Mozart and Nina Simone.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley Producer: Clare Walker

The costume designer Jenny Beavan has won three Academy Awards for three very different films: the elegant Merchant Ivory drama Room with a View; the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road; and most recently the Disney film Cruella, for which she created a huge, vibrant parade of 1970s-inspired fashion.

She’s received a further nine Oscar nominations across her 40 year career. She found just the right top hat for Colin Firth in the King’s Speech and ditched the deerstalker in favour of a bowler for Robert Downey Jr in Sherlock Holmes. And despite claiming she has “never been interested in fashion”, she re-created striking Dior outfits for Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.

Jenny's music choices include Handel, Mendelssohn, Sondheim and - with a nod to the film the King's Speech - Beethoven.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Lucian Msamati has played leading roles on our most famous stages: Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre, Iago in Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Estragon opposite Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. He started out performing – in his words – ‘for farmers sitting on beer crates in rural Africa, with tables for a stage’. And when he decided to leave Zimbabwe, where he began his career, to see if he could make it in the UK, he had to work as a cleaner to pay the bills. His perseverance paid off: as well as success on stage, he's appeared in high-profile TV shows, including Game of Thrones and the Number One Ladies Detective Agency.

After his role in Amadeus, it’s no surprise to find Mozart among his musical passions, which also include Satie, Tchaikovsky and an unusual track by Stevie Wonder.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Jay Rayner has his dream job: he loves writing and he loves food, and for the past 25 years he’s been the restaurant critic for the Observer.

Jay is also familiar as a broadcaster, appearing as a judge on Masterchef, and hosting The Kitchen Cabinet on Radio 4. His recent book, Nights Out At Home, provides recipes to enable readers to create some of his favourite restaurant dishes in their own kitchens. He started out as a news journalist, after growing up in a house in which his mother – Claire Rayner – was a prolific magazine and newspaper columnist and the author of dozens of books.

Jay has a very public musical passion: he performs as a jazz pianist, leading his own band in venues around the country. His choices include music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Madeleine Dring, along with a classic Broadway overture and jazz from Michel Petrucciani.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Ann Cleeves is one of Britain’s most successful and prolific crime writers, reaching millions of readers around the world.

She’s reached millions of television viewers too, with series including Vera and Shetland, adapted from her books.

She has written on average a book a year for almost four decades, but success was anything but instant. She was 32 when her first title was published, and she only became a full-time writer in her early fifties. In 2017 she was awarded the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing, and in 2022 received an OBE for services to reading and libraries.

Her choices include music by Britten and Elgar, a film score by Patrick Doyle and fiddle music from the Shetland Islands.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds in 1938. He fell in love with the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, riding around on his bicycle as a young boy and studied art despite his father believing it was a waste of time. He is now one of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary printmakers, with works in collections around the world including the Tate, Rijksmuseum and MoMA.

Norman has travelled all over the British Isles to visit what he calls "the farthest lands" which inspire his elemental etchings of rock formations in all weathers. His musical inspirations include Schubert, Beethoven, Bob Dylan and a BBC archive recording of Cwm Rhondda.

Thomas Adès is one of the UK’s foremost and most successful composers. His first opera, Powder Her Face, was premiered in 1995, when he was just 24. With its racy subject matter, based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll, it put him squarely on the musical map, winning widespread critical acclaim. His catalogue now includes almost 90 works, with commissions from the world’s leading orchestras and festivals, two further operas, The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, and an epic ballet score for Wayne McGregor, Dante, based on the Divine Comedy.

To anticipate the UK premiere of his new work, Aquifer, at the 2024 BBC Proms, Thomas Adès talks to Michael Berkeley about his musical inspirations and passions, including works by Schubert, Chopin, Walton, Stravinsky, Berg and Harrison Birtwistle.

Producer Graham Rogers

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket.

Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies around the world, along with a film starring Jim Carrey and a series on Netflix.

Lemony has published many more books for children, and Daniel has also written seven novels for adults under his own name, as well as a screenplay inspired by Verdi’s Rigoletto.

He’s also a keen accordion player and has performed with bands including Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists and the Magnetic Fields.

Daniel has described himself as an ‘unrepentant classical zealot’ and his musical choices include Dvořák, Scriabin and Berlioz.

The director Clio Barnard won prizes and critical acclaim for her first feature film The Arbor: it blended fact and fiction to depict the short, troubled life of the brilliant Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.

Since then she’s taken on a wide range of British stories. She directed Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in The Essex Serpent, a six part adaptation of the best-selling book by Sarah Perry.

She returned to Bradford for Ali and Ava, a love story which won a BAFTA nomination for outstanding British film, and for The Selfish Giant, the tale of two children trying to make money from selling scrap metal.

Music often plays an important part in her films, and her choices include Alice Coltrane, Biber and Philip Glass.

Richard Thompson began his career as a guitarist and a songwriter when he was still a teenager – and six decades on, his passion for making and sharing music is as strong as ever.

In the late 1960s he co-founded the pioneering folk-rock band Fairport Convention. In 1969 alone, they released three albums. All featured the voice of Sandy Denny, and one - Liege and Lief - was later acclaimed as the most influential folk album of all time. In the early 1970s, Richard left the band to form a decade-long musical partnership with his then wife Linda.

He’s now spent over 30 years as a solo artist, winning an Ivor Novello Award for songwriting, a Lifetime Achievement Award from BBC Radio 2 and countless plaudits for his guitar playing.

Richard's music choices include Beethoven, Purcell, Britten and Manuel de Falla.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has long been passionate about food – not just about what we eat and how we cook it, but about how it’s produced and the wider environmental consequences of our appetites.

He first appeared on our TV screens in 1995 in A Cook on the Wild Side - foraging for roadkill and frying up woodlouse fritters, earning him the nickname Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-it-all.

He went on to document his early attempts as a smallholder trying to produce seasonal, ethical food in the River Cottage series on Channel 4. Out of this came the highly successful River Cottage Cookbook. Over two dozen books have followed – the latest of which is How to Eat 30 Plants a Week.

He’s also enjoyed success as a food campaigner. Hugh’s Fish Fight brought about changes in fisheries law at the European level, Britain’s Fat Fight examined the national obesity crisis and War on Waste challenged supermarkets and the fast food industry to change how they operate.

Hugh's music choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi and Keith Jarrett.

Olivia Laing has won prizes and critical acclaim for her books, but readily admits that she led quite a wild life before becoming a writer: she dropped out of university, lived in a treehouse on an anti-road protest and later trained and worked as a herbalist.

Her non-fiction books include The Trip to Echo Spring, which examined how writers who were damagingly addicted to alcohol could still produce great literature. She drew on her own experience of extreme loneliness in New York to write The Lonely City, which blended memoir with reflections on the works of artists including Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol.

Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Memorial Prize.

And most recently she’s written The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. It’s an account of how she’s restoring a walled garden in Suffolk - and an investigation into the history of gardens and the solace and pleasure they can bring.

Olivia's music choices include Puccini, Purcell, Wagner and Bach.

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s security correspondent, familiar to millions of viewers and listeners from his reports, which regularly take him around the world.

He’s also written six books, including a memoir about his 25 years in the Middle East, and more recently, four thrillers about the adventures of MI6 operative Luke Carlton.

In 2004, while filming in Saudi Arabia, Frank and his cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by al-Qaeda gunmen. Simon was killed and Frank was shot six times and left for dead. He survived, but was partially paralysed. He returned to reporting within a year, using a wheelchair.

Frank's music choices range from Schumann and Shostakovich to Fats Waller, and he also includes part of a concerto for oboe and strings written by his father, Neil Gardner, who was a keen and accomplished amateur musician.

For years Professor Brian Cox has encouraged us to look up to and beyond the stars and to understand that the universe is very, very large and our place in it very, very small. He is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester – and through his extensive work on television and radio, he’s shared the wonders of the universe and of science with millions of us around the world.

As a teenager and then a student, Brian combined his passion for physics with a parallel career in pop music as a keyboard player. His choices include music from the jazz improviser Keith Jarrett, Mahler, Charles Ives and Richard Strauss.

Dorothy Byrne has worked in journalism for more than 40 years, including almost 20 years as Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 from 2003 to 2020. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the sexism and harassment she experienced as a young producer, which she detailed in her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2019, in which she added that she would still recommend journalism to young women today - ‘in what other line of work, when... you hear of some absolute disgrace, can you say to yourself “I’m going to make a programme exposing that and I’ll put a stop to it!” And sometimes you even do.’ She has also argued that challenging journalism which calls politicians to account is a vital part of any healthy democracy. Since 2021 she has been President of Murray Edwards College, a women-only college at the University of Cambridge. Her music choices include pieces by Mozart, Handel, Amy Beach and Nina Simone, as well as a recording of her college choir performing music by Hildegard of Bingen.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has published seven collections of her verse. She’s performed her poems to thousands of students at Poetry Live events, a scheme founded by her late husband Simon Rhys Powell.

Imtiaz was born in Lahore in Pakistan and was six months old when her family moved to Glasgow. There she grew up as – in her words – “a Muslim Calvinist”.

When she was 17 she fell in love with her first husband, married in secret and eloped to India. As a result she was disowned by her family, but began to publish her first poems. She illustrates all her collections with pen and ink drawings.

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.

Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the Science Museum in London – one about the Hadron Collider, another about the Sun, and his first book was called How To Make An Apple Pie from Scratch, a title which draws on a comment by the astronomer Carl Sagan: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". His most recent book Space Oddities looks at some of the strange things – anomalies - that are currently confounding scientists, and transforming our understanding of physics.

The American writer Percival Everett is enjoying a moment in the spotlight: his novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022; an earlier book, Erasure, was adapted into the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction; and his latest novel, James, is already a best-seller in the United States. It’s a powerful re-telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim.

In the past four decades he's published two dozen novels, and another dozen books of stories and poetry, but he's just as happy away from the world of literature, fly-fishing or painting. He's also worked as a horse trainer, a cowboy and a jazz guitarist. Jazz and blues feature among the music he shares with us, along with Dvorak, Schoenberg, Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.

Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black.

Alison probably knows better than most what it’s like to be a young woman in the spotlight, as the mother of a high-profile star herself: the singer Lily Allen.

Her music choices include Beethoven, Coltrane, Ravel and Puccini.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we write and think today.

She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World. Her writing and teaching are based on decades of scholarship, with a focus on ancient Greek drama, and she’s also a familiar voice as a broadcaster, on programmes such as In Our Time.

Her most recent book is Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks and Me - a deeply personal account of the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, drawing parallels between her own family history and characters from Greek tragedy. Edith's music selection includes Schubert, Beethoven, Gluck and Handel.

Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English but he went to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.

He started out writing for newspapers, winning the Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002. He now writes for The Times. In 2008 he published his memoir of his early life called The Boy With the Topknot.

More recently he has focused on our colonial history. In 2021 he published Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, which was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards. Then came Empireworld: How British Imperialism has shaped the Globe, which quickly became a best-seller. Sathnam's musical choices include Bach, John Coltrane, Debussy and Jasdeep Singh Degun.

Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.” Her painstaking work and expertise mean she can work out how people have met their end, and police forces, the Foreign Office and the UN have called on her evidence in countless high profile investigations. She was the lead forensic anthropologist to the British forensic team during the international war crimes investigations in Kosovo and the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Operation. Back in the UK she provided evidence that helped prosecute Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring. She is currently the President of St John’s College, Oxford, and in 2021 she entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer. She has just been appointed to the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in Scotland. Sue's music selections include Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn and Elgar.

(Photo: Sue Black. Credit David Gross)

David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii – and back again.

Closer to home, he drew on his own childhood in Worcestershire in his coming-of-age tale Black Swan Green, about a teenager attempting to overcome a stammer and negotiate playground hierarchies, all against the backdrop of the Falklands War.

His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, charts the rise of an imaginary rock band in the late 1960s.

David's musical choices include Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius and Hildegard von Bingen.

John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes.

In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering.

Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on high-profile public roles: he was the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he faced the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He’s also a cross-bench peer and was principal of Jesus College, Oxford, for a decade.

His musical choices include Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Corelli.

Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe – Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan – which went for $108 million in June 2023.

Helena also plays the violin and the piano and her musical background has come in handy when standing on the auction block. She also loves the cross-over between music and art and how one can inspire the other.

Her musical choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Bach.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the digital innovations of our own times. Mark has interviewed many of the most significant directors and actors of the past half century, and with Tilda Swinton he created the Screen Machine, a large portable cinema which they and their supporters sometimes pulled by hand through the Scottish Highlands.

Mark’s choices of film music range from Doris Day and Henry Mancini to a score by Alfred Schnittke and a song from Neneh Cherry.

Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events.

He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including a version of Jude the Obscure with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet.

He’s worked extensively with Steve Coogan, starting in 2001 with 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson. More recently they’ve made four series of the BAFTA award-winning series The Trip, in which Coogan and Rob Brydon tour restaurants in England, Italy, Spain and Greece.

Many of his films react to real-world events, including Welcome to Sarajevo and The Road to Guantánamo. In 2022 he co-wrote and co-directed This England, a TV series about Boris Johnson’s leadership during the Covid crisis, with Kenneth Branagh playing the former Prime Minister.

Michael’s most recent film, Shoshana, is a political thriller set in the 1930s in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.

His music choices include Schumann, Bach and Philip Glass.

The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a few. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians including Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Sting, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.

His most enduring collaboration has been with Elton John. Ray is on more than 90 of Elton’s recordings, and has performed over 1000 concerts with him, most recently on the Farewell Tour.

In 1979, Ray was asked by George Harrison to help run Handmade Films and he remained at the helm for just over a decade, overseeing the production of seminal British films such as Withnail and I, Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday.

Ray's musical choices include Bach, Shostakovich, John Tavener and Elton John.

Producer: Clare Walker

Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Trilogy, she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and unpalatable truths in her fiction, exploring issues of identity, sexuality, class, immigration, viral pandemics and shady economics.

Her latest book, To the Dogs, is a thriller centred around a university professor who finds himself dragged into his former life of violence and danger when his son is arrested on drugs charges.

But despite these serious themes, Louise’s work is punctuated by a playful, dry sense of humour, highlighting the absurdity of certain situations - and a vivid vocabulary. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and she loves to collaborate. She has written short stories and plays, edited collections of poetry and has a long-standing working relationship with the composer Stuart MacRae, with whom she’s written four opera librettos.

Her musical choices include works by Debussy, Purcell and Verdi.

Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied range of settings – including original songs for the recent film Wonka, a chamber opera inspired by Tolstoy for Covent Garden, and the theme tune for the sitcom Father Ted.

Neil talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland with a bishop for a father, writing his first pop song when he was 14, and how, as a self-described "pathetic twerp", he managed to make it in the pop world. His typically wide-ranging musical passions include works by Puccini, Stravinsky, Chopin and Ravel, alongside tracks by Michael Nyman, Kate Bush and Scott Walker.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-profile convictions. Her work has received global recognition and now inspires crime writers such as Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves.

Lorna is head of the centre for soil forensics at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, which conducts research into land, crops, water and the environment. She also works with SEFARI, the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutions, delivering farming systems that benefit the environment and nature.

Lorna's choices include music by Elgar, Mozart and Ravel.

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in our bodies, in the air we breathe - and only 6% of them have been identified. Merlin’s book “Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”, was an international best-seller. It caught the eye of the Icelandic singer and musician Bjork, who recently released an IMAX film with Merlin, which she narrates. It’s called Fungi: the web of life, and follows Merlin to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania, on a quest to find an incredibly precious blue mushroom. Merlin's choices include works by Chopin, Tallis, Bach and Purcell.

Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of books.

She found herself running a home where Alan Bennett often appeared at suppertime and other famous neighbours and people would pop round - though Nina had often no idea who they were. Her affectionate, witty memoir won non-fiction Book of the Year in 2014 and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series.

After nannying, Nina worked in publishing and then moved to Cornwall where she lived with her partner and children. Since the success of Love Nina, she has written six more books, four of them novels. Her latest, Went to London, Took the Dog, charts her first return to the capital for twenty years. It’s a break from domestic life back in Cornwall, or perhaps a fresh start altogether.

Nina's musical choices include music by Handel, Mozart, Brahms and Benjamin Clementine.

Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat. In his latest film, One Life, he stars alongside Anthony Hopkins, as the young Nicholas Winton, who helped Jewish children flee from the Nazis in what became known as the Kindertransport.

He’s currently starring as Richard Burton in the play The Motive and the Cue, the story of how Burton and Sir John Gielgud clashed as they staged Hamlet on Broadway in 1964.

Johnny has also released four albums with his band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. He composed the theme song for the acclaimed TV series Detectorists, and more recently he’s collaborated with the nature writer Robert MacFarlane on two folk albums: Lost in the Cedarwood and The Moon Also Rises. His musical choices include Paul Robeson, Sondheim and Bizet.

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant genetics and as Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge her particular focus has been on a hormone called auxin which controls the growth of plants.

In 2020, she was appointed the chief executive of UK Research and Innovation whose mission is to work in partnership with research organisations, universities, businesses, charities and government to “push the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding" and deliver economic, social and cultural impact, with a budget of more than £8 billion each year.

Dame Ottoline is a fellow of the Royal Society and in 2017 she was appointed DBE for services to plant science, science in society and equality and diversity in science.

Her music choices include Mozart, Vaughan Williams and Debussy.

Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the past half century – The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, The Talented Mr Ripley.

He co-wrote the first movie George Lucas ever directed – the dystopian science fiction drama THX 1138. In 1985 he made his own directorial debut with Return to Oz – an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz. As an editor and sound mixer - and the only person to win Academy Awards in both categories - he’s thought deeply about the craft of cinema and all its possibilities, ideas which he shared in his book In the Blink of an Eye.

Walter's musical choices include Wagner, Beethoven, Pergolesi and Chopin.

Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the age of eleven. He went on to dance with Sadler’s Wells and Birmingham Royal Ballet, taking on roles such as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, Albrecht in Giselle and Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet.

He retired from the stage in 2000, at the age of 35, but before long he was back in the world of dance – this time behind the scenes. By 2009, he was Administrative Director of the Royal Ballet and oversaw their first tour to Cuba. Three years later he became overall director. He has since worked with a wide range of dancers, choreographers and composers, and helped steer the company through the Covid crisis.

Kevin's choices include music by Tchaikovsky, Thomas Ades, Rachmaninov and Anna Clyne.

The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years.

She was born in Wales and studied at the University of Newcastle, where the Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton was one of her teachers. He brought her and fellow students news of New York which she says “seemed as far away to me as the moon”.

Mali herself taught at a number of art schools including Chelsea, the Slade School and the Royal College of Art. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2010, and last year, flags made from her work hung above Bond Street, not far from the Academy, in a riot of joyous colour.

She currently has a major exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Her musical choices include Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi and some blues singing and whistling by Professor Longhair.

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent.

He was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, and first came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 18, in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled how, even as a young schoolboy, he loved writing stories. He also reflected on how his move to England changed everything: "there", he said, "in my homesickness and amidst the anguish of a stranger’s life… I began to do a different kind of writing. There was a task to be done."

Abdulrazak's musical choices include Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Miles Davis and the Malian kora player, Toumani Diabaté.

Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director.

You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless junior Whitehall adviser in The Thick of It, the political satire created by Armando Iannucci. He’s worked as a director on another highly-acclaimed comedy in the corridors of power: the Emmy Award-winning Veep, set in and around the White House. He has also co-created and directed Breeders, a brutally honest sitcom about parenthood, starring Martin Freeman.

Chris has also performed in opera on the stage at Covent Garden – though in a speaking role. He is an opera fan, so his musical choices include Mozart and Rossini but also folk music by Eliza Carthy and a Swedish Christmas song.

A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music written or performed by black women, and who have made their own important contributions to black history: artists Helen Cammock and Theaster Gates, writers Kit de Waal, Nadifa Mohamed and Isabel Wilkerson, jazz saxophonist YolanDa Brown, broadcaster Johny Pitts, and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, mother of seven brilliant young musicians including 2023 BBC Proms stars cellist Sheku and pianist Isata. Their choices range from music by Florence Price to performances by Nina Simone and soprano Jessye Norman.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Professor Fay Dowker is a theoretical physicist fascinated by space and time. She was obsessed with maths from a young age and went on to study at Cambridge University. There Professor Stephen Hawking became her mentor and a very close friend.

She is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London where she researches “quantum gravity” – how the force of gravity works on the universe's tiniest particles.

Fay's musical choices include John Coltrane, Shostakovich, Bach and Handel.

Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harrison of the Beatles. George died in November 2001, at the age of just 58, and Olivia describes her poems as ‘thoughts, feelings and words about life and death, but mostly love and our journey to the end’.

Olivia grew up in Los Angeles, and in her early 20s she joined A&M Records. She first met George in 1974 through her work, and went on to help run his Dark Horse record label. They married four years later. Olivia has protected George’s musical legacy since his death and continued the work of the Material World Foundation, the charity he founded 50 years ago. She also worked with Martin Scorsese to create an acclaimed, Emmy-winning documentary about George.

Olivia's musical choices include Bach, Mozart and Ravi Shankar, as well as recordings from Mexico and Bulgaria.

Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries.

In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published in 2015, he argued that the Persian empire gave rise to the West and he explored the importance of the trading routes that linked Arabia and Asia to Europe, and how they spread ideas, culture and religion. The book was a bestseller in the UK, China and India and even inspired a musical collaboration between singer Katie Melua and students at Oxford, where Peter is professor of global history. His follow-up, The New Silk Roads: the Future and Present of the World investigated how economic power is shifting eastwards.

More recently Peter has turned his attention to climate change. In The Earth Transformed he examined how it has dramatically shaped the development - and the demise - of civilisations across time.

Peter's musical choices include works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Edward Naylor.

Rhiannon Giddens has won two Grammy awards for her folk music albums, and a Pulitzer Prize for her opera, Omar, proving that she’s a musician who can’t be quickly categorised.

She grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and as a singer, fiddle and banjo player, she’s been fired by a desire to chart and reclaim the stories of people whose contributions to American music have been overlooked or erased. Her musical journey originally had a rather different destination: she trained as a classical soprano at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.

Now she draws on all these musical traditions as a composer for ballet, opera and film. She also finds time for acting – appearing in the TV series Nashville about the tangled lives of country music stars – she presents podcasts and has even written children’s books.

Her music choices include Bach, Dvorak, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim.

Jeremy Deller is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s won the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, but you’re just as likely to find his work on our streets as in a gallery.

In 2016, marking the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, thousands of young men in World War One uniforms appeared unannounced in stations, shopping centres and towns across the UK. Each participant represented a soldier who died on 1 July 1916. Jeremy called this work We’re Here Because We’re Here. 15 years earlier, he recreated the clash between striking miners and police officers in the Battle of Orgreave. He’s toured a rusting car from a street bombing in Iraq around the USA, and in 2012 he created a life-sized inflatable version of Stonehenge which you could bounce on.

His musical choices are suitably wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected: taking us on a journey with sounds from across the world, but including Beethoven, Monteverdi and Vaughan Williams.

Raynor Winn is a writer whose first book, The Salt Path, followed the remarkable 630-mile journey she and her husband Moth made around the South West Coastal Path.

It was a story of endurance as they had lost their home, had little money and Moth had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. But they found solace in nature and kept putting one foot in front of the other, living for the now: a message that obviously chimed with readers, as the book became a bestseller and is currently being made into a film.

Raynor has since written a sequel called The Wild Silence, about readjusting to four walls and normal life after that seminal walk, and Landlines where she and Moth again embark on a thousand-mile journey from Scotland back to the familiar shores of the South West Coast Path.

Raynor's musical choices include works by Britten, Schubert and Vaughan Williams.

2023 marks the centenary of the composer György Ligeti's birth, and in this programme, first broadcast in 1997, he joined Michael Berkeley to share some of his musical passions. They include piano music by Beethoven, player piano music by Conlon Nancarrow, a thinking song by the Gbaya people of central Africa and gamelan music from Java.

A Classic Arts production for BBC Radio 3 (revised repeat)

Isabella Tree is an author and travel writer. Her award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, describes how she and her conservationist husband Charlie decided after many generations of intensive dairy and arable farming to undertake a pioneering experiment. They would rewild their 3,500 acre estate, Knepp in West Sussex – returning it to nature.

Using herds of free-roaming animals to create new habitats, their rewilded land is now – more than 20 years later - a haven for wildlife and rare species like turtle-doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. The estate has become central to the debate about how we look after and regenerate the land.

Isabella is also a travel journalist and has written books about her journeys to Nepal, Mexico and Papua New Guinea. Her music choices include works by Schubert, Handel, Bach but also compositions made in response to the Knepp estate.

Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists.

He has created sets, often drawing on his work in sculpture, for operas including Verdi’s Falstaff and Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for which he created huge illuminated stalactites, suspended above the stage. For a 2022 production of Mozart’s opera Mitridate in Copenhagen, the centrepiece was an enormous layered ochre-coloured rock formation, with which bodies merged or slid across.

As a painter and sculptor, he’s enjoyed exhibitions in galleries around the world, and has collaborated with the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, in 2016 and 2023. His work also appears in prominent public spaces, including his statue of Giordano Bruno in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

Naomi Alderman is a writer who likes to question established ways of thinking. In 2017 her novel The Power won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. It imagines a world where women develop the ability to emit electric shocks from their fingers, leading to a worldwide reversal in the traditional balance of power between the sexes. The book became a global bestseller, and more recently a nine part TV drama. A sense of rebellion was evident in the title of her first novel, Disobedience: it’s tale of a woman who questions the conventions of the strict Orthodox Jewish community in which she grew up, and draws in part on Naomi’s own experiences. Along with four novels, Naomi created and written computer games, including Zombies, Run! This immersive app encourages you to improve your fitness – by running faster to escape predatory zombies. Naomi's musical choices include Mozart, Respighi, Bach and Stephen Sondheim.

Photo of Naomi Alderman: Annabel Moeller.

Beccy Speight has been the chief executive officer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 2019. It is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity with over a million members and manages more than 200 nature reserves providing a home to at least 18,500 species.

Beccy began her work in the conservation sector when she joined the National Trust at the turn of the millennium. From 2014, she focused her energies on our trees and woods when she became Chief Executive at the Woodland Trust.

She has said she moved on to the RSPB because she wanted to be ‘where the really big fights are in terms of our natural world’ – and where she could make a difference to something she cares deeply about.

Beccy's musical choices include Elgar, Vaughan Williams and the folk singer Karine Polwart.

Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a love of books until much later in life. Her bestselling first novel, My Name is Leon, written in her 40s, draws on her own childhood experiences and her early career as a legal worker in the foster care system, and she devoted some of the proceeds to setting up a scholarship for aspiring authors from working class backgrounds.

Her music choices include tracks from classic film scores - her father was an avid film buff - including Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway version of Carmen, alongside Bach, Chopin and Miles Davis.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in English Literature at University College London. The offer of free film and the use of a dark room proved irresistible.

Since then her images, with their focus on people, have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Time magazine and many more. She’s worked for the Guardian newspaper for more than 20 years and is an official photographer for the BAFTA awards. There she captures the likes of Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio backstage or on the red carpet, in intimate black and white shots.

Her musical choices range from Bach and Mozart to Scarlatti and Nina Simone.

Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do.

Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest parts of Dhaka and Delhi to the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster zone. She has lived with Yak herders in the high plains of Tibet and sailed across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Closer to home, she’s written two books about British archaeology, full of tips on how to read the landscape from ancient burial mounds to medieval woodlands.

Landscapes have inspired some of her musical choices – from the Scottish Highlands to Mount Fuji in Japan.

Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everything But the Girl – taking their name from the slogan of a local furniture shop. Over the next twenty years, they had 12 top 40 singles and 7 top 20 albums. Since then Ben has experimented in dance and electronic music, run his own record label and returned to songwriting with the release of two solo albums.

Ben has also written two acclaimed books. The first about his experience of a life-threatening autoimmune disease and the second, a poignant portrait of his parents. Most recently, he’s returned to making music with his wife Tracey Thorn in a new Everything But the Girl Album.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about this exodus in her bestselling and widely acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, the product of 15 years of research and more than 1200 interviews.

She started out in newspapers as a reporter and feature writer, and in 1994 she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, when she was Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. More recently she published her second book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents, an examination of racial stratification. The New York Times described it as the “keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far” and it also won praise from President Obama.

Isabel's choices include works by Camille Saint-Saëns, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Georg Philipp Telemann.

Libby Jackson is the head of Space Exploration for the UK Space Agency. She has turned a childhood passion for space into a wide-ranging career. She was flight instructor and controller at Europe’s Mission Control Centre for the International Space Station. She then joined the UK Space Agency in 2014 and led their education programme when the astronaut Tim Peake went into space. She is now one of Britain’s leading experts in human spaceflight, and last year was awarded an OBE for her work.

Libby’s musical passions reflect the vast wonder of space but also her love of choral music and her adventures in Newfoundland as a teenager with works by Handel, Verdi and Shanneyganock.

Producer Clare Walker

Steve Rosenberg is the BBC’s Russia editor.

After studying Russian at university, he moved to Moscow in 1991 and since then has charted the transformation of the country – from the conflict in Chechnya and the Beslan school siege to President Putin’s rise to power and the impact of the current war against Ukraine.

His musical passions include - perhaps unsurprisingly - Russian composers such as Rachmaninov, but his choices also draw on childhood memories and the many hours he spent watching TV. Steve is a keen pianist, and he recalls the moment he played for President Gorbachev, who sang Russian songs to his accompaniment. Steve also posts piano improvisations and compositions on social media - anything from Postman Pat in the style of Tchaikovsky to a piece he wrote inspired by birds sitting on a telegraph wire.

Producer Clare Walker

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous theatre roles, and television appearances which have included six years on Holby City. For many people, though, he will always be Gustav Mahler thanks to Ken Russell’s 1973 biopic; for some, he became a memorable representation of Jesus Christ, thanks to his starring role in Zeffirelli’s six-hour epic.

Robert Powell begins by choosing Mahler’s famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. He listened to Mahler non-stop when rehearsing for the role, but was still surprised by some of the eccentric things Ken Russell asked him to do: he will never forget floating for hours in a freezing lake. He talks about the impact of early fame, conjuring up the excitement of the King’s Road in the “swinging sixties”, and meeting his wife, Babs, who danced with Pan’s People. And he tells the story of how, when he was playing Jesus, he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and “something really extraordinary happened”. These days he is a devoted grandfather, making up for the time he couldn’t spend with his family when he was away filming. Other music choices include Stravinsky, Bach, Janacek, and his hero Bob Dylan.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow University to read English and becoming a teacher, as they expected, she startled everyone by travelling to London - to study for the Bar. Some of her friends misunderstood and thought she’d gone south to find bar work. This was the end of the sixties, a time when there were extremely few women barristers. Since then, her ambition, fierce intelligence and considerable charm have taken her right to the top, and she now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws. She created a huge stir when she published her first book, Eve was Framed, in 1992 – a shocking examination of how the criminal justice system fails women. Three years ago, she felt so little had changed that she published a sequel – in a book with the title Misjustice. Helen Kennedy campaigns now too on wider human rights issues, such as the persecution and murder of women in Iran and the shocking genocide of the Uighurs in China.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Helena Kennedy looks back to the childhood which has been so influential on her campaigns for justice, and chooses the music which has sustained her through a series of difficult and high-profile cases. Her playlist includes Handel, Bach, Schubert, George Benjamin, James MacMillan, and her favourite Puccini opera, with Mimi’s famous aria from La Boheme.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the speaker there changed the whole course of his life. The writer was Iris Murdoch. She became a friend, and he became – in his words – her “disciple”, and eventually her biographer. And then Peter and his partner, Jim O’Neill, spent eight months caring for Iris at the end of her life, as Alzheimer's took hold – they listened to a lot of music together. Peter has spent his career as an English Professor at the University of Kingston and his biography of Iris Murdoch is not his only book: he’s also written about Dostoevsky, John Fowles, and Angus Wilson; about grief, about becoming a Buddhist, and about dogs.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Peter discusses the extraordinary power Iris Murdoch exerted over all her friends and lovers, and her secretiveness, so that each would be kept in a separate compartment. He remembers how she kept singing and dancing right up to the end. And he reveals his own mental health struggles, and how Buddhism has helped him. Music choices include Strauss, Bartok, Bach, Britten’s War Requiem, and the Anthem by Leonard Cohen that contains the famous words “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Wayne Sleep tells Michael Berkeley about the music that has inspired his career of nearly 60 years.

Wayne Sleep is one of the most celebrated dancers of all time. He’s performed more than fifty leading roles for the Royal Ballet, and had roles created for him by choreographers including Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois and Rudolf Nureyev. Equally at home on the stage of the Royal Opera house, performing musical theatre in the West End, choreographing, directing or teaching, he’s known for his versatility, flawless technique, dramatic flair and humour.

He made headlines around in the world in 1985 when he danced – to the total surprise of everyone there - with Diana, Princess of Wales, on the stage of the Royal Opera House. He tells Michael about the secrecy surrounding their rehearsals and the friendship between them that followed their performance.

Wayne chooses the music that has shaped his long career including pieces by Mahler, Britten and Andrew Lloyd Webber. And, in a highly emotional moment, he hears for the first time since his childhood the voice of his adored mother on a record specially restored for this programme.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The novelist and journalist Susie Boyt tells Michael Berkeley about her lifelong passions for music, theatre and dancing.

Whether she’s writing black comedies about dysfunctional families or about her intense love of Judy Garland, Susie Boyt is unafraid to address the big questions in all our lives. Her seven novels explore how we can best take care of people, how we can survive life’s inevitable traumas and how we might live alongside the loss of people we love.

Susie chooses pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Britten as well as music from the ballet Giselle that conjures up the fragility and vulnerability of childhood. Susie’s father was the painter Lucian Freud and we hear a song by the music hall star Gus Elen which recalls the many hours she sat for him in his studio sharing their love of song lyrics.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The historian Simon Thurley tells Michael Berkeley about his passion for ancient buildings and the music associated with them.

At the age of seven, Simon Thurley dug up what turned out to be Roman remains in his back garden in Cambridgeshire, and a lifelong passion for history - and historic buildings - was ignited.

He went on to work as Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and as the Director of the Museum of London. Then, in 2002, at the astonishingly young age of 39, he was appointed Chief Executive of English Heritage, a post he held for 13 years, during which time he was responsible for overseeing over 400 historic sites from Dover Castle to Stonehenge.

He is the author of more than a dozen books about history and architecture and since 2021 he has chaired the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the fund of last resort to protect the nation’s most vulnerable heritage when other routes have failed.

Simon tells Michael about the building mania of Henry VIII, how we can make old buildings sustainable to live in today, and what the future might hold for the Royal Palaces under King Charles III.

He chooses music by Holst which reminds him of his religious childhood, an opera by Bellini which conjures up the English Civil War, and music by Purcell which reminds him of up Hampton Court, one of the buildings he loves most and which he helped to restore after a devastating fire.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Kaffe Fassett’s textiles are unmistakable: in bright cerise and crimson and cobalt, his stripes and flowers burst onto the scene back in the seventies, and he’s been designing ever since. Brought up in a log cabin on the Californian coast, he’s lived for fifty years in Kilburn, north-west London, a house where every surface is painted or mosaicked or embroidered – and stuffed full of antique textiles and pots. In fact, it’s so full of stuff that his partner, Brandon, had to retreat to a white room of his own. But Kaffe would like us all to get sewing, or embroidering or knitting. He’s the author of numerous books which share his designs, and currently has an exhibition of his quilts at the Fashion and Textile Museum that will soon travel around Scotland.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Kaffe reveals that he first left California for Britain as a young man after a chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood, who so beguiled him that he was determined to see Europe for himself. He talks about growing up gay at a time when it was still illegal, and how he never felt he fitted in – he was the boy at school wearing bright orange corduroy. He reveals that he bought some wool and then begged a woman opposite him on the train home to teach him to knit. Since then, he’s never looked back, and however busy he is, he makes time to knit and embroider, finding it a chance to meditate and recover.

His music choices include Arvo Pärt, The Beatles and Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood”.

Joanna Scanlan is one of our great comic actors; she’s best-known for “The Thick of It”, where she plays the obstructive civil servant Terri Coverley. But her range is much wider than comedy. She’s extraordinarily moving in “After Love”, Aleem Khan’s 2021 film about a widow who discovers her husband’s secret life – a performance so powerful that it dominates the whole film, and won her BAFTA’s lead actress award in 2022.

Before that, she played Charles Dickens's long-suffering wife, Catherine, in “The Invisible Woman” – and appeared in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “Notes on a Scandal”, to name just a couple of her film roles. On television she’s familiar from “The Larkins”, “No Offence” and “Puppy Love” – a series she co-wrote. She also co-wrote “Getting On”, a blackly comic portrayal of life on an NHS ward, which has become a great deal more topical in the fourteen years since it was first broadcast.

Born in Merseyside, Joanna Scanlan grew up in North Wales; she went to Cambridge to study history and law, and only got her first job as an actress when she was thirty-four, after having a breakdown.

She tells Michael about how that breakdown became a turning point, thanks to a doctor who told her that she would be ill all her life unless she acted. She remembers her schooldays in Wales, when she sang in a choir five times a day, and her early career working for the Arts Council, where the power-mad clock-watchers she worked with became the inspiration for the character of Terri Coverley.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their languages, discovering their ways of being in the world, and helping map their territories so they could claim land rights. He has also worked in isolated villages in the west of Ireland, in the southern Kalahari, on Skid Row in Edmonton, Canada, and in tribal communities in western India.

He has explored these places over the last fifty-five years in a considerable body of work: more than a dozen films, dozens of essays, and ten books. The latest is a moving and beautifully written personal memoir, “Landscapes of Silence: from Childhood to the Arctic”. Married to the actress Juliet Stevenson, Hugh Brody now divides his time between Highgate, North London, and a house on the Suffolk coast, though he admits that he has never really “settled down”.

Hugh Brody’s music choices include Beethoven, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Clara Schumann, and the music he heard every day when living with an Inuit family: Johnny Cash.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her life lived on a rollercoaster: she has experienced passion, great friendships and celebrity but also depression, illness, heartbreak and the deaths of two of her children.

Running through her life for 46 years was her enduring - but extremely complicated - marriage to the jazz musician and bon viveur George Melly, who died in 2007.

She has written two novels, a searingly honest memoir, and has co-edited the letters of her friend Jean Rhys as well as campaigning for charities concerned with dementia and drug abuse.

Diana Melly talks movingly about the deaths of her children and the happiness she and George found at the end of his life. And she describes her passion for trying new things late in life including ballroom dancing, philosophy and riding a tandem.

But her greatest new passion, developed in her eighties, is for opera and she chooses her favourite arias by Puccini, Massenet, Mozart, Gluck and Verdi.

And she reveals why, having been married to a jazzman for 46 years, there is no jazz on her music list.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Todd Field began his career as a jazz musician and as an actor; he has appeared in over forty films, including Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”. He then went on to direct two full-length award-winning films, “In the Bedroom” - about grief and revenge in a close-knit family - and “Little Children”, starring Kate Winslet. Both were nominated for multiple Oscars. This week his third feature film “Tar” opens in Britain. Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tar, the conductor of a major German orchestra; the film is an exploration of the darker side of the classical music world, the power of the conductor, and of abusive power more generally – it’s also a celebration of some really wonderful music.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Todd Field talks about how he started writing “Tar” by interviewing classical musicians, and particularly women working in the industry. He looks back on his “free-range” childhood in Oregon, and tells how his wife financed his ambition to become a film director by buying a truck, going round flea-markets, and starting an interior-design shop. He reveals the struggle to release his award-winning film “In the Bedroom” after Harvey Weinstein bought it and demanded more and more cuts. Field won the fight and retained the film he believed in, but it took six months and a fiendishly clever strategy invented by his friend Tom Cruise.

Todd Field started out as a jazz musician in a big band, and his choices include two tracks by Sarah Vaughan, whom he met backstage at a concert in Oregon. Other choices include Mahler’s Symphony No 5; Elgar’s Cello Concerto; and Gorecki’s second string quartet, which played constantly in his head while making “Tar”.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Rabbi, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Romain is minister of Maidenhead Synagogue and one of Britain's leading rabbis in Reform Judaism. He’s the author of twenty books – some scholarly and learned, and others which are very funny – revealing the ups and downs of his day-to-day work, in a way that will resonate with vicars, priests and religious leaders of any description. He’s become a kind of agony uncle, dispensing advice on love affairs, marriage, parenthood, and he’s written about all this in “Confessions of a Rabbi” and in his latest book, “The Naked Rabbi”. On the more serious side, he’s a prominent figure in the campaign for Assisted Dying, he was awarded an MBE for his work on inter-faith marriage, and he’s spent much of the last year working with Ukrainian refugees.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Jonathan Romain talks about what he’s learned over the years as a rabbi about love and marriage, and why some of his views put him very much out on a limb. His playlist takes in Max Bruch, Leonard Cohen, Rimsky-Korsakov, and a tribute to his love of football. And he tells us his favourite Jewish joke.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal tells Michael Berkeley about her passions for tall buildings, bridges, concrete and Indian classical dance.

Roma Agrawal is a highly successful woman operating in what is still very much a man’s world. Her job is, essentially, to make sure that the buildings, bridges, roads and tunnels we use every day don’t collapse. She spent six years working out the incredibly complex structure of the spire and foundations of the Shard in London, the tallest building in western Europe.

As well as engineering, Roma has another passion: she tells Michael about her lifelong love of the ancient Bharata Natyam form of Indian Classical Dance, and we hear the first piece of music she danced to as a child in Mumbai. She chooses songs by Abida Parveen, Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney as well as pieces by Tchaikovsky and by Carl Davis which drew her to Western music.

Roma tells Michael about her campaign to encourage more women to become engineers, why she decided to speak out about the emotional and physical strain of IVF and how working on the Shard helped her overcome her fear of heights.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford tells Michael Berkeley how his passion for music allows him to escape the rigours of science and enjoy the emotional side of life.

Adam Rutherford’s career in science has taken him from a PhD on the role of genetics in eye development to becoming a well-known broadcaster who campaigns against pseudoscience and racism.

Presenter of Radio 4’s Start the Week and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, he’s also the author of six bestselling books; a lecturer at University College London; and the recipient of the Royal Society David Attenborough Award for outstanding public engagement with science.

Adam shares some astonishing facts about our genes and our common ancestry: everyone of European descent is definitely directly descended from the eighth-century Emperor Charlemagne – and from the person who cleaned his boots.

Adam was a music scholar at school and his passion for the violin started with lessons at the age of four and culminated in playing with his teacher in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. We also hear his favourite piece of violin music, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Adam is the President of Humanists UK but asks for music from his two musical gods, Bach and Radiohead.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Simon Warrack travels the world restoring the most sacred and beautiful buildings. As a stonemason he’s worked on the Rose Window of Canterbury Cathedral, the Trevi fountain in Rome, and the Temple of Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Coming from a professionally musical family - his father is the music writer John Warrack, his grandfather was the composer and conductor Guy Warrack – it’s no surprise that classical music is very important to him. But after taking a degree in Renaissance History at Warwick, Simon discovered his own personal vocation, and he’s now pre-eminent as a stone carver and advisor on the restoration of temples and religious statues. He lives in Rome but is currently in Britain with a delegation from Cambodia who are examining the treasures of British museums to see how many of them were looted illegally and should go back.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Simon Warrack talks about the joy and difficulty of cutting stone, and about how finding a pair of stone feet in the Cambodian jungle led him on a detective trail to discover how many religious artworks had been looted during the 1970s. Music choices include Mozart, Verdi, Elgar, Britten, Tippett and Vivaldi.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The writer Julia Blackburn talks to Michael Berkeley about how music helped her through her traumatic childhood and about the joy of late-flowering love.

Julia Blackburn is the author of novels, poetry, plays and books about historical figures including Napoleon, Billie Holiday, Goya, and the Norfolk artist John Craske, as well as books about grief, her love of animals, and the natural world. She’s also published memoirs, including an astonishing book about her childhood, The Three of Us.

Julia shares her love of Beethoven, Pergolesi, English folk song, music from central Africa, and the songs of Billie Holiday, which helped her through her a childhood marked by chaos and neglect.

And she tells Michael Berkeley about the happiness she has found in bringing up her own children, and the delight she has found in love later in life.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Stuart MacBride was born in Dumbarton and raised in Aberdeen; abandoning his studies to become an architect, he went to work on the oil rigs, scrubbing toilets. He then tried out careers as an actor, a web designer, and a computer programmer, all the while writing away after work – he wrote four novels before his first, Cold Granite, was published in 2005. Since then, he’s become one of our most successful and prolific crime writers, with twenty-four titles in all, sometimes labelled as “tartan noir”. His latest, about the hunt for a serial killer, is called No Less the Devil. Reviewers say things like “this isn’t a novel to read over dinner”, or “slick, gruesome and brutally intelligent.” Gruesome crime-writing apart, Stuart MacBride’s other notable achievements include winning Celebrity Mastermind (his subject was A.A. Milne) and coming first in the World Stovies Championship.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Stuart MacBride reveals how his “very dull” childhood developed his imagination as a writer, and how he first discovered crime fiction in the Aberdeen public library. He went to the library every day, read under the covers at night, and borrowed new books the following morning, moving on from the Hardy Boys to Dashiell Hammett.

For Stuart MacBride, music is essential; he listens continually when he works, and his latest novel was written entirely to the soundtrack of Wagner’s Ring. Alongside Wagner, choices include Beethoven, Purcell, Bruch and Holst. He also introduces music by the Australian composer Sean O’Boyle, a concerto for didgeridoo, which he loves because it’s so dark.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

It’s hard to think of an artist with a more striking and ambitious range than William Kentridge; his work spans etching, drawing, collage, huge tapestries - as well as film, theatre, dance and opera. He was born in Johannesburg and brought up during the apartheid regime; his art is highly politically charged. His parents, both lawyers, were notable figures in the anti-apartheid movement – his father being Sir Sydney Kentridge, who represented Nelson Mandela. For forty years now William Kentridge has used his art to explore the legacy of colonialism, and the barbarity of war. He’s probably best known for his charcoal sketches, which become stop-go animations, preserving almost every change and rubbing-out. But he has a keen eye for the absurdity of life too, so we watch typewriters turn into trees, birds flying off the pages of dictionaries, or a film titled “Portrait of the artist as a coffee pot”.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, William Kentridge talks about the importance of music in his work, and brings a playlist that reflects a lifetime of listening. We hear a famous 1937 recording of a Monteverdi madrigal; Janet Baker singing one of the songs from “Les Nuits d’ete” by Berlioz; a duet from The Magic Flute; a rare recording of the American guitarist Elizabeth Cotten; and a collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and a trio of musicians from Mali.

He looks back to his childhood in South Africa, and what it was like to grow up under the cruel system of apartheid; and he reveals how important early failures were in enabling him to see the way forward.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Arifa Akbar tells Michael Berkeley about her nocturnal life as a theatre critic and her desire to tell the story of her sister's death from tuberculosis.

Arifa Akbar almost never has a quiet night in; as chief theatre critic of the Guardian she is out reviewing a production almost every evening. She also sits on the boards of the Orwell Foundation and of English PEN, and judges prizes including the UK Theatre Awards and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, she discusses the book she wrote about the death of her older sister, Fauzia, from tuberculosis, in which she explores Fauzia’s troubled life and why the medical profession failed to diagnose her illness until it was too late.

Arifa chooses music from Bollywood films which remind her of her childhood, which was split between a prosperous and lively extended family in Lahore and poverty and social isolation in London. And she reveals how, after the death of her sister, she began to explore the tubercular heroines of nineteenth-century opera. Initially repelled by the glamorization of these women dying awful deaths, she has now come to love the music of Verdi and Puccini.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Ronnie Archer-Morgan, from The Antiques Roadshow, tells Michael Berkeley about his tumultuous life and the music that has accompanied it.

Ronnie had a terrible start in life. His English father died in a car crash before he was born and his Sierra Leonean mother had severe mental health problems that made her violent and abusive. His childhood was spent in and out of the care system.

He tells Michael Berkeley how a school trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London ignited his life-long fascination with antiques, and how he learned the tricks of the trade exploring junk shops and markets while doing a rich variety of other jobs – model-maker, DJ at Ronnie Scott’s, boutique manager and celebrity hairdresser.

Eventually antiques took over from everything else: he became a consultant to Sotheby’s, opened a Knightsbridge gallery, and he delights in presiding over the ‘miscellaneous’ table on The Antiques Roadshow.

For Ronnie, the importance of objects is in the stories they tell and their emotional significance – and music is the same. He chooses pieces to remind him of different times in his life: a Handel aria that takes him back to rare moments of peace in his childhood; jazz from Donald Byrd which he played at Ronnie Scott’s; pieces by Mozart and by Dvorak that sparked his passion for classical music; and a song by Marvin Gaye, who wandered one day into Ronnie’s hair salon and shared a beer with him.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Jules Montague trained as a doctor in Dublin before moving to London and becoming a consultant neurologist, specialising in treating people with dementia. This led to her first book, "Lost and Found: Why losing our memories doesn’t mean losing ourselves". After fifteen years as a doctor, she has now left clinical practice to become an investigative journalist, focusing on some of the deeper questions raised by her medical work. Her second book is called The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis gets us Wrong.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, she explains that although most of us are relieved when our symptoms are explained by a medical label, diagnosis is not always a good thing. Her experience working as a doctor in Mozambique and in India has revealed how differently diseases may be diagnosed across different cultures. In some ways, she claims, a diagnosis of “spirit possession” may actually be more helpful to the patient than the label “PTSD”. She talks too about her work as a neurologist treating patients with brain damage and dementia, and how it’s led her to ask questions about how much of the “real” person remains when memory is lost.

Jules’s parents are from the Assam region of India and took her back as a child to spend time there; her music choices include a New Year dance from Assam, as well as piano music by Beethoven, a heart-breaking scene from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly; and music by Stravinsky, which he finished soon after suffering a stroke.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

The Broadmoor psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead shares her passion for choral music with Michael Berkeley.

When people ask Gwen Adshead what she does for a living she sometimes tells them she is a florist, because she is unable to face another conversation about why she has devoted her life to working with ‘monsters’.

Gwen has spent thirty years as a psychiatrist and as a pioneering forensic psychotherapist working at Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire with some of society’s most violent, and vilified, offenders.

The author of more than 100 academic books and papers, Gwen recently co-wrote a best-selling book, with her friend Eileen Horne, for a more general audience: The Devil You Know takes the reader into the therapy room at Broadmoor to try to understand people often labelled as ‘monstrous’, including serial killers, stalkers and child sex offenders.

Gwen tells Michael about her work at Broadmoor, encouraging offenders to understand what drove them to violence, to face up to what they have done, and to try to find a future free of violence. She finds parallels in her work with music: the leader of a group therapy session has much in common with a conductor; and as a psychotherapist Gwen has to listen to her patients with the same concentration as when she is listening to fellow choir members.

Gwen’s passion for choral music runs through the programme with pieces by Tallis, Gibbons, Lauridsen and Verdi, and a Maori song that conjures up her early childhood in New Zealand.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Sometimes a musical work of art is so perfect, so magnificent, that it’s almost impossible to remember the work that’s gone on, behind the scenes, from the early drafts to the anxiety and relief of the first performance. That’s certainly true of a masterpiece such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But writer James Runcie wants us to think about what went on in Bach’s mind while he was creating that magnificent Passion, and he’s written both a play and a novel about it. The novel, his twelfth, is called The Great Passion and it was published earlier this year; it was also broadcast on Radio 4 just before Easter.

James is an award-wining film-maker, playwright and artistic director who has worked at the BBC, the Bath Literary Festival and Southbank Centre. He’s also the author of the Grantchester detective novels, now filming their eighth series for television. The hero’s a young priest, who solves crimes while wrestling with problems of religious faith - and religion is something James Runcie knows all about, as his father was Archbishop of Canterbury.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, James Runcie talks about the influence of his father, and of his unconventional mother, who was a pianist and piano teacher; in their household, he says, religion was optional, but music was compulsory. He shares his passion for the works of Bach in three of his choices, including the Matthew Passion. And he talks movingly about the death of his wife, the drama director Marilyn Imrie, from Motor Neurone Disease. When she was no longer able to speak, he played her music.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Katherine Rundell started writing for children at the age of only 21; in little more than a decade she’s become one of our leading children’s writers, with six books so far, including the award-winning Rooftoppers, the story of a girl who travels across the rooftops of Paris looking for her mother. Katherine herself is a roof climber and a tightrope walker.

Born in 1987, she grew up in Zimbabwe and Brussels; after taking her undergraduate degree at Oxford, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College where she wrote her PhD thesis on John Donne. Her book on that great metaphysical poet, Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, was published earlier this year, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

Katherine Rundell tells Michael Berkeley that her books set out to explain to children that life does contain loss, and pain, and darkness, but that it is always possible to discover joy. Her own childhood was marked by the loss of her sister and she says it is no accident that she lost her sister when she herself was ten and that she writes for ten-year-olds now. She talks too about her love of tightrope-walking and roof-climbing, and about her passion for John Donne, choosing two musical settings of his work. Other music choices include Mozart, Bach, Strauss, Fauré and Miles Davis.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Anyone who’s spent any time with children in the last thirty years will know Horrid Henry and his brother, Perfect Peter. They’re the creations of Francesca Simon, and they’ve appeared in 25 books, been translated into 31 languages and sold 25 million copies. They seem to embody archetypes: the chaotic, naughty brother who’s always in trouble, and the neat well-behaved sibling who’s always anxious to please the parents.

In Private Passions, Francesca Simon tells Michael Berkeley that her own emotional memories of childhood are extraordinarily vivid. She was brought up living on the beach in Malibu, where her father Mayo Simon was a screenwriter, but then moved around to Paris and New York and London. It all sounds glamorous, but actually, she says, it was hard. They moved so often that she always felt like an outsider. Francesca chooses music that reflects the very diverse influences of her early life: Yiddish and Breton folk songs, and Jascha Haifetz playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto. She also chooses music by the young British composer Gavin Higgins, for whom she’s written a libretto for his new work The Faerie Bride, and by E. J. Moeran, a composer she thinks should be much better known.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

In this special programme for the Queen’s platinum jubilee, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the author and former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Anne Glenconner, who tells Michael about her long life as a friend of the royal family, her marriage to the outrageous Colin Tennant, and how she survived unimaginable family tragedy.

At 11.15am on June 2nd 1953, Lady Anne Coke stood at the door of Westminster Abbey, dressed in a gorgeous embroidered white satin gown. She was 20, one of six maids of honour about to pick up the Queen’s 21-foot-long velvet train and follow her up the aisle at the start of the Coronation.

What followed that momentous day for Lady Anne Coke, who became Lady Glenconner, was a life of continued service to the royal family, as well as running enormous houses, having five children, hosting glamorous parties, and travelling the world. Then at the age of 87 she published her bestselling memoir Lady in Waiting, followed by two novels. Her new book Whatever Next? will be published in the autumn.

Anne Glenconner tells Michael about the exciting days leading up to the coronation and her emotions as Elgar’s Nimrod was played at the very start of the service. She reminisces about playing on Holkham beach as a child with the Queen and Princess Margaret, and plays music that helped her through the terrible events that engulfed her three sons in the 1980s.

And she also talks frankly, and with great humour, about life with Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner: the temper tantrums which got him banned from airlines, the ruined trips to the opera, the excruciating first evening of their honeymoon, and the final, awful twist in the tale of their marriage.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media Production for BBC Radio 3

In a wide-ranging and engaging interview, musician Jarvis Cocker tells Michael Berkeley about the role classical music plays in his life and relationships.

Fortunately for the world of music Jarvis Cocker abandoned his early ambition to be an astronaut and instead, at the age of 14, had the idea of forming a band called Pulp during an Economics lesson at school in Sheffield. Some 15 years later, Pulp was one of the most successful bands in the world, with a string of witty, emotionally raw, and musically inventive hits rooted in the details of real life.

Since then, he has become a much-loved radio presenter with the long-running "Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service" on BBC Six Music, and "Wireless Nights" on Radio 4. Amongst numerous other projects he has formed a new band, JARV IS…, and he has just published a memoir of his childhood and the early years of Pulp called Good Pop, Bad Pop.

Jarvis describes how, during a long period of convalescence after an accident, he transformed the way he wrote songs, realizing that the details of everyday life around him in Sheffield provided a goldmine of material. He tells Michael how he coped with fame when it eventually arrived in his thirties, and how he has never conquered his stage fright.

Jarvis chooses music by Schubert, Max Richter, Rachmaninoff, Eric Satie and Delius, all guaranteed to give him the ‘tingle’ factor. He talks about the power of particular vinyl records to bring back memories of his teenage years in Sheffield and of his son as he was growing up in Paris. And he talks movingly about the role Richter’s music played in his relationship with his dying father who had been absent for most of Jarvis’s life.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

The science writer and broadcaster Dr Kat Arney shares with Michael Berkeley her passion for the harp and her revelatory new research into the causes of cancer.

Gone are the days when cancer could not be mentioned but was “the Big C”. It is just as well, since about half of us will develop cancer during our lifetime. And as the treatments and drugs improve all the time, so does our knowledge of what causes it. Kat Arney’s latest, award-winning, book, Rebel Cell: "Cancer, Evolution and the Science of Life", explains the revelatory new breakthroughs happening in labs around the world.

After a PhD in Genetics at Cambridge University, Kat Arney worked for ten years as Science Communications Manager at Cancer Research UK. And then she left that job to go freelance - writing books and newspaper articles about science, broadcasting and podcasting including a recent Radio 4 series, Ingenious, about how individual genes shape our lives.

But as well as science Kat Arney has another passion, for music, and particularly the harp, which she has played since she was a teenager both as a classical instrument and in bands. She chooses music by the harpist Ruth Wall; Arnold Bax’s Harp Quintet; and we hear Kat herself playing with the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics.

And she lets Michael into the secret of how to fit a harp into the back of an Austin Metro.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

As we’ve watched the war in Ukraine unfold, we’ve seen huge crowds of people queuing at the border, dragging small suitcases, carrying babies and children, leaving their homeland behind. Dr Waheed Arian knows what it’s like to be forced to leave your home, suddenly, and under fire; he’s a refugee from an earlier war, the Soviet-Afghan War, which lasted for almost ten years and claimed the lives of as many as two million Afghan civilians. Five million people are estimated to have left the country as refugees, and Waheed Arian was one of them.

In 1988, at the age of five, he escaped on horseback from Afghanistan to Pakistan, arriving at a refugee camp on the North-West frontier. In the camp he almost died from malnutrition, malaria and TB. But – just in time - he managed to get medical treatment, and the doctor who treated him inspired an ambition to be a doctor himself. Dr Waheed Arian is now an A and E doctor in the NHS and he has founded a pioneering medical charity, Arian Teleheal. He has received many awards for his work, and has written about his life in a vivid memoir, “In the Wars”.

In a moving conversation with Michael Berkeley, Waheed describes the dangerous journey that brought him to Britain, where he was at first imprisoned in Feltham Young Offenders Institution. He reveals how he fulfilled his early ambition to become a doctor, despite having had almost no schooling. And he chooses music which takes him back to childhood, watching Bollywood films with his family, and to his early years in Britain, when he was befriended by an old woman who played Schubert to him. Other choices include music by Charlie Chaplin, and a song by Ahmad Wali, who like Waheed fled Afghanistan.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media Production for BBC Radio 3.

The fashion designer and artist Osman Yousefzada tells Michael Berkeley about his childhood in a strictly religious Pashtun community in Birmingham.

Osman Yousefzada shot to fame when Beyoncé wore one of his designs to the 2013 Grammy Awards. Lady Gaga, Thandiwe Newton and Taylor Swift are among his many other celebrity clients. He is also an acclaimed artist, curator and film-maker, and the creator of one of the world’s largest ever pieces of public art: the ‘wrapping’ of the Selfridges building in Birmingham in geometric patterns inspired by Islamic art.

Educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Central St Martins and Cambridge University, Osman grew up in a community described by the Daily Mail as ‘the Jihadi capital of Britain’. His newly published memoir, The Go Between, is a fascinating account of his childhood and his first steps into the outside world while navigating both racism and family expectations.

He tells Michael Berkeley about his beloved mother, a talented seamstress who inspired him as a designer: she was married at 14, had her first child at 15 and lived most of her life in Birmingham, but remained illiterate and never learned to speak English. She hardly ever left the house. Osman’s sisters were taken out of school at the age of 11 and also shut away inside the family home.

Osman chooses music inspired by the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism by Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and a song by the Grammy-winning Pakistani-American Arooj Aftab, as well as pieces by Philip Glass and by the Canadian composer and cellist Zoe Keating.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Looking ahead to International Women’s Day, this is a second chance to hear Michael Berkeley’s interview with the trailblazing surgeon Dame Clare Marx, who sadly died in November 2022; the programme is repeated by kind permission of her husband, Andrew.

Clare Marx was the first woman to become President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 2014, and the first woman to become the Chair of the General Medical Council five years later. Clare Marx had to overcome significant prejudice to reach the top of her field but in 2007 she received a CBE and in 2018 a DBE for services to medicine. But then came the blow of a terminal diagnosis of incurable pancreatic cancer. With characteristic courage and grace, she announced her resignation from the General Medical Council.

When she came into the studio, Clare Marx had only eight months to live, but no one would have guessed she was ill. She was calm, elegant, composed. But she knew that this would be her last broadcast interview, a message to her colleagues, her family, indeed to everyone listening. Her music choices include Britten’s Sea Interludes, Verdi’s Requiem, and Mozart’s trio “Soave sia il vento”, a message to all who are about to sail away across the sea. “May the winds be gentle, may the waves be calm.”

Michael Berkeley began by asking Clare about that moving public letter of resignation, in which she said: “Since receiving this news, I've been reminded once again of the importance and power of kindness in everything we do as doctors.”

Pancreatic Cancer UK www.pancreaticcancer.org.uk

Information and support: Cancer https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1KkkxvD0G1w4l294QCrQZbh/information-and-support-cancer

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

For Easter Day, Private Passions celebrates Spring and the music of birdsong with one of the world’s leading experts on birds, Professor Tim Birkhead.

An award-winning scientist, author and university lecturer, Tim Birkhead is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Sheffield, and the author of many books that communicate his life-long passion, including “What it’s like to be a bird” and most recently “Birds and Us”, a 12,000-year history of our relationship with birds, from cave art to conservation.

His choices include music that Mozart taught to a starling, and the old Catalan “Song of the Birds”, played by Pablo Casals. There will also be the music of birdsong itself, from the Dawn Chorus to the song of the bullfinch, which Tim Birkhead regards as the ultimate songbird. The programme includes the famous recording of Beatrice Harrison playing her cello to a nightingale with the nightingale answering back. Tim Birkhead explores the story of the recording and considers the enduring impact of Beatrice’s duet.

A correction: Since we broadcast this programme, new evidence has been brought to light. We’ve now learned that the recording initially believed to be the original 1924 broadcast of Beatrice Harrison and the nightingale, as labelled by the BBC Archives and the National Sound Archive, is instead likely to be a commercial recording released in 1927 by HMV. The labelling has now been corrected to ensure this mix up won’t happen again. Suggestions that the song of the nightingale in 1924 may have been sung by a siffleur are not new but probably impossible to verify since it seems likely that the original 1924 broadcast was never recorded, as the recording technology did not exist at the time. Claims about the real bird being replaced in 1924 by a professional bird imitator, Madame Saberon, are based on written testimony to the BBC from relatives of Madame Saberon, as well as accounts from Madame Saberon herself. There continues to be competing accounts of this extraordinary musical event as well as huge public interest; this demonstrates just how important the story of Beatrice and the nightingale is in the history of broadcasting.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the architect, author and broadcaster Francesco da Mosto.

With his shock of white hair, boundless energy and unmistakable accent, Francesco da Mosto is for many of us the quintessential Venetian.

His distant ancestors were some of the first settlers to colonise the swampy islands that were to become Venice, fleeing Attila the Hun in the 5th century, and since then the da Mosto family has been at the forefront of Venetian public life.

One of the team of architects who restored the opera house in Venice after a devastating fire in 1996, Francesco shot to fame with his BBC television series exploring Venice, Italy and the Mediterranean. And with his English wife Jane, he’s at the heart of the campaign to find a sustainable future for this most beautiful and vulnerable city.

Francesco tells Michael about the joys and travails of living in Venice, and about his life in a crumbling palazzo just off the Grand Canal, shared by his parents, his children and more than twenty other Venetian families. And he tells Michael how to cook his favourite Sunday lunch dish.

His music choices are a celebration of Italy, with arias from operas by Puccini and by Verdi; a much loved song by Mina Mazzini; music by Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Marcello, and the most famous Venetian composer of them all: Vivaldi.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, talks to Michael Berkeley about faith, doubt, compassion and the powerful emotions stirred up by his favourite music.

In 1948, at the age of just 14, Richard Holloway left his home in a small town near Glasgow to train for the priesthood at an Anglican monastery in Nottinghamshire. Nearly four decades later, after working in some of Scotland’s most deprived inner-city parishes, he was appointed Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Church of Scotland. But in 2000 he resigned, unable any longer to reconcile his religious doubts, and his views, especially on gay rights, with church orthodoxy.

As he’s navigated his unusual spiritual journey he’s remained an honest, compassionate voice, cutting through dogma and unafraid to engage with uncertainty and celebrate our humanity.

Richard Holloway has presented many radio series and has written 33 books, the latest being Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe, an exploration of how we can try to make sense of our fleeting lives in a post-religious world.

For Richard Holloway, listening to music is a deeply emotional experience; he chooses pieces by Rachmaninov, Elgar and Brahms, and a psalm and a hymn that bring back powerful memories of life in the seminary as a teenager.

And Robert Burns’ Ca’ the Yowes reminds him of the joy of singing with his family around the kitchen table.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Misan Harriman didn’t become a photographer till five years ago, when his wife gave him a camera for his fortieth birthday. Since then he’s become world-famous, photographing celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Cate Blanchett, and Meghan Markle – his was the romantic black-and-white photograph of Harry and Meghan announcing her pregnancy last year. Alongside these high-profile celebrity commissions, he’s also become a photographer known for documenting Extinction Rebellion, anti-Trump protests, and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020 he became the first black person in the 104-year history of British Vogue to shoot the cover of its prestigious September issue; last year he became the Chair of the Southbank Centre, the renowned arts complex in London.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Misan talks about his journey to become a photographer, from early childhood in Nigeria to his time at an English boarding school. He reveals his “superpower” of dyslexia, and how he’s found a new way of shooting portraits in lockdown: “remote photography”.

Misan Harriman is a passionate film buff, and all his music choices come from movies that have made a profound impression on him, from the soundtrack to “Ghost” which he saw as a boy, to William Walton’s score for “Henry V” and the moving Dunkirk scene in “Atonement”.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Katy Brand talks to Michael Berkeley about obsession, opera, brass bands and juggling her career as a comedian, actor, novelist and screenwriter.

On television, Katy Brand’s Big Ass Comedy Show ran for three series and won her a British Comedy Award, and she has appeared in everything from Peep Show to Midsomer Murders. Her stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Festival have been highly acclaimed, and she is a regular on BBC Radio comedy and drama. Katy has starred in musicals such as West Side Story and Everyone’s Talking About Jamie; and she has written plays and screenplays – her feature film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson, premiered at the recent Sundance Festival and will be on our cinema screens this autumn.

Katy tells Michael about her childhood experience as an extra at the Royal Opera House; her grandfather, the trumpet player and brass band conductor Geoffrey Brand; and her passion for the madrigals of the 17th-century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo.

And she describes the obsessions that dominated her early life, which have provided rich material for her books and comedy shows: her conversion to born-again Christianity as a teenager and her ongoing passion for the films Dirty Dancing and Mary Poppins.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Back when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister, it was said there were three powerful women in Britain. There was Mrs Thatcher herself; there was the Queen; and there was Esther Rantzen. Breaking into television at a time when it was very much a man’s world, she became one of the most recognisable and powerful voices in the country, thanks to her Sunday-night show, That’s Life, which ran for 21 years. In today’s fragmented television world, it’s almost unbelievable quite how popular that programme was in the 70s and 80s; up to 22 million people tuned in for a mix of consumer affairs, cheeky vox pops, and rudely shaped root vegetables sent in by viewers. It was a programme that exposed both faulty washing machines and the shortage of organ donors, and it created some serious social campaigns. In 1986 Esther Rantzen set up Childline, which is now run by the NSPCC, and in 2012 she launched Silver Line, offering support to older people. In 2015 she was made a Dame for services to children and older people.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley Esther Rantzen looks back on her early days in broadcasting, when her job was to create sound effects for dramas by running round the studio flapping a huge umbrella (to simulate a pterodactyl, apparently). She talks about how she began to realize the scale of abuse suffered by the children in this country, which led to the creation of Childline. She reveals, too, the pleasure she takes now in living in the country, leaving her career behind, and realising that life is for living, not working.

Music choices include Elgar, Georges Brassens, Brahms’s Double Concerto, Grieg, and Carmen Jones.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Theaster Gates is a potter, a sculptor, a film-maker, a curator of black history, a real estate developer and a professor of fine art in Chicago, where he lives - and where he’s also transformed a whole run-down area near the university. When he was made a professor in 2007, he bought a derelict bank for a dollar, tore out the urinals, cut them up and sold them off at five thousand dollars each as artworks – thereby raising enough money to create a large new art centre. That was just the beginning, as he explains. Gates’s art and installation work is shown all over the world, and current projects include a library for Obama and this year’s Serpentine Pavilion building. As his recent show at the Whitechapel revealed, his work is ambitious and provocative - he takes pots and deconstructs them so that they’re exploding, back to the original clay. He films his work in dream-like spaces - a huge abandoned factory, for instance, full of broken bricks and haunting music, including his own singing.

Theaster Gates is also a musician, the founder of a group called The Black Monks of Mississippi, which aims to rescue old songs from the black South. He brings Michael Berkeley a playlist that includes Scott Joplin, Joseph Boulogne, Rachmaninoff and gospel music sung by Leontyne Price.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old grandmother became the first person in the world to be given the Covid jab as part of a mass vaccination programme. Within six months more than 30 million people in the UK had received at least one dose. Many people say that extraordinary achievement would not have been possible without Dame Kate Bingham. A venture capitalist with a first-class degree in biochemistry, in May 2020 she was asked by the Prime Minister to head a new Vaccine Taskforce, leading British efforts to find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine for the UK and abroad. Her appointment was not without controversy. But, in the words of Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, who invented the AstraZeneca vaccine, “her calm decisions in the uncertain early days of the pandemic saved countless lives”. Kate Bingham was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours List.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Kate Bingham reveals what it was like to create the Taskforce, working remotely from home in Wales. It was her first encounter with the inner workings of government, a culture she describes as paralysed by “groupthink”, and “a massive aversion to risk”. She reveals the music that sustained her, and which she listened to at night when she ran. Kate is an oboist, and she begins her music selection with Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto; other choices include Gustav Holst, Robert Schumann, Arturo Marquez, Guys and Dolls, and a song with lyrics by her son Sam.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The geologist Sanjeev Gupta tells Michael Berkeley about his search for evidence of ancient life in rocks on Mars with the help of NASA’s Mars Rovers, and he plays unique recordings of sounds from the surface of Mars.

Professor Sanjeev Gupta is a scientist who takes the long view, the very long view, into Deep Time. As the Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London, he investigates how landscapes have evolved over vast spans of time. His work as a geologist has meant camping out alone for months at a time in some of the world’s most remote places.

And Sanjeev Gupta is part of a team of hundreds of scientists working on one of humanity’s most ambitious expeditions ever - NASA’s three billion dollar Perseverance Mars Rover which is helping us to understand what that planet was like an astonishing three-and-a-half billion years ago. The team is searching for evidence of ancient life in rocks on the Red Planet, rocks that will hopefully be returned to earth for analysis in 2031.

Music is vital to Sanjeev Gupta’s life. He brings Michael Berkeley music by Bach, Messiaen and Handel and by contemporary composers Peteris Vasks, John Luther Adams and Anna Meredith, music which conjures ‘visions of the beyond’ – starlight, canyons, oceans and heaven.

Sanjeev describes the surreal experience of helping to operate the Perseverance Rover as it landed on Mars in February 2021 from a flat above a hairdresser in Lewisham when restrictions prevented him from travelling to NASA Mission Control in California.

And he recalls the transcendent experience of listening to music alone on long field trips in the vast deserts of Utah.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s life story is every bit as extraordinary as one of her novels. As she tells Michael Berkeley in a warm and frank interview, she was born in the back streets of Leeds in 1933, left school at 15 to work as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post, and at 18 was the first editor of the paper’s 'Woman’s Page'. By 20 she was an established Fleet Street journalist.

And then came the novels - her first book, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and has sold over 32 million copies: it is the story of Emma Harte, an impoverished maidservant who through sheer grit rises to become a phenomenally successful businesswoman. Barbara Taylor Bradford has gone on to write another 34 books, with sales approaching 100 million; many were turned into films and television series by her late husband, the producer Robert Bradford.

Barbara takes Michael back to her childhood in Leeds, where her mother, Freda, introduced her to the composers she still loves today: Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Bizet and, especially, Puccini. She talks movingly about her long and happy marriage and how her determination to keep writing has sustained her since her husband’s death; she describes the ambition and determination, which drove her in the male dominated world of journalism in the 1950s; and her pride in the success of her novels.

And, at 88, Barbara Taylor Bradford shows no sign of slowing down.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Jamila Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas; her Indian father and English mother met as teachers in Iran and married in Mumbai. By the age of 12, she’d lived in an Indian palace in the Punjab, a bungalow in Poona - and a terraced house in Ealing, west London. Ealing was where the family settled in 1953; Jamila went on to study at London’s Trinity College of Music, and to become a sound engineer and then a director in television. She didn’t start to write until her late thirties, beginning a career distinguished by many awards for her novels, plays and short stories – around 50 books in all. It’s a rich world of myths and fairy-tales, orphans and adventures, ranging from 15th-century Venice to the mountains of India. She’s best known for Coram Boy, her prize-winning novel, later staged at the National Theatre, about the Foundling Hospital – to which Handel gave the royalties from his Messiah.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Jamila Gavin reveals the shocking story, which inspired her to write her first book for children. Her books deal with serious themes: particularly slavery, both historic slavery and people-trafficking now. Reading them, you can forget that these are children’s books; but, she says, any experiences which children suffer should also be experiences they can read about.

Jamila Gavin’s playlist includes Handel’s Messiah, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Schubert, Brahms, Stockhausen - and her favourite Night Raga.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Actress, comedian and playwright Katherine Parkinson shares her favourite music with Michael Berkeley.

Two years out of drama school and heavily in debt, Katherine Parkinson was offered a part in a new television comedy series The IT Crowd. As all fans of the cult series know, she played Jen, the hopeless boss of two computer geeks – she was the so-called “normal” one. The series ran from 2006 to 2013, with audiences of two million. For Katherine Parkinson, it made her career, winning her a British Comedy Award and a Bafta.

Since then Katherine Parkinson has appeared in everything from stage productions of Sophocles and Chekhov to television sci-fi drama Humans as well as Doc Martin and the sitcom The Kennedys. She has also moved into writing: her play about three people sitting for a painter premiered on television during lockdown.

Katherine chooses music by John Tavener, George Gershwin and Thomas Tallis, and polyphonic singing she discovered while filming in Georgia. She tells Michael how she tried to channel her inner Cecilia Bartoli during singing lessons at drama school, and how she had to pretend to be good at housework for her Olivier-nominated role in Home, I’m Darling at the National Theatre. And she talks movingly about her affection for her late father-in-law, the actor Trevor Peacock.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived in Britain from Vienna as a five-year-old, without her parents. It was 1939, and she was one of 10,000 Jewish children brought by train on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis. She went on to become one of the most successful businesswomen of the 20th century; in 1962, working from home, she founded one of the first tech-start-ups: an all-woman software company, Freelance Programmers, which was ultimately valued at almost $3 billion, making seventy of her staff millionaires.

Since ‘retiring’, her work has been in philanthropy, with a particular focus on IT and autism – in memory of her son, who had autism, and who died at the age of only 35. She estimates that The Shirley Foundation has given away £67 million, not least for the establishment of three autism charities. She is the author of two books and is frequently asked to give motivational speeches about women in business and her own life story. She says, “I decided to make my life one worth saving”.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Dame Stephanie Shirley looks back on an extraordinarily dramatic life. She describes the Kindertransport train, with children sleeping on the luggage racks, weeping for their lost families. She tells the story of her early days in business, and how she took on the name “Steve” to be taken more seriously. She also had a tape recording of frantic typing that she used to play during work phone calls, to disguise the fact that she was at home. And she talks movingly about her son’s death and how that changed the direction of her life. Her music choices include Bach, Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’, Dido’s Lament and the ‘Cat Duet’ attributed to Rossini.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Professor David Nutt is an expert on drugs, and how they work on the brain. He trained as a psychiatrist, and for almost 50 years his research has focused on new drug treatments for anxiety, depression and addiction. In the late 1980s, at Bristol University, he set up the first unit in Britain to bridge psychiatry and pharmacology. He’s now at Imperial College, where he is Professor of Neuro-psychopharmacology. He has published hundreds of scientific papers and 27 books.

All of this makes David Nutt sound like a pillar of the establishment. But the reason most people know his name is that he has repeatedly challenged the government over its policies on illegal drugs and alcohol, arguing, for instance, that it’s more risky to go horse-riding than to take ecstasy. In his words: “no one in a position of authority dares to speak the truth”. But he also stresses “I have repeatedly said that cannabis is not safe”.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, David Nutt looks back on the childhood that gave him the confidence to challenge established opinion. Living on a council estate, he felt out of place at Bristol Grammar School, and was a very anxious child who couldn’t sleep. At night he used to creep to the stairs to hear the Proms drifting up from his father’s radio. Professor Nutt describes fascinating new research into treating depression using the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, and he reveals which music he plays to his patients during these experiments.

Music choices include Faure, Nielsen, Grieg and Beethoven – his Seventh Symphony, which David persuaded the crowd to dance to at a New Year’s Eve party. That experiment, he says, was a resounding success.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Meg Rosoff waited until she was 45 to write her first novel, How I Live Now, the story of a passionate love affair between young teenage cousins, set against the background of apocalyptic war. It changed her life, selling a million copies and becoming a film starring Saoirse Ronan. She gave up a series of unfulfilling jobs in advertising and reinvented herself as a writer. Over the last 16 years she’s published eight more novels, as well as eight books for younger readers, including four about McTavish the rescue dog. She’s won numerous awards, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award - half a million Pounds, the biggest prize in children’s literature.

In Private Passions, she talks to Michael Berkeley about the ways in which she’s reinvented her life over the years. First, there was the decision to come to England from New York and begin a new life here; then, after the tragic early death of her sister, there was the decision to become a writer. It didn’t begin well; she decided to write a book about ponies aimed at teenaged girls, but no publisher would touch it – it was far too sexy. Finding her voice as a writer took a while, and has led Meg Rosoff to think about “voice” in relation to musicians and composers too. Music choices include Bach’s B Minor Mass; “London Calling” by the Clash; Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, and Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Over the last 40 years, Valentina Harris has done more than anyone else to convince the British public that there is a lot more to Italian food than pizza and Spaghetti Bolognese. Her television series and her more-than-50 books have brought her passion for Italian food, wine and culture to a huge audience.

She tells Michael Berkeley about her childhood in Tuscany, choosing a romantic song by Georgio Gabor for her aristocratic Italian mother and Stravinsky for her father, who taught her to speak English without a trace of an accent. We hear music from the great gourmet Pavarotti, and a celebration of Italian food by Rossini.

Valentina describes her horror of tinned spaghetti on toast when she arrived in England in the 1970s, and shares her tips for using up Christmas leftovers, Italian-style.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

John Cleese has been making us laugh for more than 50 years. Back in the 1970s, he became a comedy legend in Monty Python and in Fawlty Towers, and he now has a second generation of fans, discovering for themselves his unique combination of surreal humour, verbal pyrotechnics and farce. So much so that even now, as he enters his eighties, John Cleese is recognised in the street all across the world.

With almost six million Twitter followers, his is still a powerful voice, mocking those in power and generally trying to stir things up a bit.

This programme was recorded while John was in Britain for a couple of weeks, over from LA to work on the script for the musical version of A Fish Called Wanda. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, he looks back on his childhood in Weston-super-Mare and the physical awkwardness that made him stand out from an early age – “six feet of chewed string”, as one of his teachers remarked. He remembers his fateful early decision not to be a lawyer but to try comedy instead. And he shares what he’s learned about the strange unconscious process of creativity.

Music choices include Tchaikovsky, Scott Joplin and John Williams, as well as comedy sketches by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – and John's favourite sketch from his own career, a double-act with Rowan Atkinson, “Beekeeping”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

In a warm and frank interview, Hayley Mills talks to Michael Berkeley about the joys and difficulties of growing up in Hollywood as a child star and about the music that reminds her of her family.

Hayley Mills was described by Walt Disney as ‘the greatest movie find in 25 years’. After winning a Bafta at the age of just 12 in the British crime thriller Tiger Bay alongside her father, John Mills, she was signed up by Disney for a six-movie deal which included The Parent Trap, In Search of the Castaways and Pollyanna - for which she won an Oscar in 1961.

In a career spanning more than six decades, Hayley Mills has gone on to work all over the world in films, television and on stage, and she has just published a memoir of her early life called Forever Young.

She tells Michael why she was unable to collect her Oscar, and about the agonies her parents suffered trying to decide whether or not she should sign with Disney and the pressures of juggling a double life between Hollywood and a chilly English boarding school.

And she talks frankly about suffering from bulimia as a teenager, the problem of her mother’s drinking, and how her life changed forever at the age of 21, when she had to hand over almost all her childhood earnings to the Inland Revenue.

A proud mother of two sons and grandmother of five, Hayley Mills chooses music by Tchaikovsky, by Mendelssohn and by Bach, which reminds her of her sister, the actor Juliet Mills; of her mother, the screenwriter Mary Hayley Bell; and of her partner, the actor Firdous Bamji.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Iain Sinclair describes himself as an urban prophet: in book after book, he has walked through London, recording the graffiti, the rubbish, the electric-green scum of a canal, the things you glimpse out of the corner of your eye and perhaps would rather not see.

He brings to these pilgrimages many rich layers of reading about the city, interpreting what he sees through the eyes of past writers, particularly William Blake. In fact, he seems always to be walking with ghosts. It’s very hard to categorise his work, which is a rich blend of history, geography, travelogue, poetry, photography, literary criticism – sometimes all within a single book. Among dozens of publications over fifty years, he is probably best known for his walk around the M25, which became a film and a book, “London Orbital”. But in 2019, just before Covid, he embarked on an even more daring journey, to Peru.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Iain Sinclair talks about the journeys, which have shaped his life, and about how music has inspired those wanderings. Music choices include Stravinsky’s setting of the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”; Mahler’s Eighth Symphony; a song by Britten originally intended for the song-cycle Les Illuminations; and the singing of the Bakaya People from the Central African Republic.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Nick Lane is a scientist who peers down microscopes at incredibly small cells in order to ask really big questions. How did life on Earth begin? Why is life the way it is? Why do we have sex? Why do we die?

He is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London and the Co-Director of UCL’s Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution. He is also the award-winning author of five books, and his next – Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death – is due out in May.

Nick Lane tells Michael Berkeley about his youthful ambition to be a violinist and how he funded his biochemistry studies by busking on the streets of London. He explains how his passion for the music of Janacek helped win him a place to study for his PhD, and how he unwound each evening to the sound of the early-twentieth-century American folk and blues musician Lead Belly.

Nick Lane still plays the fiddle with his band in pubs and now also busks with his teenage son. He chooses folk music inspired by Handel; Bach played by his hero, the violinist Nathan Milstein; and music by Peter Maxwell Davies that brings back an unforgettable jamming session in a pub in Orkney.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

In a special edition of Private Passions for COP26, Michael Berkeley talks to Dr Tamsin Edwards about her career as a climate scientist and her lifelong passion for music.

As a child, Tamsin wanted to be a concert pianist and she went on to play the clarinet, saxophone and double bass, and to sing in choirs. Music is still a vital part of her life but now she is one of our leading climate scientists, at King’s College London, studying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly in relation to rising sea levels.

In 2018 she joined the author team for the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. Instantly recognizable with her trademark cropped blue hair, she is a passionate science communicator, blogging, writing for newspapers and frequently appearing on radio and television.

Tamsin tells Michael how performing music helped her to develop the confidence to speak about science to governments, corporations and the public. We hear part of a Beethoven sonata that brings back memories of the terror she felt playing it for her Grade 8 Piano exam. She chooses music by Liszt for her mother, a concert pianist, and we hear her late father playing the trumpet with his New Orleans jazz band.

And Tamsin talks movingly about her debilitating treatment for bowel cancer, paying tribute to the love and support of her partner, the television presenter Dallas Campbell, with piano music by Philip Glass.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

In this special programme for Radio 3’s Twilight Season, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the sleep scientist Professor Matthew Walker.

So many of us have trouble sleeping, and are longing to find the secret of a good night’s rest, that when Matthew Walker goes to parties he is more likely to tell people he is a dolphin trainer than the world’s leading expert on sleep science. Otherwise, he says, ‘for me the evening is over’.

Matthew began his career in Britain, training as a doctor, but he is now Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Berkeley, California and the founder and director of the Centre for Sleep Science. He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers and his best-selling book Why We Sleep has been translated into over 40 languages.

Matthew tells Michael about the ‘global sleep crisis’, the sleep deficit that is costing individuals their health and economies billions. He explains why it is so important to get at least seven hours of sleep a night and the dangers to our physical and mental health if we regularly get even an hour less than that. And he describes the joys of sleeping and dreaming, and the magic they work on our creativity, memory and wellbeing.

Matthew has chosen music with a restful, sleep-inducing tempo and rhythm by Debussy, Chopin, Handel and Purcell, as well as a track that transports him back to his home town of Liverpool.

And he tells Michael about the most important scientific conversation of his career – with a pianist.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Diplomat, Soldier, Explorer, Politician, Academic – Rory Stewart defies easy labels. By his own admission, his identity is complicated: he describes himself as “a Scot, born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia”. After Eton, he went on to Oxford and to the Diplomatic Service, but then abandoned this conventional career path and spent two years walking across Afghanistan and Iran. He became a deputy governor in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, and then ten years later entered British politics as a Tory MP, serving under both Cameron and May, and finally making a bold bid to become Party Leader and Prime Minister. When Boris Johnson won the election in 2019 he resigned, and threw his hat into the ring to become the new London mayor. After that contest was delayed by Covid, he left politics, and indeed left the country; he now teaches international relations and politics at Yale University.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Rory Stewart reveals that he feels nothing but relief at leaving politics behind. He looks back at the years he spent in Afghanistan and wonders how much of that work will survive, and he explains why he’s now moving with his young family to Jordan. Music choices take him back to his father, who often sang to him, and to his travels in the Borders and in Iran. He talks too about his search for religious belief, a yearning expressed by a Bach cantata; and why above all we must continue to hope – not despair – about the future.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Mark Solms is a neuroscientist who has spent his whole career investigating the mysteries of consciousness. His research throws light on some of the most difficult questions of all: how does the mind connect to the body? Why does it feel like something to be you? Born in Namibia and educated in South Africa, he came to Britain in his late twenties to avoid military service under the apartheid regime. He made his name with research into what happens in the brain when we’re dreaming; then he startled his scientific colleagues by training as a psychoanalyst, something which, he says, “put me at odds with the rest of my field”. He’s now very unusual in holding eminent positions within both psychoanalysis and scientific research. He’s the author of six books – his latest is "The Hidden Spring" – and he divides his time between London and Cape Town, where he also pursues his other career... as a winemaker.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Mark Solms reveals the traumatic childhood event which made him determined to become a doctor, when his brother jumped off a roof and suffered a major brain injury. He discusses the latest research on dreams, and how working with brain-damaged people can teach us about the nature of consciousness. And he tells the story of how he tried to rescue his family vineyard from the wider historical trauma of the apartheid past.

Mark chooses music which he hopes will illuminate the nature of consciousness itself: Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata, Bach, Ligeti, Chopin, and Talking Heads.

Esther Freud talks to Michael Berkeley about her extraordinary childhood and her passion for story telling in both words and music.

After attending drama school and making appearances in The Bill and Dr Who, Esther Freud changed direction at the age of 20 and turned to writing. She found instant success with her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which drew on her experience of living in Morocco as a very young child with her mother and sister Bella. She was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and has gone on to write eight more books, the latest being I Couldn’t Love You More.

Esther tells Michael about her childhood passion for telling stories and how her experiences in Morocco dominated her imagination for years afterwards. She conjures up memories of life in North Africa with a song by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.

As she grew older she grew closer to her father, the painter Lucian Freud, partly by sitting for him and partly by their sharing a rare holiday. We hear Lotte Lenya singing Kurt Weill, which reminds Esther of her father’s German heritage.

Esther learned the cello at school and its sound has remained an abiding love; she chooses music by Saint-Saëns and by the contemporary English composer Michael Hoppé. And music from Britten’s Peter Grimes transports her to her beloved Suffolk coast.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Walter Iuzzolino is an Italian television presenter who has become well known on our screens thanks to Walter Presents, Channel 4’s free streaming service of European television dramas. He’s a man with a mission to open up European culture to the British, and he has now begun a specially curated publishing list too, so that we can read the latest European fiction. Alongside that latest venture, he’s created special playlists – because together with his passion for European television and literature, Walter Iuzzolino is a classical music fan, with a love of Chopin.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Walter reflects on the challenges of opening up British culture to “foreign” influences, and explains why he’d actually rather live in London than Genoa.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is fascinated by the Bible, and she’s a leading scholar of those ancient texts which have so profoundly shaped how we see the world. She’s Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter; she’s also a convinced and passionate atheist. She is the author of several books about the Bible, and her most recent is her most daring: called “God: An Anatomy”, it draws on the Bible to describe the body of God, from head to foot, in a way she herself describes as “very controversial”.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Francesca talks about how her early fascination with Greek gods has inspired her to think differently about the God of the Bible. She talks movingly too about her partner, who served as a marine in Afghanistan, and how difficult it is to adjust to life after the army.

Music choices include Tallis, Beethoven, Elgar, and Handel’s portrayal of her favourite Biblical heroine, Athalia.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The writer Helena Attlee transports Michael Berkeley to the sounds, smells, tastes and music of Italy.

Helena has spent most of her life immersed in Italian culture, and she has written two bestselling books that take her readers to the heart of Italy via unexpected avenues: The Land Where Lemons Grow tells the story of citrus-growing in Italy, from the Medici to the Mafia; and Lev’s Violin recounts her obsessive search in Italy and beyond to discover the history of a battered but beautiful old violin.

Helena chooses music by Paganini that takes her to the Tuscan garden once owned by Napoleon’s sister; a folk song from Sicily, the heartland of Italian citrus farming; and a moving recording of singing from the windows of Siena during the lockdown.

She tells Michael how for much of her life she felt excluded from classical music until one evening, and one violin, transformed her relationship with music and changed the direction of her life.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Peggy Seeger’s extraordinary musical career spans six and a half decades. Since the age of 17 she has been writing, performing and recording songs pretty much non-stop. At the age of 80 she won the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best New Song with her son Calum and earlier this year, at the age of nearly 86, she released her latest album.

Peggy tells Michael Berkeley about her complex 30-year love affair with Ewan McColl, which was at the heart of the British folk revival; together they produced more than 40 albums, the revolutionary Radio Ballads for the BBC – and three very musical children.

Peggy describes her surprise and joy at falling in love with a woman 30 years ago; she chooses contemporary a cappella music that reminds her of her wife, Irene. And we hear a piece of extraordinary complexity by Peggy’s mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century, whose early death changed the course of Peggy’s life.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku - without doubt the only guest ever to have built a particle accelerator in their garage while still in high school. After that auspicious start Michio went onto become the co-founder of string theory in the 1970s; a professor at The City University of New York; and one of the world’s most prominent scientists.

He is also a great science communicator, so alongside his hundreds of scientific papers, he has written bestselling science books and appears regularly on television and radio all over the world. His latest book, The God Equation, describes his quest to continue Einstein’s search for a ‘theory of everything’.

Michio tells Michael how that particle accelerator drove his mother to distraction by blowing every fuse in the house and how his parents survived internment as Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. And he shares his passion for ice dancing to opera arias and his life-long love of the trumpet.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Carole Boyd is an accomplished theatre actress: she has recorded some three hundred audio books, and she does all the female voices in Postman Pat. But all this pales into insignificance compared with the role she has played on radio for thirty-five years, as Archer's character Lynda Snell.

More than five million Archers listeners have been listening to her as the snobbish but good-hearted Lynda since she first arrived in Ambridge, in 1986. Lynda is the Archers’ theatre director, putting on pantomimes and musicals; and Carole Boyd too is musical, creating words and music shows.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Carole Boyd tells the story of how she became an actress, despite the opposition of her family (she applied to drama school secretly) and how she was inspired to create the inimitable grating speech of Lynda Snell by the voice of her husband’s secretary. She concedes that her identity has become somewhat blurred with Lynda’s, and that channeling Lynda’s assertiveness is very useful when doing battle with utility companies on the phone. She admits, though, that she has never got close to a llama (unlike Lynda).

More seriously, Carole Boyd talks movingly about what it’s like to care for her husband, Patrick, who had a major stroke in 2003. She speaks very honestly about the daily reality of life as a carer: the loneliness, the frustration, the mourning for the person you used to know, and still love.

Carole Boyd’s playlist ranges from Schubert and Debussy to The Beatles, taking in Vaughan Williams, Canteloube, and Aaron Copland. We hear too Laurence Olivier with the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

One of the things that stands out, over more than 20 years of Private Passions, is the very strong connection between music and memory: as people choose music, which takes them way back, vividly evoking pivotal moments in their lives, it can be deeply emotional. Veronica O’Keane is perfectly placed to explain that response: as a practising psychiatrist, she’s spent many years observing how memory and experience are interwoven, working with patients whose memories are often broken or disrupted through brain tumours or mental illness. She’s Professor of Psychiatry and Consultant Psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin, and the author of The Rag and Bone Shop: How we Make Memories and Memories Make Us.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Professor O’Keane explains the latest research on memory, and why unreal experiences such as psychotic delusions can leave people with lasting traumatic memories, even when they know they’re false. She chooses music that evokes a series of “memory snapshots” from her own life, going back to her childhood in rural Ireland. And she reveals that she has the perfect antidote to the sadness of her professional life: she swims every morning in the cold sea near her home in Howth.

Music choices include Bach’s cello suites, Maria Callas, John Lennon and Philip Glass, as well as the traditional Irish musicians she loves.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

For almost a decade, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s right-hand man, first as Press Secretary and then as Downing Street Director of Communications. He was at the heart of power through the Good Friday Agreement, the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War, which involved him in the greatest controversy. These days he’s a writer and mental health campaigner, and he’s recently published a very frank book, “Living Better: How I learned to survive depression”.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Alastair Campbell talks about how music helps him manage depression, and reveals his lifelong passion for the bagpipes. His father, who was from the Hebrides, played, and he and his brother Donald learned as boys. Donald was diagnosed with schizophrenia when Alastair was only nineteen: “a defining event in my life”. Donald left Alastair his bagpipes when he died, too young; and he also left recordings of himself playing – one of which we hear in the programme. Alastair himself played the pipes as a busker in the South of France as a student, where he discovered a lifelong musical passion for the songs of Jacques Brel.

Other music choices include Mozart, Schubert, and Verdi’s famous drinking song from La Traviata. Alcohol has played a major role in Campbell’s life, and he talks about being drawn to the “drinking cultures” of both piping and politics. In fact, he says, it is not alcohol but politics – and his need to be needed by people in power – which is his real “demon”. He discusses too his inability to retire, his hatred of domesticity, particularly shopping with his partner Fiona, and why the satirical series “The Thick of It” is in some ways very close to the bone.

A Loftus Media production from BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, making the classics funny and the joy of running.

Just like the ancient Greek dramatists she loves, Natalie excels in both tragedy and comedy. She has written three novels, which retell stories from Greek myth, and she has had a long-running parallel career as a stand-up comedian, including her hugely popular Radio 4 series, Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics. Central to all her work is her focus on the much-neglected stories of women in the ancient world and particularly in Greek myth.

Natalie talks to Michael about why stories and myths from the ancient world continue to resonate so powerfully today and how classics is changing as women scholars and novelists reclaim ancient stories and retell them from a female perspective.

She chooses music by Elgar, by Cole Porter, and by two contemporary women composers, Annelies van Parys and Calliope Tsoupaki, who have been inspired by women in Greek myth. And we hear one of the best-loved pieces inspired by a classical story: Dido’s Lament, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

We hear the music by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which Natalie loves to run to, and a surprising choice, which for her conjures up the beauty and power of the music of Orpheus.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

If you’ve ever wondered why you love blue and hate the colour khaki, or have spent hours arguing over a colour chart because you and your partner can’t agree on how to paint the bedroom, you’ll be fascinated by Professor Anya Hurlbert. She’s a neuroscientist and a leading researcher into how the brain perceives colour, and why we feel so strongly about it. Brought up in Texas, studying at Princeton and Harvard, she is now Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the University of Newcastle; she’s also spent years advising the National Gallery on how to show their pictures so we can see the colours most vividly. She’s married to the science writer Matt Ridley.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Anya Hurlbert discusses the scientific research that reveals the world’s favourite colour: blue. She talks about how the brain processes colour, and why colour perception is so individual and so bafflingly complex. A few years ago for instance, ten million people took to Twitter to argue about the colour of ‘The Dress’ – was it blue and black, or white and gold? Professor Hurlbert got hold of the real dress, put it in a tent in Newcastle, and invited people to come look at it. So, can she tell us what colour it is really?

Music is incredibly important in Anya Hurlbert’s life, and she grew up with an ambition to be a concert pianist. She still finds that playing Bach ‘calms her soul’. Music choices include Bach, Beethoven, and two composers she believes should be better known: Thea Musgrave and Elisabeth Lutyens. She chooses a song by Schubert which is all about the colour green. And she reveals her passion for country music, with Jerry Jeff Walkers “Up Against the Wall, Red Neck Mother”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke. A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The writer and art critic Laura Cumming talks to Michael Berkeley about the music and art she loves and the extraordinary story of her family.

Laura has been writing about art for The Observer for more than two decades, but her books suggest that at heart she’s really a detective. All three have unravelled mysteries: a missing Velázquez painting; the inner lives of great artists revealed through their self-portraits; and the secrets and lies which lay behind the kidnap of her mother, aged three, on a Lincolnshire beach in 1929.

She describes how her mother overcame childhood trauma and neglect to become an artist and the lynchpin of her own loving family. Her mother introduced Laura to classical music and she chooses a Chopin Nocturne and a performance by Andrés Segovia to remind her of the music they listened to together when she was growing up in Edinburgh.

Laura describes the emotional power of art and music, from the overpowering effect of her favourite painting by Velázquez to the music of Bach, Shostakovich, Mozart and the music of the Hebrides, where she spent childhood holidays.

And she reveals why, despite her passion for music, she can’t bear to go to concerts.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

With her shocking pink hair and extravagantly colourful clothes, Dame Zandra Rhodes has been an instantly recognisable figure on the British fashion scene for more than fifty years. An artist as much as a clothes designer, she tells Michael Berkeley about her experiences dressing everyone from Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana, to Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan.

As well as fashion, she has developed a passion for opera, designing productions for San Diego Opera and for Houston, in America, and for the English National Opera. She chooses music from operas by Bizet, Mozart, Verdi and Puccini, and talks about her admiration for singers, and the particular challenges of designing costumes for the stage.

Zandra describes her evolution as a fashion designer, in particular how her screen-printed fabrics are at the heart of her designs. And how, at the age of 80, every morning she puts on brightly coloured clothes, jewellery and full make-up, and heads to her studio – with no intention of retiring.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

George Szirtes arrived in Britain at the age of eight, wearing only one shoe. It was 1956, and as the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, George and his family fled on foot across the border to Austria, eventually ending up (with many others) as refugees in London. It was such a hasty journey that one of his shoes got lost on the way. From a very early age, he wanted to be a poet – and he has certainly fulfilled that ambition over the last forty years, publishing close to 20 books of prize-winning poetry, and as many translations from Hungarian literature. His moving memoir, The Photographer at 16, won the James Tait Black Prize and was recently broadcast on Radio 4.

George talks to Michael from his house in Wymondham, an old butcher’s shop which he and his wife, the artist Clarissa Upchurch, have decorated with dramatic murals. He discusses his memories of leaving Hungary, walking across the border, and about how he then went further back, reconstructing his mother’s incarceration in concentration camps during the War. He explains too the project of writing a poem every day on Twitter, which has enlivened this strange period of lockdown.

His playlist includes Tallis, Bartók, Bach, Ravel and Berlioz – as well as an early blues recording from 1931. What they all have in common, he says, is that each opened a door for him into a new world.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her; in fact, she asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that could help. Twenty years on – after taking her PhD in biochemistry and embarking on a career as a scientist – Camilla has herself has written that manual. She’s called it “Explaining Humans” and it won the Royal Society Prize in 2020 for the best science book . A highly original blend of scientific theory and personal memoir, it gives a real insight into what it’s like to live with autism.

In a fascinating conversation with Michael Berkeley, Camilla Pang talks about how she’s learned to thrive in a world which can seem very overwhelming. One of the issues for her is the sensory overload that people with autism spectrum disorder can experience. She’s very sensitive to certain sounds, and the morning commute to work can jangle her senses to such an extent that it takes much of the morning to recover. Music, on the other hand, restores mental calm. Camilla sings and plays the piano; although she has never learned to read music, she can “catch” a tune after hearing it only once. She did this first as a very young child, hearing her mother’s favourite Michael Nyman track and reproducing it straight away on her toy xylophone.

Camilla shares the music that has sustained her over the years; we hear Hubert Parry’s great coronation anthem “I was glad”; Michael Nyman’s music for The Piano; William Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus”; Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”, and Teardrop by Massive Attack.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan shares her lifelong passion for classical music with Michael Berkeley and describes how we can best prepare for an unpredictable future.

Born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated in Britain, Margaret Heffernan has had a hugely varied career – she’s been a high profile entrepreneur and the CEO of multimedia technology companies in America; she’s written plays and spent 13 years as a BBC producer; she’s a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath; she’s written seven bestselling and prize-winning business books and her Ted Talks have been watched by more than twelve million people.

Underlying everything Margaret does are her unconventional, inclusive ideas about leadership summed up by her motto: ‘Let's not play the game, let's change it.’

Margaret’s intense curiosity about the world is reflected in her lifelong desire to discover music. She trained as a singer while living in America and she chooses music she studied by Vivaldi and by Monteverdi; part of a requiem by the contemporary composer Nick Bicat; and a piece by William Brittelle performed by the experimental vocal group Roomful of Teeth, to which her son introduced her.

And we hear part of Anthony Burgess’s rarely heard operetta Blooms of Dublin, which was produced for the BBC in 1982 by her first husband Michael who was killed when they had been married for just two years.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

James Shapiro is one of the world’s great Shakespeare scholars. A professor of English at Columbia University in New York, he is the author of seven major books, including the bestsellers "1599" and "1606", each of which zoomed in on one year, immersing us in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and politics. His latest book is “Shakespeare in a Divided America”, an intriguing study of how the bard has been staged – and fought over – on his side of the Atlantic. But Professor Shapiro describes himself as “the least academic academic I know”: he is deeply involved in the practical business of staging Shakespeare, working with The Globe in London, with the RSC, and with a New York company that takes plays into schools and prisons.

In an episode to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, James Shapiro talks about how he first fell in love with the Bard, despite a terrible teacher at school who put him off as a teenager. He reflects on his upbringing in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and the family reaction when he married an Irish Catholic. He reveals why holding hands had a different meaning in Elizabethan England. And, drawing on historical parallels, he tells Michael Berkeley that he is absolutely certain we will have a thriving theatre culture again soon: after a plague (or a pandemic) people need the theatre.

For Private Passions, James Shapiro creates a playlist which gathers together fellow-admirers of Shakespeare, with Mendelssohn, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. The programme begins with an Elizabethan pop song with lyrics by Shakespeare himself.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Kieran Hodgson tells Michael Berkeley how he turned his lifelong obsession with Mahler, and his own struggle to write a symphony, into comedy gold.

Fortunately for us Kieran put aside an early ambition to become a train driver and has instead forged a career as one of our most entertaining actors, writers and comedians. He’s won awards and accolades at Edinburgh for shows on the unlikely subjects of school French exchanges, British politics in the 1970s – and his obsession with late-Romantic music.

You might know him from his Radio 4 show Earworms – comic introductions to the great composers – and for his television roles in Two Doors Down, Upstart Crow and God’s Own County. And you might also be one of the tens of millions of people who have enjoyed his ‘Bad TV’ parodies on YouTube.

Music is central to Kieran’s life: he’s been playing the violin in amateur orchestras since childhood and composing since he was in his teens. He chooses an unfairly neglected concerto by Bruch; Schnittke’s breath-taking Choir Concerto; and music by Schoenberg, by Bernstein and – in a first for Private Passions – by the Dutch cabaret artist Wim Sonneveld.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Some 40 years ago, Teresa Keswick exchanged her career as a London lawyer for life as a nun in an enclosed and largely silent Carmelite monastery in Norfolk. She’s devoted her life to prayer and work and has become a highly skilled embroiderer. Since 2014 she’s written a regular column for The Oldie magazine.

In a special programme, originally broadcast on Easter Day 2021, Sister Teresa shares her fascinating life story and the music she loves with Michael Berkeley.

Teresa tells Michael about her initial reluctance to accept her vocation and leave her busy social life in London for a remote monastery in the Norfolk countryside and the contentment she eventually found in the strict daily routine of prayer and work.

She chooses pieces by Handel and by Beethoven that reflect her life before she became a nun, and two pieces of plainchant that play a central role in the life of her community. She describes her ongoing love of 1960s pop music and we hear a song by Simon and Garfunkel that she still plays when she has a day off from work, once a month. And she appreciates the importance of having fun – in life and in music – choosing the party scene from the opening of La traviata, which recalls a wonderful evening at the opera when she lived in London.

Teresa describes how her community celebrates Easter Day and chooses music from Bach’s Mass in B Minor; she says this music is the only thing that comes close to describing Christ’s resurrection.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Bill Browder describes himself as Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy. When Putin came to power, Browder was the most successful international businessman in Moscow, seizing the opportunities offered by the collapse of communism to build up a multi-billion-pound investment fund. But then he uncovered what he calls serious corruption at various state-backed companies. In 2005, he was detained by the authorities and was kicked out of Russia. His tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky was arrested, and died in prison in Moscow in 2009.

In his memory, Browder has spent the past decade leading a global campaign against Russian corruption – Magnitsky Acts have now been passed in America, Britain and Europe – legislation freezing the assets, and banning travel, of officials guilty of human rights violations. Browder’s exciting account of his time in Russia, Red Notice, has become a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Browder tells his extraordinary and compelling personal story. He now lives in a secret location somewhere in London and lives in fear of his life. He talks about the guilt he felt when Magnitsky died, and how he found a new meaning in life afterwards, by campaigning for the laws which bear Magnitsky’s name.

Browder’s music choices reflect the high drama of his life, with excerpts from operas by Verdi and by Puccini which he discovered when he went to the Bolshoi in Moscow. He includes too music by the Russian composer Sviridov, a setting of a Pushkin short story. And he ends with Jessye Norman singing “Amazing Grace” – a hymn which reflects his belief that he has been helped, and sustained, by powerful forces outside his control.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

The shepherd and writer James Rebanks shares his favourite music with Michael Berkeley and describes how he is restoring the balance of nature on his Lake District hill farm.

James Rebanks’s family have lived and farmed in Cumbria for over six hundred years. His grandfather taught him to work their land in the old-fashioned way, but by the time James took over from his father, modern industrial methods and economic pressures had made hill farming almost impossible. James has told the story of his farm, his family, and his renewed hope for the future, in two best-selling books: "The Shepherd’s Life" and "English Pastoral".

James tells Michael about the challenges and pleasures of spring for a shepherd, with long days and nights lambing his beloved Herdwick sheep, and his relief at the end of winter.

He describes the tensions in his relationship with his father when he was growing up and how films brought them together; he chooses film scores by John Barry and by Jerome Moross. James’s mother introduced him to books and classical music and Rachmaninov particularly reminds him of his mother.

James tells Michael the extraordinary story of his education: dropping out of school at 15 with just two O levels, he won a place at Oxford in his early twenties and gained a double first in History.

And he pays a moving tribute to his wife Helen with music by Michael Nyman as together they witness the joyful return of wildlife to their farm.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Dublin-born artist Sean Scully is known worldwide for his abstract paintings of blocks and stripes of bold colour. You can see his work in the Tate, the Guggenheim, and the National Gallery of Ireland, among many other prestigious collections. He was brought up in what he describes as “abject poverty” and his paintings now fetch more than a million pounds; he and his wife and son fly back and forth between two homes, one south of Munich and one in New York.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Sean looks back at his post-war childhood. His Irish father was a deserter and the family was on the run, often living with travellers. Once they moved to London, his mother earned a living as a vaudeville singer; she had an act with the transvestite performer next door. Sean worked as a builder’s labourer but discovered art through going to church with his Catholic grandmother. The stained-glass windows made an unforgettable impression. He went to night school, determined to be an artist, but was rejected by eleven art schools. He discusses the toughness needed to become an artist, especially in “brutal” New York. He admits that his restlessness now – constantly moving around the world, and buying up property – is a legacy from his traveller childhood. And he reveals the power music has over him when he’s painting.

Music choices include Brahms’ Cello Sonata No 1' Schubert’s String Quintet; Kodály’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello; Beethoven’s "Pastoral" Symphony; and Bartok’s First String Quartet.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Caroline Bird was only fifteen when she had her first collection of poems published; she’s been writing since she was eight, hiding in the corner behind her bunk beds at home. This was in Leeds, where Caroline was brought up, the daughter of playwright Michael Birch and theatre director Jude Kelly. She’s now published six collections of poetry, along with a clutch of plays for theatre and radio. Her latest poetry sequence “The Air Year” was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for the best collection of poetry published this last year.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Caroline Bird talks about the impact of being published as a teenager, and about the depression that led her to drug addiction by the time she was a student. She confesses she finds classical music without words almost unbearably emotional – as a child, it made her deeply sad. Understanding that sadness and coming to terms with it, she returns now to music she heard when she was young, going as far back as the music her mother played to her in the womb.

Music choices include Rachmaninov’s Sonata for Cello and Piano; Janet Baker singing Elgar’s Sea Pictures; Billie Holiday; and Lionel Bart's Oliver!

Produced by Elizabeth Burke

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

The economist Tim Harford shares his passion for contemporary classical music with Michael Berkeley.

Tim Harford has for many years been the Undercover Economist at the Financial Times; he is the author of nine books, and is a familiar voice on Radio 4 as the presenter of More or Less, Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, and now also How to Vaccinate the World.

Tim is on a mission to show us how, if properly investigated and explained, good statistics can help us see things about the world and about ourselves that we would not be able to see in any other way. He was awarded an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in 2019.

Tim talks to Michael Berkeley about how his love of music developed in childhood, encouraged by his father, who introduced him to composers such as Janáček and Britten. He chooses music by his favourite contemporary composers Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Steve Reich, and a beautiful piece of choral music by Arvo Pärt that was sung at his wedding.

Tim spends his working life pursuing cool-headed analysis of statistics and data but he reveals to Michael Berkeley the piece of music that makes him surrender to his most passionate emotions.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Rachel Clarke is a doctor who specialises in palliative care. She’s now on the Covid frontline; in March 2020 she moved to Horton General Hospital outside Banbury to care for the most gravely unwell patients on the Covid Wards. She’s the author of three books: the first, about being a junior doctor; the second, which was read on Radio 4, “Dear Life”, about working with the dying, and most recently, “Breath-taking”, which describes in moving detail what it’s been like in hospitals during the pandemic.

In a moving programme recorded in mid-January, Rachel Clarke gives a frontline report from the hospital where she works. When she looks out of the window, she sees lines of parked cars – and people just sitting in them, watching the hospital, for hours: unable to visit their loved ones, they are just getting as close as they can, yearning for a glimpse through the windows. Instead, nursing staff must give loving care to people who are at the end of their lives - Rachel reassures listeners that nobody in hospital will ever die alone.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Rachel Clarke reveals the music that gives her courage and hope on the way to the hospital every morning. She talks about the difficulty of explaining to her children why she has taken such personal risks to treat Covid patients, and shockingly she reveals the kind of abuse she faces on social media from people who think that Covid is fake.

Music choices include Vaughan Williams, Bach, and Tchaikovsky. She loves Jimi Hendrix too, and tells the story of driving down to the South of France with the man who will become her husband, terrified to tell him she loves him, listening to Hendrix all the way.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3. Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

Jamie Parker shot to fame as one of Alan Bennett’s original History Boys – he was the one who played the piano. In this week’s Private Passions he tells Michael Berkeley about the vital role music plays in his life.

A decade after The History Boys Jamie took the title role in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the marathon West End and Broadway show which won nine Olivier Awards, including Best Actor for Jamie. In between, he has sung in Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan and the Sinatra tribute Prom, and appeared in films such as 1917 and Valkyrie. And he has starred at Shakespeare’s Globe – memorably as the recorder-playing Prince Hal.

Jamie shares with Michael his lifelong passion for the clarinet – he chooses Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto, which he has played himself, as well as music by Gershwin and by Louis Armstrong with inspiring clarinet parts.

Two of Jamie’s favourite pieces of music come from films he loved as a child – Henry Mancini’s score for Blake Edwards’ The Great Race and the music for Watership Down by the neglected composer Angela Morley. Jamie shares her remarkable story: born a man, she transitioned in 1972 and was a largely self-taught musician. She wrote extensively for film, television and radio, including the theme tune for Hancock’s Half Hour, and she won three Emmys and was twice nominated for an Oscar.

And Jamie reveals how, in his long quest to play it, he instilled an enduring love of Rhapsody in Blue in his childhood dog.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Since the publication of her first novel while she was still in her twenties, Nadifa Mohamed has been a writer to watch. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, won her the Somerset Maugham Award and gave her a place on the prestigious Granta List of Best Young Novelists. She’s about to publish her third novel, and is also turning it into an opera – a commission from the Royal Opera House. What’s striking in all her work is the epic sweep of her storytelling, which explores themes of exile and survival: her characters are caught up by war and love. Nadifa herself left Somali-land in northern Somalia when civil war broke out and she was only four when she came to Britain in 1985.

She talks to Michael Berkeley about her dramatic family history, and about her father, who was a travelling troubadour in Sudan. She pays tribute too to the Somali musician Hudeidi, who died of Covid this last April. He was her teacher on the oud for seven years, and her mentor, and she spent many evenings jamming with him in his west London flat. Her musical choices range from Pergolesi, Purcell and Vaughan Williams to Max Richter, Toumani Diabate and Louis Armstrong.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to disc jockey David ‘Kid’ Jensen about his career in pop music and his lifelong love of classical music.

In 1968 David Jensen left his native Canada to become the youngest member of Radio Luxembourg’s original ‘all live’ line up. He was just 18 – hence his enduring nickname, ‘Kid’. Since then he’s never been off the air, working at Radio 1, Radio 2, Capital Radio, Heart, and picking up five Gold Sony Awards along the way. And for many people of a certain age his appearances with John Peel on Top of the Pops were the highlight of their week.

David tells Michael about his first job in radio, at the age of just 16, playing classical music on a radio station in his native British Colombia and he chooses music by Dvorak that reminds him of that time.

His passion for opera is reflected in arias by Italian composers and a contemporary Icelandic composer, in honour of his Icelandic wife, Gudrun, and their happy marriage of 45 years.

In 2013 David was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and he talks movingly about the challenges of living with the disease and the determination and optimism with which he has faced it.

And he shares memories of practical jokes at Radio 1; holidays with Paul and Linda McCartney; football matches with The Rolling Stones; and how Billy Bragg helped launch his career by delivering a curry to David and John Peel at Broadcasting House.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Anyone who saw Sheku Kanneh-Mason play the cello at the Royal Wedding, or win BBC Young Musician of the Year at the age of only 17, will realise that he comes from the most extraordinary family. Two of his siblings are also Young Musician finalists, and his older sister, Isata, is a professional pianist. Collectively the seven Kanneh-Mason children make music wherever they are. During lockdown, that was the family home in Nottingham, from which they performed live on Facebook.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is their mother, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: the woman who inspires them, who gets up before dawn to drive them to lessons and trains, who organises their practice schedules, who dances with them in the kitchen. She tells Michael Berkeley about how she does it – and why. She looks back on her childhood in Sierra Leone, and the huge transition of coming to live with her grandparents in Wales after her father died. She reveals her own musical ambition – to play the violin – and discusses how she manages to get the children to practise. She explores with Michael the question of prejudice in the classical music world. And she plays the reggae song the family will be dancing to at Christmas.

Other choices include Verdi’s “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Trout Quintet and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Deep River”.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

On this darkest day of the year, Judith Herrin brings to Private Passions the dazzling gold of medieval icons and mosaics: she has spent a lifetime exploring the history of Byzantium, that thousand-year civilization which led Europe out of the dark ages and into the modern era. She’s one of our greatest historians of the early medieval Mediterranean world, that melting pot of East and West, Christianity, Islam and paganism. She’s worked in Paris, Munich, Istanbul and Princeton, and is currently Emeritus Professor of Byzantine Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of eleven books, and her latest is a fascinating study of the north-Italian city of Ravenna, famous for its gold mosaics and once the centre of the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire.

In Private Passions, she talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for Ravenna, which she first visited as a teenager. The mosaics there made an unforgettable impression – an almost mystical experience. As a young woman, Judith Herrin spent her summers in Prades in Southern France, working on a peach farm by day and going to hear Pablo Casals at night. She chooses a memorable archive performance of Casals, as well as a recording of Jacqueline du Pré, who was a friend when she was growing up. Her own instrument is the bassoon and she chooses bassoon music by Mozart and by Janáček. And she has never forgotten seeing The Doors at the Roundhouse in the mid-60s, with revolution in the air and the excitement of creating a new kind of history.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to Alexandra Harris, one of the very first Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, about her passions for landscape, weather and music.

As the evenings draw in and the weather gets colder, Alexandra Harris could not be happier. There’s no greater fan of English weather – even the miserable cold, wet variety – so much so that she’s written a book about it – Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies.

Alexandra is a Professor of Literature at the University of Birmingham, is this year’s chair of the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and among her other highly praised books are a biography of Virginia Woolf, and Romantic Moderns, about the complex relationship between modernism and tradition in English art and literature, which won the Guardian First Book Award.

Alexandra tells Michael about her love of weather, winter and Schubert’s Winterreise, and about the music that conjures up the English landscapes that mean so much to her: we hear pieces by Britten, by the violinist Laura Cannell and by the Norfolk composer Simon Rowland-Jones.

Alexandra’s twin passions, for early church music and for the quiet of the evening, are brought together in music by Tallis written for the monastic service of Compline – and she acknowledges how lucky she is to be able to listen to it in the warmth and comfort of her home rather than in a freezing medieval monastery.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Mike Brearley, the former England cricket captain, talks to Michael Berkeley about the wide range of classical music that inspires him.

Mike is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time, winning 17 tests for England and losing only four. No one who follows the game will forget the so-called ‘miracle’ of the 1981 Ashes: recalled as captain, Mike galvanised the demoralised team in one of the greatest-ever feats of sporting psychology - and led England to an astonishing 3-1 series victory.

The Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously described Mike as having ‘a degree in people’ – and that’s particularly appropriate as he’s gone on to have a long and successful second career as a psychoanalyst, as well as writing a series of books and working as a cricket journalist.

Mike talks to Michael Berkeley about the close engagement he has with music – he listens with the same intensity and concentration he brought to test cricket and that he brings to his work as a psychoanalyst.

He chooses music by Bach, Monteverdi, and Tchaikovsky, and a Mozart sonata that reminds him of his father, also a first-class cricketer.

Mike is drawn to the complexity and darkness of music written by Beethoven and by Schubert at the very end of their lives and to an opera by Harrison Birtwistle that he finds challenging and difficult but ultimately enlightening.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Sarah Perry’s novels are like extraordinary highly coloured dreams - or nightmares. Her bestseller The Essex Serpent features a mythical sea-creature that roams the Blackwater marshes, and the novel that followed, Melmoth, is a terrifying gothic tale with a female ghost who always seems to be just behind you, almost out of sight.

In Private Passions, Sarah Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about ghosts and Gothic nightmares, and admits that the ghost in Melmoth haunted her too. She wrote the book high on painkillers amidst the ‘torment’ of spinal collapse, an experience of pain which thankfully she recovered from, but which has changed her view of life. She looks back on her upbringing in the Strict Baptist Chapel, in which popular culture was banned – but classical music was played on speakers so large they reached her shoulders, and Beethoven blasted her out of bed at night.

She talks too about Essex, and trying to live down the social shame of being an “Essex Girl” – before realising that Essex girls have a proud tradition, and being an Essex girl was something to aspire to: loud, pleasure-loving, refusing to fit in.

Sarah Perry was a viola player as a child, and her music choices include one of Hindemith’s sonatas for viola – which she describes as “the Essex girl of instruments”. She also loves late Beethoven quartets, and Dvorak, and Bach, and the contemporary composer Stephen Crowe, whose setting of fragments from Sappho is one of her choices. She hates jazz – well, almost all jazz. She invites us to hear the one track that completely seduced her.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Michael Berkeley talks to writer, photographer and broadcaster Johny Pitts about the music from his European and American heritage that inspires him.

Johny was brought up on a housing estate in a tough part of Sheffield, the son of an African-American father and a mother of Irish descent. His prize-winning book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, describes his recent five-month journey through Europe exploring the idea of a shared black European identity.

He’s a musician too, part of the Sheffield-based Bare Knuckle Soul Collective, and classical music also plays a big part in his life.

Dvorak inspires two of Johny’s choices: an arrangement of the New World symphony by Raymond Lefevre, and music by Florence Price, the first African-American woman to be recognised as a major symphonic composer. Her story echoes that of Johny’s grandmother, who moved to New York in the great migration of the early 20th century when six million African Americans fled the racism and poverty of the rural South. Johny’s grandmother arrived in New York at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, a period immortalised for Johny by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Music by Wagner and by Sakamoto brings back strong memories of Johny’s childhood, and both aspects of his cultural identity are brought together in a Russian Rag from the WWI African-American bandleader James Reese Europe.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Gretchen Gerzina says that she’s drawn to writing about those who cross boundaries of time, place, and race. During a distinguished academic career, she’s explored the lives of black people in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and America, and she presented a ten-part series on Britain’s Black Past for Radio 4. She also has a passion for 19th-century children’s books and has written a biography of Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett - and a biography of Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington.

Gerzina herself has spent a life moving back and forth between two cultures, Britain and the US. Currently Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, as well as teaching, she’s also now writing a memoir about growing up mixed-race in America; she says: “It’s time to put the past to bed.”

Her music choices reflect her interest in 18th- and 19th-century black composers and include Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Joseph Boulogne. She reveals, too, a passion for Early Music, with Corelli and Purcell, whose exuberant “Welcome, Welcome Glorious Morn” heads her playlist.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Jack Klaff’s first movie was Star Wars: a two-day booking for which he was paid £250. Star Wars fans still write to ask him for his autograph. But to focus on that one film from 1976 is to miss the rich variety of an acting and directing career that has taken in Shakespeare, James Bond, Chekhov and Midsomer Murders, alongside writing more than a dozen one-man shows for television and the stage. He’s also been involved for thirty years in the public understanding of science, working both in a think-tank in Brussels and as a visiting professor in the US.

Brought up in South Africa and the son of a watch-maker, Jack now lives in South London, where he’s set up a home studio so he can do Zoom productions of Beckett. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, he looks back critically at the way he was brought up during Apartheid, and how he was affected when his uncle and aunt were imprisoned as political dissidents by the South African regime. And he talks about what it was like recording Star Wars – a franchise then so unknown that his agent put the booking in the diary as “Stan Wars”.

His playlist includes Schubert’s much-loved String Quintet, in a recording he loves from 1956; Yo-Yo Ma playing “Hoedown” with Bobby McFerrin; a late string quartet by Beethoven; Maria Callas in La Traviata; the African song Shosholoza; and Danny Kaye making fun of Russian composers.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the artist Heather Phillipson whose giant swirl of cherry-topped, fly-blown whipped cream has recently been installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Heather was a serious classical musician in her teens, and often uses music she’s composed and performed in her work.

She talks to Michael about music she’s loved since her childhood, including a Mozart symphony and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf; a radical opera by Robert Ashley from the 1980s that has had a profound influence on her work; piano music by Grieg which reminds her of her grandmother; and the soaring emotional impact of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5.

Produced by Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.

Professor Anthony David works at the mysterious interface between the mind, the brain and the body. The Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London, he’s published 13 books and more than 600 academic articles, and his work focuses on illnesses at the edge of human understanding.

He tells Michael Berkeley about some of the patients he’s tried to help over the years: a man who thought he was dead; a strong teenage boy who appeared to be paralysed despite no detectable physical cause; and the manic patient he bonded with during a piano and guitar jamming session in the hospital gymnasium.

Music has been central to Anthony’s life since he played the flute in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his primary school orchestra. He chooses that piece and complements it with Dudley Moore’s hilarious homage to Beethoven. And we hear music Anthony loves from Debussy, Copland, Bach and Sondheim as well as from a school friend who went on to become one of our most celebrated jazz pianists.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

In an emotional and highly personal interview, the former rugby international Brian Moore tells Michael Berkeley about the role music has played during his extraordinary life.

Brian is a man of many parts – nicknamed ‘the pitbull’ for his fiercely competitive attitude on the rugby field, he won 64 England caps, playing in three world cups, and in the sides which won three Five Nations grand slams. He toured twice with the British Lions and in 1991 he was voted Rugby World Player of the Year.

But he’s also had a parallel career as a City solicitor, is much in demand as a rugby commentator, has written for newspapers not just about sport but wine too, is a passionate fan of Tolkien and Shakespeare, writes books, loves motorbikes and skiing, and even trained as a manicurist when his then wife opened a nail bar in Soho.

In a moving tribute to his 92-year-old adoptive mother, Brian chooses her favourite music, by Mendelssohn, and we hear the Overture from The Nutcracker, which he’s seen every year since he was 17 and now shares with his own daughters. We also hear the Mozart aria that convinced Brian it was the right time to retire from rugby.

Unafraid to talk openly about his personal lows as well as his sporting highs, Brian reflects on the power music has over his emotions. Indeed, one piece proves to be totally overwhelming and he has to leave the studio while it is playing.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the writer Helen Macdonald, whose book "H is for Hawk" shot to the top of the bestseller lists, not just here but around the world. It’s perhaps no surprise that there’s a certain amount of birdlife in her playlist, from Stravinsky’s The Firebird to a piece inspired by a song thrush by the Finnish-English singer Hanna Tuulikki. She chooses music from A Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, full of glittering ice, which consoled her when she was working in the UAE. We hear Britten’s Second String Quartet, Lully’s “The Triumph of Love”, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and a song by Henry VIII.

Helen Macdonald talks about why writing about nature can be a way of holding the world to account, and about how she finds joy in the fields and lanes around her in Suffolk, during this difficult time. She reveals too what it’s like living with her grumpy parrot Birdoole, who steals the keys from her computer keyboard.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

For more than 20 years, in more than 20 books, Peter Stanford has grappled with religious belief. Starting with a book called Catholics and Sex, he’s gone on to write the lives of Martin Luther and Cardinal Hume, and the biography of the campaigning Catholic Lord Longford; he’s published books about the devil, about heaven, and most recently – a fascinating book about angels. They’re works which mix history, theology, literature and art history – and some really honest and funny personal stories; because although he was brought up a Catholic, he says he’s the kind of church-goer who always wants to jump up and argue with the sermon.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Peter Stanford reflects on his Liverpool childhood, and the challenges his mother faced living with MS. He talks about his commitment to prison reform, and his belief in the importance of rehabilitation, even for those who have committed appalling crimes. And he reflects on why so many people believe in angels, even when they say they don’t believe in God or any organised religion. Peter has never seen an angel himself; but at the end of the programme he does tell an extraordinary story about being touched by the supernatural.

Music choices include Hildegard of Bingen, Jacqueline du Pre playing Bach, Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate, the political protest singer Harry Chapin, and Jennifer Johnston singing a song that resonates now: “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the forensic ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire, a solver of puzzles who has carved out a whole new discipline within forensic science. Patricia solves crimes with her microscope by meticulous examination of tiny particles such as pollen and spores left at crime scenes or found on the clothing of criminals or on their victims. She says: ‘Nature will invariably give up her secrets to those of us who know where to look.’

Patricia tells Michael how the course of her life was changed by a phone call from the police asking her to assist on a murder case. She was able to match the pollen left by the shoes of the murderers in their car to the plants where they had dumped the body of their victim, and thus secured their conviction.

Since then she has worked on nearly 300 cases including the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham; the Millie Dowler and Sarah Payne cases; and the Ipswich prostitute murders.

Patricia chooses music by Chopin that she played when she was learning the piano in her 40s, and music by Hasselmans, which expresses her regret at never having learned to play the harp.

We hear Russian ballet music, and a Mozart aria sung by her favourite singer Cecilia Bartoli. Patricia talks movingly about how her grief at the death of her infant daughter allows her to deal with the most distressing aspects of her job.

She describes the happiness she finally found with her second husband at the age of 63 and chooses exuberant flamenco music to celebrate their relationship.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York; he’s renowned for his ground-breaking discoveries in superstring theory. But the reason he's well known way beyond the scientific community is that he’s so very good at explaining science to a wide popular audience. He’s written six best-selling books, starting with The Elegant Universe, which explains string theory, and most recently Until the End of Time. In 2008 he and his wife founded the annual World Science Festival in New York, which is now held in Australia too, and gets forty million hits online. The son of a composer, he’s also worked extensively with musicians, and has collaborated with the composer Philip Glass.

He says: "Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.” In conversation with Michael Berkeley, he shares his musical discoveries: pieces by Bach, by Beethoven, and by Philip Glass. He reveals how as a graduate student he learnt to play the piano purely in order to play the Brahms Rhapsody in G Minor. We hear too haunting cello music composed by his father, Alan Greene, and specially recorded for the programme.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

In a moving and personal interview the novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan talks to Michael Berkeley about his family and the music that inspires his writing.

Andrew O’Hagan grew up on a tough housing estate in north Ayrshire, the son of a cleaner and a carpenter, and the youngest of four boys. He has gone on to become one of our most prolific, vivid and meticulous writers - an essayist and investigative journalist whose subjects have included Julian Assange; the invention of Bitcoin; and the Grenfell fire. And he has published five multi-award-winning novels, ranging from a fictionalised life of Lena Zavaroni to the tragedy of a Catholic priest in a small Scottish town - and the memoirs of Marilyn Monroe’s dog.

Andrew tells Michael Berkeley that his childhood ambition was to be not a writer but a ballet dancer, which did not go down well in his tough home and school environment. We hear the ballet music by Massenet that first transfixed him.

Despite living in England for many years Andrew returns to Scotland constantly in his novels. He chooses a setting of a poem collected by Robert Burns, which always takes him back to his homeland. And we hear music by John Field and by Beethoven, two composers who provide him with creative inspiration.

Andrew talks movingly about his love for his family and chooses music by June Christy that accompanied the birth of his daughter, and a poem by Shelley set by Frank Bridge which was played at his wedding.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

John Dyson spent 23 years as a judge, moving up through the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and finally becoming Master of the Rolls. He retired as Master of the Rolls three years ago, but he’s back working on international arbitrations, busier than ever; in fact, he presided over the recent decision that the Saracens rugby team were being overpaid.

Through it all, the great passion that has sustained him is music. He's an accomplished pianist and took lessons from the legendary teacher Dame Fanny Waterman. Piano music is his first love, and so his music choices include Beethoven’s exuberant first piano concerto; Schubert’s F Minor Piano Fantasy for Four Hands, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He loves opera too, especially Verdi’s Otello, an opera written when the composer was in his seventies. Choosing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms becomes an opportunity to talk about his Jewish heritage, and about his grandmother, who escaped from Bergen Belsen. John Dyson talks too about the rise of anti-Semitism now; he says: “our suitcases are packed.”

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Wildlife sound recordist and sound artist Chris Watson talks to Michael Berkeley about how his favourite music is inspired by the natural world. Chris is most famous for his sound recordings for David Attenborough’s television series – for which he’s won BAFTAs – but he’s a musician too. A member of the influential post-punk band Cabaret Voltaire in the late 70s and early 80s, today he’s a sound artist and composer, creating installations around the world.

His 2003 release Weather Report, featuring soundscapes of a Kenyan savannah, a Highland glen, and an Icelandic glacier, was voted one of the 100 best albums to hear before you die by The Guardian, and has been described as ‘cinema for the ears’.

Chris’s mission in life is to make us stop what we’re doing and listen to the sounds of the natural world and this is reflected in his choices of music. We hear his own recording of a Sami calling to his ancestors across a Norwegian lake, and northern landscapes echoed in Sibelius’s symphonic poem Tapiola. And Chris chooses the music of multi-award-winning Icelandic film composer Hildur Guðnadottir, who worked with him to record the soundscape for the television series Chernobyl.

Chris tells Michael about the challenges of recording in cold and hostile environments for his many series with David Attenborough, and the pleasures of the year he spent recording the sounds around Aldeburgh for Benjamin Britten’s centenary, in 2013. We hear the magical combination of a recording he made of a nightingale in Britten’s garden paired with the Ciaconna from Britten’s Second Cello Suite.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Jools Holland, king of boogie-woogie piano, reveals his lifelong passion for classical music in conversation with Michael Berkeley.

The piano is at the heart of everything Jools Holland does. Since he left school at fifteen and joined Squeeze, he - and his piano - have been pretty much constantly on the road, touring with The Jools Holland Big Band, and now his nineteen-piece Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. He also finds time to present a regular Radio 2 show and has made a record-breaking fifty-five series of Later with Jools Holland, the longest running music show on television, chatting to and playing with everyone from David Bowie and Paul McCartney to Amy Winehouse and Jay-Z.

Jools tells Michael that his first musical passion was Bach, listening as a young child growing up in Deptford to a family friend playing from The Well-Tempered Clavier. He juxtaposes two pieces from this collection, played by his favourite pianists Edwin Fischer and Friedrich Gulda, to illustrate his passion for interpretation – for Jools, music is predominately about ‘the singer, not the song’.

He has a great passion for early recordings: we hear Kathleen Ferrier and Isobel Baillie singing Mendelssohn in 1945 with the pianist Gerald Moore; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Richard Strauss’s bitterly comic opera Arabella; and Tito Schipa, the great Italian tenor of the 1930s, singing an eighteenth-century French love song.

Jools tells Michael how he taught himself the piano and developed his trademark boogie-woogie style; how he’s kept sane and healthy during the decades he’s spent on the road; and how he winds down with the non-musical passion that he keeps in his attic...

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Stephen Schwartz is a master of musicals. He wrote Godspell, Pippin, and The Baker’s Wife; he’s written the lyrics for films such as Pocohontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Enchanted - and many others. His musical Wicked, for which he wrote the words and music, has become something of a cult; it opened on Broadway in 2003 and in the West End in 2006, and it’s been running both in New York and in London ever since. He’s received numerous awards – three Oscars, four Grammys – and he’s over from New York for the opening of his new musical, The Prince of Egypt, a stage version of the popular film.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Stephen Schwartz reveals how classical music gives him ideas for his most successful musical numbers. In fact, he admits, he steals ideas from the great composers “flagrantly”. The opening of Wicked, for instance, comes from Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor – listeners to this episode can hear both, and compare them. He has been influenced too by Carl Orff and the exuberant orchestration of Carmina Burana. He also talks us through the bass chords he has borrowed from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and the two bars of Beethoven that he believes are the most moving music ever written. He reflects about the success of Wicked – and the “green girl inside us all”. Other musical choices include Bernstein’s Mass, Bach’s sixth Brandenburg Concerto, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Puccini’s opera La Rondine.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Isabel Allende’s first novel, “The House of the Spirits” catapulted her to literary stardom, and was acclaimed as a classic of Latin American magic realism. That was nearly forty years ago and she’s not stopped writing since: with twenty novels and four volumes of memoir, she’s been translated all over the world and has sold some seventy-four million books. They’re vivid family sagas, with eccentric characters, dramatic reversals, discoveries of lost children, violent death, disease and revolution, and sudden consuming love affairs.

But Isabel Allende’s own life is as extraordinary as any of her novels. Abandoned by her father as a small child, she spent her early years travelling across South America with her stepfather, who was a diplomat. He was the cousin of Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist leader, who became Isabel’s godfather. But when Allende was deposed by the right-wing government of General Pinochet in 1973, Isabel – by then married, with children – became caught up in the violent revolution and had to flee the country. She now lives with her third husband in California.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Isabel Allende reflects on her extraordinary life, and reveals how she has found happiness now in her seventies. Music choices include Vivaldi, Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1, Albinoni, the Chilean singer Victor Jara, a moving song from the Spanish Civil War, and a Mexican love song from the 1940s, “Kiss Me Lots”.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of female composers, Michael Berkeley draws together some of his guests who have championed works by women.

Turner Prize-winner Helen Cammock introduces the 17th-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, and actor Greta Scacchi tells the story of her discovery of the 18th-century musician and composer Maria Cosway. There is music too by Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century writer, abbess and mystic, who is a role model for scientist Uta Frith; and a discussion of Clara Schumann and her complex relationship with husband Robert from biographer Lucasta Miller.

Architect Daniel Libeskind champions the work of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose work for him conjures up the glittering beauty of modern glass buildings. And Michael Berkeley reveals the answer to the question he’s frequently asked about this programme: which composer gets chosen most often? And the answer is that, apart from Bach, probably the most popular choice of all at the moment – from men, women, young, old, artists, scientists, writers – is Nina Simone.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Piers Gough co-founded his own architectural practice while he was still at college, at the age of only twenty-two. He made his name during the redevelopment of London’s Docklands, though you can also see his work in Liverpool (the golden “bling bling” building), in Nottingham, where he built a centre for Maggie’s cancer charity, and in Glasgow, where he designed the masterplan for the redevelopment of the Gorbals. He’s won numerous awards for his buildings, not least for his bright-green triangular public lavatory in London’s Westbourne Grove. And six of his buildings have been listed by English Heritage, protected for posterity. He’s been president of the Architectural Association, he’s a Royal Academician... which all sounds steady enough, but trying to sum up his style, the Architects Journal said: “One’s never certain whether one is in a town house, a country house, a castle, or a gigantic piece of sculpture.”

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Piers Gough reflects on the challenges of designing for the modern city, and on the influence of the accident that broke his spine and which at one point made him doubtful that he would ever walk again. He shares, too, the surprise and fun of becoming a father in his sixties.

Music choices include William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”; Monteverdi’s haunting love duet “Pur ti miro”; Handel’s “Semele”; and Piers's favourite country-music track, “Truckstop Honeymoon”.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

Michael Berkeley talks to author Chibundu Onuzo about the challenge of writing novels while studying for her A-levels, and the role of music and faith in her life.

At the age of nineteen, Chibundu became the youngest female writer ever to be signed by Faber and Faber. She started writing aged ten while growing up in Lagos, Nigeria and was working on her first novel, ‘The Spider King’s Daughter’, while doing her A-levels at boarding school in England. It was published while she was still at university and was shortlisted for a host of prizes – winning a 2013 Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, ‘Welcome to Lagos’, was published in 2017 to great acclaim.

Chibundu talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Lagos, and the challenge of adapting to life at boarding school in Britain. She chooses a carol, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, that she sang with her school choir in Winchester Cathedral. The soundtrack to a Nigerian television advert from the 1990s speaks to her about the tensions between western and traditional values in Nigeria. We hear a miniature by Christian Petzold that will be familiar to anyone who has ever learned the piano, alongside music from Handel and from Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, ‘From the New World’.

And, in a special moment for Private Passions, Chibundu is joined in the studio by members of her family to sing a setting of Psalm 23 by her uncle, Bishop Ken Okeke.

Produced by Jane Greenwood. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

In a frank and moving interview the priest and former politician Jonathan Aitken talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that has accompanied his rollercoaster life.

At one time Jonathan Aitken was widely tipped to be a future Conservative Prime Minister, but his glittering political career came crashing down just over twenty years ago, when he stood in the dock of the Old Bailey to plead guilty to perjury, after a lie he told about the payment of a hotel bill caused the collapse of his libel case against the Guardian and Granada Television. He left the court in a prison van with an 18-month sentence. Last December, he was back at the Old Bailey – this time leading the annual carol service, having recently been ordained as a priest.

Jonathan chooses pieces which bring back childhood memories of singing for Benjamin Britten and performing Messiah as a chorister in Norwich, and we hear a song John McCormack sang to him during the three years Jonathan spent on a Dublin TB ward as a very young child.

He talks frankly to Michael about the mistakes and pride that led to his downfall from public life, and how he survived disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and prison. He chooses, with a smile, the Prisoners’ Chorus from Fidelio, and a setting of Psalm 24 that was a crucial part of his spiritual journey in prison.

Jonathan tells a funny musical story about when Nixon met Wilson, and he reveals the piece of music that best captures his sense of redemption and renewal as he embarks on his new life as a prison chaplain.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Ann Wroe about the inspiration and comfort she finds in music.

Ann spends the first 36 hours of each week wrestling with the challenge of distilling the life of a person into just 1000 words – because, for nearly two decades, she has written the weekly obituary for The Economist.

The rest of Ann’s week is spent wrestling with biography of an altogether different kind - because she finds the subjects for her books in the shadowy territory where history meets myth. She dares to mix intense scholarship with her own imagination to capture the essence of figures as varied as Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the English throne; Pontius Pilate; and the mythical lyric poet Orpheus. Hilary Mantel has said of her: ‘She is a genius, because she lights up every subject she touches’.

Ann tells Michael why she is attracted to such ambiguous subjects for her biographies and why she often chooses the quirky over the famous for her Economist obituaries – she’s written about the lives of firefighters, woodcarvers and even animals.

Passionate about the natural world, Ann chooses piano music by Schubert that conjures up walks on the South Downs; Jonathan Dove’s Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars; and Frank Bridge’s The Sea, which takes her to her beloved Brighton.

She talks movingly about her attitude towards death and what might come after it, and tells Michael why most of her music choices are ‘bittersweet’, including a song by Vaughan Williams to remember her late husband.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to the environmental lawyer James Thornton about tackling the climate crisis, about Zen Buddhism and about James's love of the violin.

Every day we’re bombarded with more bad news about the climate crisis, deadly air pollution, and our oceans filling up with plastic. So who will save our fragile planet? The UN? Governments? Scientists? Activists? If James Thornton is anything to go by, it might well be lawyers. As the founding CEO of ClientEarth, an international not-for-profit organisation, he holds governments and corporations to account and forces them to uphold environmental legislation.

Many musicians support the work of ClientEarth – David Gilmour donated the $21million raised from the sale of his guitars – and James chooses music with an environmental theme from his long-time collaborator Brian Eno. He talks to Michael about his lifelong passion for the violin and how playing it helps him keep his life in balance - he chooses Jascha Heifitz’s astonishing recording of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. He is also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and we hear a key Buddhist text set by the master of modern gamelan, Lou Harrison.

And James talks about why he prefers life in the UK to his native USA, not least because he was able to marry his long-term partner, the writer Martin Goodman. We hear the music by György Kurtág which they chose for their wedding.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

William Sieghart, the founder of the Forward Prizes for poetry and National Poetry Day, talks to Michael Berkeley about the music and poetry he loves.

Over the last twenty-five years National Poetry Day has become a popular fixture in the cultural calendar, and it was William’s idea to have permanent poems engraved at the Olympic Park in East London.

He’s also the creator of the hugely successful Poetry Pharmacy. At festivals and events, William sits in a tent and people bring him their dilemmas, problems and sadnesses - and he ‘prescribes’ them a poem to console, comfort or encourage. The Poetry Pharmacy has spread to Radio 4, television and hugely successful poetry anthologies, described by Stephen Fry as ‘a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss’.

William chooses music by Schubert and by Mendelssohn that reminds him of his father, who fled Vienna just before the Second World War, and he talks movingly about the effect of his father’s immigrant experience on his own life.

He describes how poetry and, later, music, helped him through his distress at being sent to boarding school at the age of eight and chooses recordings of music by Bach and by Debussy that have remained vital to him ever since.

And in the spirit of the Poetry Pharmacy, he reveals the poetry and music he turns to for comfort in a crisis.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Helen Cammock grew up wanting to be a singer, and performed on the folk circuit as a teenager. But then she stopped, and became a social worker for more than ten years. Finally, at the age of 35, she took up photography, went to art school – and she’s never looked back. She’s known now for her richly-layered video installations, which mix film archive, dance and poetry with current interviews, all woven together with music. She is the joint winner of the 2019 Turner Prize; for the first time in its 35-year history, the Prize was shared between all four artists on the shortlist, at their request.

In Private Passions, she talks to Michael Berkeley about why music is at the heart of all her work. Last year the MaxMara art prize paid for her to spend six months working in Italy, and there she began to explore the subject of lament, and particularly laments sung by women. As part of her performance work, Helen Cammock began to take singing lessons again, and lament, loss, longing, and hopes for a better future, are all captured in the music she chooses. She shares the excitement of discovering little-known women composers of the 17th century Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi. She talks about the troubling incident which persuaded her to give up a career in social work, when she was told to abandon a young woman outside a police station. She remembers the isolation and boredom of growing up in the countryside of Somerset, and the racist abuse her family faced every Saturday when they went shopping together.

Music choices include Jessye Norman singing Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament”; Glenn Gould humming along to Bach; Nina Simone on the piano; and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

As we start a new year, our thoughts turn towards the year ahead with all its plans and resolutions. And yet of course it is irrational to make this complete distinction between December and January; in fact, the more you think about it, the more you realise that everything about time is strangely slippery.

The slippery nature of time is something that preoccupies Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who has worked in Italy and the United States and who is currently directing the quantum research group at the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille. His books “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics”, “Reality is Not What it Seems” and “The Order of Time” have become international best-sellers, outselling “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

In Private Passions, Carlo Rovelli talks to Michael Berkeley about how music has helped him think about time, and how memory of the past and expectation of the future come into constant play when we listen to music: “We don’t live in the present, we live a little bit in the future and a little bit in the past – we live in a clearing in the forest of time.” He looks back to his childhood, growing up in Verona, and hearing Vivaldi played every week in the local church. He discusses Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach”, a work he admits he likes particularly for its title. He thinks about how Mozart represents the end of time in his “Dies Irae”, music he loves to listen to at full volume when his partner is out of the house. Other choices include Schubert, Arvo Pärt, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and the Bach cantata he discovered as a teenager that still astonishes him.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Darcey Bussell became principal dancer of the Royal Ballet at the age of only twenty; she went on to become a household name thanks to her seven years as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, a job she unexpectedly stepped down from earlier this year.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, she looks back at a career which started when, against the wishes of her mother, she went to ballet school at thirteen – and was desperately unhappy, thinking she’d made the worst mistake of her life. Alone, away from her family, she used to listen to Mozart’s Requiem again and again. She had little hope of becoming a star ballerina as she was “too tall” at five foot seven, and “not British-looking”; what this amounted to is that most British male dancers were not tall enough to partner her. But then she met choreographer Kenneth Macmillan, and he saw her potential. She reflects candidly on the “disciplines and sacrifices” of a life devoted to dance: the long hours training, dancing till your stamina runs out and you literally can’t feel your legs. Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty pushed her to the limit. She reveals how becoming a judge on Strictly gave her new confidence to speak in public for the first time and why she doesn’t mind being labelled as the judge who was “too nice”. She talks too about creating a new post-performance life out of the glare of the public eye, her mission to bring dance to all schoolchildren, about injuries and the battle for fitness, and about the toll dancing has taken on her feet.

Her music choices range from the intensely serious – Stravinsky's 'Agon, Poulenc's Gloria, the Mozart and Faure Requiems - to Dinah Washington’s “Mad about the Boy” and “Roxanne” by The Police.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

As a small child, Matthew Bourne used to put on shows in his parents’ living room in East London; by the age of eight or nine, he was staging musicals for the whole school, co-opting his friends to star in Mary Poppins and Cinderella. (He played an ugly sister.) Fast forward to today and Sir Matthew Bourne is now Britain’s most popular and successful choreographer and director, with a long list of awards for shows including Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Cinderella, The Car Man (based on Carmen), Edward Scissorhands, and The Red Shoes.

Sir Matthew has become particularly associated with Christmas shows and he’s somehow nailed the essence of the Christmas “treat”. He attributes this to memories of the shows his parents took him to. But, despite their outings, it never occurred to anyone in the family that Matthew might make a living in the theatre, and he was twenty-two before he took his first dance lesson. This, he believes, has given him a strong connection with the audiences coming to see his shows. Despite this, there have been some bumps in the road: when he first staged Swan Lake with all-male swans and two male dancers dancing a love duet, some of the audience walked out. He reflects on the challenges of creating dances in which men dance together but are not strong enough to lift each other.

Matthew Bourne is a profoundly musical choreographer: he talks about listening to famous pieces of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev over and over again. Other choices include a Percy Grainger setting of an old Christmas carol; film music by Bernard Hermann; Mary Poppins; and his favourite song from his favourite musical, The Sound of Music: “Climb Every Mountain” – which could describe his own stellar career.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

David Nott is a Welsh consultant surgeon and Professor of Surgery at Imperial College London; for more than twenty-five years he has volunteered as a surgeon in disaster and war zones across the world. He has worked in Sarajevo, Kabul, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Iraq, the Congo, Yemen, Gaza, and, most recently, Syria. Often under fire, in makeshift tents or in rooms with no adequate lighting or machinery or drugs, he has risked his life to save others – operating on people injured by bullets and bomb blasts, delivering babies, stitching people together as the sound of gunfire raged outside.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley David Nott reflects on why he chooses to live so dangerously (“It’s a kind of addiction”) and on how his perspective has changed since he had a young family. He tells the story of saving the life of a man he discovered to be an ISIS leader, believing at every moment he was about to be killed. Once back safely in the UK, he suffered an extreme breakdown, and was helped by a friend who is a Catholic priest.

Music choices include Elgar’s “Nimrod”, Vaughan Williams's “The Lark Ascending”, and music from Africa and from Syria. And, as he says, unapologetically, his playlist is “very Welsh”, including “Myfanwy” and the Welsh hymn “Llef”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Hannah Rankin grew up on a sheep farm near Loch Lomond. Earlier this year she made history by becoming the first Scottish woman to win a boxing world title when she became the IBO (International Boxing Organisation) super-welterweight champion. She’s recently returned from winning her first big fight in America.

But, as she tells Michael Berkeley, she is just as likely to be found in the woodwind section of an orchestra as she is in a boxing ring, because Hannah is also a highly accomplished bassoonist. She studied at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Music, and now teaches in schools and performs with the London Sinfonietta, at the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre, and the London Coliseum. With her fellow Royal Academy of Music alumni she founded the Coriolis Quintet.

Known on the professional boxing circuit as the Classical Warrior, Hannah explains how she balances her two lives, in the ring and on the stage, and what it’s like building up to a really big fight.

She chooses music by Mendelssohn and by Sibelius from early in her musical career, which reminds her of northern landscapes, and operas by Humperdink and by Tchaikovsky - composers who share her love of the bassoon.

And we hear music that transports Hannah back to summers shearing sheep on the family farm.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

In a special programme to coincide with the London Jazz Festival the outstanding saxophonist YolanDa Brown talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for spreading the joy of music, especially to children.

YolanDa presents 'YolanDa’s Band Jam' on CBeebies and hosts Young Jazz Musician of the Year. She’s an ambassador for BBC Music Day and chair of the charity Youth Music. She has won a string of awards, including two Jazz MOBOs – Music of Black Origin Awards – and her most recent album, 'Love Politics War', topped the jazz charts.

Less well known is that she started out on a career in social science research, taking masters degrees in both Operations Management and Methods of Social Research and beginning a PhD before veering back to her first love – music.

YolanDa talks about the importance of introducing children to live music at the earliest possible age. Her own daughter responded to music in the womb and went to her first opera at the age of four. We hear music from YolanDa’s own first musical outing to see Iolanthe with her father, also at the age of four.

YolanDa describes her vibrant mix of jazz and soul as ‘posh reggae’, influenced by her Jamaican heritage. We hear a track from her latest album and tracks from musicians who have influenced her, including Kamasi Washington, Dave Brubeck and Bobby McFerrin. She talks to Michael about playing the piano and violin as a child; classical music remains very close to her heart, and she chooses music by Schubert and Dvorak.

And we hear a special commission from film composer Hans Zimmer, part of the BBC’s Ten Pieces Trailblazers, which was introduced by YolanDa when she presented this year’s CBeebies Proms.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

The film director Ken Loach talks to Michael Berkeley about the classical music he’s loved throughout his life and the dangerous power of music in film.

Ken Loach began his career directing Z Cars - but very soon entered the national consciousness in the late 1960s with films such as Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow and Kes. He’s kept up this prolific pace in the subsequent fifty years, making more than fifty award-winning films for cinema and television, and achieving a level of realism rarely captured by other directors. His latest film, Sorry We Missed You, is about the impact on families of the gig economy.

Ken talks to Michael about the music of his childhood growing up in Nuneaton after the war – he chooses Brahms's Academic Festival Overture to recall music lessons at school - and he we hear a piece by Schubert which reminds him of his own children growing up.

Ken picks recordings which bring back particular moments in his life: the sheer energy and excitement of Carlos Kleiber’s 1974 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; the 1968 recording of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto by Mstislav Rostropovich and Herbert von Karajan, which brings back memories of making Kes; and Geza Anda’s recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 21, which was used in the film Elvira Madigan.

Every one of Ken’s films has a cause at its heart such as homelessness, unemployment and civil rights. We hear the music of resistance that reflects the struggle of ordinary people for justice and dignity that has driven his career.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music to shape our emotions and tell the stories of our lives.

Philippa left school at 15 and did all sorts of jobs, including a stint in McDonalds before training as a psychotherapist and becoming a best-selling author, agony-aunt and broadcaster. Her graphic novel about the process of psychotherapy, 'Couch Fiction', was published in 2010, and since then she’s written 'How to Stay Sane' and 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read – and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did'.

Philippa talks to Michael Berkeley about her thirty-year marriage to the artist Grayson Perry, and how a song from La traviata broke through her father’s dementia; she emphasises the importance of learning new things throughout our lives, choosing music by Shostakovich that surprised and delighted her at this year’s Proms.

We hear music played by the violinist Min-Jim Kym; a supremely joyful moment from Beethoven; and Philippa is moved to tears hearing a piece of Chopin that her aunt played when she was a child.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Producer: Jane Greenwood

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan is President of the Royal Society and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 for his research into the ribosome – the mysterious ancient molecule that decodes DNA, what he terms ‘the mother of all molecules’. He’s what you might call a science all-rounder: he gained a PhD in Physics before turning to Biology, and his Nobel Prize was in Chemistry. Born in India, he moved to the US as a postgraduate student, and in 1999 came to Britain to work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Alongside science Venki Ramakrishnan has another passion – for music, and, in particular, chamber music, which grew out of the Indian classical music he heard as a child. His son Raman is the cellist with the Horszowski Trio and we hear their performance of music by Schubert, as well as a Brahms piano quartet and a Beethoven cello sonata, reflecting both Raman's and Venki’s deep engagement with that instrument.

Venki's other great love is for the violin, and he chooses music by Mozart alongside Bach's Double Violin Concerto - which Venki himself played whilst learning the violin as a graduate student in the USA.

He talks to Michael about the central role of music in his life, about how he would reform the Nobel Prizes in science, and why he swapped the mountains of Utah for the fens of East Anglia.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Selina Cadell is one of our most versatile and accomplished actresses - from French and Saunders to Chekhov on Broadway, and from Alan Bennett to Shakespeare, she brings humour and sensitivity to stage and screen. Michael Billington described her recent performance in Charlotte Jones’s play Humble Boy as ‘one of the best pieces of acting you’ll see anywhere'.

Instantly recognisable to millions as the infatuated neck-braced pharmacist in the hugely popular TV series Doc Martin, Selina has another string to her bow – as a director specialising in 18th-century drama and, particularly, opera. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how she coaches singers to become better actors and she chooses arias from operas she’s directed: Handel’s 'Arianna in Creta' and Stravinsky’s 'The Rake’s Progress', written in 1951 but set in Handel’s time.

Selina shares memories of her godfather Sir Ralph Richardson - and his acting tips – and we hear his beautiful reading of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. She chooses a song by Noel Coward in memory of her brother, the actor Simon Cadell, and she speaks movingly about the death of her husband and mother earlier this year, choosing Debussy’s 'La Mer' as a celebration of her husband’s love of the sea.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Peter Tatchell was still a teenager, living in Australia, when he started on what has been a long and headline-grabbing career of political protest. He was only fifteen when he began campaigning against the death penalty, and in support of aboriginal rights. At the age of seventeen, he realised he was gay, and the struggle for gay rights became his increasing focus: he was a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s, and, more recently, a campaigner for same-sex marriage. He gained international celebrity for his attempted citizen's arrest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 1999 and again in 2001, on charges of torture and human rights abuses. Beaten by Mugabe’s bodyguards, he suffered permanent eye and brain damage. He has also been beaten up by Neo-Nazis in Moscow, and held in prisons across the world. He says, ruefully: “I’m the master of the motorcade ambush”. One of his tactics has been literally to run into the road and throw himself in front of official limousines; he did it not just to Mugabe, but also to Tony Blair – protesting against the war in Iraq – and John Major.

In a rare personal interview, Peter Tatchell talks about the early experiences which fired him into trying to change the world. He grew up at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Australia - his mother believed it was against her Christian principles. And yet despite this Peter loves, and forgives her.

The music list is a mix of stirring protest and softer romantic pieces which help Peter escape from daily pressures. Choices include Prokofiev’s “Battle on the Ice” from the film score to Eistenstein’s Alexander Nevsky; Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; Prince; and the jazz drummer Billy Cobham.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine, in 1968. Unsurprisingly her work as a writer is concerned with themes of identity, exile, dislocation. Beginning as a poet and a playwright – her plays were staged by the RSC – she then turned to novels, and there are now seven in all, of which the last three have been nominated for the Booker Prize. The latest is ‘The Man Who Saw Everything’.

Deborah talks with Michael Berkeley about the music that means most to her. Many of the pieces she loves are to do with saying farewell: Lotte Lenya saying ‘goodbye’ in Brecht and Weill’s Alabama Song; Orpheus pining for Euridice in Kathleen Ferrier’s legendary recording of Gluck’s ‘Che Faro?’; sisters wishing their lovers safe travel as, purportedly, they depart for war, in the trio from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte.

Deborah talks openly about her memories of her father’s imprisonment and of his return home; about the enormous transition in her life when, aged fifty, her marriage ended; and about how she found a room of her own in which to write, renting a friend’s garden shed and working to the noise of apples dropping onto the roof. Also among her music is Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata (‘the silences are as important as the notes’); a song by Leonard Cohen; and a translucent setting of a Verlaine poem, ‘La Lune Blanche’, composed by Billy Cowie and sung by identical twins.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Lord Stirrup, former Chief of the Defence Staff, talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for music from Renaissance motets to twenty-first-century opera.

Jock Stirrup was lucky to survive when a bird hit one of the engines of his Jaguar jet in 1983. With the cockpit glass obscured and one engine on fire, he chose not to eject from the plane, but to try to land it to save the life of his student pilot. For this he was awarded the Air Force Cross.

This calm under pressure served him well as he rose through the ranks of the RAF, commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and becoming Chief of the Defence Staff – the head of all the UK’s armed forces – until his retirement in 2011.

A member of the Order of the Garter, he now sits as a cross-bencher in the House of Lords and has spoken critically about the regime in Russia and equipment shortages for troops in Iraq. He talks to Michael about the pressures of commanding forces, dealing with casualties, and speaking out on behalf of the men and women in the armed forces.

Less well known is Jock Stirrup’s lifelong love of classical music. Now he’s retired he spends as much time as he can listening to music live, and he’s chosen pieces that span five centuries and many genres – a motet by Josquin Des Prez, music by Bach and by Mendelssohn, part of George Benjamin’s 2012 opera Written on Skin, and music from Die Walküre, illustrating the passion he’s had for Wagner from his schooldays.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

It’s hard to sum up the extraordinary reach of Siri Hustvedt’s work. On the one hand, there are popular novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, which became international best-sellers and were translated into thirty languages. But underpinning her six novels there’s an impressive body of philosophical exploration – about Freud, neurophysiology, painting. Then there’s her own art work: Siri Hustvedt illustrates many of her own books. She has published a volume of poetry, and she’s also a lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. She lives in New York with her husband, the writer Paul Auster.

In Private Passions, Siri Hustvedt admits that she enjoys being hard to pin down, because much of her work is about identity and how it shifts across a lifetime. She reflects on her own youth in New York, where she was so poor that she ate by cruising bars during “Happy Hour” and eating the free snacks. She reveals too that she has neurological episodes where she loses consciousness, sees auras, and sometimes visions and voices. She admires the visionary composer Hildegard of Bingen, and also composer Meredith Monk, who is pushing the human voice to the limit in "Scared Song". Other choices include Mozart’s Don Giovanni, John Cage’s Sonata V, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, and Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Ete.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

David Cannadine describes himself as “staggeringly lucky”: he found what he wanted to do early in life, and it has rewarded him richly. He is one of our most distinguished historians; his period is the 19th and early 20th century, and he’s written more than twenty books, on Churchill, on class, on the aristocracy - among many others. He’s the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and the President of the British Academy, and a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4. He was knighted for services to scholarship in 2009. But perhaps the most surprising thing about David Cannadine is that although he was born in Birmingham and his historical research focuses on Britain, he himself lives in America; he’s spent ten years at Columbia University and is currently Professor of History at Princeton.

In Private Passions he reflects on how his trans-Atlantic life changes his perspective, and enables him to see both Britain and the US as foreign countries. Although he’s now at the heart of the British establishment, he confesses that he’s always felt an outsider. His childhood in Birmingham was far from privileged, although the grand 19th-century buildings that surrounded him gave him a sense of Victorian grandeur, and his schoolteachers inspired him to aim high. They also inspired his passion for classical music, and many of the choices relate to his childhood and to his years at Cambridge and Yale. David's music includes Haydn’s Creation, Purcell’s King Arthur, Walton’s First Symphony, and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, in a performance of which, somewhat improbably, Sir David sang in the girls’ chorus.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

James Ellroy has been dubbed the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’, a label he relishes. His crime novels, fifteen to date, are international best-sellers; the world they depict is Los Angeles at its wildest and darkest, cops and criminals as violent as each other. Ellroy’s own life has been dominated by crime; his mother was murdered when he was ten, and Ellroy himself got involved in petty theft and, as a young man, spent time in jail.

In Private Passions, James Ellroy reflects on a turbulent life, and how he honed his story-telling skills in a cell with five other criminals. He reveals how much he owes to classical music – and particularly to Beethoven. He has a bust of Beethoven on his desk as he writes, and speaks to him every day. Sometimes Beethoven answers back. James talks too about his other heroes: Mahler, Shostakovich, Bruckner and Wagner, and his admiration for their monumental works. The choices have a strong romantic streak, perhaps surprising in a writer whose world is so violent and dark. But in conversation with Michael Berkeley, James Ellroy reveals himself as never before.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Earlier this year, when Hannah Sullivan won the biggest prize in the poetry world, the TS Eliot Prize, the chair of the judges announced: “A star is born. Where has she come from?” Such a prestigious prize is a rare honour, as the book, Three Poems, was Hannah Sullivan’s first published collection. Up until then, she’d established a successful academic career, studying at Cambridge, teaching at Harvard and for the last seven years at New College Oxford, where she’s an Associate Professor of English.

In Private Passions, Hannah Sullivan talks to Michael Berkeley about the time in New York which inspired her prize-winning poems, and why she wanted to capture what it’s like to be alone and vulnerable in a strange city. She reads from a new poem about Grenfell Tower, which will be published next year. And she reveals a passion for Nina Simone. Other music choices include Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier”, the Dvorak Cello Concerto, the Schubert String Quintet, and a setting of a poem by Thomas Campion so perfect she wishes she’d written it: “What is love but mourning?”

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

At the age of 27, Peter Piot’s life was changed by the arrival of a special package from Africa. He was working as a researcher in a microbiology lab in Antwerp, Belgium; and, in September 1976, the lab was alerted that a package was on its way from Zaire: samples of blood from an epidemic that was stirring along the river Congo. Several Belgian nuns had already died of a strange new disease. The disease – which Peter Piot and his team identified, and named – was Ebola, and he went on to play a leading role in helping to contain the epidemic. He then led research into the worldwide epidemic which followed, the new disease of AIDS, becoming President of the International Aids society. Peter Piot has held prominent positions in the United Nations and in the World Health Organisation and has been ennobled both in Belgium and in Britain, where in 2016 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. It’s a career which has taken him all over the world, and though Peter Piot is now the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, he still travels a great deal. His musical choices reflect that, with music from Africa, including a piece performed for him on his 60th birthday by the 'king of Rumba Rock', Papa Wemba. He includes, too, a rarely heard viol piece by the Flemish composer Leonora Duarte, which he discovered when he was studying in Antwerp.

With the horrifying return of Ebola, Peter Piot reflects on a career which has been spent very close to the dead and dying. And he chooses music which helps him make sense of the tragedies he has witnessed first-hand: Kathleen Ferrier singing Gluck’s heart-breaking aria “Che Faro”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

As the 50th anniversary of the moon landings approaches, James Burke talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that brings back memories of the heady days when, new to science broadcasting, he was chosen by the BBC to lead the coverage of the Apollo Missions and the moment the first human stepped onto the Moon.

James Burke has the rare gift of making complex ideas comprehensible to a wide audience – and providing a great deal of entertainment along the way. He began his BBC career on Tomorrow’s World, and his series Connections, which offered a new perspective on the history of science and technology, was a television landmark. James is the author of more than a dozen books, and his series about his long-running project The Knowledge Web was broadcast recently on Radio 4.

The surprising thing about James Burke is that he studied Middle English at university and got into science broadcasting quite by accident while working in Italy. He tells Michael how it happened and plays a Neapolitan song which reminds him of the years he spent there as a young man. He chooses music that reminds him of his musical childhood – Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet which he played at school, and a piece by Handel which he sang. His lifelong love of playing the guitar is reflected in music by Albeniz, and James makes some truly startling predictions about how technology is about to utterly transform our lives.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Sarah Langford is a barrister; in her words, her job is “to represent the mad and the bad, the broken and the hopeful” – telling their stories in court. After thirteen years of practice, she decided to tell their stories in a book, too. In Your Defence was published last year and has had a huge impact. In it she tells the stories of eleven people she represented in both the criminal and family courts: harrowing stories of mothers whose babies are taken away at birth, teenagers caught up in addiction, a wife who’s abused, a boy whose parents fight over him for years. In Private Passions, she talks to Michael Berkeley about why she felt it was important to get these people’s stories into the public domain, at a time when the criminal justice system in Britain is facing overwhelming pressure.

One of the challenges of the job is to decompress, after the emotions of a day fighting a case in court, and this is where listening to music is crucial. “When I was coming home on the train from court, I would often find myself wrestling with emotions about all that had happened that day. I had Bach’s cello suites on my phone playlist and would listen over and over whilst writing my attendance note and closing the case, both literally and mentally. The music helped me remove myself from the carriage and also gave me a way to feel contemplative about what had gone on.” Other choices include Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Paul Dukas, Benjamin Clementine, and choral music by Morten Lauridsen.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

In the early 1990s Harry Enfield went from being a part-time milkman to one of our biggest comedy stars, and many of the characters he created have become embedded in our national psyche - Loadsamoney, Kevin the Teenager, Tim Nice-But-Dim, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Stavros and Smashie and Nicey, to name just a few. He started out on Spitting Image and Saturday Night Live, and his television shows in the 1990s reinvigorated British sketch comedy, gaining him more than 13 million viewers a week. Films, documentaries, and more comedy series have followed, as well as a hugely successful theatre show with his comedy partner of nearly 30 years, Paul Whitehouse.

Harry tells Michael Berkeley about how his journey from punk to opera - his great musical passion - developed when he was living in a council flat in his twenties and borrowing a record a week from the library. We hear parts of two Verdi operas that inspired the theme tunes for his first two television series.

He reveals why he’s chosen the aria Largo al Factotum from The Barber of Seville in tribute to Paul Whitehouse and we hear a moving performance by John Tomlinson as Boris Godunov.

Music by Elgar and by Schubert brings back memories of Harry's time at university and he talks movingly about family life and his relationship with his father Edward, who enjoyed a late-flowering career as a journalist and broadcaster. And he quotes a less than flattering entry about his grandparents from Virginia Woolf’s diary. Harry doesn’t usually do interviews so it’s a real pleasure to hear him talking about his life through the music he loves.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

June Spencer can walk down the street unrecognised, but as soon as she starts to speak, she’s known instantly by millions. That’s because, since the very first episode in 1950, she’s played Peggy in The Archers – that’s more than 68 years. The only remaining member of the original cast, she’s been honoured with both an OBE and a CBE.

As part of the celebrations for her 100th birthday she talks to Michael Berkeley about her life-long love of music. A keen pianist, she had to leave school at 14 to look after her sick mother, but persisted with music and acting classes and forged a successful career on stage and in radio.

June tells Michael why she thinks The Archers has such enduring appeal and why it’s so important for the series to have topical and challenging story lines. For many years her character Peggy struggled with her husband Jack Woolley’s Alzheimer’s - a disease which sadly claimed the life of June’s own husband.

June chooses music by Vivaldi which reminds her of her late son David, a talented ballet dancer; pieces by Rossini and by Bruch which recall her Mediterranean holiday home; and music by Mendelssohn and by Rachmaninov which reminds her of the early days of her acting career.

These pieces illuminate a moving conversation between June and Michael about the realities of old age and the pleasure of memory.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Lucasta Miller is a writer fascinated by the Romantic, and the dark excesses of the Gothic. Her latest subject is a poet, Letitia Landon, whose life was scandalous and whose sudden death is like a scene from a detective novel. In her day, Landon was an icon, hailed as a “female Byron” – and a favourite of the Brontë sisters, who were the subject of Lucasta Miller’s previous book. Both biographies were years in the making, partly because they involved such meticulous research, partly because Lucasta Miller was at the same time writing journalism, editing books, teaching English to refugees, bringing up children and generally holding together a household, the other half of which is the singer Ian Bostridge. In Private Passions, Lucasta Miller talks to Michael Berkeley about her lasting obsession with the gothic, and about the dark secrets concealed in Letitia Landon’s life. The theme of dark secrets takes her to the first German Romantic opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz, and the terrifying Wolf’s Glen. She discusses too what biographers can bring to our understanding of music and chooses a song by Clara Schumann, written just as she was on the point of marriage to Robert. And in relation to her own husband, Lucasta talks honestly about how difficult the life of a professional musician is, both for them and for their family at home. Does husband Ian Bostridge make it onto the playlist? As she says, she felt she was damned if she chose him, damned if she didn’t. So she does include him in the end, singing a lyrical song by Hans-Werner Henze which was written for Bostridge. Other musical choices include Maria Callas singing from Bellini’s Norma, and the Bach cello suites played by Stephen Isserlis.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

At thirty-two, Robert Icke is already one of this country’s leading theatre directors. He’s best-known for his modern adaptations of classic texts; his version of the Greek tragedy the Oresteia won him an Olivier in 2016 for Best Director, and both the Critics Circle and the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. He wrote a seventy-minute prequel to the Aeschylus play himself, so there’s no shortage of ambition; and playfulness too – in Mary Stuart, which starred Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams, a coin was tossed each night to decide which of them would play Elizabeth I and which Mary Stuart. He’s about to leave the Almeida after six years. His first production as a freelance director in Europe is with Ivo van Hove, in his International Theatre Amsterdam.

Robert Icke has a lot to say about the state of theatre in this country, which he thinks is in big trouble. He’s particularly concerned about young people trying to enter the profession, when wages are so low and it’s so expensive to live in London, where most work is being made. Tickets have become so expensive that it’s simply impossible for young people to go to the theatre and see what’s being done. Rob’s musical tastes span 12th-century polyphony to 1960s pop music. And he includes a Chopin piece which he is struggling with himself on the piano, helped by his boyhood piano teacher Mrs White in Middlesborough, who now comes to all his shows.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3. Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

The actress and comedian Jess Robinson tells Michael Berkeley how her training as a classical singer informs her impressions of a vast range of singers, including Kate Bush, Bjork, Lady Gaga, Billie Holiday and Julie Andrews.

A regular on Radio 4’s The Now Show, Dead Ringers, and 15 Minute Musicals, Jess made her name starring on stage in Little Voice and playing Joan Collins’ daughter in Full Circle. Her musical impressions propelled her to the semi finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2017 and she’s currently on tour with her show No Filter.

Jess chooses songs by Samuel Barber and Debussy that were favourites from her classical singing lessons, and pieces that remind her of the rich musical heritage of her family, including a 20th-century organ prelude that she plays in her local church as a double act with her mother – her mother plays the keyboards but Jess plays the pedals, as her mother’s legs are too short to reach them! And we hear Jess’s grandmother singing a traditional Yiddish song, recorded after she arrived in Britain on one of the very last Kindertransports in 1939.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Barbara Hosking was born above her father’s dairy in Penzance, back in the 1920s, and ended up in the corridors of power serving two British prime ministers. Two years ago, at the age of 90, she decided to come out as gay, which, she says, is the best thing she’s ever done.

Barbara Hosking talks to Michael Berkeley about moving from Cornwall to a new world in London after the War, meeting Eastern European emigres and discovering lesbian clubs where women could dance together openly. All sorts of women were there, from the posh to the very poor, from “respectable” women to prostitutes. Despite her early Labour party affiliation, she found herself working for Edward Heath, whom she admired greatly, and who she persuaded not to wear a terrible old cardigan when he was conducting with the London Symphony Orchestra. She talks too about finding happiness late in life with her partner Margaret.

Music choices include Edward Heath conducting Elgar, Strauss’s opera Ariadne Auf Naxos, Schubert’s Winterreise, and Britten’s Billy Budd. And a love song in Yiddish, a language she taught herself and which she loves.

Producer: Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

David Wilson has spent his life working with violent men – particularly those who have committed murder and serial murder. Currently Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University and a campaigner for penal reform, he spent much of his career working in a series of prisons and young offender institutions, dealing with some of our most notorious murderers - including Dennis Nilsen.

He has made memorable television programmes including the award-winning 'Interview with a Murderer'. And he’s written sixteen books, the latest being My Life With Murderers: Behind Bars with the World’s Most Violent Men.

David tells Michael Berkeley about the huge challenges of becoming Britain’s youngest prison governor at the age of 29, his many encounters with the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, and his pioneering approach to rehabilitating violent offenders.

He chooses a song from the jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker – sadly no stranger to prison himself – and music by Bernstein and Copland that reminds him of his time as a student in America.

He talks movingly about family love and music being vital to coping with a career spent dealing with violence and murder. With the exception of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, all of David’s music is about love rather than death, including Sibelius’ Andante Festivo, chosen for his daughter, and music from the film Love Actually for his wife.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

The surgeon Roger Kneebone tells Michael Berkeley how his work with tailors, lacemakers, Formula One teams, and musicians has transformed his understanding of medicine.

Roger Kneebone began his career as a trauma surgeon in Soweto, operating on victims of stabbings and shootings, before working in a war zone in Namibia in the 1980s. Then he was a GP in Wiltshire for fifteen years before joining Imperial College London, where he is Professor of Surgical Education and Engagement Science.

So with that impressive medical background it comes as something of a surprise to discover that he spends a lot of his professional life these days hanging out with craftspeople, engineers and musicians.

He says: ‘When I started to think about surgery not only as an application of scientific knowledge but as a form of performance and craftsmanship, it made a lot of sense to find out what other performers and other craftsmen were doing and see what the connections were between their worlds and mine, rather than looking at the differences. It’s a whole new area of exploration and research.’

As a child Roger rebuilt a piano with his father and they formed a close bond over their mutual love of baroque music: Roger chooses Rachel Podger playing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, and Handel’s 'As Steals the Morn'.

Later he built a harpsichord from a kit when on call as a GP and we hear his harpsichord teacher Sophie Yates playing Couperin.

And Roger chooses jazz from the American saxophonist Charles Lloyd, which leads him to consider the parallels between musical improvisation and the improvisation so often necessary during surgery.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

The comedian Jo Brand tells Michael Berkeley about the important role classical music plays in her life.

Jo Brand has enjoyed a pretty unusual career path - from psychiatric nurse to The Great British Bake Off. On the way she’s taken in radical stand-up comedy – under the moniker The Sea Monster – invented a new genre of Bafta-winning sitcom drawing on the black humour of nurses and social workers, and has made numerous appearances on panel shows from QI and Have I Got New For You to Question Time.

Jo talks movingly about the music in her childhood – learning the piano and violin, bell ringing in her local church and listening to music with her father, who suffered from depression. She chooses Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in his memory.

Music runs through Jo’s family, and her teenage daughters are keen singers. We hear Carmina Burana, which one of them has performed, as well as part of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which reminds her of her rural childhood with her two brothers.

And she tells Michael that coping with drunk hecklers in rough comedy clubs was as nothing compared to the paralysing fear she felt when she had to perform Bach’s Toccata on the organ of the Royal Albert Hall for a television programme:

‘There were 8,000 people there. It was absolutely terrifying. I’d never actually realized what that expression "your blood running cold" really meant, but two minutes before I walked up and sat down at the organ, my hands were completely freezing and I thought they wouldn’t work.’

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

For forty years, Uta Frith has dedicated her life to understanding the enigma of autism; she was one of the first neuroscientists to recognise autism as a condition of the brain, rather than the result of cold parenting. She works at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, alongside her husband, Chris Frith, who’s a specialist in mapping the brain through neuro-imaging. Elected to the Royal Society in 2005, she’s passionate about encouraging more women into careers in science.

When Professor Frith first published her influential research into autism in the 1980s, she says it evoked “strong emotional reactions”, and autism remains controversial today, as it is increasingly viewed not as a disability, but as simply a different way of seeing the world. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Uta Frith talks about the little boy she met very early on in her research who inspired her, and about why autism is so fascinating – because of what it reveals about the mystery of human communication.

Music choices include works by Smetana, Hildegard von Bingen and Beethoven, a Berlin cabaret song from the 1920s, and a work by Professor Frith's great female role model, Clara Schumann.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Over the last 40 years, Mark Morris has established a reputation as the most musical of choreographers. Inspired by both baroque and twentieth-century music, he’s most famously choreographed Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” – he danced both Dido and the sorceress himself - and his witty version of The Nutcracker, “The Hard Nut”, has been so popular that it’s been staged every year for almost 30 years. Mark Morris has worked in opera too, directing and choreographing productions for the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera and The Royal Opera, among others. He tours extensively but home is the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, which runs outreach programmes into the local New York community. He’s received numerous awards, including the Leonard Bernstein Award for the Elevation of Music in Society.

In a humorous and revealing interview, Mark Morris looks back on his childhood in Seattle and his childhood passion for music and dance. It wasn’t very socially acceptable for a boy to become a dancer: “If you were in dance, you were a sissy. But I also was a sissy so what’s the problem?” He talks too about losing many friends to AIDS, and fearing that his own time was limited, a pressure that created a manic burst of creative energy.

Music choices include Germaine Tailleferre, a French composer from the twenties whom he believes is unjustly neglected; Scarlatti; Handel; Lou Harrison; and Erik Satie.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

From Hollywood to European art house cinema, from Shakespeare to contemporary drama, Greta Scacchi is one of our most versatile actors.

She talks to Michael Berkeley about the film that made her name in 1983 – Heat and Dust – and chooses music from the soundtrack featuring Zakir Hussain.

She reveals how her musical training as a child – learning ballet, piano and singing - has been invaluable when she’s been called on to play and sing on film. She particularly loved the character she played in Jefferson in Paris, the eighteenth-century Anglo-Italian artist and musician Maria Cosway, and explains how difficult it was to pretend the play the harp on screen. We hear some of Maria Cosway’s music from that film.

Greta chooses music by Satie which reminds her of her mother’s ballet school when she was a child. Her mother is still dancing at 87! And we hear one of Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, and a Handel aria which illustrate Greta’s passion for the theatre; she chooses pieces which remind her of the places she loves – Sussex, Italy and Australia. We get an insight into her passion for jazz with music from Jimmy Guiffre and Fats Waller.

And Greta speaks out about the importance of actors campaigning for causes they believe in – she’s passionate about the environment and even posed naked with a cod to draw attention to unsustainable fishing.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

The comedian Rachel Parris talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions and how her life as a classical musician led to her career in comedy. Her hugely versatile career includes improvised comedy shows, stand-up, musical comedy and appearances on Radio 4’s The Now Show. She’s caused quite a stir with her hilarious turns as a faux-naïve reporter on BBC2’s satirical news show The Mash Report.

During her teens Rachel thought she would have a career as a classical musician –– she has a Music degree from Oxford, she’s an accomplished singer, and an excellent pianist; indeed, until recently she was a piano teacher.

Rachel talks to Michael about how she moved from music to comedy via drama school and how music still has a central place in her life. Her choices of pieces reflect the breadth of her musical passions, from a recording of Tallis in which she sings, to Bernstein and the American Songbook. She loves music that tells a story, particularly Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and music that makes her laugh, like Tom Lehrer’s songs. Rachel talks movingly about depression and her work with The Samaritans, and we hear music by Debussy which she finds a comfort in difficult times.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to the philosopher Julian Baggini about the pleasures of serendipity, transience, philosophy and music.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Do They Think You’re Stupid? and What’s It All About? are just three of the eye-catchingly titled books by Julian Baggini. He’s written 19 books in all, is the founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, writes for newspapers, magazines and think tanks, and appears on radio and television. His latest book is How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy.

Julian has been described as a philosopher’s philosopher, but he also has a mission to liberate philosophy from its ivory tower and bring it to the general reader. The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten – his collection of 100 brief thought experiments – has been described as ‘mental fun-sized treats’ and ‘the Sudoku of moral philosophy’.

Julian tells Michael about the joy he’s felt discovering pieces of music by Brahms, Ravel and Dvorak through chance encounters, and how he’s come to love music written for a video game by Jessica Curry when he met her on University Challenge.

He believes that both music and philosophy can help us appreciate beauty, come to terms with the transience of existence, and accept that life can be bitter and sweet at the same time.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Preti Taneja about her wide-ranging love of music, from Indian gazals and ragas to Vivaldi and Shostakovich.

Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young won last year’s Desmond Elliott prize and huge critical acclaim, after being rejected as ‘commercially unviable’ by multiple publishers in both London and Delhi.

It’s a reworking of King Lear, set in contemporary India, and tells the story of a battle for power within a rich and turbulent Delhi family.

Before she found success as a novelist Preti worked as a journalist, as a human rights campaigner, and as a teacher of writing in places as diverse as universities, prisons, youth charities and refugee camps - and she chooses a song by Ilham al Madfai that reminds her of working in Jordan with minority communities who had fled the war in Iraq.

Preti talks about the music that reminds her of childhood holidays in Delhi, how she uses music in her writing, and why King Lear resonates so clearly in the India of today.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3, produced by Jane Greenwood.

When he started out on an acting career, Oliver Ford Davies was given some extremely discouraging advice by his first director, who said: “You’ll be OK when you’re forty, and even better when you’re fifty!” Davies was only twenty-seven at the time so that was a bit off-putting, to say the least; but in fact that advice was clairvoyant. His big breakthrough did indeed come at the age of fifty, in 1990, when he was given the lead in David Hare’s Racing Demon at the National Theatre, for which he won an Olivier Award. Since then he’s played Lear at the Almeida, and Star Wars fans will know him as Sio Bibble (the governer of Naboo); he also appears as Cressen in the very popular Game of Thrones. Among numerous Shakespeare roles over the last 40 years at the RSC, he’s just finished playing Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, a production which was shown in cinemas across the country.

Looking back over a very varied and successful career, Oliver Ford Davies reflects on the ups and downs of a career which has been risky, and challenging, and richly enjoyable. He talks too about why big American films love English actors: because they can deliver unintelligible dialogue, and because they’re cheap. And he pays tribute to a great actor reading great poetry, in his choice of Paul Scofield reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Other choices include Haydn, Stravinsky, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro’.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Memory, desire, madness: these are the themes that fascinate Lisa Appignanesi and that she’s explored over the last forty years in novels, in memoirs, and in prize-winning books such as “Mad, Bad and Sad”, a history of women and mind doctors. Lisa Appignanesi is the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a former President of English PEN, an organisation which campaigns for free speech. She’s written about cabaret, about Proust and fin-de-siecle Paris, about Simone de Beauvoir, about Freud, and about her own troubled search for identity.

In Private Passions she tells Michael Berkeley about her childhood in Poland, where she was born Elżbieta Borensztejn, and about the way identities in her family were always shifting, “always there for the making”. She reflects on the power of the dead to haunt us, expressed by Monteverdi in his opera Orfeo, and admires the strength of singers Bessie Smith and Lotte Lenya, alongside music choices such as Mozart's ’The Marriage of Figaro’, Laurie Anderson, and Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3

Tim Firth is the man behind the show that captured the nation’s heart: Calendar Girls, the true story about a Women’s Institute who produced a naked calendar. It’s been a film, a play, and is now a musical.

He’s also responsible for the hugely successful film Kinky Boots, as well as multi-award winning TV shows, films and more musicals including Neville’s Island, The Flint Street Nativity, Preston Front, and most recently The Band, a collaboration with his long-time friend Gary Barlow and Take That.

But surprisingly there are no songs from musical theatre in Tim’s choices for Private Passions. Instead he shares with Michael Berkeley his love of Baroque, with music from Bach and from Albinoni (first heard on his honeymoon), and he chooses music by Delius and by Copland that resonates with the folk music he loved as a child.

Tim talks movingly about the emotional impact of music in his life, whether it’s writing the perfect song for a show or being spellbound by hearing Gorecki for the first time in a forest in the Lake District.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Sigrid Rausing is a writer, publisher and philanthropist. She’s the co-founder of Portobello books, the owner of Granta books, and the editor of Granta literary magazine, a role she says she hugely enjoys. It’s impossible though to talk about her own achievements without mentioning her Swedish family background: her grandfather founded the packaging company Tetra Pak, and his brilliant idea for the invention of waxed cardboard cartons for milk and fruit juice brought him great wealth - and has allowed his grand-daughter to found one of the biggest philanthropic organizations in this country. But the family has been marked by great tragedy too: in 2012, Sigrid’s sister-in-law Eva died of a drugs overdose and her brother, who was also an addict, was arrested for possession of drugs, and for keeping his wife’s body at home with him.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Sigrid talks about the terrible effect of drug addiction on her family, and the guilt she and everyone around her feels about what happened. She looks back on her early career as an anthropologist, and reflects on the pleasures and challenges of editing a literary magazine. Music choices include Mozart’s clarinet concerto, Brahms’s Handel Variations, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert, and Ella Fitzgerald singing “Anything Goes”.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Michael Berkeley talks to the actor Clarke Peters about his passion for breaking down barriers between musical traditions.

Best known for his television roles as Detective Lester Freeman in The Wire and Albert Lambreaux in Treme, Clarke has also appeared in films such as Notting Hill, Mona Lisa and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

And he has a rich career in music too – from busking in France in his youth to working as a backing singer for David Essex and for Joan Armatrading – if you listen carefully you can hear him on her iconic song Love and Affection. And he’s appeared in Chicago, Chess, and Porgy and Bess to name but a few musicals. In 1990 he created the award winning revue Five Guys Named Moe, based on the music of Louis Jordan.

Clarke’s choices of music reflect the trans-Atlantic nature of his life: a piece written in France by the New Orleans composer Gottschalk, which he heard when filming Treme; music by Ravel and by Debussy; and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which always takes him straight back to his birthplace, New York. And his final piece – Nat King Cole playing Rachmaninoff - illustrates perfectly his desire to open people’s ears to the cultural breadth of classical music.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

This week’s Private Passions is pretty crowded, with Kirsty Wark, Fiona Bruce, Emily Thornberry and Theresa May all putting in appearances - in the person of Jan Ravens, from the award-winning Radio 4 show Dead Ringers.

Jan’s career has been a series of firsts – she was, in 1979, the first female president of the Cambridge Footlights, and the show she directed in Edinburgh went on to win the first ever Perrier Award. She was one of the first women to appear with Jasper Carrott and on Spitting Image, and last year she made her solo Edinburgh debut with her show Difficult Woman.

Jan tells Michael how her difficult childhood was transformed by writing and performing at Cambridge, about the battles she’s fought to have women equally represented on comedy shows and discusses the frequently negative perception of women in positions of power.

And she demonstrates just how she got inside the voice of Theresa May.

Jan’s passion isn’t just for female speaking voices but for singing voices too, and she’s chosen to hear four women singers: Maria Callas, Kathleen Ferrier, Jessye Norman and Barbara Cook.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Actor and theatre director Daniel Evans shares with Michael Berkeley his passions for musical theatre, opera and the piano.

Daniel Evans grew up in the Rhondda Valley and won praise and prizes at Eisteddfods as a teenager. Since then his career has been something of a high-wire act: balancing performing versus directing and theatre management, stage versus screen, popular musicals versus edgy new dramas.

He first made his name twenty years ago as an actor, in Peter Pan at the National Theatre and then as an outstanding interpreter of Sondheim, twice winning Oliviers for Best Actor in a Musical. He’s also well known for his roles in television and film, from Spooks and Dr Who to Great Expectations.

And then in 2009 Daniel Evans was appointed Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres and he’s now at Chichester Festival Theatre. His stage production of The Full Monty went into the West End and continues to be on tour nationwide, and Flowers for Mrs Harris - a new musical about the life of a post-war char lady being transformed by the sight of a Christian Dior dress – won three UK Theatre Awards.

Daniel tells Michael about meeting Sondheim whilst performing in New York, about his passion for singing, and about the importance of the tradition of the actor-manager in British theatre.

He chooses music by Sondheim and Bernstein that reflects his passion for musical theatre, and he shares his love of opera with music by Britten and Donizetti.

And we hear Bryn Terfel sing a Welsh folk song which takes Daniel back to the valleys and Eisteddfods of his childhood.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

David Rieff has admitted ruefully that he’s made a career out of telling people what they don’t want to hear: whether it’s the politics of the global food crisis in his book “The Reproach of Hunger”, or the failure of the West to prevent the terrible bloodbath of Bosnia in his provocatively-titled “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West”. As a war correspondent, Rieff has worked in the Balkans, in Rwanda and the Congo, in Israel-Palestine, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s not afraid to tackle the big issues: immigration, exile, American imperialism. There are thirteen books in all, including a memoir about his mother, the American writer Susan Sontag.

In Private Passions, David talks to Michael Berkeley about being “Susan Sontag’s son”, and whether that label has at times been a burden. He’s her only child and Sontag was only 19 when he was born. He reflects on the privilege and yet strangeness of his New York upbringing, and how he has used that background “to make a living being a critic of everything. That’s an immense privilege.”

David Rieff is a passionate fan of Early music, and his choices include the 16th-century composer Orlando di Lassus, and Alfred Deller singing Purcell. Other choices include Bach’s moving cantata “Ich Habe Genug”, Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Bluegrass.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Rebecca Stott grew up in a community where the following things were forbidden: newspapers, television, cinema, radio, pets, universities, wristwatches, cameras, holidays – and music. Her family belonged to one of the most reclusive sects in Protestant History, the “Exclusive Brethren”, which has 45,000 followers worldwide. How and why she left the Brethren is the gripping story told in her memoir, “In the Days of Rain”, which won a Costa Prize in 2017. Before that there were two historical novels; two books about Darwin; and a body of academic work about 19th century writers. Rebecca Stott is currently Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. It’s a remarkable career for someone who grew up not being allowed to read freely, or even to enter a library.

In Private Passions Rebecca Stott tells the story of how her family escaped from the sect, and how the outside world flooded in, in all its technicolour. The discovery of music was particularly exciting, and she has never forgotten the impact of Rachmaninov and of Mozart. She reveals that after she wrote about the sect, she gathered hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony from other former members, telling stories of scandal and suffering. And she reflects on the lifelong influence of growing up in a religious sect that believed the world would end any minute, and everyone on earth would literally disappear into the air.

Music choices include Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater”, Klezmer music, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 21, Rachmaninov, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen. A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Michael Berkeley’s guest on the centenary of Armistice Day is the historian Margaret MacMillan.

In this year’s Reith Lectures, Margaret Macmillan delivered a powerful series of lectures exploring war and society, and our complex feelings towards those who fight. She is Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, and Professor of History at the University of Toronto in her native Canada.

But she wasn’t always as well known as she is now; her book Peacemakers, about the Paris Conference at the end of the First World War, was rejected by a string of publishers – before winning the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize and catapulting her into the public eye in her late fifties.

Many more best-selling and prize-winning books have followed, including Nixon in China, The Uses and Abuses of History, and The War That Ended Peace, about the long build-up to the First World War.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Margaret Macmillan reflects on how our perception of the First World War has changed in the last hundred years, and sounds a note of warning as she perceives worrying parallels between the years leading up to that conflict and the state of the world today.

Both her grandfathers fought in the First World War and she chooses music which reflects her Welsh and Scottish heritage, as she argues for the importance of personal stories within the big picture of history.

She and Michael Berkeley explore the paradox that great works of literature, art, and music are created out of the horror of war, and she chooses music from both World Wars by Ravel, by Strauss and by Tippett; all of whom, in different ways, bring beauty out of appalling suffering and destruction.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

It’s the size and shape of a cauliflower, and weighs about 3 lbs. And yet the average human brain has so many intricate and complex connections that if you counted one connection every second it would take you more than three million years.

Professor Anil Seth has devoted his career to trying to understand the brain, puzzling over the mystery of consciousness itself. He’s Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the Sackler Centre at the University of Sussex, and the author of a popular book, “The 30-second Brain”. In Private Passions, he muses on how our consciousness of the world, and of ourselves, is “one of the big central mysteries of life”. And it’s a mystery we face every day – when we fall asleep and when we wake up. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Anil Seth explores the concept of free will (he doesn’t believe in it); why music evokes such strong memories; and how meditation changes the structure of the brain.

Music choices include Chopin, Bach, Nina Simone, and an ancient Hindi mantra.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of forests this autumn, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the American novelist Richard Powers. His latest novel, The Overstory, is his twelfth, and it’s a monumental work which was entirely inspired by trees.

It all started when Powers was teaching in California, and visited the giant redwoods there. That encounter amounted he says to “a religious conversion”. He realised he’d been blind to these amazing creatures all his life. So, to make up for lost time, in his new Booker long-listed novel he gives trees a voice:

"A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words."

Inspired by his passion for trees, Richard Powers has now moved to live in the forests of the Smoky Mountains which run along the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.

"In 15 to 20 minutes, I can be up and walking in these forests that are recovering from a century-and-a-half of logging and see the way that nature persists and transforms and perseveres."

On a brief trip to London, he looks back over a thirty-year writing career in which each novel is more audacious than the last. But one theme runs through all his writing: the power of music, and Powers plays the cello, guitar, clarinet and saxophone. His music choices include Dowland’s “Time Stands Still”, Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4, Bach’s Cantata BWV 100, and Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Big Issue founder John Bird talks to Michael Berkeley about the role music played in transforming his life.

For two weeks in 1970 John Bird worked in the Houses of Parliament washing dishes; in 2015 he returned as a life peer.

To say he didn’t have a great start in life is something of an understatement. Born in 1946 in a Notting Hill slum, he was five when his family was made homeless and at seven he was taken into care. Much of his teens was spent in reform school, he slept rough, and he went to prison several times for stealing.

But John Bird turned his life around and has devoted it to fighting for social justice and particularly for homeless people, founding the Big Issue in 1991 with Gordon Roddick. Nearly thirty years on, and with over 200 million copies sold, it’s become a multi-million pound social investment enterprise, and has helped 92,000 vendors earn nearly £120 million pounds.

John tells Michael about the music that cut through his chaotic childhood, and we hear Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture, played to John's class by a beleaguered music teacher and which John has never forgotten.

Passionate about making classical music accessible to all and breaking down notions of elitism in music, John chooses works by Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Weber, Wagner and Steve Reich, music he has discovered on his extraordinary journey from reform school and prison to the House of Lords.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Ed Vulliamy has worked all around the world as a journalist; he’s best-known for his prize-winning coverage of the war in Bosnia, on television and in The Guardian. The war crimes he reported on led to his becoming a witness in the trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and he was the first journalist since the Nuremberg trials to testify at an international war crimes tribunal. He went on to cover the 9/11 attacks in New York, and more recently the drug wars on the US/Mexico border.

Ed Vulliamy is also the son of the much-loved children’s author Shirley Hughes, something that often eclipses all his other achievements, and he was immortalised as a teenager in her books. Music has been crucial to him all through his career, and in conversation with Michael Berkeley he reveals that his very first job was as an extra in a production of Aida.

He talks movingly about his experience in Bosnia, about the psychological after-effects of being so near the horror of war, and about why he wishes he’d been a cartoonist instead.

Music choices include Verdi, Schubert, Shostakovich, Joan Baez, Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”, and the Bosnian singer Amira Medunjanin.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Bel Mooney describes her pleasures as: watching for kingfishers, riding pillion on a motorbike, and dancing to a 1962 Wurlitzer. That entertaining list reflects something of her enjoyment of a life which has brought many challenges as well as pleasures. Bel Mooney started out as a writer almost 50 years ago, and in 1976 was one of the first journalists to speak from personal experience about the terrible loss of having a stillborn baby; that article led to the founding of the first national stillbirth society. She’s a novelist, children’s writer and broadcaster, and the advice columnist for the Daily Mail, a job she says is more worthwhile than any other she’s done.

In Private Passions, Bel Mooney talks very openly about the ups and downs of a life which has brought about many transformations, about how her stillbirth changed her, and about finding happiness again after the ending of her marriage to Jonathan Dimbleby. Music plays a central role, and her choices include sacred music by Mozart and Pergolesi, Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Nigel Kennedy playing unaccompanied Bach, and jazz poetry from Christopher Logue.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley’s guest is Bella Hardy, a passionate interpreter of traditional songs who has also blossomed into an accomplished songwriter, drawing on the Peak District, where she grew up, as well as influences from as far away as Nashville and China.

Despite being only in her early thirties Bella has nine acclaimed solo albums to her name. She was part of the first - and highly memorable - Folk Prom in the Albert Hall in 2008 and she’s held the title of BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer of the Year.

Bella talks to Michael about her passion for storytelling, which is reflected in her love of opera as well as traditional songs – we hear both an aria from Maria Callas and an unaccompanied folk song by Oxfordshire glover Freda Palmer, recorded in the 1950s.

She talks about learning to play music by ear; her teenage years playing festivals in a folk band; and the challenges and satisfactions of running her own record label – and raising money to produce her albums through internet crowd funding.

A contemporary carol by Philip Stopford illustrates Bella's love of community singing, and her many inspirations are reflected in her choice of music played on instruments as diverse as the English accordion and a form of Chinese lute called the pipa.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Steve Punt is well known thanks to the popular Radio 4 Friday night comedy, The Now Show - with fellow-host Hugh Dennis, he’s been mocking politicians and celebrities for an astonishing twenty years now. He also presents The Third Degree, the Radio 4 quiz which pits undergraduates against professors. But behind the scenes he’s been busy writing for a whole host of other shows, such as Mock the Week and The Mary Whitehouse Experience, for comedians Jasper Carrott and Rory Bremner; he even used to write for the puppets on Spitting Image. He says “Weirdly, I think people are more inclined to believe comedians than they are politicians.”

In Private Passions, Steve talk to Michael Berkeley about how it all began: when he was bad at games at school, and forced to play the clown. He reminisces about his first job, in a music shop in Croydon, which he describes as being so rich in comic material that it was a bit like a sitcom – all of life was there. He talks about how audiences have changed thanks to social media, and why he worries that mocking politicians may just be a way of feeding their gigantic egos.

Music choices include Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, piano music by Debussy and by Scott Joplin, Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite, Dave Brubeck, and a comic masterpiece by Dudley Moore, “Bedazzled”.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

At first glance chocolate brownies, puff pastry and Battenberg cake don’t seem to have a great deal in common with theoretical maths, but Eugenia Cheng has harnessed her love of cooking in order to tackle the fear of maths so many of us share – and has published a book about it called How to Bake Pi.

Her mission is to rid the world of "maths phobia", and to this end she gave up her secure job teaching at Sheffield University to open up the world of maths to students from other disciplines as Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which also gives her the opportunity to pursue her own research in Category Theory - the purest form of maths.

And she’s a highly accomplished pianist, performing in concert halls around the world, as well as founding Liederstube - a popular venue for lieder and art song in Chicago which has hosted performers such as Gerald Finley and Richard Wiegold.

Eugenia explains to Michael how chocolate brownies and pure maths are related; how she prefers to work in cafes and bars with pen and paper rather than on a computer, and how her intensely emotional response to music is a release from the intensely ordered world of pure mathematics. And they dismantle stereotypes about Chinese ‘tiger mothers’, girls and maths, and the idea that people who are good at maths are automatically good at music.

Eugenia chooses music from Bach’s Matthew Passion, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto – which she herself has played – and from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony and Janacek’s opera The Makropulos Case, which take her on an emotional and philosophical journey towards a reconciliation with mortality.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

Michael Berkeley's guest is the best-selling author, illustrator, and Children's Laureate Lauren Child.

I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato; I Am Too Absolutely Small for School; I Am Not Sleepy and Will Not Go to Bed - these are just three of Lauren Child's bestselling, funny and touching picture books for young children. Her big-eyed characters such as Charlie and Lola, and Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent, capture the way children negotiate the small but significant challenges of family life, school and growing up. And they're illustrated with Lauren's trademark collages of her drawings and paintings, magazine cuttings, fabrics and photographs.

But she writes for older children too - novels featuring the feisty Clarice Bean and, most recently, Ruby Redfort, who has to juggle her mundane life at school with being a top international secret agent and expert code-breaker.

The winner of numerous awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal and multiple Smarties Prizes, Lauren Child has been Britain's Children's Laureate since 2017.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Lauren talks about the struggle she faced in her twenties to find direction in life, the challenge and joy of adopting her daughter from Mongolia, and why she can't work unless she's feeling melancholy. She chooses a Mongolian long song for her daughter; music by Satie that conjures up her own childhood; and music by Puccini and Vivaldi used in films that had a huge impact on the development of her imagination.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Ahead of this week's first test against India, Michael Berkeley's guest is cricket commentator Henry Blofeld.

Henry was a very promising young cricketer, but his prospects of a first-class career were ended by a near-fatal accident at the age of seventeen. He eventually found his way to cricket journalism and ultimately to Test Match Special, where he was a mainstay for nearly fifty years, illuminating each match with his forensic knowledge of the game, as well as entertaining listeners with sightings of snoozing policemen, passing buses, and pigeons on the outfield.

But last year Henry Blofeld declared his long innings in the commentary box closed. At his final test at Lords he was given the great honour of ringing the bell for the start of play, which he did attired in one of his signature colourful outfits - an orange shirt, yellow trousers and shoes, a pale green jacket and a yellow patterned bow tie.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Henry Blofeld reveals how his accident changed the course of his life, and discusses the difficult decision to retire from broadcasting, and the joy of finding love later in life. He chooses music from Mozart and Puccini which reflects his life-long love of opera; music from Gilbert and Sullivan which reminds him of his Norfolk childhood; a Schubert symphony; and music from Ravi Shankar that recalls the time he almost played for England against India.

Audrey Niffenegger had a huge worldwide success with her first novel, The Time-Traveller's Wife, which sold eight million copies in thirty-six languages. It was made into a film, of which, she says, the least said the better. But that commercial success bought her creative freedom - and what she's done with it is intriguing. After a second novel, about the ghosts in Highgate Cemetery, Audrey Niffenegger has gone back to her first love of art, combining story-telling with comic-book-style illustrations. Her latest graphic novel, "Bizarre Romance", features thirteen stories: about angels, monsters, fairies, cats, and - in her words - "oddballs in love".

In Private Passions Audrey Niffenegger tells Michael Berkeley about her own improbable long-distance romance with artist Eddie Campbell, who now illustrates her books. Her eclectic music list goes back to the twelfth century, with music by Hildegard von Bingen, and forward to Philip Glass, Radiohead, and the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, who recorded music fourteen feet down in an underground cistern. In fact, so great is Audrey Niffenegger's love of minimalism that she confesses she was even once seduced into listening, for some time, to the low mesmeric thrumming she heard in a foreign hotel room - before she realised it was not the radio but the the hotel heating system.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Paco Peña first started playing the guitar at the age of six; it was his older brother's guitar, and since there were nine children in the family, all living in two rooms in a crowded house in Córdoba, he had a ready-made audience right from the beginning. He made his first professional appearance at the age of twelve, and toured through Spain before moving to London in the 1960s, where he found himself sharing concerts with Jimi Hendrix. Over the last fifty years, he's established a world-wide reputation as a pre-eminent master of flamenco guitar. He's a composer, too, of both a requiem and a mass in flamenco style.

In Private Passions, Paco Peña takes us back to the Spain of his childhood; this was only a few years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and he describes the country he was born into as "fragile and tortured". He talks too about making a living as a musician on the Costa Brava, where he met his wife, and about what it was like to arrive in London in the 1960s, a time when flamenco guitar was relatively unknown.

Music choices include Mozart, Beethoven, de Falla - the Argentinian composer Eduardo Falú - and Bach, the composer Peña always listens to before going on stage to perform. He includes too the track he regards as flamenco at its quintessential best, by singer Camarón de la Isla and guitarist Paco de Lucía. And he gives away a few trade secrets about how to master passionate flamenco strumming - it involves painting your fingernails with glue.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

The actor Adjoa Andoh talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for theatre, opera, and the music that reflects both her English and African heritage.

Whether you're a regular at the National Theatre or Old Vic, prefer your entertainment on the big screen, or like to curl up on the sofa in front of Dr Who or Casualty (or - even - with the radio), you'll be familiar with the work of Adjoa Andoh.

The daughter of a history teacher and of an exiled Ghanaian journalist, she was heading for a career in the law before making a dramatic switch to acting, and has scarcely been out of work since. Her recent theatre work includes playing the exiled Black Panther leader in Assata Taught Me at The Gate, and Casca in Nicholas Hytner's highly acclaimed production of Julius Caesar at the Bridge Theatre.

She chooses music by Vaughan Williams, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bernstein, Puccini, Britten, and the African musician Dade Krama - music which reflects joyous moments in her life but also the challenges she's faced: growing up mixed race in rural England in the 60s and 70s, forging a career as an actor without a drama school training, and speaking up about being the mother of a transgender child.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Kim Moore won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize this year for her first poetry collection, "The Art of Falling", and is still only in her thirties. The judges described her prize-winning collection as "thrilling: language at its most irresistible and essential". But however thrilling, poets need to make a living, and Kim Moore's day job has been as a trumpet teacher, in Cumbria where she lives. She's also conducted brass bands.

In Private Passions, Kim Moore explores her musical passion for brass, from Handel's Messiah through to Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, taking in the Grimethorpe Colliery Band on the way. She tells Michael Berkeley how she started writing, and about her sequence of poems exploring a dark and abusive relationship. She reflects too on the influence of her father's job as a scaffolder, and how a fear of falling and images of falling haunt her work. And there are some true confessions about what it's like to play the trumpet in a bandstand with one dog and the drunk who slept there the night before.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of Radio 3's week in the forest, Michael Berkeley talks to wildlife presenter, President of the RSPB and accomplished musician Miranda Krestovnikoff.

She's dived with sharks, shown viewers how to eat roadkill, and searched for mammoth bones in the North Sea. The co-presenter of ten series of Coast, Miranda's also a regular on The One Show and Radio 4's Costing the Earth. As well as the RSPB she's involved in numerous other environmental and wildlife charities. She tells Michael about staying up all night waiting for pine martens in a Scottish forest, and a frightening experience diving with sharks.

But she's also a talented musician - a flautist, pianist, and singer who plays with the New Bristol Sinfonia and sings in choirs in the city. We hear a recording of Miranda singing a Duruflé motet with the Bristol University Singers and from other composers whose music she has performed - Holst, Vaughan Williams, and Rachmaninoff, whose All Night Vigil was played at her wedding. And we hear a piece that combines her love of music and birds - Martinů's Sonata for Flute and Piano - the piece that inspired her as a young flautist and which also features the song of a nightjar.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

In midsummer week, Radio 3 enters one of the most potent sources of the human imagination. 'Into the Forest' explores the enchantment, escape and magical danger of the forest in summer, with slow radio moments featuring the sounds of the forest, allowing time out from today's often frenetic world.

Dr Richard Smith heads an organisation called Patients Know Best, and having been editor of the British Medical Journal for most of his career, he now enjoys stirring things up in a provocative weekly blog there. Among his targets: the sinister power of drug companies - and the not unrelated tendency of doctors to over-treat illnesses like cancer. When he's not stirring things up at home, Richard Smith is in Bangladesh, working for a charity trying to prevent the terrible human loss caused by infected drinking water. He has also worked as a television doctor and at one point answered readers' letters for Women's Realm.

In Private Passions, Richard Smith tells Michael Berkeley about his strong belief that doctors and patients collude to hide the truth about disease and death, and explains why he gives a talk called provocatively: "Death: the Upside". He reveals too how music has sustained him at crisis points in his life.

Choices include Bach's cello suites, the Stan Tracey Quartet, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Haydn, Deborah Pritchard, and sacred music by the medieval composer Hermannus Contractus.

The Hay Festival began in 1988 with 250 people in a field in mid Wales. Thirty years later, the crowd has swelled to more than quarter of a million - 265,000 people are expected to turn up this year over ten days - and it's still in a field in mid-Wales. But the Hay Festival has also grown into an international brand, with spin-offs across the world in Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Segovia.

The Festival founder, Peter Florence, has been running it all that time; he started it with his parents - his father was a theatre manager for Sam Wanamaker. Legend has it - and Peter confirms this - that it was partly funded by winnings from a poker game. In Private Passions, he looks back over the lessons of the last thirty years, and reveals how he has grappled with censorship when staging festivals in Hungary and Mexico.

Peter Florence's music list reflects a passion for Bach and Mahler, and for the oud player Anouar Brahem. He chooses Handel's Sarabande, made famous by the film Barry Lyndon, and Sarah Vaughan singing "The Man I Love", which he describes as the sexiest song in the world.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Berkeley talks to the food writer, artist and journalist Elisabeth Luard about her favourite music and the memories it conjures up of the joys and tragedies of family life.

The winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award for Lifetime Achievement, she has written more than twenty cookbooks, including European Peasant Cookery, Flavours of Andalucía, and A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse. And her compelling series of memoirs documents the joys and appalling tragedy she's experienced as a mother; the delight she found in living abroad with her young children; and the ups and downs of her long marriage. The latest is Squirrel Pie: Adventures in Food Across the Globe.

Elisabeth tells Michael about her childhood growing up in embassies in South America and her return to school in England and a very special choir master. She chooses flamenco music that reminds her of her life in rural pre-tourism Andalucia bringing up her four young children.

We hear Elisabeth's friend Christopher Logue reading from his poem War Music, and music by Mozart and Beethoven - and we hear a song which was special to Elisabeth's daughter Francesca, who died in her twenties.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

For Lubaina Himid, winning the Turner Prize is recognition for thirty-five years of work as a painter, curator and installation artist. Her work is witty, vibrantly coloured, and provocative; in her most famous work, "Naming the Money", she filled galleries with more than a hundred huge and very beautiful cut-outs of African figures from the past - the forgotten black servants and musicians who were brought back by their slave-masters to live in Britain in the 18th century.

Lubaina Himid herself was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, but came here as a baby, first to Blackpool and then to London. She now lives in Preston, where she's Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. She was awarded an MBE for services to black women's art. She says "My work is a mixture of humour, celebration, optimism and fury. I want to challenge the order of things."

In Private Passions, she talks about how winning the Turner Prize has changed her perspective, and about how she creates a musical soundtrack to her installations. She pays tribute to her aunt, who played the violin and brought music into the house, and talks honestly about how difficult it was to make a living as a young artist. Musical choices include Bellini, Bruch, Janacek, and Nina Simone.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anne Sebba, the best-selling biographer of iconic women including Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill's mother Jennie, Laura Ashley, and Mother Teresa.

Her most recent book tells the stories of the women of Paris in the 1940s. She follows the lives of housewives, Resistance fighters, shop girls, prostitutes and celebrities, all the time examining the big, small - and often impossible - choices people have to make in wartime. And we hear part of an operetta composed by one of these women, imprisoned by the Nazis at Ravensbruck.

Anne tells Michael about her controversial biography of Wallis Simpson in which she claims that we should have more understanding of her situation and more admiration for her as a person - and she argues that Wallis married Edward with great reluctance.

We hear Artur Rubinstein playing Rachmaninov, which brings back memories for Anne of interviewing him when she was a young journalist, and she chooses music by Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Verdi. A passionate advocate for the celebration of women's lives and talents, Anne chooses performances by Robyn Archer, Maria Callas and Margaret Fingerhut.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

The artist Phyllida Barlow shares her passion for music that reflects her sculpture, in its defiance of convention and delight in surprise.

For years Phyllida Barlow was so desperate for people to see her sculptures that she would leave them on the street or in disused factories; or she would install them in friends' houses, using pianos and ironing boards as plinths.

Initially overlooked by museums and galleries, she was in her sixties when she found widespread recognition - in the last decade she's been invited to exhibit all over the world, and has became a Royal Academician, a CBE, and the recipient of numerous awards. Her 2014 exhibition at Tate Britain was unforgettable - she filled the cavernous Duveen Galleries with huge, gravity-defying pieces made out of timber and scrap materials which appeared to be about to topple over or to be on the point of collapse. And in 2017 she received the ultimate accolade of representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.

She talks to Michael Berkeley about finding success in later life, how she juggled life as a teacher, artist and mother of five, and the challenges of constructing monumental installations. She chooses music by Birtwistle, Wagner, Janacek, Webern, and Messiaen, pieces which reflect her fascination with size, scale, texture and unexpected beauty.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

In a revealing and entertaining programme for Easter Day, the Reverend Richard Coles talks to Michael Berkeley about his double life as a celebrity priest and his enduring passion for classical music.

The only vicar to have had a number one hit and to have danced the paso doble dressed as Flash Gordon in front of 10 million television viewers, Richard Coles is also the presenter of Radio 4's Saturday Live and the author of several books including a devastatingly honest autobiography in which he describes how he swapped the sex-and-drugs fuelled world of pop stardom for the life of a parish priest.

Richard talks to Michael about how he balances being a celebrity - appearing on shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Masterchef and Have I Got News For You - with the day to day normalities of being a vicar in rural Northamptonshire. He reveals how Mozart helped his recovery from depression as a teenager, looks back on the risks he took as a hedonistic pop star with The Communards in the 1980s, and talks frankly about the difficulties of being gay in the Church of England.

Classical music has always been at the centre of Richard's life from his days as a teenage pianist and chorister, and he continues to discover new passions such as Janacek and Wagner. He chooses choral music which reminds him of studying theology at King's College London, jazz in memory of his racy grandfather, and the Monks of Solesmes singing from the Gradual Mass of Easter.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Xavier Bray is a renowned specialist in 17th- and 18th-century art, and he's been director for a year now of the Wallace Collection, that rich collection of rococo painting, china, and armour, housed in a grand mansion in Marylebone that remains something of a well-kept secret. Bray would like to change that, opening up the gallery to a wider public and to music of all kinds. He himself would have loved to be an opera singer, and he has sung in choirs all his life. His party piece is a demonstration of Mongolian throat singing, which he taught himself after going to a concert as a student. He gives Michael Berkeley a demonstration, and discusses, more seriously, the connection between the visual arts and music. He reveals his other musical passions: for Marin Marais, flamenco, Bizet, Messiaen, and for the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

The poet and singer-songwriter Gwyneth Glyn talks to Michael Berkeley about the music she loves from Wales and around the world.

Gwyneth has been described as a poet among singers and a singer among poets. She's also a television script writer, a playwright and a children's author, having won the Crown at the Urdd Eisteddfod aged 18, and going on to be appointed Wales' National Poet Laureate for Children in 2006, the year she also won Best Female Artist in the Radio Cymru Rock and Pop Awards. Brought up in a Welsh speaking household, she's a passionate advocate of the language both within Wales and internationally.

Gwyneth talks to Michael about writing a libretto for the first ever Welsh language opera, growing up in a rural Welsh-speaking community, and the pleasures and challenges of passing the language on to the next generation.

She chooses music from her collaboration with Indian ghazal singer Tauseef Akhtar, as well as music by Tippett, Welsh folk hero Meredydd Evans, Rimsky Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Richard Flanagan first came to worldwide attention in 2001 with one of the most original titles ever: "Gould's Book of Fish, a Novel in Twelve Fish". It was his third novel, the story of a 19th-century forger sentenced to hard labour off the coast of Van Diemen's Land. Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania as it's now called, is where Flanagan was brought up, and still lives and writes, publishing every few years a novel that is extraordinarily thought-provoking and original - and very different from all the books before.

His last novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the Death Railway in Burma, won the Booker Prize. Four years on, his new novel First Person is the story of a conman, and it's based on an extraordinary experience of his own. Flanagan dreamed of being a writer but was working as a builder's labourer when he suddenly got a commission: to write the life story of a notorious conman who was facing jail. They spent three weeks together shut up in a publisher's office, and it was frightening to be incarcerated with such a violent murderer. After three weeks the man shot himself, but for Flanagan that trauma was just the beginning of the story - he then had to recreate the criminal's life on the page, making it all up.

Flanagan talks to Michael Berkeley about a life lived on the edge, in the wild beauty of Tasmania, and about his admiration for those who live outside the cultural mainstream, often lone voices of dissent. His music choices reflect this: the Polish Australian composer Cezary Skubiszewski, Arvo Part, John Field, Von Westoff, and Jane Birkin.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

In a special edition to mark International Women's Day next week, Michael Berkeley talks to Britain's most decorated female Olympic athlete, the rower Dame Katherine Grainger.

Katherine won a silver medal in Rio in 2016 - at the age of 40. It was her fifth medal from five consecutive Olympic Games, including a gold in the double sculls at London 2012. On her return from Rio, she was voted the Olympians' Olympian by her fellow Team GB athletes. The holder of six World Champion titles, she has an MBE and a CBE, was made a dame in 2017 New Year's Honours list, and, since last summer, has been the Chair of UK Sport.

On top of her huge sporting achievements, Katherine has a PhD in Criminal Law and is Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University.

Katherine tells Michael how music has helped her to cope with the pressure of competing at the highest level, and how music has been an important part of her life since her Scottish childhood. She chooses a Mozart aria to remind her of her grandparents in Aberdeen, and Rachmaninov for her rowing partner Cath Bishop, who is a talented pianist.

In celebration of International Women's Day, all but one of her choices - which include Elgar, Chopin and Bach - are performed or conducted by female musicians.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Singer, multi-instrumentalist, electronic sitar player, performer and DJ, Bishi has performed with everyone from Yoko Ono, Pulp, Goldfrapp, the LSO, and the Kronos Quartet. A glamorous and extravagantly costumed presence on stage, she's influenced by both Eastern and Western classical music as well as electronic dance, glam rock and folk music.

Michael Berkeley talks to her about growing up with the music of her mother, Susmita Bhattacharya, a celebrated Indian classical singer who knew Ravi Shankar. Bishi has her own take on the sitar, which she plays like an electric guitar.

A talented chorister and pianist as a child, she could have chosen a career in Western classical music, but instead has brought it to bear on her own panoramic musical style.

She chooses music from Ravi Shankar's collaboration with Philip Glass, iconic film soundtracks she's used in her work as a DJ, a song she's sung from a Bulgarian choir and pieces from major influences Mica Levi and Meredith Monk.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Bernard Cornwell is now one of the world's most popular writers of historical fiction. He's famous for his Sharpe series, about a British soldier during the Napoleonic wars, and for his Last Kingdom books, set in 9th-century Britain. Both have become successful television adaptations, with a third season of The Last Kingdom being filmed for Netflix at the moment. The numbers are pretty staggering: 57 books published, worldwide sales of 35 million.

But Bernard Cornwell owes his existence as a writer to a very happy accident. It was 1978, he was in an office in Edinburgh, the lift doors opened, and out stepped a blonde. In his own words, he "fell disastrously in love". But Judy, the woman who stepped out of the lift, was American, and, when he moved to America to live with her, he couldn't get a green card. Unemployed, he decided to write a novel. And so the Sharpe series was born.

In Private Passions, Bernard Cornwell reveals his extraordinary childhood among a religious sect called the "Peculiar People". He was adopted, and he tells the story of his search for his birth parents. When he found his mother, her shelves were full of his books. The music he loves now is very much influenced by his lifelong rebellion against this ascetic religious upbringing: he loves Requiems and Catholic liturgical settings. Music choices include Faure's Requiem, Mozart's Requiem, Allegri's Miserere, and songs from Shakespeare.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Berkeley talks to the actress Frances Barber about the music and friendships that have inspired her throughout her career. From Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre to the evil Madame Kovarian in Dr Who, from Peter Greenaway to Inspector Morse, and from Chekhov at the Royal Shakespeare Company to playing a seductive barrister in TV's Silk, Frances Barber is one of our most versatile actors. From the moment she won the Olivier Award for the Most Promising Newcomer, her hugely diverse career has spanned theatre, television and film - and every genre from comedy, sci-fi, kitchen sink drama, to theatrical classics and Hollywood.

Frances tells Michael how she discovered classical music by working her way through the records in her local library when she was setting out on her acting career; she chooses Chopin to remind her of that time.

In a funny and revealing interview, Frances talks about the music that's been part of her work, including Michael Nyman's soundtrack to A Zed and Two Noughts and songs by Brecht and the Pet Shop Boys. And she chooses music that reminds her of people she's loved, including Schubert for her close friend Alan Rickman.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is steeped in Viking lore. She travels through the icy landscapes of the Far North in the footsteps of those Norse "far travellers" who have left us their wonderful poetic stories of kings and trolls and dragons. She's an Associate Professor at Durham University and an AHRC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, and her fieldwork has taken her pretty much everywhere the Vikings went: through Greenland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Orkney. Recently she went to stay on the Arctic island of Svalbard, where in 24-hour darkness she encountered a family of polar bears.

Eleanor Barraclough's music list full of snow and ice - glittering, shimmering music - from the Norwegian composer Frode Fjellheim and Sibelius's 5th Symphony, through Eriks Esenvalds' "Northern Lights", to Martin Carthy, singing "Lady Franklin's Lament". She ends with music by Geoffrey Burgon that will resonate with anyone growing up at the end of the last century: the theme tune to the BBC dramatization of Narnia.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Alistair Spalding talks about dance with the zeal of the convert. Although he's headed Sadler's Wells since 2004, commissioning new work from leading international choreographers - Akram Khan, Mark Morris, Matthew Bourne, Pina Bausch - he doesn't come from a dance background. He left school at sixteen, and worked in a solicitor's office, aiming to be a lawyer. He then studied linguistics and philosophy and became a primary school teacher. And so, how did he end up becoming Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sadler's Wells in London, the top British venue for international dance?

In Private Passions, Alistair Spalding reveals his route to an unlikely career, beginning with the first dance performance he ever saw: John Cage was in the pit, blowing on a conch shell. He explains his vision of drawing in the best contemporary composers to write for dance, and of widening the repertoire to include older dancers. He discusses too his innovative and highly popular dance afternoons for the over-65s.

Music choices include Debussy, Bach, Thomas Adès, Monteverdi, Nick Cave and Joni Mitchell.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

The physicist and broadcaster Helen Czerski talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, inspired by her Polish heritage and her fascination with technology and exploration.

Having gained a wonderfully titled PhD in Experimental and Explosive Physics from Cambridge in 2006, Helen worked in the US and Canada, and is now a Research Fellow at University College London where she specialises in the relationship between waves, weather and climate.

But apart from her academic research and teaching she has another mission - to make physics accessible to us all. She does this by exploring the connections between the way the world works and our everyday experiences - for example weather patterns can be seen in microcosm when you stir milk into your tea. Hence the title of her highly successful book - Storm in a Teacup.

She writes regularly for the Guardian, and has made numerous radio and television programmes about colour, bubbles, the sun, the weather - and the science behind sound and music. Her latest is a three part television series about temperature.

She chooses music by Strauss which reminds her of her Polish heritage; music by Dvorak which evokes the long sea voyages she undertakes for her research into ocean bubbles; music by Verdi which celebrates her fascination with technology and industry. And she gives the definitive, scientific answer to that most vital of questions: what's the best shape for a champagne glass?

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Alfred Brendel is one of the great musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He's renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven; in fact he was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven.

Alfred Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of only 17, in 1948, and went on performing around the world for more than sixty years. Since his retirement in 2008 he has relished the chance to teach young musicians, and to spend more time going to exhibitions, reading and writing; he has published six volumes of essays and two collections of his own poetry.

In Private Passions he talks to Michael Berkeley about the composers and musicians he admires, and looks back at his early life. It wasn't a musical childhood; the family had no record player, but his mother used to sing cabaret songs. And later, as a teenager, his father managed a hotel and he discovered a stack of LPs, all operettas. The War made an unforgettable impression. Alfred Brendel reveals too what drew him to live in Britain: the musical culture here, the Third Programme, the Proms, and the flourishing choral tradition. He chooses one of Gesualdo's madrigals, which for a long time was thought too difficult to sing. We also hear Liszt, Schubert, Bach, Zelenka, Beethoven, and Bizet's Carmen. At the end of the programme, he talks honestly about his recent deafness, and how it has affected his love of music. He gets no pleasure from playing the piano, he says, but still loves the violin; and he dreams of music all the time, and plays it continually in his head.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Many Private Passions guests over the years have revealed their passion for Bach. But for some, the great composer has really transformed their lives.

The great primatologist Jane Goodall, for instance, describes how she reached such a dark time in her life that she considered giving up altogether. Four of her workers had been kidnapped in Africa, in the chimpanzee sanctuary she'd established. The money for her research had come to an end. At crisis point, she went into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and heard Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor being played on the organ. Bach gave her hope, and transformed her vision of the world so that she could carry on. "It helped me to understand that I was a small person in a big world. And the world was very beautiful. It caused me to think about the meaning of our lives, and what am amazing thing it is that this little creature can encompass so much. So I came out a different person."

"Bach deals with death, but also with transcendence..." - so says architect Daniel Libeskind who reveals how Bach sustained him when he was building the memorial to 9/11 in New York. Alan Bennett describes first hearing the St Matthew Passion in Leeds Parish Church when he was growing up, while Vivienne Westwood discovered Bach's Passions only recently: "I don't believe in God, but the beauty, the hypnotic rhythm lifts you." And tenor Mark Padmore talks about singing the Evangelist in Bach's Passions, how he never tires of the music, and how there's always something more to discover. As Joan Armatrading says at the end of the programme: " This guy Bach - how IS that humanly possible?"

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Jane Birkin came to fame in the swinging 60s, thanks to her wild beauty and daring appearances in avant-garde films such as Blow-up, and thanks also to her tempestuous relationship with Serge Gainsbourg. In 1969 their song "Je t'aime" was banned by the BBC and the rest is history; it became the biggest-selling foreign language record ever. Since then, Jane Birkin has appeared in more than fifty films, been awarded the OBE for services to Anglo-French relations and released thirteen albums.

In Private Passions, she remembers Paris in the 1960s, and above all, her beloved Serge Gainsbourg; she describes the night they met in vivid cinematic detail. She talks too about her marriage to the film composer John Barry and chooses music he wrote for the funeral of her daughter. She talks perceptively about getting older, and the strange freedom age brings.

Music choices include Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring; Allegri's Miserere; John Barry's music for The Lion in Winter; Mahler's 10th Symphony, and Bernstein's West Side Story.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

The playwright and novelist Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley.

Michael Frayn is an acute observer of the absurdities and pain of the human condition, and his writing career has spanned journalism, novels, philosophy, Russian translation, and plays both philosophical and farcical. Noises Off, his 1982 farce about a farce, has become one of the twentieth century's best loved and most successful plays and is frequently described as the funniest farce ever written. Equally praised have been his philosophical plays such as Copenhagen and Democracy.

He tells Michael about his childhood in Surrey, which partly inspired his award-winning novel Spies, his time in the army learning Russian, and the pain and pleasure of farce - the most technically demanding of all literary forms.

And he shares his lifelong love of classical music, choosing pieces by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Mozart, Mahler, and Brahms - and a piece by his late mother-in-law Muriel Herbert.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Susan Richards, writer and commentator on contemporary Russia, talks to Michael Berkeley about her fascination with the country and her passion for 20th-century Russian music.

Susan's first book, Epics of Everyday Life, was about the euphoric period after the collapse of communism. She travelled all over Russia to try to find out how ordinary people were coping with the discovery that they'd been so comprehensively lied to for so long. Her second book, sixteen years in the writing, was Lost and Found in Russia, and it described the collective nervous breakdown that took place after that. Both books are a testimony to her fascination with the lives of ordinary Russians - and a celebration of friendship. They also include hair-raising encounters with the KGB and the Mafia.

A Founding Editor of OpenDemocracy, set up in 2001 to encourage democratic debate around the world, Susan is also the co-founder, with her husband the television producer Roger Graef, of Bookaid, which has sent more than a million books to Russian public libraries.

Susan's music takes us on a journey from pre-revolutionary Russia to the early 21st century, with pieces by Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina. And we hear music inspired by a Siberian forest, and a singer Susan first met during a hair-raising encounter with the mafia.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of Radio 3's coverage of the London Jazz Festival, Michael Berkeley talks to the saxophonist and bass clarinettist John Surman, who over a career of dizzying versatility that spans more than fifty years, has shown us just how many different ways jazz can be made. Surman's hundreds of recordings include solos with synthesizers, saxophone trios, trios with voice and drums, with brass bands and big bands. He has made albums with church choirs, duos with church organs and with drums, as well as composing music for saxophone and string quartet.

He has worked with most of the jazz greats of the last half century, including Ronnie Scott, Alexis Korner and Gil Evans, and more unusually for a jazz musician he's worked at the Paris Opera, with the Trans4mation Quartet, and on modern reinterpretations of the songs of John Dowland. He's been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2017 Ivor Novello Jazz Award.

In Private Passions, John Surman tells Michael how his love for music began in his childhood in Devon, when he was a talented boy treble. He chooses Bach's St Matthew Passion, which he first heard in a Plymouth church, and Beethoven's "Pathétique" sonata (No 8, in C minor), which his father would play on the piano. Surman's love of jazz is entwined with his love of classical music, and among his musical passions Duke Ellington and Miles Davis go hand-in-hand with Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and the voice of Kathleen Ferrier. Happily based in Norway for the last decade, Surman has chosen a music list to help him through the long dark Scandinavian winters.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Jane Greenwood.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning writer whose books return again and again to Russia. His latest novel is Red Sky at Noon, the last of his Moscow Trilogy, following Sashenka and One Night in Winter. His most recent history, The Romanovs 1613-1918, tells the story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness. It's a world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance. Montefiore is also author of the epic history books Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Young Stalin; and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

In Private Passions, Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the story of how his grandparents fled the Russian Revolution, buying tickets to New York. Instead, they were cheated, and landed in Ireland on the coast of Cork. In Ireland they had to flee persecution again - and relocated to Newcastle. He talks too about what he saw first-hand as a war correspondent during the fall of the Soviet Union. He explores the similarities between Putin, Stalin, and the Tsars who came before them. And he reflects on what "Russian Culture" means in a country with such a turbulent history.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production by BBC Radio 3.

Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter whose latest drama series on the BBC, "Gunpowder", dramatizes the story of Guy Fawkes from the point of view of the Catholics, who were persecuted in England at the time. All through his substantial body of work Ronan Bennett has explored the roots of violence and terrorism, something he knows about from personal experience, having grown up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He was imprisoned twice as a young man, accused of IRA terrorist offences, but was acquitted both times, not before spending a total of almost three years in prison, sometimes in solitary confinement.

After he came out of prison for the second time, Ronan Bennett made the decision to study history at King's College London, and went on to do a PhD on crime and law enforcement in 17th-century England. In Private Passions he talks about how studying history is a way of trying to make sense of his own painful experience. He looks back on his childhood and chooses Berlioz's opera "The Trojans" for his mother; he includes, too, choices for his own children, who have widened his musical tastes, with Chopin and the grime artist Kano. He talks movingly about the death of his wife, the journalist Georgina Henry, and about the music which he listened to as she died - and which then gave him hope.

Musical choices include Thomas Tallis, the Chieftains, Jessye Norman singing from Strauss's "Four Last Songs", and Bon Iver.

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke.

Thirty years ago, Vesna Goldsworthy fell in love with a young Englishman she met at a summer school in Bulgaria; she moved to England to be with him, much to the disapproval of her parents, arriving in London in 1986. Since then, she's established a reputation as a writer of great wit and originality: with her memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries; with her poetry; and in 2015 with her first novel, Gorsky, which became a best-seller and which was serialized on Radio 4. Vesna Goldsworthy is also a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

In Private Passions, Vesna Goldsworthy talks to Michael Berkeley about being brought up in Belgrade during the Communist regime. The popular idea is of an era which was grey and philistine - but in fact there was a huge amount of classical music around. And when she moved to England, her friends and family were horrified. They asked, "How could you move to a country where there is no music"? She reveals why she started writing a memoir of her Serbian childhood: because her doctors told her she was dying of cancer, and she wanted to leave a record for her son. Happily, the cancer was cured, but it taught her a lifelong lesson: not to take life too seriously.

Vesna Goldsworthy's music choices include the Romanian-Serbian composer Ion Iovanovici; an Orthodox address to the Virgin by Divna Ljubojevic; the Sephardic song, "Adio Querida", by Yasmin Levy; and a popular Russian song from the Second World War. She ends with Purcell, a composer she discovered only after she moved to a country "with no music".

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Allan Corduner is an astonishingly versatile actor, equally at home in the West End, on Broadway, in television series such as Homeland, or in films like Yentl, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, in which he played the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, perfect casting for an actor who is also an accomplished pianist.

He talks to Michael Berkeley about his favourite music, with pieces by Scriabin, Sibelius, and Bruch that reflect his Russian, Finnish and Jewish heritage. And Allan chooses piano music by Schubert, which he loved playing as a child, and his favourite recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, with Glenn Gould.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of Radio 3's Why Music? The Key to Memory weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to the psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely is one of our most eminent psychiatrists: until recently the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he is the current president of the Royal Society of Medicine, and Regis Chair of Psychiatry at King's College London. An interest in unexplained symptoms and syndromes has led to many years of research in areas such as Chronic Fatigue and Gulf War Syndrome.

Simon talks to Michael about the powerful relationship between music and memory, his decision to study medicine rather than history, and how playing the flute once got him out of a tricky situation at Tel Aviv airport.

He chooses violin music by Brahms and Dvorak for his parents, shares his love of opera with music by Puccini and Mozart, and tells Michael about his other passion - musical theatre.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of the BBC's opera season, designer Hildegard Bechtler talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music and some of the twenty-seven operas she has worked on all over the world.

Hildegard is one of our most prolific and successful theatre and opera designers. Born in Germany, she moved to Britain aged eighteen, and very quickly established herself first in film, then in theatre and opera. Her style combines wit and invention to deliver minimalist style with maximum impact.

She has designed for every major theatre and opera company including the Royal Opera, ENO, Glyndebourne, and the Royal National Theatre. And the international nature of her work is typified by one of her most recent productions - Thomas Adès's new opera The Exterminating Angel - staged in Salzburg, Copenhagen, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Hildegard chooses music from two operas she has worked on, The Ring Cycle and The Damnation of Faust; a Burns song which reminds her of her love of Scotland and her husband, the actor Bill Paterson; and a piece by her namesake, Hildegard of Bingen.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Maurice Riordan is a poet much preoccupied with time - how time suddenly stands still, or speeds up, or loops you back in dreams to childhood - in his case, to the countryside of County Cork where he grew up. It's a theme he's explored in four prize-winning collections of verse, alongside translations and a series of anthologies - including an anthology of very early Irish poetry, scribbled by Irish monks in the margins of Latin texts. In his day job, he's professor of poetry at Sheffield Hallam University and was until recently editor of Poetry Review.

In Private Passions, Maurice Riordan talks to Michael Berkeley about his childhood in the "horse-drawn, candle-lit" Irish countryside and the music which inspires him, beginning with the Gregorian Chant he heard as a young altar boy. We hear the haunting unaccompanied voice of the traditional Irish singer Darach Ó Cathain, and of the Traveller and banjo player Margaret Barry. Other choices include Debussy, Piazzola and Samuel Barber. Ian Bostridge sings an aria from Monteverdi's Orfeo, begging the boatman Charon to carry him to the underworld: a metaphor, Riordan believes, for what poets do. They take you, he claims, deep down into the underworld of the unconscious. To illustrate this, he reads "The January Birds", a poem about hearing birds singing in a local cemetery:

The birds in Nunhead Cemetery begin Before I've flicked a switch, turned on the gas. There must be some advantage to the light I tell myself, viewing my slackened chin Mirrored in the rain-dark window glass, While from the graveyard's trees, the birds begin...

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Stephen Poliakoff made his mark as a playwright very early; he began writing plays as a schoolboy and got first review in The Times when he was only seventeen. At the age of twenty-four he became writer in residence at the National Theatre and he's also written for the RSC. But it's as a television scriptwriter and director that Poliakoff is now best-known, with series such as "Shooting the Past", "Dancing on the Edge" and recently, "Close to the Enemy". Some of our very greatest actors - Maggie Smith, Lindsey Duncan, Timothy Spall - have queued up to work with him time and again. There have been nineteen television dramas and films to date, broadcast over the last forty years, and though they all have different settings, there's a strong atmosphere in common. Filmed in strange dream-like locations - old train carriages, empty country houses, abandoned ballrooms - they explore how the past haunts the present. And in particular, family secrets.

Poliakoff claims that every family has at least three good stories in it; and his certainly has more than its fair share. In Private Passions he tells Michael Berkeley about how his father witnessed the Russian Revolution as a boy, and reflects on the influence of Russian culture on his childhood. He talks too about the importance of trying to observe life with the fresh curiosity of a child, and how his films capture a child's-eye view.

Music choices include Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp; Bach's Cantata "O Jesu Christ, mein Lebens Licht"; Haydn's Symphony No 49 and Michael Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Sebastian Barry's great-grand-father was a traditional Irish musician, who played on the wooden flute and piccolo. His mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; his aunt Mary O'Hara had a huge career as a singer and harpist with her own series on the BBC. Little surprise then that Sebastian Barry's writing is musical in the widest sense; full of the rich music of everyday speech. It's an impressive body of work: fourteen plays, two volumes of poetry, and nine novels. Two of his novels, "The Secret Scripture" and the latest, "Days Without End", have won the coveted Costa Book of the Year prize. When he thanked the judges earlier this year, Barry declared: "You have made me crazy happy from the top of my head to my toes in a way that is a little bit improper at sixty-one."

In Private Passions, Sebastian Barry talks to Michael Berkeley about the "gaps" in Irish history he has explored in his books: areas which are touchy, taboo, and perhaps deliberately forgotten now, such as the fate of those who were Catholic, but loyal to Britain. He reveals too that his latest novel, a love story between two young soldiers, was inspired by his son coming out as gay.

Music choices include Bruch's Violin Concerto; Handel's "Judas Maccabaeus"; Alfred Deller singing "Three Ravens"; Bach's Cello Suites; and his aunt Mary O'Hara singing a song written by Sebastian Barry's own mother.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Craig-Martin is one of our most influential artists, celebrated for his huge black and white wall drawings and intensely coloured paintings of everyday objects, as well as his installations, sculpture, and computer-generated works. A pioneering conceptualist, he's always provoking questions about what we understand to be art.

Born in Dublin in 1941, Michael Craig-Martin grew up in the United States but returned to Britain in the 1960s where he's lived and worked ever since. He's had numerous solo exhibitions and his work is in national collections worldwide.

He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, having taught there for over four decades, and he's been nicknamed 'the godfather of the Young British Artists', who include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas.

He received a CBE in 2001 and was knighted in 2016.

Michael Craig-Martin talks to Michael Berkeley about the parallels between his art and the music he loves, including Satie, Bach, the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, and he reveals his long-standing passion for opera.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Dame Vivien Duffield is one of our leading philanthropists, and her passion for the arts - and particularly opera - is reflected in her giving. Her Foundation, the Clore Duffield Foundation, has supported the Royal Opera House, the Tate, the Royal Ballet, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Southbank Centre and The National Children's Museum. It all amounts to more than 200 million pounds over the last fifty years. In 2008 the Prince of Wales presented her with one of the first medals for arts philanthropy.

In Private Passions Dame Vivien talks to Michael Berkeley about why it's important to give money to the arts in this country, and about the legacy of her extraordinary family. Her father, the businessman Sir Charles Clore, was brought up poor in East London - but ended up a millionaire property developer and owner of Selfridges. Despite his own success, he was determined that his daughter should never go into the business, a job not at all suitable for a woman. But he did take her to concerts and the opera, and ignited Dame Vivien's passion for the arts.

Dame Vivien's choices capture key performances she's been lucky enough to see: Edif Piaf, for instance, on the Paris stage, "tiny, in a little black slip dress, virtually carried on to the stage." She saw Callas too, and Placido Domingo, in a disastrous first night at the Royal Opera House when he kept sliding down the vertiginous slate set. Other music choices include Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony; Wagner's Parsifal; and Ravel's Kaddisch sung by Jessye Norman.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Nick Davies is an expert in the art of deception - as practised by the cuckoo. He has spent his career studying that deceiving, murderous bird, and living in woods and wild gardens, even up in a mountain hut in the Pyrenees. He's a hugely influential scientist: since the late 1970s he's really helped define the field in behavioural ecology, and he's Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Pembroke College. But really, as he tells Michael Berkeley, he's happier not sitting in a library, but roaming the fens.

In Private Passions, Nick Davies reveals what he's learned about bird behaviour, and how birds use song to compete and, sometimes, collaborate to sing duets. He explains how some birds sing in poetry, some in prose; and why the blackbird in your back garden is a better songster than the nightingale. Music choices reflect his passion for the beauty of the natural world: Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, for instance, Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending, and songs by Herbert Howells and Samuel Barber about the transformative power of nature. We also hear the song of larks, nightingales, blackbirds, pink-footed geese - and the croaking of natterjack toads.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

A chance to hear a programme recorded in 2017 with Michael Berkeley talking to the children's author Shirley Hughes, who died in February this year. On her ninetieth birthday, Shirley Hughes, the creator of many of our best-loved and most enduring children's books, talked to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions.

In a career spanning nearly 70 years, Shirley wrote as many books and illustrated nearly two hundred. She was the first winner of the Book Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal, and was awarded a CBE for services to literature. Her picture books have an enduring appeal with their sympathetic but unsentimental depiction of the small dramas and joys of family life.

Shirley Hughes chose music by Scriabin, Mozart, Beethoven and The Beatles - who reminded her of her roots in Liverpool and share her love of storytelling.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Dan Pearson discovered his passion for gardens very young, building landscapes for his toy trolls out of stones. He's now one of our most influential landscape designers, with work ranging from private gardens around the world - including Chatsworth - to the 600-acre Tokachi Forest Garden in northern Japan, and gardens in Manchester and London for the Cancer charity Maggie's. He's written five books, presented several television series, and exhibited at Chelsea six times, winning awards each time - last time, for Best in Show. He's known for his painterly naturalistic planting, or to put it more simply, he likes to create landscapes which look wild, and ancient. He says, "the way I garden is to let things go almost to the brink of being lost".

In Private Passions, Dan Pearson talks to Michael Berkeley about his love of wild plants, and the influence of a very neglected garden of a house he lived in as a child. He reveals how his gardens for cancer patients and his encounters with the people he's met there have changed his sense of what a garden means. He talks too about the way in which music inspires his landscape designs; he loves music which creates a sense of wide open space. Choices include Estonian composer Arvo Pärt; 12th-century polyphony; Spanish guitar music; the Bulgarian Trio Bulgarka and Moondog.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Lindsey Davis is best known for her series of historical crime stories about a laid-back amateur sleuth called Marcus Didius Falco. Set against the turmoil of the 1st-century Roman Empire, the books are witty, gritty and hugely entertaining. She's also written stand-alone novels about Ancient Rome, and about the English Civil War.

The recipient of many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, Lindsey writes a book a year, but has still found time to be the Chair of the Society of Authors and Honorary President of the Classical Association. Lindsey talks to Michael Berkeley about her introduction to music as a schoolgirl in Birmingham, her passion for symphonic music and her decision to introduce a new, feisty female protagonist to succeed her beloved Falco.

Her music includes works by Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak and - appropriately - Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

As part of Canada 150, a week of programmes marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of the nation, Michael Berkeley talks to Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien.

Born in Vancouver, she is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada and her writing explores the history of the Asian diaspora. She is the author a short story collection 'Simple Recipes' and the novels 'Certainty', 'Dogs at the Perimeter' and 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing' -about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2016 and the Governor General's Award 2016. Her books and stories have been translated into 23 languages.

Madeleine talks to Michael about the history of Western of classical music in China and its suppression during the Cultural Revolution. Countless instruments were destroyed, including more than 500 pianos at the Shanghai Conservatory. The bravery of its director, He Luting, a Debussy scholar, in resisting the Red Guards was an inspiration to her as she wrote the book and she chooses a piece of his music.

She tells Michael how her love of music was reborn as she listened to Bach whilst writing Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and we hear Bach's music played by the Chinese pianist Zhu Xiao Mei. She also chooses music from fellow Canadians Glenn Gould and Leonard Cohen.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

CANADA 150: a week of programmes from across Canada, marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of the nation and exploring the range and diversity of Canadian music and arts.

Michael Berkeley talks to Patsy Rodenburg, the most highly acclaimed voice teacher of her generation, about the music she loves.

Patsy Rodenburg has worked with pretty much every actor you can name, including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Daniel Day Lewis. They all testify to the huge impact she has had on their careers and performances.

Among the many companies she's worked with all over the world are the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she continues to teach drama students, as she has done for more than 20 years, at the Guildhall School of Music and the Michael Howard Studios in New York.

Patsy tells Michael about her passion for helping everyone - actors, singers, children, business leaders and even prisoners - find their own natural, strong voice, a frequently moving and liberating experience.

Among her choices is music by Sibelius, Strauss, Bach and Philip Glass.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Production for BBc Radio 3.

Nishat Khan is one of India's finest musicians; born into a dynasty of famous sitar players, he first went on stage with his father and uncle when he was only seven. Since that first appearance in Calcutta in the 1970s, he has performed worldwide, collaborated with all kinds of musicians, from Philip Glass to Gregorian choirs to Django Bates, and composed both for the BBC Proms and for Bollywood films. He's here in Britain to appear at the Aldeburgh Festival this June, fresh from recording the soundtrack to a Bollywood movie.

In Private Passions he talks to Michael Berkeley about the musical family he grew up in - he started playing the sitar before he could even walk. He explores too the spiritual meaning of music within this tradition and its power to reveal the voice of God. And he shares his excitement at discovering Western classical music, still very much a minority taste in India.

Nishat Khan's choices include Bach's B Minor Mass; Bruckner's 8th Symphony; Mozart, Manuel de Falla; Britten's "Sea Interludes"; and sitar music played by his father and uncle.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3.

Michael Berkeley talks to the award-winning theatre director Ivo van Hove about his musical passions.

The director of Amsterdam's prestigious Toneelgroep theatre, Ivo works all over the world, notably with the New York Theatre Workshop and at the Barbican in London. Equally at home with Sophocles, Shakespeare and contemporary American drama, he won huge acclaim for his stripped-back production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and his recent A View From The Bridge with the Young Vic won, among many other awards, two Oliviers and two Tonys.

Ivo talks to Michael Berkeley about working with David Bowie on his musical Lazarus; about the close working and personal relationship with his partner, the designer Jan Versweyveld; and the dramatic decision he made to leave law school at the age of 20 to pursue a life in theatre.

His musical choices reflect the emotional intensity and sparse aesthetic of his directing style, with pieces by Brad Mehldau, Webern and Ligeti, as well as songs by Rufus Wainwright and Joni Mitchell.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Bettany Hughes talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that's shaped her family life, and the music she's come to love during her travels as a historian.

Bettany has more than 50 radio and television documentaries to her name, many about ancient history and she's also a prolific writer, a Research Fellow at King's College London and has been honoured with numerous awards including the Norton Medlicott Medal for History and the Fem 21 International Journalism Award for her 'exceptional contribution to the international coverage of the place of women in societies past and present'.

She's the author of three bestselling books, the latest of which is 'Istanbul', a decade in the making and over 800 pages long, which brings to life 3000 years of action-packed history in that great city.

She talks to Michael about the importance of visiting the places she writes about and the joy of discovering music such as shepherds' calls in Greece and gypsy music in Istanbul. Bettany's interest in women's history is reflected in music by a 9th-century female Byzantine composer, and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. And she tells a touching musical story which shaped the history of her own family.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Jane Goodall was only twenty-four when in she went to live among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and she went on to spend more than 55 years there. She has done more than anyone else to transform our understanding of chimpanzees - and beyond that, her work has raised questions about how we treat these highly intelligent primates, and indeed about the rights of all animals. Now in her early eighties, she's on an extraordinary mission travelling round the world to protect chimpanzees from extinction.

During a rare stay in Britain, Jane Goodall talks to Michael Berkeley about her life and ground-breaking discoveries. She reveals that the chimpanzees she lived with also had a darker side, and were sometimes violent, stamping on her. She remembers difficult times after the kidnapping of some of her workers, and the death of her second husband - and how music sustained her, and transformed her view of the world.

Music choices include Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Richard Burton reading the Dylan Thomas classic "Under Milk Wood'. She also introduces some very excited chimpanzee speech, and speculates about what kind of music chimpanzees enjoy.

Gabriele Finaldi, the Director of the National Gallery, talks to Michael Berkeley about his artistic and musical passions.

When Gabriele Finaldi took up his post as Director of the National Gallery in the summer of 2015, one of the first things he did was to install a piano in the corner of his office.

He grew up in a musical household in Catford in South East London, the son of a Neapolitan father and half-Polish, half-English mother. Early in his career he was a curator at the National Gallery, specialising in Italian and Spanish paintings and he was involved in major and memorable shows such as Seeing Salvation and Discovering the Italian Baroque. In 2002 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Prado in Madrid, where he worked until his return to the National Gallery. Gabriele takes Michael on a musical and artistic journey though Britain, Italy, France and Spain and chooses music by Ravel, Messiaen, Puccini and Britten, as well as a 17th-century Neapolitan serenade and a spine-tingling piece of flamenco.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

It's not easy starting out to make a living as a writer, and A.L. Kennedy began with one of the most challenging jobs ever: as a puppeteer and clown, chasing children around a field in Fife with a loud horn. Thankfully it didn't take long before she left the day job behind and established her reputation as one of our most original voices, the author of 17 books - novels, short story collections, non-fiction - and talks and plays for stage, radio and television. She's also, on and off, a stand-up comedian - so that early training as a clown wasn't wasted.

In Private Passions she tells Michael Berkeley about growing up in Dundee, and discovering that she could escape on the overnight bus to Stratford and the theatre, which made everything in life more bearable, more alive. Glenn Gould is one of Kennedy's heroes, and we hear him playing Bach; but we also hear Gould's speaking voice in a radio documentary about the Canadian North. Other choices include the Venetian baroque composer Franceso Cavalli, and Josquin des Prez. We hear John Adams too, with a yearning love aria, and a commemoration of Auschwitz composed by the New York Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov. There's Gaelic folk music to end, re-interpreted by a group of contemporary Scottish singers. So, a wonderfully eclectic list of choices, and - we clear up the mystery of her name, and find out why Alison Louise Kennedy became "A.L. Kennedy".

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.