Podcast Episodes

Comedian Stewart Lee on Derek Bailey

"The area I mostly work in is generally known as free - the free music area. And free is one of those four letter words, like rock or jazz or punk ma…

7 months, 2 weeks ago

Jock Stein, first British football manager to win the European Cup

Jock Stein, first British football manager to win the European Cup, picked by composer Sir James MacMillan and aided by Jock Stein’s biographer, Arch…

7 months, 3 weeks ago

Benjamin Franklin

Matthew Parris heads to the house where Benjamin Franklin lived for almost 17 years to meet banker and philanthropist John Studzinski.

Franklin was bo…

8 months ago

Miles Jupp on JL Carr, author of A Month in the Country

"I find his novels extraordinarily beautiful .. and they're an excellent length."

Miles Jupp picks an author he loves, but knows little about. JL Carr…

8 months, 1 week ago

Helen Castor on Richard II

Today's great life is possibly more famous as a Shakespearean character - King Richard II who was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. He…

8 months, 2 weeks ago

DJ Deb Grant on John Prine

DJ Deb Grant picks US mailman turned country-folk singer John Prine, whose beautiful songs captured the world in which he lived. Bob Harris, who fir…

8 months, 3 weeks ago

Sir Seretse Khama, first president of Botswana

Seretse Khama was born in 1921 in Bechuanaland when it was still a British Protectorate. In 1966 he became Botswana's first president. In between he …

11 months ago

Emily Williamson, co-founder of the RSPB

For over a hundred years no one thought too much about the origins of the RSPB, but among its founders was a woman in Didsbury opposed to the use of …

11 months, 1 week ago

Tina Turner

Rock Icon Tina Turner proposed by the actress and author Rebecca Humphries. Tina Turner began life as Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, joinin…

11 months, 2 weeks ago

Raymond Blanc on Professor Nicholas Kurti

The chef Raymond Blanc nominates his mentor and friend, the physicist Professor Nicholas Kurti. Kurti was born in Hungary but fled to Oxford when Hit…

11 months, 3 weeks ago