Start the Week gets emotional at the Free Thi...

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an age of social media saturation and at a time when reality can seem stranger than ...  Show more

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith in 1776, which gives an early account of what ...  Show more

The British Government has just allocated £289 million to the World Service for the next five years, in a bid to promote UK soft power. But where will this money go, and what does this mean for the BBC's independence? Roger Bolton talks to the Director of the BBC World Service Gr ...  Show more

The Danish Girl is the remarkable love story inspired by the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, portrayed in the film respectively by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) and Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), and directed by Academy Award winner Tom Hoope ...  Show more

Ryan speaks with Heather Cox Richardson about her new book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, her mission to deliver history as a way of promoting human connection, changing ...

Sam Harris speaks with Derren Brown about his work as a “psychological illusionist.” They discuss the power of hypnosis, the power of expectations, the usefulness of Stoic philosophy, and other topics. Derren Brown began his UK television career in December 2000 with a series of ...  Show more