George McGavin, entomologist and broadcaster

Lee Child is a writer who is best known for his series of bestselling novels featuring Jack Reacher. Reacher is an enigmatic 6ft 5in, 17-stone ex-military police major who rights wrongs before disappearing off into the sunset. The books have sold in their millions around the worl ...  Show more

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer. She has published more than sixty books spanning novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, children’s literature, and graphic novels, and has been called “one of the sharpest and most imaginative novelists writing in English”. She is one of ...  Show more

Matthew Bannister on

Professor David Vaughan OBE, who was a leading expert on the effects of climate change on glaciers in the Antarctic.

Burt Bacharach (pictured), who wrote scores of hit songs including 'I Say A Little Prayer', 'Do You Know The Way To San José' a ...

Jimmy Carr joins Richard Coles and Nikki Bedi. After deciding to pursue a comedy career in his mid-twenties Jimmy has now toured the world as a stand up and is a household name thanks to programmes such as Channel 4’s 8 out of 10 Cats. Jimmy talks about the power of laughter a ...

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the writer Umberto Eco. His best-selling novel The Name of the Rose propelled him from the relative obscurity of his post as Professor of Semiotics at Bologna University to worldwide fame at the age of 50.He'll be talking to Sue La ...  Show more

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The children’s author and illustrator Eric Carle, best known for creating The Very Hungry Caterpillar which has sold fifty-five million copies.

Helen Murray Free, the American chemist who developed revolutionary simple tests for diabetes and ot ...