Private Passions

Elif Shafak is a best-selling writer who is as happy telling a story from the point of view of a fig tree or a water droplet as a fellow human being.

She began writing in her native Turkish and now writes in English, and her 13 novels have been translated into dozens of languages. Her books cross continents and centuries. Her novel There Are Rivers in the Sky moves from ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century London, and she loves uncovering forgotten histories and giving voices to the silenced.

In her most recent book, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, she tells the story of the great French writer Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, from the perspective of the women, both real and imagined, who influenced him.

Elif is also a passionate campaigner for books and freedom of expression, and is the President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her musical passions include Rachmaninov, Chopin and Hildegard of Bingen.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

As part of the BBC's collaboration with The Music is Black, the V&A East Museum exhibition celebrating Black British music and musicians, Michael Berkeley talks to the saxophonist and composer Courtney Pine, whose work is recognised at the exhibition.

Courtney Pine released his first album 40 years ago, and it became the first British jazz album to enter the UK Top 40, competing at the time with the likes of Madonna, Paul Simon and the Pet Shop Boys. In the decades since, he has become one of the most influential figures in British jazz. As a performer, his musical passions are wide-ranging, embracing acoustic jazz and electronics as well as the Jamaican sounds he heard when he was growing up. He has also been a tireless musical ambassador through broadcasting and education and has earned both an OBE and a CBE for his services to music. He learned piano and clarinet at school, where he established musical roots in the classical tradition. His music choices include Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Florence Price.

Presented by Michael Berkeley. Produced by Graham Rogers.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama loves big ideas, and his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man was an international best-seller.

It argued that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union - Western liberal democracy was the best system of governance. It wasn’t perfect and hadn’t achieved everything, but it was the most humanly satisfying model.

He also stated that “the end of history will be a very sad time” – predicting that safe, prosperous "last men" would grow bored and restless. Eventually this would fuel a rage against the establishment that would invite populism.

Francis’s most recent book is a memoir called In the Realm of the Last Man, in which he reflects on his political evolution over five decades, and also writes about some of his favourite music. His choices for Private Passions include works by Bach, Handel, Mozart and Carl Orff.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Family is at the heart of the work of the writer Louisa Young. Her first book was about her grandmother, Kathleen, a sculptor who was also the widow of the Antarctic explorer Captain Scott.

She’s written five books for younger readers with her daughter Isabel, under the pen-name Zizou Corder, including the best-selling Lionboy trilogy.

She’s also written an acclaimed memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, about her relationship with the composer Robert Lockhart.

And her most recent book, The Golden Hours, continues much-loved The Cazalet Chronicles, the sequence of novels written by her aunt Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Louisa's music includes works by Chopin, Franck and Puccini.

The actor Sylvester McCoy was a familiar face to millions of TV viewers when he played the Seventh Doctor in Doctor Who in the 1980s. On the big screen, he has played the eccentric wizard Radagast the Brown in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, and on stage, he has played the Fool opposite Ian McKellen’s King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His route into acting was unconventional. He spent his teenage years preparing for the priesthood, then later honed his physical comedy skills in Ken Campbell's maverick Roadshow. His music choices include tracks by Stravinsky, Satie, Beethoven, and Britten's Shakespearean opera A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Presenter Michael Berkeley.

Producer Graham Rogers

When Lyse Doucet was a child growing up in a small town in eastern Canada, she borrowed a library book called How to Become a Journalist. It clearly made an impact. She is now the BBC’s chief international correspondent and has reported from some of the world’s most challenging countries, including Afghanistan and Iran, for more than 40 years.

This year she won the Women’s Prize for non-fiction for her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, in which she explores the country’s recent history through the story of Kabul’s landmark Inter-Continental Hotel.

Lyse's choices include music by Elgar, Sibelius, Bach and Einaudi.

In the world of dance, Carlos Acosta is a superstar. He grew up in a poor part of Havana, where he was the 11th child in his family, and began his training at the National Ballet School of Cuba.

At the age of just 18, he became the youngest principal dancer at the English National Ballet. After gaining further international experience, he joined the Royal Ballet in 1998 and made it his home for nearly two decades, dancing almost every major classical role.

He’s now Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, where he’s fostered some unexpected collaborations, including a ballet danced to the music of local heavy rock legends Black Sabbath as well as productions of classics such as Swan Lake and the Nutcracker. And this summer, he returns to the stage of the Royal Ballet in London with a programme called Myths and Modern Masters.

Carlos' music choices include works by Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Massenet and Ennio Morricone.

Leslie Cavendish left school at the age of 15 years, without any artistic qualifications, and decided to become a hairdresser. Within three years, his clients included Terence Stamp, Keith Moon, the Bee Gees, Jane Asher – and the Beatles.

He began by cutting Paul McCartney’s hair - and soon became part of the band’s inner circle. He attended Beatles recording sessions and joined them on their Magical Mystery Tour. They even invited him to open a salon at their Apple Tailoring boutique on the Kings Road in Chelsea.

Leslie's music includes Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Beethoven.

Thirty-five years ago, during the Gulf War, the face of the RAF navigator John Nichol appeared on news bulletins around the world. His Tornado jet had been shot down over Iraq, and he was captured, tortured and paraded on Iraqi television.

Together with the pilot John Peters, he wrote about these experiences in their best-selling book Tornado Down. Since then, he's written many more books about military history, on topics ranging from the Spitfire to the Unknown Warrior. His most recent book, Blitz, focuses on the effects of German bombing, not just on London, but in Glasgow, Cardiff, Manchester and his native north east.

John's music includes Chopin, Aaron Copland, Arthur Sullivan and Elgar.

Ruth Ozeki won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022 with her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. The judges called it a ’complete joy to read.’ She’s also a film-maker and a Zen Buddhist priest, and her books draw on her Japanese-American heritage. They also convey her deep concern for our environment, taking on topics such as industrial agriculture, ocean pollution and mass consumerism. Her most recent book, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions, is her first collection of short stories – and the Typing Lady of the title has more than a little in common with Ruth herself. Ruth Ozeki's music includes Albeniz, Praetorius, Prokofiev and Benny Goodman.

Jeremy Vine is one of the most familiar voices and faces in British broadcasting. He's presented his Radio 2 lunchtime show since 2003, and its mixture of music and news reaches 6 million listeners every week. Their personal stories and opinions are a vital part of the programme.

Jeremy also presents a weekday show on Channel 5, and since joining the BBC almost 40 years ago, he's been our correspondent in Africa and appeared on everything from Newsnight to Strictly Come Dancing.

He also writes crime fiction, drawing on his work behind the microphone. His books Murder on Line One and most recently Turn the Dial for Death feature the radio presenter Edward Temmis turning his hand to detective work.

Jeremy's music includes Morricone, Mussorgsky and Holst.

Like many writers, Sofka Zinovieff draws on her own history in her books – and her family tree offers plenty of inspiration. Her paternal grandmother was born into Russian high society, fled to England after the 1917 revolution and became a Communist. Sofka wrote her biography.

Her maternal grandmother married the eccentric aristocrat Robert Heber-Percy, and for a time shared a house with his lover, the artist and composer Lord Berners. Sofka has also charted her story.

Her father Peter was a composer and co-founder of Britain's first synthesiser manufacturer, making instruments used by the likes of Pink Floyd and David Bowie. He banned his many children from attending his funeral – a decision which inspired her most recent book, a novel called Stealing Dad.

Sofka's music includes Bach, Monteverdi, Theodorakis and Mozart.

The writer Simon Barnes has two very public passions - sport and the natural world. He wrote about both for The Times for 30 years, covering seven Olympic Games and six World Cup finals, while also delivering columns on short-eared owls, mountain hares and “the organ-pipe contact call of lions."

His books include reflections on the meaning and the soul of sport, and numerous titles about birds, including the best-selling How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher, in which he says: ‘Birdwatching is a state of being, not an activity. It is not a matter of organic trainspotting. It is about life and it is about living.’ This way of seeing also informs his most recent book How to Fly – which examines not only birds, but butterflies, bees, bats and the deep human fascination with flight.

Simon's musical choices include Beethoven, Scarlatti, Monteverdi and Messiaen.

Margaret Busby is a publisher and editor who's helped change our literary landscape. She's been lauded by the writer Zadie Smith as the cheerleader, instigator, organiser, defender and celebrator of black arts, something she's done for nearly 60 years.

She started young - she was just 23 years old when she co-founded the publishers Allison and Busby with Clive Allison in 1967. Free from the usual industry rules and with little money or experience, they began with five shilling poetry paperbacks and went on to champion new work as well as established writers from all backgrounds. Margaret's drive to showcase often overlooked or neglected talent led to two groundbreaking anthologies of women writers, Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa.

Margaret's music includes Bach and Chevalier de Saint-Georges, along with jazz greats Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.

Radio 3 is celebrating the centenary of Miles Davis' birth in the coming week across numerous programmes including Composer of the Week, Round Midnight and The Essay.

The historian Michael Wood has shared his enthusiasms and expertise with television viewers and readers around the world for almost five decades.

He’s brought us complex individuals such as Alexander the Great, pivotal conflicts such as the Trojan War, and national histories, including the Story of India, the Story of China and a people’s history of Britain.

And here on Radio 3, he’s one of the distinguished historians joining Gillian Moore for Key Changes, a year-long series charting one thousand years of musical history, on air on Saturdays and on BBC Sounds.

Michael's musical choices include Monteverdi, Bach, Messiaen and Chopin.

James Aldred is an Emmy award-winning documentary wildlife cameraman and filmmaker who has collaborated with David Attenborough on projects such Planet Earth, The Life of Mammals and Our Planet. He often finds himself suspended from ropes or on platforms high up in the rainforest canopy, capturing shots of rarely-seen animals and birds, including orangutans, gibbons and eagles.

He recalled some of his treetop adventures - and the many dangers he’s faced - in his first book, The Man Who Climbs Trees. His second, Goshawk Summer, detailed his experience of filming a family of goshawks in the New Forest during lockdown. It went on to win the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. His most recent book, A Wagon in the Woods, returns to the New Forest and is about his painstaking restoration of an old horse-drawn wagon he once played in as a child.

James picks music by Borodin, Wagner, Mahler, Bach and John Barry.

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu has dedicated her career to studying nanoparticles, finding ways to carry medicines to parts of the body that are notoriously hard to reach, such as the back of the eye and the brain, while causing fewer side-effects.

She’s Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London, President of Wolfson College Cambridge and was appointed a DBE in the King’s New Years Honours List last year.

She’s also written a book called Chain Reaction: the Wondrous Chemistry of Everyday Life, in which she blends explanations of the science that surrounds us with moments of personal memoir.

Ijeoma's music list includes Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach and Johann Strauss.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Dietmar Mueller-Elmau is the owner of Schloss Elmau, a resort hotel in the Bavarian Alps, 60 miles from Munich. It was set up in 1916 by his grandfather, the philosopher and writer Johannes Müller. He wanted people to take “a holiday from the ego” and to enjoy classical concerts.

Over the decades, it hosted performances by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin and Alfred Brendel. Dietmar continues that tradition, with musicians such as Yuja Wang and the Kanneh-Masons, along with jazz concerts, events with writers and philosophers, and the G7 leaders conference – twice. Dietmar's music choices include Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin.

The American writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths creates poetry that resonates with music: she writes about her mother cleaning the house while ‘Pavarotti trembled across the terse sunlight of every room.’

As well as poetry, she’s written a novel, and her most recent book is a memoir called The Flower Bearers. It deals with loss, including the sudden death of her closest friend. She received the news on what should have been the happiest of days – her marriage to the writer Salman Rushdie. And less than a year later, she found herself beside his hospital bed after the knife attack which nearly claimed his life.

But this is no misery memoir – there is the joy of finding her voice as a young poet in New York in the 90s, the strength she gains from the writers who have paved the way, and the music that travels with her.

Eliza's music choices include music by Schumann, Bach, Puccini and Nina Simone.

Francis Spufford is an award-winning writer who loves to inhabit different worlds and vividly bring them to life: Golden Hill, which won the Costa First Novel Award, takes place in Manhattan in 1746, Light Perpetual begins in a Woolworths in South London in 1944 and Francis’s latest novel ‘Nonesuch’ is a historical fantasy set during the Blitz.

But it wasn’t until he was 52 that Francis felt confident enough to write works of fiction, before that his books covered a wide variety of topics from polar expeditions to the economic optimism of post-Stalin Russia to an exploration of the role religion has played in his life. He became an atheist in his teens but turned back to the church after a 20 year hiatus.

When not penning his own work, Francis encourages other budding authors as Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

His music choices include works by Byrd, Satie, Mozart and Ravel.

Sir Ian Blatchford has been the Director of the Science Museum in London for more than 15 years – the longest serving director in its history.

He also oversees the National Railway Museum in York, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, Locomotion in County Durham, and the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire - all enjoyed by more than four million visitors last year.

He was the first in his family to go to university and his early career was in banking, but his passion was for culture. He combined the two as Finance Director at the V+A, before crossing the road to lead the Science Museum. It’s currently a very challenging time for anyone running a museum, with hard questions about funding, sponsorship and exhibition content.

His musical choices include Elgar, Monteverdi, Wagner and Sarah Vaughan.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The American writer George Saunders won the 2017 Booker Prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s a moving exploration of the grief of President Lincoln as he mourns his 11-year-old son Willie – and it’s voiced by the weird and wonderful spirits trapped in the cemetery.

George was 58 when the novel was published. In the decades before that, he won renown and awards as a master of the short story. He’s also won legions of followers for his close analysis of the form.

Most recently he’s published a second novel, Vigil, in which spirits return – this time to the deathbed of an oil tycoon.

His musical choices include John Adams, William Grant Still, Caroline Shaw and Dvorak.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The writer and film-maker Penny Woolcock can’t be pigeonholed: she’s worked as a director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and made a film about warring drug gangs on the streets of Birmingham.

A passion for storytelling has driven her career, along with a rebellious streak, perhaps because she’s something of an outsider and never went to university or film school. She often uses non-professional actors in her work, including a staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with people who had experienced homelessness. And after completing her movie about rival gangs in Birmingham, she found herself helping to broker a peace deal between two of the actual gang leaders.

She has recently written a memoir, The Man Who Gave Me a Biscuit, about growing up in a British enclave in Argentina.

Her musical choices include Shostakovich, Britten, Bach and Sibelius.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Peter Hamlyn is the founder and president of the Brain and Spine Foundation, after working as a neurosurgeon for 40 years.

He is perhaps best-known for saving the life of the boxer Michael Watson, who suffered a severe brain injury during a title fight in 1991 and was in a coma for 40 days. Peter performed seven brain operations and became a pioneer in the field of sports medicine, campaigning for better care for athletes.

He is now fascinated by how Artificial Intelligence might transform the diagnosis and care of neurological patients.

Peter's music includes Hildegard of Bingen, Berlioz, Handel and Prokofiev.

Asif Khan is a world-renowned architect and designer whose work inspired a recent headline – ‘is there anything Asif Khan can’t transform?’.

His current projects include the re-invention of the former Smithfield meat market into the new London Museum, working with Stanton Williams and Julian Harrap Architects, and the extensive renewal of the Barbican Centre. Further afield, in Kazakhstan, he’s turned a vast former Soviet cinema into a new cultural centre.

He opened his own studio in 2007, and has designed exhibitions, temporary pavilions and installations around the world. He views architecture as a multi-disciplinary field, bringing together design, science and art.

His musical choices include Chopin, Shostakovich, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Brian Eno.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Philippa Gregory has been called the ‘Queen of Historical Fiction’. The English royal court has inspired many of her best-selling titles, and she’s written sixteen novels about the Plantagenets and Tudors. One of them – The Other Boleyn Girl – became a BBC TV drama and a Hollywood movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

This success probably surprised her A level teachers: she says she found history ‘insanely boring’ at school, but her passion was fired at university. She’s also written non-fiction, notably seeking the stories of what she calls ‘normal women’ over 900 years. More recently she’s returned to the Tudors, with a novel called Boleyn Traitor, focussing on the intrigue surrounding Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane.

Her music choices include Mozart, Philip Glass, Scott Joplin and the Mazurka from Coppelia by Leo Delibes.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Richard Stokes has been passionate about song since he was a teenager – although, as he readily admits, he’s not a great singer. Instead, he’s become one of the world’s leading authorities on German art songs – or lieder – and has also co-written books on English, French and Spanish songs.

His work as a translator includes the complete Bach cantatas and the complete songs of Hugo Wolf, as well as operas by Wagner and Berg. He also collaborated with the pianist Alfred Brendel on translations of his poetry. Since 2006 he’s coached young singers at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he’s Professor of Lieder.

His choices include music by Bach, Mahler and Stravinsky.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Graham Rogers

The botanist Dr Sandra Knapp is a senior researcher at the Natural History Museum - but that title doesn’t convey the sheer adventure of her work. She’s a kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, travelling to remote regions of Central and Southern America and beyond. Her speciality is the Solanum genus, which includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines – and she has found and named more than a hundred new varieties.

The rainforests, where she has worked for more than 40 years, are a long way from the dry rural deserts of New Mexico, where she was born.

Her music choices include works by Mozart, Brahms, Hindemith and Holst, as well as music inspired by the biodata of some of her beloved plants.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Katy Hickman

Paul Chahidi is an actor whose versatility shines through in prize-winning performances from Shakespeare to satire. He delighted West End and Broadway audiences as Maria in Twelfth Night and won acclaim from filmgoers as the hapless Nikolai Bulganin in The Death of Stalin. On TV, he’s played a well-meaning vicar in the BAFTA-winning This Country, an archangel in Good Omens, and he’s currently a spook in the BBC thriller The Night Manager.

Such shape-shifting came early: Paul was born Ghiv Khatib-Chahidi in Iran before moving as a child to the Oxford countryside. He studied Arabic and Persian at university with an eye to becoming a foreign correspondent, before the lure of Shakespeare and Sondheim won him over.

His choices include music from Iran, as well as Vaughan Williams, Chopin, Beethoven and Palestrina.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Katy Hickman

Michael Berkeley's guest is actor and TV presenter Peter Purves. Purves has been involved in two of TV’s longest-running and best-loved institutions - he was one of the earliest companions to travel in the TARDIS with Doctor Who (1965-66), and for ten and a half years from 1967 to 1978, alongside John Noakes, Valerie Singleton and Leslie Judd, he presented Blue Peter – entertaining the nation’s children with demonstrations in everything from competitive swimming to scaling the Fourth Road Bridge. A dog lover, he has also presented TV coverage of dog show Crufts for many years. Purves's musical passions include Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Elgar and Sondheim, alongside tracks by Louis Armstrong and Count Basie - both of whom he remembers seeing perform live in concert.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley

Producer: Graham Rogers

Vanessa Williams is musical theatre royalty. She’s worked with Stephen Sondheim on Broadway and is currently commanding the London stage as the fearsome fashion editor Miranda Priestly in the musical The Devil Wears Prada. She’s also topped the American pop charts, starred in Hollywood movies with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played key roles in prize winning TV series including Ugly Betty.

And before all that she was crowned Miss America 1984 - the first Black American to take the title – although she was later forced to relinquish it in controversial circumstances.

Her choices include music from her homeland by Samuel Barber, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, as well as works by Bach and Delius.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Katy Hickman

The best-selling writer Alison Weir knows precisely what sparked her interest in history: at the age of 14 she read what she calls a ‘really trashy novel’ about Katherine of Aragon – and a lifelong passion began.

Since then she has written 38 books, selling more than three million copies around the world. Her non-fiction titles include biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth of York. She has also written many historical novels – including a book about each of Henry VIII’s six wives.

In her most recent novel, The Cardinal, she focuses on the rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey, who enjoyed a prominent and powerful role in the court of Henry VIII.

Alison's music choices include Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and Purcell.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the poet Pam Ayres, who shares the music that matters most to her, including some seasonal favourites. It’s now 50 years since Pam first won a vast national audience on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, with poems including her much-loved wintry verse 'Sling another chair leg on the fire, Mother!'

Her musical choices include Rachmaninov, Elgar and Johnny Mathis.

The Canadian crime fiction writer Louise Penny has sold more than 18 million books around the world – and she was a late starter: she was 45 when her first book appeared, after working for two decades as a broadcaster and journalist.

Success as a fiction writer came quickly: her first novel Still Life won numerous awards, and introduced Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who works in rural Quebec. Louise has just published her 20th book featuring Gamache: in The Black Wolf, he’s taking on a powerful conspiracy attempting to make Canada the 51st state in a fight over natural resources.

Louise's music includes works by Beethoven, Michael Nyman, Bach and Neil Young.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Lea Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, grew up in Albania under communism, when it was the last Stalinist outpost in Europe.

She was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and a year later she saw the collapse of communism in Albania. Statues of Stalin and Enver Hoxha, the country’s leader for 40 years, were toppled. Democratic elections followed - but so did civil unrest.

Lea wrote about these turbulent years in her book Free, which won prizes and widespread acclaim: 'essential - just as much for Britons as Albanians' according to one critic.

She has delved further into her family history, looking into the past of her grandmother, in her book Indignity.

Lea's musical choices include Beethoven, Wagner, Dizdari and Bach.

Hugh Bonneville is one of the most familiar faces on British TV and film. You might know him as the Earl of Grantham from Downton Abbey, or the long-suffering Mr Brown in the Paddington films, or the baffled Ian Fletcher in the London Olympics sitcom Twenty Twelve and its BBC-centred sequel W1A.

Hugh was captivated by acting from an early age, staging his own plays at home and even making the tickets to sell to his family.

More recently he’s has branched out into writing, with a memoir Playing Under the Piano and a children’s book Rory Sparkes and the Elephant in the Room, which is inspired by some of the events of his childhood.

Hugh's selection of music includes works by Beethoven, Strauss, Elgar and Faure.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley Producer: Clare Walker

Annabel Croft first picked up a tennis racquet at the age of nine. Within six years, she’d become the youngest British player to compete in the Wimbledon main draw for almost a century. At the age of 17, she won the junior championships at both Wimbledon and the Australian Open, and at 18 she was the British number one. Then – aged 21 – she retired from tennis and moved into broadcasting. She was soon back at the world’s major tennis tournaments, this time as a commentator and reporter. In 2023 her competitive spirit found a new outlet: she took part in Strictly Come Dancing on BBC One and came fourth. Her musical choices include works by Pachelbel, Handel, John Rutter and Prokofiev.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

The Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer is the seventh Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Prior to his political career, he was a barrister and served as Director of Public Prosecutions. He was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2015 and became Labour leader in 2020.

A former Guildhall School of Music scholar, Sir Keir Starmer is a flautist but also played piano, recorder, and violin in his youth.

He shares his love of music including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich and Brahms.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley Producer: Clare Walker

Hollie McNish has been writing poems about – as she puts it – ‘anything and everything’ since she was seven years old. Her work now reaches audiences of millions, through her books, performances and short videos, making her one of the UK’s most widely shared poets.

In 2017 she won the Ted Hughes Award for her book Nobody Told Me, a collection of poetry and diary entries that she kept from the moment she discovered she was pregnant until her daughter was three. She has published six other collections, including her most recent, Virgin, which explores how one six letter word holds such power.

Her choices include music by Telemann, Joseph Bologne Chevalier de Saint-George, Nina Simone and Tchaikovsky.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

The pioneering choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has produced more than 60 original works, many of them created for outdoor or unusual settings.

She was born in India and came to England in her late teens to study English literature at Sussex University. She had learned classical Indian dance as a child and in her early twenties, she drew on that passion, touring first as a dancer and then founding her own dance company in 1989 to develop her own work.

Since then, she has collaborated with scientists, film-makers and numerous composers including Errollyn Wallen, Kevin Volans and Michael Nyman.

Her most recent work is inspired by The Tempest, and views Shakespeare’s story through the eyes of Caliban, the so-called ‘monstrous’ slave.

Shobana's music includes Mozart, Messiaen, Arvo Part and Purcell.

The actor Richard Armitage refuses to be pigeon-holed. He first made a national impact as the mill owner John Thornton in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Audiences around the world know him as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson. He’s played a serial killer in Hannibal, a spy in Spooks, and has starred in four Harlan Coben thrillers on Netflix.

He’s also written thrillers: the most recent is The Cut, which examines childhood trauma and the dangers of buried secrets - and also draws on his own musical experiences, because the main character, like Richard, plays the cello.

His choices include works by Arvo Part, Mahler, Rameau, and Gluck.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Deborah Prentice became the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 2023.

She’s the first American to take on the role, and she’s leading the university at a challenging time for higher education in the UK, with questions about funding, freedom of expression, student protest, striking academics and even vice-chancellors’ pay never far from the headlines.

Before Cambridge, she was Provost at Princeton University, and a professor of psychology, where she focused on the social norms that govern human behaviour and the impact of unwritten rules and conventions. And before that, her first degree at Stanford was in Biology and Music.

Deborah's music choices include Beethoven, Bach, Mussorgsky and Ravel.

Mark Kermode began reviewing films 40 years ago, and has established himself as one of our most foremost critics, both in print and on air. He co-presents Screenshot on Radio 4 and the podcast Kermode and Mayo’s Take, with his long-term collaborator Simon Mayo. He’s said he goes to every screening hoping it will be the next Citizen Kane – but he’s also renowned for his energetic rants against the films he finds most disappointing. Music is another lifelong love – and for nearly 30 years he’s played double bass in The Dodge Brothers, a skiffle band who have also performed live soundtracks for silent movies. And film music is the subject of his most recent book, Mark Kermode’s Surround Sound, examining the complex relationship between what we hear and what we see. Mark's music includes Mica Levi, Strauss and Jelly Roll Morton.

The American director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall has been nominated for nine Tony awards, winning three times for Broadway productions of Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game and Anything Goes. She was the first woman to complete a trio of achievements - directing a play, directing a musical and choreographing a musical on Broadway.

She also won an Olivier Award for her 2021 production of Anything Goes in London. It was the first big musical to open after numerous Covid lockdowns, and received an ecstatic welcome from audiences and critics alike, hungry to get back into a theatre and enjoy a hugely uplifting show. More recently she has directed Irving Berlin’s Top Hat in Chichester.

Her musical choices include Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Duke Ellington.

Dame Rachel de Souza is the Children’s Commissioner for England. She’s the fourth person to take on this role, which was established in 2004 to promote and protect the rights of all children. Before becoming the Commissioner in 2021, she worked as a teacher and headteacher, and was credited with improving failing schools in less than privileged areas. In her current post, she’s said that her priority is to listen to children, to hear about their lives and champion their voices – and she’s focused on big and difficult questions, including mental health, online safety and the strip-searching of children by the police. Rachel's music includes Handel, Tippett, Messiaen and Beethoven.

Daniel Katz is a renowned art dealer, collector and gallery owner who has very much beaten his own path through the tangled forests of the art world.

Although he left school at the age of 14, his energetic curiosity brought him early success, making a profit of £15 on the first bronze he bought, and discovering something quite unexpected inside a grandfather clock.

Danny is an expert on European sculpture, but has also branched out into new fields, including antiquities, Old Masters, Impressionist paintings and Modern British Art. He’s worked closely with museums, exhibitions and libraries around the world.

Danny's choices include Schubert, Debussy, Sibelius and Bernstein.

Jay Griffiths first wanted to be a writer – an entity she believed to be a “god-like” creature - when she was just four years old and already captivated by words. And she’s fulfilled that early ambition. Her books include Wild, the product of seven years’ work, travelling to wildernesses including the Amazon rainforest, the Canadian Arctic and the Australian outback.

She has also written very honestly about her experience of bipolar disorder in her book Tristimania: a Diary of Manic Depression. More recently, she’s reflected on the deep connections we have to animals and their ability to alleviate fear and trauma, under the title How Animals Heal Us.

Jay's music selections include Sibelius, Rodrigo, Vivaldi and Debussy.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel is the director of Pompeii, one of the world’s most important ancient historical sites. It sits at the base of Mount Vesuvius, the still active volcano which erupted in 79AD and buried the city under volcanic ash and pumice, preserving a unique snapshot of life there nearly 2000 years ago.

Gabriel grew up in Germany, where ruins and ancient myths first sparked his interest in our ancient past, and led him to study archaeology. Prior to Pompeii he oversaw Paestum, a site about 60 miles south of Vesuvius, celebrated for its three ancient Greek temples, dating back to about 500 BC.

More recently, he has written a book called The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii - and new finds continue to be unearthed, as around a third of the site is still buried.

Gabriel's music choices include Schubert, Mozart, Vivaldi and Bach.

The American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega released her first studio album almost exactly 40 years ago – and it soon found an audience, particularly here in the UK where it sold more than 300,000 copies.

Listeners responded to her understated, acoustic sound and thoughtful lyrics in songs such as Marlene on the Wall and Luka. Another of her songs, Tom’s Diner, took on a life of its own. It’s been sampled by dozens of artists, and one remix became a global hit.

Suzanne recently released her tenth studio album, Flying with Angels, and will be embarking on a major tour with dates in England and Scotland later this year.

Her mix of music includes Bartok, Rachmaninov, Philip Glass and Debussy.

Producer: Clare Walker

Hilary Cottam is a writer, innovator and social entrepreneur who wants to find solutions for some of the most intractable problems of our time - from the design of prisons to how we provide care for the elderly and might end long-term unemployment. In her book Radical Help, she argued that we need to re-invent the Welfare State to match the challenges of the 21st century. In her most recent book, The Work We Need, she focuses on how we could re-imagine work in a way that benefits everyone, in a world facing immense technological change and ecological crisis. Hilary's choices include Pergolesi, Chopin, Schubert and Satie.

The comedian, writer and podcaster Adam Buxton first burst onto our TV screens 30 years ago. He and his friend Joe Cornish created The Adam and Joe Show, which featured pranks, songs and re-enactments of famous films like Titanic and Trainspotting using their childhood stuffed toys.

Along with work on radio and film, an eye for the weird and wonderful quirks of music videos, and a multi-award winning interview podcast, he has also written two memoirs. The first, Ramble Book, included a very poignant account of his father’s final months, when he lived with Adam and his family until his death at the age of 91. More recently, his book I Love You Byeee! includes reflections on losing his mother – as he says, ‘to death – we didn’t get separated in a shop.’ And both books include plenty of musings on growing up and his many personal obsessions.

Adam's musical choices include Ravel, Grieg and Thelonious Monk.

Philip Hoare is an award-winning writer whose books often describe the lure of the sea, the strange and beautiful creatures that live in it and the inspiration artists have found in its murky depths.

His book Leviathan won the Samuel Johnson Prize: it drew on his lifelong obsession with whales, which began with the gigantic skeletons in the Natural History Museum and continued with his own encounters with them at sea.

His most recent book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, traces Blake’s enduring influence on numerous poets, writers, film-makers and musicians. He’s also written about Noel Coward, the British socialite Stephen Tennant and the Netley Military Hospital on Spike Island, near Southampton.

His musical choices including Prokofiev, Britten and Copland.

Producer Clare Walker

The theatre director Emma Rice is renowned for her bold stagings of much-loved films and books including Brief Encounter, Wuthering Heights and the Red Shoes.

For twenty years she worked as an actor, director, and eventually artistic director of Kneehigh, an international touring company based in Cornwall, known for its energetic productions with an inventive use of music and puppetry.

In 2016, Emma became artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, the reconstructed Elizabethan theatre on the south bank of the Thames - although her tenure there ended after two years following disagreements with the board.

She has since founded her own touring theatre company, Wise Children, whose recent productions include The Buddha of Suburbia and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Emma's musical passions include Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Mozart and Bach.

Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, isn’t afraid of hard work or an intellectual challenge. He’s combined a high-profile legal career with a passion for medieval history, and his books include a five volume, 4000 page account of the Hundred Years War, widely described as ‘monumental.’

For much of his career he was a very successful barrister working on commercial law, constitutional law and human rights cases, with clients ranging from the British government to Roman Abramovich. Then in 2012 he made history when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, without ever having served as a full time judge.

In 2019, he gave the Reith Lectures, under the title Law and the Decline of Politics, examining how the courts are taking on more of the role of making law. It’s a topic he follows up in his most recent book, The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law.

Jonathan's musical choices include Berlioz, Schumann, Britten and Mozart.

The writer Colum McCann isn’t afraid to take on big subjects – and his ambition has delivered a shelf full of awards, from both sides of the Atlantic.

He grew up in Dublin but moved to the United States in the mid-1980s and now lives in New York. That city is the setting for his international bestseller Let the Great World Spin, in which Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 plays a key role. He’s also written a novel about both sides of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people, from the perspectives of two fathers.

He collaborated with Diane Foley, whose son James was executed by Islamic State militants, to create a memoir, American Mother, which was published last year. Most recently his novel Twist focuses on the vulnerability of the undersea cables carrying the world’s internet data.

Colum's music includes Gorecki, Prokofiev, Brahms and Haydn.

Romola Garai won her first professional acting roles as a teenager, and since then, her career has taken her in a wide range of dramatic directions.

Most recently, she won a 2025 Olivier Award for her role in The Years, a sometimes shocking play based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux – and she was competing against herself, with a nomination in the same category for her part in Giant, a play about Roald Dahl.

Her previous stage work includes playing Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen’s King Lear, and her extensive screen credits include the title role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. She also won acclaim for The Hour, a drama set behind the scenes of a TV current affairs programme in the 1950s. In 2020, she went behind the camera to write and direct a horror film called Amulet.

Romola's music choices include John Taverner, Handel and Keith Jarrett.

Terry Gilliam is one of the world’s most imaginative and original directors. He first made his mark more than 50 years ago, with the animated opening sequence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, when a giant foot stomped on the titles with a burst of flatulence.

That spirit of mischief, fun and creative adventure has informed many of his films: they include Time Bandits, Brazil, The Fisher King and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, working with stars such as Matt Damon, Uma Thurman, Brad Pitt and Robin Williams.

He’d be the first to admit that life as a film maker can be complicated: he’s faced natural disasters, budget overruns and clashes with studio executives. But he has no plans to retire: now in his 85th year he’s working on a new film called Carnival at the End of Days starring Johnny Depp as Satan and Jeff Bridges as God.

Terry's list of musical passions includes Richard Strauss, Berlioz and Delius.

The barrister Monica Feria-Tinta has been described as one of the “most daring, innovative and creative lawyers” in the UK for her work in defending our natural world.

She was born in Peru and was the first Latin American lawyer to be called to the Bar of England and Wales. She began by representing indigenous peoples, from Latin America and the Pacific, setting ground-breaking legal precedents. More recently she has found herself pleading for rivers, oceans, cloud forests and endangered species. As she says: “I had become a barrister for the earth,” and she’s written a book about ten of her landmark cases, called A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future.

Monica's music choices include Sibelius, Monteverdi and Chopin.

As part of Radio 3's Boulez at 100 day celebrating the centenary of composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, Michael Berkeley's guest is someone who knew Boulez well - composer and musicologist Gerard McBurney. McBurney is most closely associated with the music of Russian composers – particularly Shostakovich – as a result of having lived and studied in Russia in the 1980s. Notable Shostakovich scores he has rescued from oblivion with completions and orchestrations include the music-hall show Hypothetically Murdered and the opera Orango. He talks to Michael about life in Russia in the years immediately before the collapse of the Soviet Union. His many other musical projects have included working on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s long-running dramatized discovery series Beyond the Score, on many of which he collaborated with Boulez - about whom McBurney has first-hand insightful stories to relate.

Producer: Graham Rogers

To listen to this programme on most smart speakers, say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Private Passions".

The set and costume designer Bob Crowley says he creates ‘other worlds’. The stage is where his imagination runs riot, at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company the Royal Opera House, the West End, Broadway and beyond. He’s won numerous Olivier and Tony awards for memorable designs such as the brightly lit revolving horses for Carousel, magical black and white tissue paper drawings evoking the foggy London skyline for Mary Poppins and couture dresses and the River Seine for An American in Paris. He’s also worked on many new plays including The History Boys by Alan Bennett. His most recent credits include Richard the Second at the Bridge Theatre in London, with Jonathan Bailey in the title role. Bob's music selection includes Tallis, Gershwin, Schubert and Verdi.

Dr Sian Williams was a familiar face and voice on BBC Breakfast, television news, and Radio 4 for many years, and she’s now a presenter on Radio 3 Unwind on BBC Sounds. There she hosts a three hour programme every morning, sharing a restorative selection of music with the aim of supporting your well-being. She also presents Life Changing on Radio 4, interviewing people who have lived through extraordinary events.

In 2012, she started to train as a psychologist and was awarded a doctorate in Counselling Psychology four years ago. Since then she has been working in the NHS primarily, with first responders who are experiencing anxiety, stress and trauma.

Sian's musical selection includes Mozart, Rachmaninov, Max Richter and Vivaldi.

Daniel Levitin is a psychologist and neuroscientist who is fascinated by the way our brains respond to music. He first worked as a musician, playing in bands, and then became a record producer and engineer. He’s worked with some of best-known names in the world, including Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Sting and The Grateful Dead.

In his 30s he went back to university to study psychology. He’s now Professor Emeritus at McGill University and has written several best-sellers investigating why music has such a powerful effect on us as a species. His most recent, Music as Medicine, is about the healing power of music, and how it might be used to help treat PTSD, slow the spread of neurodegenerative diseases and even help combat multiple sclerosis.

Daniel's music choices include Debussy, Dvorak, Thelonious Monk and Beethoven.

Ursula Jones is “nothing short of a musical icon” – at least according to the Royal Philharmonic Society, who made her an honorary member last year at the age of 92. She has devoted her life to music, and has long championed the work of young performers – she gave Daniel Barenboim his first break as a conductor in London, when he was just 23.

Ursula was born in Lucerne in 1932, where her father was one of the founders of the Lucerne Festival, so famous musicians, including the likes of Richard Strauss, were never far away.

She came to London in 1954 and worked as a secretary for the Philharmonia Orchestra, moving on to co-found the English Chamber Orchestra in 1960. She married the eminent trumpet player Philip Jones, and later managed his Brass Ensemble.

Music isn’t her only fascination: she completed a doctorate in archaeology at the age of 60, and in 2021 she cycled 100km to raise money for the charity Brass for Africa. Ursula's choices include music by Britten, Mozart and Handel.

Professor Anthony Kessel has a double life – or at least two very different roles. As the National Deputy Medical Director of NHS England, he’s one of the senior leaders responsible for improving the quality of our health services and patient care. He’s an international authority on public health and played a key role in the NHS’s response to the Covid pandemic. He’s also a writer, with a prize-winning series of detective novels for young adults called Don’t Doubt the Rainbow – the most recent is American Mystery. The books are adventure stories and also aim to give young readers insights into how the mind works, and to improve their psychological well-being. Anthony's music choices include Brahms, Dvořák, Astor Piazzolla and Chilly Gonzales.

The economist Sir Paul Collier has spent much of his career thinking about some of the biggest challenges we face around the world – and then trying to find solutions for them. He’s focused on low-income countries, particularly in Africa, looking at why they haven’t benefitted from the forces of globalisation. He’s examined the causes and the consequences of civil war, and the role of foreign aid. He received a knighthood in 2014 for his work on Africa. His most recent book is called Left Behind and it offers a vision for how neglected places – from South Yorkshire to South America – can start to catch up. His music choices include Bach, William Lawes, Schubert and medieval composer Martin Codax.

Miranda Hart burst into our living rooms in 2009 with her semi-autobiographical, multi-award winning TV sit-com Miranda. Her irrepressible physical comedy and willingness to make fun of herself quickly endeared her to audiences, as she battled through socially awkward situations - particularly dating. She also had to deal with her overbearing mother, while popularising phrases like “Such Fun”, “Keep calm and Gallop on” and “Bear with”. She then took a leading role in the BBC drama series Call the Midwife as Chummy - Camilla Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne – and appeared in films including Emma, playing Jane Austen’s chatterbox Miss Bates. Her recent memoir I Haven’t been Entirely Honest With You describes how she lived for years with undiagnosed Lyme disease and the lessons she has learnt – she calls them “treasures” on her journey from illness to recovery. Miranda's musical choices include Grieg, Bach, Bizet and Mozart.

In the hot, dry summer of 1976, Mary Joy Langdon made a very bold decision: she joined the fire service. She was the first woman in the UK to work as a professional operational fire-fighter. Then, after eight years, she changed course - and became a nun.

In 1989, as Sister Mary Joy Langdon, she founded the Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre, introducing inner-city children and young people with disabilities to horse riding. Recently it helped children traumatised by the Grenfell Tower fire. The Centre also attracted one of Britain’s most acclaimed painters – Lucian Freud - who came to draw the horses.

Mary Joy's music selections include Mozart, Strauss, Bach and Grieg.

Presenter Michael Berkeley Producer Clare Walker

Michael Berkeley shares festive music choices from Private Passions over the years. We’ll hear how Handel can evoke memories of roast potatoes in the oven on Christmas day; we’ll spend time by the fire in a remote Irish castle, take a seasonal trip to the ballet, and share heart-warming singing from a variety of traditions. His guests include Chris Addison, Nina Stibbe, Brian Moore, David Mitchell, Shirley Collins and Sue Black.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 on 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)

Julia Donaldson began her working life busking and writing songs, and when one of her songs became a children’s book, her phenomenally successful career as an author was born. She’s been the biggest selling author in Britain for the last six years. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has anything to do with young children, who adore her vibrant and funny rhyming picture books - which include A Squash and a Squeeze, The Snail and the Whale, and the tale of that much-loved monster, The Gruffalo.

Julia talks to Michael Berkeley about the origins of The Gruffalo – which has sold an astonishing 10 million copies – and the secret of writing for children. She remembers her student days busking with her husband-to-be in Paris and how much they enjoy singing and performing her stories together today. Julia’s music choices reflect her intensely musical background - her father’s cello playing, her mother’s love of lieder, and her own piano playing in pieces by Schubert, Haydn and Handel. Her love of storytelling is reflected in songs by Georges Brassens and Flanders and Swann.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

For three decades Glenda Jackson was one of our most acclaimed actors, winning BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Emmys, and two Oscars - for Women in Love and for A Touch of Class. And alongside her film career were ground-breaking stage performances for directors such as Peter Brook and Peter Hall, and a television career which included an astonishing portrayal of Elizabeth I - a performance few of us will forget.

But in 1992 she gave it all up to become the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, eventually becoming a Junior Transport Minister. She stepped down as an MP last year, two days before her 79th birthday, and now, after a 24-year gap, she's back on stage this autumn playing King Lear at the Old Vic.

Glenda talks to Michael Berkeley about researching Elizabeth I, arguing with Ken Russell about Shostakovich, and how she turned down tickets to the Proms, prefering to listen on the radio at home.

Her love of 20th-century music shines through with pieces by Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, John Adams, Steve Reich and Stevie Wonder.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

Andrew Solomon is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia Medical Centre in New York, and a writer with a wide-ranging interest in families. He spent ten years talking to parents who faced extraordinary challenges, because their children had turned out so very different from them: either through disabilities, or because they were musical prodigies - or because they had committed serious crimes. The resulting book, "Far From the Tree - Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" has won many awards, and millions of people have watched Solomon's TED talks. Solomon first made an impact with another prize-winning book, about depression, "The Noonday Demon", a moving account of his own illness.

In Private Passions, Andrew Solomon talks to Michael Berkeley about how both books are grounded in his own experience; he had a hard time growing up, and being accepted by his parents - and his peers - as gay. He reveals that at one point he was so depressed that he couldn't get out of bed, and thought he'd had a stroke. It was his father's love and care which saved him. He talks too about how he met his husband, and became a father himself - albeit as part of a marvellously complex and unconventional family.

Music choices include Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro"; Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier"; Bryn Terfel singing Vaughan Williams's "Songs of Travel"; Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto, and love songs by Reynaldo Hahn, Strauss and Britten.