Rank #1: Jonathan Franzen

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Oct 05 2015
41mins
Rank #2: India's Rise?

Producer: Katy Hickman
Image: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi participates in a mass yoga session to mark the International Day of Yoga on 21st June, 2016 in Chandigarh, India. Credit: Getty Images.
May 22 2017
41mins
Rank #3: Shakespeare's Late Plays - recorded at the Globe's Playhouse

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Dec 28 2015
49mins
Rank #4: Decision-making with Daniel Kahneman and Michael Ignatieff

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Mar 17 2014
41mins
Rank #5: Reforming Saudi Arabia

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Dec 07 2015
43mins
Rank #6: Social Class and Cultural Capital

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Oct 26 2015
41mins
Rank #7: Power and Corruption with Stephen Frears and Mary Beard

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Oct 19 2015
41mins
Rank #8: Yuval Noah Harari

Technological disruption, ecological cataclysms, fake news and threats of terrorism make the 21st century a frightening prospect. Harari argues against sheltering in nostalgic political fantasies. He calls for a clear-sighted view of the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Oct 01 2018
42mins
Rank #9: Play and Creativity

Producer: Kirsty McQuire.
Feb 13 2017
44mins
Rank #10: British culture and European influence

Frederic Chopin had a pan-European career. He swapped his native Poland for Paris, fled to Mallorca in search of sunshine and inspiration, and toured Britain twice, complaining bitterly about the 'crafty' locals and 'dreadful' British weather. But he had a huge impact on the musical scenes he left behind. Paul Kildea charts Chopin's journey across Europe. Sitting at the keys of Chopin's own piano, Kildea explains how this visionary composer shaped Romanticism.
European composers and performers in Britain faced a tougher reception in the wake of two world wars. In her new book, Singing in the Age of Anxiety, Laura Tunbridge depicts the contradictions of a generation that viewed Wagner as a cultural high-point - but decried all things German as enemy propaganda. At the same time radio and gramophones dramatically altered the way people heard and responded to music.
The digital world offers vast new audiences, but also brings new challenges to those in the arts. Munira Mirza is Director of HENI Talks, an online platform that aims to share cultural information and understanding with much wider audiences. By combining leading experts and world-famous works such as the Mona Lisa, she wants to take art outside the gallery. As former Deputy Mayor for Culture in London, Mirza envisages a future in which we have a truly international cultural scene.
Producer: Hannah Sander.
Jul 02 2018
42mins
Rank #11: Existentialism and Ways of Seeing

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Mar 28 2016
41mins
Rank #12: Life Is a Dream

For his latest ballet, choreographer Kim Brandstrup has taken inspiration from Calderon's 17th century Spanish play Life is a Dream, in which a dire prophecy leads a King to imprison his son. Brandstrup uses contemporary dance to explore where dreams end and reality begins, but also to express wonder at life itself.
How to live well is at the centre of Edith Hall's self-help book based on the teachings of Aristotle. She examines the ancient Greek philosopher's ideas on how self-knowledge, responsibility and love could help us forge a more meaningful life.
And the philosopher John Gray continues his exploration of what it is to be human in his new work, Seven Types of Atheism.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
Apr 23 2018
42mins
Rank #13: AL Kennedy and David Sedaris on matters of the heart

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Mar 31 2014
42mins
Rank #14: The Death of Democracy

Professor Nic Cheeseman is all too aware that democracy can become an empty shell. His new book How To Rig An Election, co-written with Brian Klaas, looks at the myriad ways autocrats use elections for their own ends, from buying votes and bribing electors to issuing fake pens in the ballot box. And it is not only the developing world in which corruption takes place. He addresses the role of outside states in the 2016 US presidential election, and asks how western democracy can be kept healthy.
Anne Applebaum has studied the ways in which democracy can arise like a phoenix from the ashes of authoritarianism. As the author of Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine, and a professor at the LSE, she has analysed the reasons why democracy flourished in Poland and Ukraine after 1989, and suggests reasons why the 2012 Arab Spring has not yet had the same results. But as a journalist for the Washington Post she is all too aware of attacks on democracy today, both in the former Soviet bloc and in America. She argues that the onus is on us to save our own systems.
Producer: Hannah Sander.
May 07 2018
41mins
Rank #15: 1968: Radicals and Riots

Historian Richard Vinen finds waves of protest across the western world in his book The Long '68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies. Some movements were genuinely revolutionary, such as the ten million French workers whose strike nearly toppled the government. But on American university campuses and in British art schools, protests took the forms of civil rights marches and feminist collectives, whose narratives changed the way we think today.
In Paris, left-wing students armed with works of philosophy took on the police and the state. But Paris was still coming to terms with its Nazi occupation, explains Agnès Poirier. Her new book follows the artists and writers of the 40s and 50s, from Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to Miles Davis and James Baldwin, as a new generation helped France regain its reputation for art, passion and political action.
Not only left-wing radicals were inspired by the events of that year. In 1968 philosopher Roger Scruton was holed up in a Paris bedroom studying while rioters smashed windows outside. Scruton was horrified by the chaos and destruction, and turned his back on the left-wing politics of his childhood. He became part of a generation of new conservatives who sought to preserve the past rather than fight for an unknown future.
Today France is facing new waves of strikes, with railway workers bringing the transport system to a halt and Emmanuel Macron pushing through sweeping reforms to social security. Sophie Pedder, Paris bureau chief for The Economist and author or a new biography of Macron, asks what France in 2018 owes to the events of 1968.
Producer: Hannah Sander.
Apr 16 2018
42mins
Rank #16: Jordan Peterson: Rules for Life

Hashi Mohamed is the living embodiment of many of Peterson's life rules: he came to Britain when he was 9 years old with little English and through a combination of skill, luck and hard work is now a barrister. But he is critical of the lack of social mobility and his own rags to riches story is one he thinks is increasingly difficult to realise.
The Irish author Louise O'Neill has made her name challenging the roles given to women. In her books for young adults she has tackled small town hypocrisy and sexism, rape culture and victim-blaming. She too has looked to the stories of the past and her latest book is a radical retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright turns his focus on his home state Texas, to see what it can teach us about America. A 'superstate' with a GDP larger than most industrialised countries, and with a population on track to double by 2050, Texas both confirms and challenges its stereotype. Wright is confronted by cowboy individualism, gun-loving patriotism and nostalgia for an ersatz past, but also finds pockets of liberal progressiveness and entrepreneurial drive.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Picture: Jonathan Castellino for Penguin.
May 14 2018
41mins
Rank #17: 'Home' and cultural identity with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Apr 08 2013
41mins
Rank #18: A Theory of Everything?

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Jun 20 2016
41mins
Rank #19: Claudia Rankine at the Free Thinking Festival

Producer: Katy Hickman.
Nov 09 2015
50mins
Rank #20: The Tudors

Producer: Simon Tillotson.
Jan 12 2015
42mins