Private Passions

Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists. He has created sets, often drawing on his work in sculpture, for operas including Verdi’s Falstaff and Rigoletto, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for which he created huge illuminated sta...

Naomi Alderman is a writer who likes to question established ways of thinking. In 2017 her novel The Power won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. It imagines a world where women develop the ability to emit electric shocks from their fingers, leading to a worldwide reversal in the traditional balance of power between the sexes. The book became a global bestseller, and more recently a nine part...

Beccy Speight has been the chief executive officer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 2019. It is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity with over a million members and manages more than 200 nature reserves providing a home to at least 18,500 species. Beccy began her work in the conservation sector when she joined the National Trust at the turn of the millennium. From 201...

Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a love of books until much later in life. Her bestselling first novel, My Name is Leon, written in her 40s, draws on her own childhood experiences and her early career as a legal worke...

Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in English Literature at University College London. The offer of free film and the use of a dark room proved irresistible. Since then her images, with their focus on people, have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanit...

Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do. Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest parts of Dhaka and Delhi to the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster zone. She has lived with Yak herders in the high plains of Tibet and sailed across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Closer to home, she’s written two books...

Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everything But the Girl – taking their name from the slogan of a local furniture shop. Over the next twenty years, they had 12 top 40 singles and 7 top 20 albums. Since then Ben has experimented in dance and elec...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about this exodus in her bestselling and widely acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, the product of 15 years of research and more than 1200...

Libby Jackson is the head of Space Exploration for the UK Space Agency. She has turned a childhood passion for space into a wide-ranging career. She was flight instructor and controller at Europe’s Mission Control Centre for the International Space Station. She then joined the UK Space Agency in 2014 and led their education programme when the astronaut Tim Peake went into space. She is now one of...

Steve Rosenberg is the BBC’s Russia editor. After studying Russian at university, he moved to Moscow in 1991 and since then has charted the transformation of the country – from the conflict in Chechnya and the Beslan school siege to President Putin’s rise to power and the impact of the current war against Ukraine. His musical passions include - perhaps unsurprisingly - Russian composers such as Ra...

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous theatre roles, and television appearances which have included six years on Holby City. For many people, though, he will always be Gustav Mahler thanks to Ken...

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow University to read English and becoming a teacher, as they expected, she startled everyone by travelling to London - to study for the Bar. Some of her friends misunderstood and thought she’d gone south to find bar...

Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the speaker there changed the whole course of his life. The writer was Iris Murdoch. She became a friend, and he became – in his words – her “disciple”, and eventually her biographer. And then Peter and his part...

Wayne Sleep tells Michael Berkeley about the music that has inspired his career of nearly 60 years. Wayne Sleep is one of the most celebrated dancers of all time. He’s performed more than fifty leading roles for the Royal Ballet, and had roles created for him by choreographers including Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois and Rudolf Nureyev. Equally at home on the stage of the Royal Opera house, p...

The novelist and journalist Susie Boyt tells Michael Berkeley about her lifelong passions for music, theatre and dancing. Whether she’s writing black comedies about dysfunctional families or about her intense love of Judy Garland, Susie Boyt is unafraid to address the big questions in all our lives. Her seven novels explore how we can best take care of people, how we can survive life’s inevitable...

The historian Simon Thurley tells Michael Berkeley about his passion for ancient buildings and the music associated with them. At the age of seven, Simon Thurley dug up what turned out to be Roman remains in his back garden in Cambridgeshire, and a lifelong passion for history - and historic buildings - was ignited. He went on to work as Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and as the Director of the...

Kaffe Fassett’s textiles are unmistakable: in bright cerise and crimson and cobalt, his stripes and flowers burst onto the scene back in the seventies, and he’s been designing ever since. Brought up in a log cabin on the Californian coast, he’s lived for fifty years in Kilburn, north-west London, a house where every surface is painted or mosaicked or embroidered – and stuffed full of antique texti...

Joanna Scanlan is one of our great comic actors; she’s best-known for “The Thick of It”, where she plays the obstructive civil servant Terri Coverley. But her range is much wider than comedy. She’s extraordinarily moving in “After Love”, Aleem Khan’s 2021 film about a widow who discovers her husband’s secret life – a performance so powerful that it dominates the whole film, and won her BAFTA’s lea...

Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their languages, discovering their ways of being in the world, and helping map their territories so they could claim land rights. He has also worked in isolated villages in...

The author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her life lived on a rollercoaster: she has experienced passion, great friendships and celebrity but also depression, illness, heartbreak and the deaths of two of her children. Running through her life for 46 years was her enduring - but extremely complicated - marriage to the jazz musician and bon viveur George Melly, who died in 2007. She has wr...

Todd Field began his career as a jazz musician and as an actor; he has appeared in over forty films, including Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”. He then went on to direct two full-length award-winning films, “In the Bedroom” - about grief and revenge in a close-knit family - and “Little Children”, starring Kate Winslet. Both were nominated for multiple Oscars. This week hi...

Rabbi, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Romain is minister of Maidenhead Synagogue and one of Britain's leading rabbis in Reform Judaism. He’s the author of twenty books – some scholarly and learned, and others which are very funny – revealing the ups and downs of his day-to-day work, in a way that will resonate with vicars, priests and religious leaders of any description. He’s become a kind of ag...

The structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal tells Michael Berkeley about her passions for tall buildings, bridges, concrete and Indian classical dance. Roma Agrawal is a highly successful woman operating in what is still very much a man’s world. Her job is, essentially, to make sure that the buildings, bridges, roads and tunnels we use every day don’t collapse. She spent six years working out...

The geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford tells Michael Berkeley how his passion for music allows him to escape the rigours of science and enjoy the emotional side of life. Adam Rutherford’s career in science has taken him from a PhD on the role of genetics in eye development to becoming a well-known broadcaster who campaigns against pseudoscience and racism. Presenter of Radio 4’s Start the...

Simon Warrack travels the world restoring the most sacred and beautiful buildings. As a stonemason he’s worked on the Rose Window of Canterbury Cathedral, the Trevi fountain in Rome, and the Temple of Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Coming from a professionally musical family - his father is the music writer John Warrack, his grandfather was the composer and conductor Guy Warrack – it’s no surprise that...