Private Passions

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...

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...

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 hu...

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 sp...

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 ch...

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 Be...

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...

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. Lo...

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...

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 tick...

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...

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...

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 mome...

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...

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 Net...

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...

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...

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 Anyt...

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 prior...

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 s...

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 hone...

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 o...

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...

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,...