Private Passions

Jack Klaff’s first movie was Star Wars: a two-day booking for which he was paid £250. Star Wars fans still write to ask him for his autograph. But to focus on that one film from 1976 is to miss the rich variety of an acting and directing career that has taken in Shakespeare, James Bond, Chekhov and Midsomer Murders, alongside writing more than a dozen one-man shows for television and the stage. He...

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the artist Heather Phillipson whose giant swirl of cherry-topped, fly-blown whipped cream has recently been installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Heather was a serious classical musician in her teens, and often uses music she’s composed and performed in her work. She talks to Michael about music she’s loved since her childhood, including a Mozart symphony...

Professor Anthony David works at the mysterious interface between the mind, the brain and the body. The Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London, he’s published 13 books and more than 600 academic articles, and his work focuses on illnesses at the edge of human understanding. He tells Michael Berkeley about some of the patients he’s tried to help over the years: a ma...

In an emotional and highly personal interview, the former rugby international Brian Moore tells Michael Berkeley about the role music has played during his extraordinary life. Brian is a man of many parts – nicknamed ‘the pitbull’ for his fiercely competitive attitude on the rugby field, he won 64 England caps, playing in three world cups, and in the sides which won three Five Nations grand slams....

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the writer Helen Macdonald, whose book "H is for Hawk" shot to the top of the bestseller lists, not just here but around the world. It’s perhaps no surprise that there’s a certain amount of birdlife in her playlist, from Stravinsky’s The Firebird to a piece inspired by a song thrush by the Finnish-English singer Hanna Tuulikki. She chooses music from A Carol Symphony by...

For more than 20 years, in more than 20 books, Peter Stanford has grappled with religious belief. Starting with a book called Catholics and Sex, he’s gone on to write the lives of Martin Luther and Cardinal Hume, and the biography of the campaigning Catholic Lord Longford; he’s published books about the devil, about heaven, and most recently – a fascinating book about angels. They’re works which m...

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the forensic ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire, a solver of puzzles who has carved out a whole new discipline within forensic science. Patricia solves crimes with her microscope by meticulous examination of tiny particles such as pollen and spores left at crime scenes or found on the clothing of criminals or on their victims. She says: ‘Nature will invariably give...

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York; he’s renowned for his ground-breaking discoveries in superstring theory. But the reason he's well known way beyond the scientific community is that he’s so very good at explaining science to a wide popular audience. He’s written six best-selling books, starting with The Elegant Universe, which explains strin...

In a moving and personal interview the novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan talks to Michael Berkeley about his family and the music that inspires his writing. Andrew O’Hagan grew up on a tough housing estate in north Ayrshire, the son of a cleaner and a carpenter, and the youngest of four boys. He has gone on to become one of our most prolific, vivid and meticulous writers - an essayist and inv...

John Dyson spent 23 years as a judge, moving up through the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and finally becoming Master of the Rolls. He retired as Master of the Rolls three years ago, but he’s back working on international arbitrations, busier than ever; in fact, he presided over the recent decision that the Saracens rugby team were being overpaid. Through it all, the great pas...

Wildlife sound recordist and sound artist Chris Watson talks to Michael Berkeley about how his favourite music is inspired by the natural world. Chris is most famous for his sound recordings for David Attenborough’s television series – for which he’s won BAFTAs – but he’s a musician too. A member of the influential post-punk band Cabaret Voltaire in the late 70s and early 80s, today he’s a sound a...

Jools Holland, king of boogie-woogie piano, reveals his lifelong passion for classical music in conversation with Michael Berkeley. The piano is at the heart of everything Jools Holland does. Since he left school at fifteen and joined Squeeze, he - and his piano - have been pretty much constantly on the road, touring with The Jools Holland Big Band, and now his nineteen-piece Rhythm and Blues Orch...

Stephen Schwartz is a master of musicals. He wrote Godspell, Pippin, and The Baker’s Wife; he’s written the lyrics for films such as Pocohontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Enchanted - and many others. His musical Wicked, for which he wrote the words and music, has become something of a cult; it opened on Broadway in 2003 and in the West End in 2006, and it’s been running both in New York and in...

Isabel Allende’s first novel, “The House of the Spirits” catapulted her to literary stardom, and was acclaimed as a classic of Latin American magic realism. That was nearly forty years ago and she’s not stopped writing since: with twenty novels and four volumes of memoir, she’s been translated all over the world and has sold some seventy-four million books. They’re vivid family sagas, with eccentr...

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of female composers, Michael Berkeley draws together some of his guests who have championed works by women. Turner Prize-winner Helen Cammock introduces the 17th-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, and actor Greta Scacchi tells the story of her discovery of the 18th-century musician and composer Maria Cosway. There is music too by Hildegard of Bingen, the 12...

Piers Gough co-founded his own architectural practice while he was still at college, at the age of only twenty-two. He made his name during the redevelopment of London’s Docklands, though you can also see his work in Liverpool (the golden “bling bling” building), in Nottingham, where he built a centre for Maggie’s cancer charity, and in Glasgow, where he designed the masterplan for the redevelopme...

Michael Berkeley talks to author Chibundu Onuzo about the challenge of writing novels while studying for her A-levels, and the role of music and faith in her life. At the age of nineteen, Chibundu became the youngest female writer ever to be signed by Faber and Faber. She started writing aged ten while growing up in Lagos, Nigeria and was working on her first novel, ‘The Spider King’s Daughter’, w...

In a frank and moving interview the priest and former politician Jonathan Aitken talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that has accompanied his rollercoaster life. At one time Jonathan Aitken was widely tipped to be a future Conservative Prime Minister, but his glittering political career came crashing down just over twenty years ago, when he stood in the dock of the Old Bailey to plead guilty...

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Ann Wroe about the inspiration and comfort she finds in music. Ann spends the first 36 hours of each week wrestling with the challenge of distilling the life of a person into just 1000 words – because, for nearly two decades, she has written the weekly obituary for The Economist. The rest of Ann’s week is spent wrestling with biography of an altogether differen...

Michael Berkeley talks to the environmental lawyer James Thornton about tackling the climate crisis, about Zen Buddhism and about James's love of the violin. Every day we’re bombarded with more bad news about the climate crisis, deadly air pollution, and our oceans filling up with plastic. So who will save our fragile planet? The UN? Governments? Scientists? Activists? If James Thornton is anythin...

William Sieghart, the founder of the Forward Prizes for poetry and National Poetry Day, talks to Michael Berkeley about the music and poetry he loves. Over the last twenty-five years National Poetry Day has become a popular fixture in the cultural calendar, and it was William’s idea to have permanent poems engraved at the Olympic Park in East London. He’s also the creator of the hugely successful...

Helen Cammock grew up wanting to be a singer, and performed on the folk circuit as a teenager. But then she stopped, and became a social worker for more than ten years. Finally, at the age of 35, she took up photography, went to art school – and she’s never looked back. She’s known now for her richly-layered video installations, which mix film archive, dance and poetry with current interviews, all...

As we start a new year, our thoughts turn towards the year ahead with all its plans and resolutions. And yet of course it is irrational to make this complete distinction between December and January; in fact, the more you think about it, the more you realise that everything about time is strangely slippery. The slippery nature of time is something that preoccupies Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical phys...

Darcey Bussell became principal dancer of the Royal Ballet at the age of only twenty; she went on to become a household name thanks to her seven years as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, a job she unexpectedly stepped down from earlier this year. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, she looks back at a career which started when, against the wishes of her mother, she went to ballet school at thi...

As a small child, Matthew Bourne used to put on shows in his parents’ living room in East London; by the age of eight or nine, he was staging musicals for the whole school, co-opting his friends to star in Mary Poppins and Cinderella. (He played an ugly sister.) Fast forward to today and Sir Matthew Bourne is now Britain’s most popular and successful choreographer and director, with a long list of...