The Interview

Mary King is a sportswoman like few others. She's 50-years-old and still at the pinnacle of her sport. That sport is three-day eventing. Next year, she's hoping to collect her first Olympic gold medal - at what will be her sixth games. But is equestrianism - as its enthusiasts insist - the toughest sport in the world? Or is it less a test of the person - more of the horse - and a preserve of the r...

Gene Sharp is a political thinker whose influence is now spoken of in same breath as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But he is no platform speaker or figurehead at a demonstration. Rather, a quietly spoken political philosopher who's been writing about non-violent struggle for 50 years. What's changed is that his most celebrated pamphlet - From Dictatorship to Democracy - is now grabbing at...

Living as an openly gay man in socially conservative Africa is hard enough, but Edwin Cameron went even further. He was the first public official in South Africa to reveal his HIV positive status. Nelson Mandela appointed him a judge and he now serves on South Africa's Constitutional Court. There remains high levels of homophobia on the continent - why are gay activists like Cameron losing the arg...

Gus O'Donnell has been at the heart of government in Britain for 30 years, working closely with the last four British prime ministers. He was John Major's press secretary; under Tony Blair he took on the top job in the civil service, a position he held when Gordon Brown took over. And that meant that at the last election he was the one overseeing the negotiations for Britain's first full coalition...

Sir Patrick Stewart has an acting career spanning more than 50 years. He was an accomplished Shakepearean actor when he took on the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation which brought him international acclaim. He talks to Sarah Montague about his decision to join the Star Trek cast and why it wasn't supposed to be successful. He also recalls his childhood where family...

The satellite TV station Al Jazeera, is credited with giving ordinary Arabs a platform from which to challenge their governments. And day by day it's been covering the dramatic events of the Arab Spring using the latest slick technology on both its Arabic and English channels. But is it selective in who it criticises? Zeinab Badawi speaks to Wadah Khanfar. He was the boss of Al Jazeera for nearly...

The British artist and film-maker Steve McQueen - whose new film Shame is about sex addiction - says the condition is very real and is destroying people's lives. He tells HARDtalk's Zeinab Badawi that both men and women can have an unhealthy relationship with sex in the same way they can with food where the craving for it becomes a compulsion making everything else in life become secondary.

Ten months after the wave of Arab unrest reached Syria, President Assad is still in power. Bloody protests continue and there are fears that the country could be sliding into civil war. But there is little appetite from foreign powers for military intervention. Sarah Montague speaks to Bassma Kodmani, a leading figure in the exiled Syrian opposition and asks her why foreign intervention in Syria s...

Hungary's centre-right government has galvanized critics at home and abroad with its new controversial constitution. There have been mass protests in the country, opposition politicians have chained themselves to gates outside public buildings, and the prime minister, Viktor Orban, has been dubbed Viktator. The EU, IMF and the US have rebuked the Hungarian government over its changes to election r...

This year - 2012 - is the Chinese Year of the Dragon and Chinese workers certainly seem to have fire in their belly. There's growing discontent amongst the workforce whose labour fuelled the country's economic miracle. They're angry that export-led growth has largely passed them by - whilst filling state coffers and enriching some beyond their wildest dreams. Zeinab Badawi speaks to Cheng Siwei -...

Sarah Montague is in Brussels to talk to the man with the unenviable job of finding a way out of Europe's financial crisis. He is Olli Rehn, Europe's Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs. It's nearly two years since the Greek crisis first blew up; and in that time seven heads of Eurozone governments have been replaced; there have been at least 15 European summits; and any number of plans...

Stephen Sackur speaks to a brilliant heart surgeon - veteran of more than 30,000 operations - but his growing international reputation rests less on his medical skill, more on his business brain. He wants to do for major surgery what Henry Ford did for the motor car - make it affordable for the masses, by means of mass production. He's building what he calls medical cities across India and beyond...