A Point of View

"I listen to Money Box on Radio 4 as others might to a recording of Indonesian gamelan music", writes Will Self, "thrilling to the intricacies, even as I find them altogether alien". Will ponders why personal finance is such an alien concept for him. But his thoughts move to “those hundreds of thousands out there for whom the words ‘personal finance’ are, quite simply, terrifying”. Producer: Adele...

"Two things seem incontrovertible about the mounting environmental catastrophe", writes Will Self.. "It's genuinely unprecedented - and we really are in it together". Will wonders what we should say to our children about global warming and our role in it. He says we have to hope that some sort of collective wisdom can emerge "because the alternative is frankly terrifying: a degraded, dystopic and...

Roger Scruton argues that political correctness, far from being the cure to our conflicts, is actually the ultimate source of them. The "isms" and "phobias", he says, have been used in order to "put some complex matters beyond discussion, so that only one perspective can be publicly confessed to". "In the world of political correctness", he writes, "there is no presumption of innocence, but only a...

"For most of my adult life", writes Stella Tillyard, "I have had a template which I have used not only to understand myself but also to interpret the world around me. History has been my guide". But today, she says, history appears inadequate "to describe the chaos that now seems to surround us". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Stella Tillyard on how we bury and remember our dead. The idea of immortality, she believes, is taking hold in a new form. "Surely it will not be long before a new form of cemetery is created...a virtual space where all the digital remains of a person will be gathered, curated and tended". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on a very tricky dilemma - which of his possessions can he throw away or put into storage...and which must he keep? "I inhabit a simple moral universe when it comes to sheets of paper", he writes. "Paper with words on, good. Paper with numbers on, bad". But it's more complicated with some other things "How can I release the evidence of me to a storage company somewhere on the North...

Michael Morpurgo reflects on our future connection with the First World War. "How will we pass it on, this torch of history?", he asks. "Those missing men, those wounded, those who lived to count the cost, their story is our story and we must tell it again, keep it alive" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson discusses the politics of dress - form religious clothing ....via too short trousers...to ripped jeans. And why are men so reluctant these days, he wonders, to put on a "little finery"? Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on the end of mooching as a way of life. "Rooting around, doing nothing in particular, walking but not knowing where I was walking to....I can only regret the happy mooching hours of earlier times", writes Howard. He ponders whether our present age of mass anger and disgruntlement is partly a result of our expectations of instant gratification. "We sit, like so many privileged Alad...

Howard Jacobson reflects on maleness in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh story. "With every sniff and grimace" Howard writes of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "it wasn't sorrow or confusion we witnessed but petulance and menace, as though a prize bull had been cornered and in its fury knew only to kick out". "This is not a good time to be a man", he says. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that the sheer scale of tourism on a shoestring is destroying the very thing we crave when we travel. "Our great cities are year-round destinations", she writes, "but when the hordes arrive, cultural simplification is seldom far behind". She says we've grown used to cheap and cheerful instant gratification in many areas of our lives without any thought for the consequences. Pro...

Val McDermid asks if Sadiq Khan’s plan for a Glasgow-style crime reduction unit can have the same transformative effect in London as it did in Scotland. "If we change the script people live by", writes Val, "then surely we should be able to alter our outcomes". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Val McDermid argues that crime fiction isn't really about murder at all. "We shift people out of their comfort zones and make them squirm", she writes. "But not because we kill people". "It might be murder that sets the wheels in motion, but it's the time and place that lead us through the labyrinth to answers that are not always comfortable". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik examines the issues raised by the row between Serena Williams and an umpire. "The question everyone is asking", writes Adam, is "would he have done the same to a man?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik on why the prefixes we use speak volumes about us. The "pregnant prefix", Adam writes, "is now the giveaway of class identity - and class bound condescension. The "um"s, "like"s, "look"s, "well"s and particularly "so"s of the world tell all". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"To stand in the corridor of a crowded locked ward in a contemporary British mental hospital" writes Will Self, "is still to feel oneself closer to Hogarth's hellish vision of Bedlam, than any enlightened healthcare". Will tells the disturbing story of what happened to a friend, recently detained in a London psychiatric hospital. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare is downsizing. But what to do with his books? He points out that he has nothing like the magnitude of problem faced by the Argentine-Canadian author, Alberto Manguel, a few years ago when he downsized from his medieval presbytery in France to an apartment in New York and had to deal with 35,000 books! Or even the 3,000 books Penelope Lively wrote about recently. But Tom ponders how...

Tom Shakespeare on why he rejects the idea of a bucket list. He proposes instead an idea dreamt up by one of his mates - a list that rhymes with bucket but begins with an F. "Let's call it a Forget-it-list" he says. Tom shares the top ten items on his Forget it List this week. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

As we near the end of four years of collective reflection on the First World War, Michael Morpurgo talks of the importance of never taking peace for granted. "We have been looking back, remembering, or trying to", he writes, "because remembering a time and a war that none of us can remember is hard". He discusses one particular plan - the dream of a WW1 soldier - to make a new pilgrims way in No M...

Michael Morpurgo argues it's time to think again over Brexit. "It is surely time to accept that we have made a mistake", he writes, "that whichever way we voted, things are not turning out the way we expected". "Or are we too proud?" he asks. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Michael Morpurgo on a new initiative to help refugee children. Michael says "it shames us" that Britain in recent years has done so little to help child refugees. "There are fine examples of how our predecessors have shown great kindness towards the suffering of child refugees", he writes. He argues that we now need to follow their example. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray argues that in the Brexit debate, few Remainers seem to have noticed the illiberal and fragmented Europe that has recently come into being. "Illiberal forces are advancing across the European continent", he writes, with hard right politics strengthening their hold in many countries. He says the idea that staying in the European Union is a way of protecting liberal values is simply an "il...

Sarah Dunant on her uneasy conundrum over inheritance tax. "Like most intelligent beings", Sarah writes, "I'm passionate about addressing climate change for future generations. But my urgency of commitment also comes from an attachment to one in particular - the next". The desire to hand something on has always been with us, but it raises big moral dilemmas. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Adam Gopnik sets out to determine the difference between cliche and universal truth. Via Homer, Shakespeare and the Beatles, Adam observes that "the deepest statements in literature are very near relations to the dumbest statements in life". How can Homer get away with writing twenty lines about laundry?! And end up with an epic poem of great beauty. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self argues that the past is not "a foreign country". He says we often have delusions about the past because of our "failure to grasp how our present shapes our hindsight". Producer: Adele Armstrong.