A Point of View

"What would it be like to consciously feel you were nothing but a robotic phenotype", asks Will Self, "pre-programmed to replicate its own integrated genotypic code then become...obsolete?" Taking the contemporary TV series "Westworld" as his starting point, Will explores consciousness, humanity and artificial intelligence. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self once wrote that he could no longer identify as a Jew at all. As anti-Semitism once again comes back to the centre stage of British political life, Will says he's had cause to rethink his position. "Once societies contain a certain proportion of active bigots", he writes, "all rational debate on such matters begins to shut down as everyone reverts - tediously, ineluctably - to type". Prod...

"Cute mobile machines with arms, hands and big friendly eyes reminding you to take your next pill... or lifting people in and out of wheelchairs" - is this the way to look after a growing elderly population? Sarah Dunant reflects on the crisis in care for the elderly and wonders if artificial intelligence can provide a satisfactory answer. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

On 5th June 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In one of the most famous editions of Radio 4's "Letter from America" - Alistair Cooke gave an eye witness account of the assassination. This is an edited version of the original talk - broadcast on Sunday 9th June 1968.

Amit Chaudhuri on why he believes modern movies have a "spiritual glumness". "Digitisation's subterranean agenda", he says, "is to repress natural light." Unlike old black and white films which were flooded in natural light, he sees the light of digitisation as a grey light. "We're meant to be distracted by drama, violence and special effects; but, crucially, enchantment is withheld from us." Prod...

Sarah Dunant gives a personal view on Ireland's abortion referendum. She remembers one of her first jobs after university - working in a Pregnancy Advisory Service in London as a counsellor - and seeing many young women from the Republic of Ireland who'd come to England seeking an abortion. And the day, some years later, when she went back there, that time as a client.

"Calcutta was born old", writes Amit Chaudhuri. But restoration work of old buildings in the city, he says, "is now often based on the assumption that an old building...must have once looked new, or should have". He says restoration in Calcutta - and in many other cities around the world - must stop fetishizing the new.

"My problem with words is something I have never written down or spoken out about". The writer, Stella Tillyard, talks about her "battle" with dyslexia - from her childhood to now. She vividly describes the "gremlin that takes me by the hand, pulls my confidence away, and makes my heart beat too fast when I have - as now - to read aloud". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare ponders why disabled sexuality is still so often taboo. "Sexuality is a human right", he points out....and says we must set aside the notion that disabled people have "special needs" when it comes to sexuality. "We have all the normal needs of non-disabled people". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"The past is concretised and solidified in things", writes Stella Tillyard "and they vibrate with the experience of their use". Stella tells the story of a small Italian Museum - the Museum of Deportation and Resistance - and reflects on how we remember the past. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare on why we need to rethink our use of the mental illness metaphor. Is President Trump really "mad"?, he asks. Is Brexit "bonkers"? Or is the latest government policy "schizophrenic"? He says we all do it. "Within five minutes of starting to write this talk, I find I'm doing it myself!" But he says we need to break the habit since it shows a profound lack of understanding towards peo...

"Western liberals", writes John Gray, "are horrified by the rise of Xi Jinping". But as China's parliament votes to allow him to be President for life, John Gray argues that the future of the liberal West ironically depends on the continuing success of the world's most powerful authoritarian state. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray says the idea that empire has had its day is one of the delusions of our age. Old empires, he says, are being replaced by new ones - in China, Russia and - he argues - in Europe. He examines the idea of a European "empire of the good" - one that is liberal and democratic throughout. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

There was Chick Lit, then Grit Lit....now it's "Up Lit" - uplifting stories about kindness and community that we all seem to be reading. Kamila Shamsie says she, too, has been carried along with this wave of escapism from "dark times". But she says the idea that "upliftment" should be marketed to the reading public as the only fictional response to difficult times strikes her as problematic. "The...

At a time when the word "civilisation" is the subject of great debate, Kamila Shamsie explores the meaning of the word through the prism of Indian art. "If you really want to understand how the world's civilisations interact and meld", she writes, "go and look at the art of Gandhara". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Tom Shakespeare tells us why he believes the phrase "going forward" is an inelegant and negative replacement for "in future". When you talk about the future, he says, you are using a temporal concept. It's a different time from now - the time to come - and "invites us to open out our imaginative space". It offers the possibility that things might be different. "Going forward", on the other hand, i...

"We're in one of those recurring periods in history", writes John Gray, "when the idea of revolution has become appealing again". In this context, John says we should dust off the work of Teffi - one of the best known writers in Russia before the revolution. "I doubt", he says, "if anyone has written with such luminous clarity of what it means to live in a time of chaos". Producer: Adele Armstrong...

John Gray argues that, throughout history, highly educated people have often made the worst decisions. Taking George Orwell as his starting point "There are some ideas so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them", he asks why we're still so reluctant today to give credence to the views of ordinary people. He examines the role of universities in teaching critical thought in the humanities...

In 1967, the philosopher Philippa Foot developed a thought experiment about a runaway trolley. It involved countless dilemmas designed to illustrate human behaviour. But whatever the scenario, the rhetoric was always the same....the overwhelming desire was for the trolley to kill fewer people and save more. AL Kennedy argues that today that rhetoric is in danger of being turned on its head. Produc...

"Death's not great for selling yoghurt" writes AL Kennedy, "but making Death dance through a culture seems to do more than reinforce dominant ideologies....it can lend power to the powerless". She says for millennia, the human race has searched for everlasting life. Instead of resisting our mortality, she argues that it's empowering to reflect on it. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Winning - isn't it great?" asks AL Kennedy. But she argues that our "winner takes all" mentality is suffocating democracy. "On both sides of the Atlantic, in regimes around the world", she writes, "we can watch the chaotic dissolution of administrations based on winning at any price". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy on why Hollywood has never been a nice place. In 1919, barely three decades after the advent of moving pictures, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and others thought things were bad enough in the studio system to break away and form an independent creative producing collective, United Artists. There are many other examples of Hollywood's woes in the C20th. But in this time of political ins...

"How long", asks Howard Jacobson, "before the protocols of looking forbid our looking appreciatively at anyone?" He explores the enormous difficulties surrounding the language of appreciation, "no matter whether the viewer in question is a mechanic ogling a pin-up in his workshop or an art critic pausing at a wall of French nudes in the Wallace Collection". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson ponders why misanthropy is out of fashion. "Where have they gone?", he asks, "such great haters of mankind as Juvenal, Swift, Flaubert". Mankind, he believes, has not grown less tribal over time. But instead of a general enemy, he says, "we each have our own individual tormentor - a private phobic for every one of us". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Howard Jacobson on why we need to preserve Bohemia. London's Soho, he says, is the nearest the UK has to a Bohemia but "you don't sniff aesthetic licence in the streets of Soho as you once did". But one day recently, writes Howard, Soho recovered its spirit - at the funeral of the leopard-skin jacketed "Prince of Soho". Producer: Adele Armstrong.