Private Passions

Peter Tatchell was still a teenager, living in Australia, when he started on what has been a long and headline-grabbing career of political protest. He was only fifteen when he began campaigning against the death penalty, and in support of aboriginal rights. At the age of seventeen, he realised he was gay, and the struggle for gay rights became his increasing focus: he was a leading activist in th...

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine, in 1968. Unsurprisingly her work as a writer is concerned with themes of identity, exile, dislocation. Beginning as a poet and a playwright – her plays were staged by the RSC – she then turned to novels,...

Lord Stirrup, former Chief of the Defence Staff, talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for music from Renaissance motets to twenty-first-century opera. Jock Stirrup was lucky to survive when a bird hit one of the engines of his Jaguar jet in 1983. With the cockpit glass obscured and one engine on fire, he chose not to eject from the plane, but to try to land it to save the life of his studen...

It’s hard to sum up the extraordinary reach of Siri Hustvedt’s work. On the one hand, there are popular novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, which became international best-sellers and were translated into thirty languages. But underpinning her six novels there’s an impressive body of philosophical exploration – about Freud, neurophysiology, painting. Then there’s her own art wo...

David Cannadine describes himself as “staggeringly lucky”: he found what he wanted to do early in life, and it has rewarded him richly. He is one of our most distinguished historians; his period is the 19th and early 20th century, and he’s written more than twenty books, on Churchill, on class, on the aristocracy - among many others. He’s the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and the...

James Ellroy has been dubbed the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’, a label he relishes. His crime novels, fifteen to date, are international best-sellers; the world they depict is Los Angeles at its wildest and darkest, cops and criminals as violent as each other. Ellroy’s own life has been dominated by crime; his mother was murdered when he was ten, and Ellroy himself got involved in petty t...

Earlier this year, when Hannah Sullivan won the biggest prize in the poetry world, the TS Eliot Prize, the chair of the judges announced: “A star is born. Where has she come from?” Such a prestigious prize is a rare honour, as the book, Three Poems, was Hannah Sullivan’s first published collection. Up until then, she’d established a successful academic career, studying at Cambridge, teaching at Ha...

At the age of 27, Peter Piot’s life was changed by the arrival of a special package from Africa. He was working as a researcher in a microbiology lab in Antwerp, Belgium; and, in September 1976, the lab was alerted that a package was on its way from Zaire: samples of blood from an epidemic that was stirring along the river Congo. Several Belgian nuns had already died of a strange new disease. The...

As the 50th anniversary of the moon landings approaches, James Burke talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that brings back memories of the heady days when, new to science broadcasting, he was chosen by the BBC to lead the coverage of the Apollo Missions and the moment the first human stepped onto the Moon. James Burke has the rare gift of making complex ideas comprehensible to a wide audience...

Sarah Langford is a barrister; in her words, her job is “to represent the mad and the bad, the broken and the hopeful” – telling their stories in court. After thirteen years of practice, she decided to tell their stories in a book, too. In Your Defence was published last year and has had a huge impact. In it she tells the stories of eleven people she represented in both the criminal and family cou...

In the early 1990s Harry Enfield went from being a part-time milkman to one of our biggest comedy stars, and many of the characters he created have become embedded in our national psyche - Loadsamoney, Kevin the Teenager, Tim Nice-But-Dim, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Stavros and Smashie and Nicey, to name just a few. He started out on Spitting Image and Saturday Night Live, and his television shows i...

June Spencer can walk down the street unrecognised, but as soon as she starts to speak, she’s known instantly by millions. That’s because, since the very first episode in 1950, she’s played Peggy in The Archers – that’s more than 68 years. The only remaining member of the original cast, she’s been honoured with both an OBE and a CBE. As part of the celebrations for her 100th birthday she talks to...

Lucasta Miller is a writer fascinated by the Romantic, and the dark excesses of the Gothic. Her latest subject is a poet, Letitia Landon, whose life was scandalous and whose sudden death is like a scene from a detective novel. In her day, Landon was an icon, hailed as a “female Byron” – and a favourite of the Brontë sisters, who were the subject of Lucasta Miller’s previous book. Both biographies...

At thirty-two, Robert Icke is already one of this country’s leading theatre directors. He’s best-known for his modern adaptations of classic texts; his version of the Greek tragedy the Oresteia won him an Olivier in 2016 for Best Director, and both the Critics Circle and the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. He wrote a seventy-minute prequel to the Aeschylus play himself, so there’s no shortage of...

The actress and comedian Jess Robinson tells Michael Berkeley how her training as a classical singer informs her impressions of a vast range of singers, including Kate Bush, Bjork, Lady Gaga, Billie Holiday and Julie Andrews. A regular on Radio 4’s The Now Show, Dead Ringers, and 15 Minute Musicals, Jess made her name starring on stage in Little Voice and playing Joan Collins’ daughter in Full Cir...

Barbara Hosking was born above her father’s dairy in Penzance, back in the 1920s, and ended up in the corridors of power serving two British prime ministers. Two years ago, at the age of 90, she decided to come out as gay, which, she says, is the best thing she’s ever done. Barbara Hosking talks to Michael Berkeley about moving from Cornwall to a new world in London after the War, meeting Eastern...

David Wilson has spent his life working with violent men – particularly those who have committed murder and serial murder. Currently Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University and a campaigner for penal reform, he spent much of his career working in a series of prisons and young offender institutions, dealing with some of our most notorious murderers - including Dennis Nilsen....

The surgeon Roger Kneebone tells Michael Berkeley how his work with tailors, lacemakers, Formula One teams, and musicians has transformed his understanding of medicine. Roger Kneebone began his career as a trauma surgeon in Soweto, operating on victims of stabbings and shootings, before working in a war zone in Namibia in the 1980s. Then he was a GP in Wiltshire for fifteen years before joining Im...

The comedian Jo Brand tells Michael Berkeley about the important role classical music plays in her life. Jo Brand has enjoyed a pretty unusual career path - from psychiatric nurse to The Great British Bake Off. On the way she’s taken in radical stand-up comedy – under the moniker The Sea Monster – invented a new genre of Bafta-winning sitcom drawing on the black humour of nurses and social workers...

For forty years, Uta Frith has dedicated her life to understanding the enigma of autism; she was one of the first neuroscientists to recognise autism as a condition of the brain, rather than the result of cold parenting. She works at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, alongside her husband, Chris Frith, who’s a specialist in mapping the brain through neuro-imagin...

Over the last 40 years, Mark Morris has established a reputation as the most musical of choreographers. Inspired by both baroque and twentieth-century music, he’s most famously choreographed Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” – he danced both Dido and the sorceress himself - and his witty version of The Nutcracker, “The Hard Nut”, has been so popular that it’s been staged every year for almost 30 years....

From Hollywood to European art house cinema, from Shakespeare to contemporary drama, Greta Scacchi is one of our most versatile actors. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the film that made her name in 1983 – Heat and Dust – and chooses music from the soundtrack featuring Zakir Hussain. She reveals how her musical training as a child – learning ballet, piano and singing - has been invaluable when...

The comedian Rachel Parris talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions and how her life as a classical musician led to her career in comedy. Her hugely versatile career includes improvised comedy shows, stand-up, musical comedy and appearances on Radio 4’s The Now Show. She’s caused quite a stir with her hilarious turns as a faux-naïve reporter on BBC2’s satirical news show The Mash Repor...

Michael Berkeley talks to the philosopher Julian Baggini about the pleasures of serendipity, transience, philosophy and music. The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Do They Think You’re Stupid? and What’s It All About? are just three of the eye-catchingly titled books by Julian Baggini. He’s written 19 books in all, is the founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, writes for newspapers, magazines a...

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Preti Taneja about her wide-ranging love of music, from Indian gazals and ragas to Vivaldi and Shostakovich. Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young won last year’s Desmond Elliott prize and huge critical acclaim, after being rejected as ‘commercially unviable’ by multiple publishers in both London and Delhi. It’s a reworking of King Lear, set in contempor...