Private Passions

Dr Richard Smith heads an organisation called Patients Know Best, and having been editor of the British Medical Journal for most of his career, he now enjoys stirring things up in a provocative weekly blog there. Among his targets: the sinister power of drug companies - and the not unrelated tendency of doctors to over-treat illnesses like cancer. When he's not stirring things up at home, Richard...

The Hay Festival began in 1988 with 250 people in a field in mid Wales. Thirty years later, the crowd has swelled to more than quarter of a million - 265,000 people are expected to turn up this year over ten days - and it's still in a field in mid-Wales. But the Hay Festival has also grown into an international brand, with spin-offs across the world in Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Segovia. The Festi...

Michael Berkeley talks to the food writer, artist and journalist Elisabeth Luard about her favourite music and the memories it conjures up of the joys and tragedies of family life. The winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award for Lifetime Achievement, she has written more than twenty cookbooks, including European Peasant Cookery, Flavours of Andalucía, and A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse. And...

For Lubaina Himid, winning the Turner Prize is recognition for thirty-five years of work as a painter, curator and installation artist. Her work is witty, vibrantly coloured, and provocative; in her most famous work, "Naming the Money", she filled galleries with more than a hundred huge and very beautiful cut-outs of African figures from the past - the forgotten black servants and musicians who we...

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anne Sebba, the best-selling biographer of iconic women including Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill's mother Jennie, Laura Ashley, and Mother Teresa. Her most recent book tells the stories of the women of Paris in the 1940s. She follows the lives of housewives, Resistance fighters, shop girls, prostitutes and celebrities, all the time examining the big, small - and ofte...

The artist Phyllida Barlow shares her passion for music that reflects her sculpture, in its defiance of convention and delight in surprise. For years Phyllida Barlow was so desperate for people to see her sculptures that she would leave them on the street or in disused factories; or she would install them in friends' houses, using pianos and ironing boards as plinths. Initially overlooked by museu...

In a revealing and entertaining programme for Easter Day, the Reverend Richard Coles talks to Michael Berkeley about his double life as a celebrity priest and his enduring passion for classical music. The only vicar to have had a number one hit and to have danced the paso doble dressed as Flash Gordon in front of 10 million television viewers, Richard Coles is also the presenter of Radio 4's Satur...

Xavier Bray is a renowned specialist in 17th- and 18th-century art, and he's been director for a year now of the Wallace Collection, that rich collection of rococo painting, china, and armour, housed in a grand mansion in Marylebone that remains something of a well-kept secret. Bray would like to change that, opening up the gallery to a wider public and to music of all kinds. He himself would have...

The poet and singer-songwriter Gwyneth Glyn talks to Michael Berkeley about the music she loves from Wales and around the world. Gwyneth has been described as a poet among singers and a singer among poets. She's also a television script writer, a playwright and a children's author, having won the Crown at the Urdd Eisteddfod aged 18, and going on to be appointed Wales' National Poet Laureate for C...

Richard Flanagan first came to worldwide attention in 2001 with one of the most original titles ever: "Gould's Book of Fish, a Novel in Twelve Fish". It was his third novel, the story of a 19th-century forger sentenced to hard labour off the coast of Van Diemen's Land. Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania as it's now called, is where Flanagan was brought up, and still lives and writes, publishing every...

In a special edition to mark International Women's Day next week, Michael Berkeley talks to Britain's most decorated female Olympic athlete, the rower Dame Katherine Grainger. Katherine won a silver medal in Rio in 2016 - at the age of 40. It was her fifth medal from five consecutive Olympic Games, including a gold in the double sculls at London 2012. On her return from Rio, she was voted the Olym...

Singer, multi-instrumentalist, electronic sitar player, performer and DJ, Bishi has performed with everyone from Yoko Ono, Pulp, Goldfrapp, the LSO, and the Kronos Quartet. A glamorous and extravagantly costumed presence on stage, she's influenced by both Eastern and Western classical music as well as electronic dance, glam rock and folk music. Michael Berkeley talks to her about growing up with t...

Bernard Cornwell is now one of the world's most popular writers of historical fiction. He's famous for his Sharpe series, about a British soldier during the Napoleonic wars, and for his Last Kingdom books, set in 9th-century Britain. Both have become successful television adaptations, with a third season of The Last Kingdom being filmed for Netflix at the moment. The numbers are pretty staggering:...

Michael Berkeley talks to the actress Frances Barber about the music and friendships that have inspired her throughout her career. From Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre to the evil Madame Kovarian in Dr Who, from Peter Greenaway to Inspector Morse, and from Chekhov at the Royal Shakespeare Company to playing a seductive barrister in TV's Silk, Frances Barber is one of our most versatile actors. From...

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is steeped in Viking lore. She travels through the icy landscapes of the Far North in the footsteps of those Norse "far travellers" who have left us their wonderful poetic stories of kings and trolls and dragons. She's an Associate Professor at Durham University and an AHRC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, and her fieldwork has taken her pretty much everywhere the Vikin...

Alistair Spalding talks about dance with the zeal of the convert. Although he's headed Sadler's Wells since 2004, commissioning new work from leading international choreographers - Akram Khan, Mark Morris, Matthew Bourne, Pina Bausch - he doesn't come from a dance background. He left school at sixteen, and worked in a solicitor's office, aiming to be a lawyer. He then studied linguistics and philo...

The physicist and broadcaster Helen Czerski talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, inspired by her Polish heritage and her fascination with technology and exploration. Having gained a wonderfully titled PhD in Experimental and Explosive Physics from Cambridge in 2006, Helen worked in the US and Canada, and is now a Research Fellow at University College London where she specialises in...

Another chance to hear pianist Alfred Brendel in conversation with Michael Berkeley in 2017. Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, died in June aged 94. He was renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven. He talks to Michael Berkeley about the composers and musicians he admires,...

Many Private Passions guests over the years have revealed their passion for Bach. But for some, the great composer has really transformed their lives. The great primatologist Jane Goodall, for instance, describes how she reached such a dark time in her life that she considered giving up altogether. Four of her workers had been kidnapped in Africa, in the chimpanzee sanctuary she'd established. The...

Jane Birkin came to fame in the swinging 60s, thanks to her wild beauty and daring appearances in avant-garde films such as Blow-up, and thanks also to her tempestuous relationship with Serge Gainsbourg. In 1969 their song "Je t'aime" was banned by the BBC and the rest is history; it became the biggest-selling foreign language record ever. Since then, Jane Birkin has appeared in more than fifty fi...

The playwright and novelist Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley. Michael Frayn is an acute observer of the absurdities and pain of the human condition, and his writing career has spanned journalism, novels, philosophy, Russian translation, and plays both philosophical and farcical. Noises Off, his 1982 farce about a farce, has become one of the twentieth century's best...

Susan Richards, writer and commentator on contemporary Russia, talks to Michael Berkeley about her fascination with the country and her passion for 20th-century Russian music. Susan's first book, Epics of Everyday Life, was about the euphoric period after the collapse of communism. She travelled all over Russia to try to find out how ordinary people were coping with the discovery that they'd been...

As part of Radio 3's coverage of the London Jazz Festival, Michael Berkeley talks to the saxophonist and bass clarinettist John Surman, who over a career of dizzying versatility that spans more than fifty years, has shown us just how many different ways jazz can be made. Surman's hundreds of recordings include solos with synthesizers, saxophone trios, trios with voice and drums, with brass bands a...

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning writer whose books return again and again to Russia. His latest novel is Red Sky at Noon, the last of his Moscow Trilogy, following Sashenka and One Night in Winter. His most recent history, The Romanovs 1613-1918, tells the story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness. It's a world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-build...

Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter whose latest drama series on the BBC, "Gunpowder", dramatizes the story of Guy Fawkes from the point of view of the Catholics, who were persecuted in England at the time. All through his substantial body of work Ronan Bennett has explored the roots of violence and terrorism, something he knows about from personal experience, having grown up as a Catholi...