Private Passions

John Finnemore is one of our most successful comedy writers and performers. A star turn in Miranda as the doting husband Chris, he writes and stars in the award-winning Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressure, and he's made two series of the Radio 4 sketch show Souvenir Programme. He regularly appears on The Now Show, The Unbelievable Truth and The News Quiz. And apart from his own shows, he also writes for...

If you should happen to be walking through the House of Commons, and hear loud Wagner blasting out along those corridors of power ? you know you're heading for the office of Kwasi Kwarteng. He's been there since 2010, when he was elected MP for Spelthorne in Surrey. Before going into Parliament, he'd already established a reputation as a historian; his new book 'War and Gold' comes out later this...

When Joan Armatrading's mother bought a piano 'as a piece of furniture' little did she know what she was starting. The fourteen-year-old Joan taught herself to play it, then to play the guitar too and twelve years later she burst onto the music scene with her hit song Love and Affection. In a career spanning forty years, she has made 20 acclaimed studio albums as well as undertaking an internation...

Michael Horovitz is one of the last surviving Beatniks, 'the big daddy of the British Beat Movement'. In the 1950s, he founded a ground-breaking magazine which was the first to publish new work by Samuel Becket and William Burroughs, including passages from Naked Lunch which had been banned for obscenity in America. At 78 he's still performing his poems in pubs, and still playing his 'anglosaxopho...

Michael Sheen is famous for playing real people on screen - from Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams to Brian Clough and David Frost. And it was playing another real person - but this time on stage - that formed a turning point in his relationship with classical music. This person was Mozart, in the play Amadeus, and Michael has chosen part of Mozart's Requiem, used in that production. His other choic...

Lewis Wolpert is a distinguished scientist -and a familiar lanky figure on his bicycle, cycling through the Bloomsbury traffic to University College London where he is Emeritus Professor of Biology. His scientific research has been into the early development of the embryo, but he's a man with many other interests ? he's written books about depression, and recently a book about getting old ? and he...

Writer Pat Barker is fascinated by the First World War; for twenty years now, her award-winning novels have returned again and again to the trauma and grief and erotic intensity of wartime. Her novels draw on the experiences of real people: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and in particular the army doctor W.H. Rivers, a pioneering psychiatrist who treated victims of shell shock. As this centenary...

Hugh Masekela is a jazz legend. Brought up in South Africa during Apartheid, he left the country at 21, and spent the next 30 years in exile, releasing album after album - 43 to date - and performing alongside all the other great musicians of our era: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder, The Who ... He's still making music and touring the world at 74, and Private Passions was lucky enough to...

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, talks to Michael Berkeley about his favourite music and the meaning of Christmas. His choices include Christmas music from Bach and Britten, and music Justin Welby loves from the late medieval period. He talks to Michael about his career in the oil industry, his relatively late ordination, and his meteoric rise to the top of the Anglican Church, and the...

Somehow Tom Hooper has cracked the secret of making films which audiences really love. Whether you count Oscars and Baftas or box office takings he is, at 41, right up there as one of Britain's top film directors. The King's Speech won him four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and earlier this year his film of Les Miserables won three more Oscars. The box office takings for Les Mi...

Laura Mvula is more than just a pop star; before she had a best-selling album and industry awards she studied composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. In an in-depth interview in Private Passions, she reveals how she went from classical music student to chart-topping singer. In this warm and funny interview, Mvula talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical upbringing and about how church musi...

As part of Radio 3's Britten Centenary weekend, Michael Berkeley travels to Aldeburgh beach to meet the artist Maggi Hambling at her controversial memorial to Britten in the form of two giant interlocking scallop shells. Michael also visits her nearby studio to see her paintings inspired by the Suffolk sea and to talk about the effect of Britten's music on her painting and sculpture. She tells Mic...

Martin Gayford has a passion for painting and music, and has spent his career writing about artists - Constable, Van Gogh, David Hockney, Lucian Freud - and thinking about the connection between art and music. His new biography of Michelangelo is published in this month, and in this edition of Private Passions he explores the musical worlds of some of our greatest painters. He begins with the choi...

It was a band called The Commitments that first brought Roddy Doyle fame 25 years ago - not a real group of musicians, but a comic novel about a group of Dublin teenagers who get together and form a soul band. The book and its sequels became successful films. Roddy Doyle gave up his job as a teacher and has gone on to write nine more novels set in Dublin, where he grew up and still lives. One of t...

Private Passions makes its first visit to Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of ideas. Michael Berkeley talks to Chris Mullin, former MP, thriller writer and one of the sharpest political diarists of our age. He's certainly a free thinker: in three volumes of political diaries he's given us a devastating and very funny account of the workings of Westminster, from his vantage point as Labour MP for S...

Michael Berkeley's guest is the actor Rory Kinnear. Rory Kinnear is in danger of becoming a national treasure. Audiences across the world know him thanks to two Bond movies, where he plays M15 officer Bill Tanner. He was the journalist in the TV thriller Southcliffe, he was Denis Thatcher in the Margaret Thatcher TV biopic, he's the straight man to Count Arthur Strong... And he's established a rep...

Greg Doran is one of those lucky people who seem to have found his perfect place in life. From the age of 13, when his mother first took him to the theatre in Stratford, Shakespeare's been his passion; as a boy he dedicated himself to seeing every single Shakespeare play - sometimes managing to watch three Macbeths in a day. So - what better job than Artistic Director of our great national Shakesp...

Beeban Kidron is a rare and very unpredictable film-maker. A woman in a man's world, she's made highly successful dramas such as the BAFTA-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and the blockbusting rom-com Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. But she also makes documentaries which come straight from her heart: films about sex workers in New York, the women of Greenham Common, the sculptor Antony G...

It's quite possible that Philip French has seen more films than anyone else on the planet. Obsessed with cinema since the age of four, he has been reviewing films for the Observer for the past fifty years, as well as writing for many other papers and publishing several critically acclaimed books about cinema. He talks to Michael Berkeley about the role of the composer in the cinema, his late flowe...

Angie Hobbs is no ordinary philosopher. Her job takes her to places as varied as cathedrals, airforce bases and merchant banks, as well as frequently to our radio and TV screens. As our first ever Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, based at Sheffield University, she's determined to ensure that philosophy doesn't remain exclusively in the hands of academics - she wants it to inspi...

Gillian Lynne is best known as the choreographer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera, among other West End hits. She received a lifetime Olivier Award earlier this year. But her career began more than seven decades ago, when she was spotted as a dancer by Ninette de Valois. She danced during the War, with doodlebugs falling around her and just two pianos in the pit - no orchestras, as all the men wer...

The Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, is on our TV screens almost every week as the authority we appeal to in every health scare: horsemeat in burgers, antibiotic resistance, three-parent babies. She is clearly a person of tremendous power and influence, in charge of the National Institute of Health Research with a budget of £1 billion ? voted by Woman's Hour recently one of the top ten most po...

Adam Nicolson has the privilege, and the burden, of an extraordinary inheritance: Sissinghurst, that quintessentially English house and garden created by his grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In his own right, he's the author of a series of highly esteemed history books and television series, about the making of the King James Bible, about the English gentry, and most recently...

The astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell changed the way we see the universe. At the age of only 24, as a Phd student, she discovered a totally new kind of star, a pulsar. Her older male colleagues got the Nobel Prize for the discovery ? her name being unfairly, and in the view of many scientists, outrageously, left off. But many honours have followed, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell is currently Visiting...

Lord Sacks ends his twenty-year tenure as Britain's Chief Rabbi this coming autumn. At his retirement dinner (24 June) Prince Charles described him as "a light unto this nation" and praised him for promoting the principle of tolerance, expressing mounting anxiety at the apparent rise in anti-Semitism, along with other poisonous and debilitating forms of intolerance. In this programme, Lord Sacks l...