Private Passions

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...

Robert Macfarlane is a writer and scholar who has spent years exploring the wild spaces of the world. In this location edition of Private Passions, he takes Michael Berkeley to an uninhabited island off the coast of Suffolk, Orfordness. It was a place used for military testing right up to the 1950s, and it's littered with abandoned rusty machinery and ruined observation towers; the wind scrapes ac...

Ruth Rogers has become one of our most celebrated cooks and best-selling food writers since she and her friend the late Rose Gray opened a modest cafe in West London more than twenty five years ago. Their modest ambition was to make the River Cafe the best Italian restaurant in the world. Since then Ruth Rogers has been instrumental in changing the way we think about Italian food in Britain. Ruth...

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright can justifiably be described as a member of folk royalty. The son of Loudon Wainwright 3rd and the late Kate McGarrigle, he is also the nephew of Anna McGarrigle and brother of Martha Wainwright, all accomplished musicians in their own right. He describes about how he spent the first few weeks of his life sleeping in a guitar-case, sang with his...

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country talk about their musical passions with Michael Berkeley. Paul Muldoon, born and raised in Northern Ireland, is one of our most distinguished poets, having won the Pulitzer, TS Eliot and Irish Times Prizes. In this programme he celebrates his Northern Irish roots in music and poetry, and discusses his fascination with the pla...

As part of the British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the UK reveal their favourite music. Sean O'Brien is a perfect choice for Private Passions because his poems capture the musical soundscapes of the north-east of England where he lives: the cries of gulls, the wash of the sea, the rumble of trains. In fact he's obsessed by trains, and for O'Brien, like many other poets, journeys by...

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country reveal the music which inspires them. Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis has the unusual distinction of having written the largest poem in the world, and it's about music. The words are six feet tall, inscribed over the entrance to the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, the music venue designed by Zaha Hadid: 'In these stones horizons sing...