Start the Week

Andrew Marr discusses the role of the public intellectual on Start the Week. The French philosopher, journalist and activist Bernard-Henri Levy flexes his muscles as he sets out his views on everything from literature to politics and fame, Baroness Mary Warnock looks at morality and what philosophers can add to the current debates about privacy, society and fairness, while Roger Scruton argues tha...

On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses the pursuit of power, and the art of leadership, from dictators to technocrats. The Ghanaian economist George Ayittey sets out the fight against tyranny in Africa and around the world, while Maha Azzam looks to see whether Egypt could learn any lessons from his assertion that many of today's despots were yesterday's freedom fighters. The columnist Simon Heff...

On Start the Week Andrew Marr asks how the arts tackle politics and current affairs. The performer Rory Bremner turns his comedic eye to opera, in an updated version of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. Originally written to satirise Napoleon III's Paris, Bremner draws present day parallels with a spin-filled, celebrity-obsessed world. For the last 30 years the film maker Peter Kosminsky has...

Andrew Marr discusses the writing of history with Peter Englund, Norman Davies Alison Weir and Boris Johnson. Norman Davies turns to the vanished kingdoms of Europe to explore an alternative history of the continent and to reclaim the stories of the vanquished. While the Swedish historian Peter Englund puts the lives of ordinary people throughout Europe at the heart of his re-telling of the First...

Andrew Marr discusses Australia's cultural heritage with the prize-winning authors Thomas Keneally and Kate Grenville, and the opera singer and composer Deborah Cheetham. Keneally has embarked on a history of Australia through its people: from convicts and Aborigines, settlers and bushrangers, patriots and reformers, and he builds up a picture of the country's unique national character. For her la...

Andrew Marr is in Perth in Australia for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, to discuss mining, money and the monarchy. He talks to the Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, Danny Sriskandarajah, about the future of an organisation, headed by the Queen, that's been criticised for being impotent and irrelevant. Compared to many Commonwealth nations, Australia is going through an econom...

Andrew Marr talks to musician Jarvis Cocker about lyrics and the lyricism of the everyday; to playwright Jez Butterworth about his vision of bucolic myths and modern brutality in the English countryside; to poet Melanie Challenger about the extinction of species and also of ways of life and to Matthew White who catalogues and compares the brutality of humanity throughout the ages. Producer: Eleano...

Andrew Marr discusses the wonders of the universe with Lisa Randall, Richard Dawkins and the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The cosmologist Professor Randall looks at the how the latest developments in physics have the potential to alter radically our view of the world around us, and our place within it. Richard Dawkins explores the beauty and magic of scientific reality, from rainbows and shooting s...

Andrew Marr looks at the lasting impact of the British Empire with Jeremy Paxman and Richard Gott. Paxman reflects on how our imperial past still has the power to influence everything from Prime Ministers' decisions to send troops to war, to the way we view adventurers of the past. While Gott argues against any residual belief that the Empire was an imaginative and civilising enterprise, and revea...

In the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, Andrew Marr discusses foreign intervention with the Conservative MP Rory Stewart and the former intelligence officer, Frank Ledwidge. Stewart looks back at the conflict to ask whether simple notions of winning foreign wars is counterproductive, while Ledwidge turns a critical eye on the army's lack of strategic thinking which he argu...

Andrew Marr discusses the work of the 'Godfather' of new music Pierre Boulez. The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard explains the joy of his compositions, which are in a state of permanent revolution. The writer Peter Conrad pits Verdi against Wagner to ask whether it's possible to love both composers, or does taste, nationality and ideology still get in the way. With a very English temperament...

Andrew Marr talks to the journalist Misha Glenny about the murky world of internet crime, as the cybercops pit their wits against the cyberthieves and hackers. The creative director at google, Tom Uglow, celebrates the art and ingenuity that comes with he calls, 'the post-digital age'. It's more colourful, but no less subversive, at an exhibition of Postmodernism at the V&A. The curator Jane P...

Andrew Marr discusses the life and work of the writer Vasily Grossman in a special programme recorded at an event in Oxford to celebrate his greatest novel, Life and Fate. Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew who spent most of WWII reporting on the front line with a humanity and attention to detail that defied the Soviet censors. His masterpiece, Life and Fate, pitted communism against fascism but came do...

Andrew Marr talks to the science fiction writer China Mieville, whose latest planetary creation explores the links between language and thought, and asks what it means to have no concept of lying. AN Wilson explores a world closer to home, but no less alien, medieval Florence, as he tries to uncover the life and work of Dante. Jonathan Bates' play, Being Shakespeare also attempts to bring to life...

Andrew Marr explores the limits of science and art in this week's Start the Week. The philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis mounts an all-out assault on those who see neuroscience and evolutionary theory as holding the key to understanding human consciousness and society. While fellow scientist Barbara Sahakian explores the ethical dilemmas which arise when new drugs developed to treat cer...

Andrew Marr talks to Tim Harford about the key to success. The 'undercover economist' argues that the fear of failure paradoxically leads to greater and more dangerous failures - from oil disasters to world conflict. Success in parliament is often mercurial, but the new Director of the Institute for Government and former Labour Minister, Andrew Adonis believes the pool of talent for the top jobs i...

Andrew Marr talks to Richard Sennett about increasing urbanisation. With half the world's population living in major cities, Sennett asks why the art of designing cities has declined so drastically in the last century. Iain Sinclair turns a critical eye on the grand plans for London's 2012 Olympics, and asks what will happen when the last race is run. Kate O'Regan was appointed as a judge in the C...

Andrew Marr talks to the historian Jane Shaw about the story of Mabel Barltrop: she was renamed Octavia by her followers who believed she was the daughter of God. The theatre director, Jonathan Kent, brings the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire to the stage, in the little known Ibsen play, Emperor and Galilean. Ziauddin Sardar gives his take on the Qur'an, drawing contemporary lessons f...

Andrew Marr wanders the globe with Paul Theroux, as he celebrates the pleasures and pains of travel, and discovers what makes the best travel writing. The General Secretary of Amnesty International Salil Shetty looks back at 50 years of the organisation, and argues that Amnesty has had to change from a small letter-writing charity aimed at freeing dissidents, to a global multi-national focused on...

Andrew Marr talks to the former British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, about the failures of Western policy in Afghanistan, and how diplomacy would have been a better option than the gun. In 2003 Baha Mousa was arrested by the British Army in Basra, in Iraq. Two days later he was dead. Richard Norton-Taylor sifts through all the evidence to bring the public inquiry into his death to the stage....

Andrew Marr talks to Francis Fukuyama about the development of political institutions from the early tribal societies to the growth of the modern state. Pakistan has often been referred to as a 'failed state', but Anatol Lieven argues that despite its reputation it has the makings of a modern, viable and coherent country. The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, explores what it m...

Andrew Marr talks to the MP Denis MacShane about the political situation in France. It's 30 years since the election of the country's first socialist president, Francois Mitterrand. The People's Pledge is campaigning for a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, and its founder Ruth Lea argues that it's time to disregard the wishes of Brussels. The Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman explores the sp...

Andrew Marr explores how far empathy, or the lack of it, can explain cruelty. Simon Baron-Cohen proposes turning the focus away from evil or specific personality disorders, and to understand human behaviour by studying the 'empathy circuit' in the brain. Gwen Adshead, a forensic psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital and the crime writer Val McDermid question whether this would help in their line o...

Andrew Marr talks to the theatre director Greg Doran about the literary detective work involved in his production of Cardenio - a play he's described as Shakespeare's Lost Play re-imagined. Nicola Shulman turns to the court of Henry VIII to explore the influence of Thomas Wyatt's poetry. While Neil Astley brings together contemporary poets from around the world in an anthology dedicated to 'Being...

Andrew Marr's guests include the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, who argues that science ought to influence human morality rather than religion; the writer Masha Gessen who describes the extraordinary story of the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman who solved a mathematical problem that had remained inscrutable for a century but refused to take the credit - or the million dollar priz...