This Cultural Life

As part of the so-called Britart generation of the early 1990’s, artist Sam Taylor-Wood, as she was then known, made her name with photographic and video pieces. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997, and then breast cancer three years later, she addressed her treatment and recovery in artworks she made at the time. She moved into filmmaking with her first feature Nowhere Boy, about the life of the...

Sir Antonio Pappano is one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors. He started work at the age of ten as an accompanist for his father, who worked as a singing teacher. After leading orchestras in Brussels and Oslo, Pappano was appointed as musical director of the Royal Opera House in 2002. Stepping down after 22 years leading Covent Garden, he has joined the London Symphony Orchestra as chief co...

John Wilson talks to actor, comedian, broadcaster and writer Sir Michael Palin. A founding member of the hugely influential comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus, he wrote and performed in its five television series and three feature films including The Life Of Brian. Other big screen credits include A Fish Called Wanda, Brazil, The Missionary and The Death of Stalin. Michael is also a globet...

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos first emerged as part the so-called ‘weird wave’ of Greek cinema, and is known for unsettling themes and absurdist humour of his films. He made his mark internationally in 2009 with Dogtooth, which won a Cannes film festival prize and was nominated for an Oscar. Shifting into English language cinema with The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Olivia Colman, he continued...

French actor Juliette Binoche is known for her portrayal of emotionally complex characters. Over a forty year career, her films have included Three Colours Blue, Les Amants de Pont Neuf, Chocolat, and The English Patient, for which she won her Academy Award. Her most recent film is The Taste of Things, a French drama about a cook and the gourmet she works for, in which she stars opposite Benoît Ma...

A rare interview with Frank Auerbach, one of the world’s greatest living painters. At 92 years old, he has been painting for over 70 years and still works every day. A child refugee from Nazi Germany whose parents were killed in Auschwitz, he made his name alongside his friends and fellow painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff in the 1950s. He’s well known for the thick layers of th...

Born George O'Dowd, Boy George shot to pop stardom in 1982 as frontman with the band Culture Club and later as a solo artist. With his soulful vocals and flamboyant, androgynous looks, he became a massive star around the world with hits such as Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? and Karma Chameleon. His personal struggles with drug addiction and a prison sentence in 2009 meant he was rarely far from t...

Patricia Cornwell’s books have sold over 120 million copies in thirty-six languages in over 120 countries. She’s authored dozens of New York Times bestsellers. For over thirty years her protagonist, the forensic scientist Kay Scarpetta has been investigating murders across America, tracking down criminals by analysing evidence left on the bodies of victims. Cornwell has won the Sherlock Award, the...

Andrew Scott won a BAFTA as the evil Moriarty in Sherlock, but is equally loved for a divine television role as the hot priest in Fleabag. A prolific and versatile stage actor, he has starred in many plays by contemporary dramatists, including Port and Birdland by Simon Stevens. He played Hamlet to great critical acclaim and won an Olivier award for his starring role in Noel Coward’s Present Laugh...

John Wilson's guest is the violinist Nigel Kennedy. A prodigy whose childhood talents were nurtured by Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest violinist of the 20th century, Kennedy himself became an international star in 1989 with his recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It sold over three million copies, topping the UK classical charts for a year and went on to be listed as the biggest selling class...

Dame Judi Dench reflects on her career playing Shakespearean roles on stage and screen across seven decades. Judi Dench has spent her career bringing to life a hugely diverse array of characters. But she is, first and foremost, one of the greatest classical actors of our times. Her love of the work of William Shakespeare and the insight she has gained into his plays over the course of her career i...

Werner Herzog is one of the most idiosyncratic, original and prolific filmmakers of modern times, having made nearly 80 films over six decades. His features include Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre Wrath of God and Rescue Dawn, and his documentaries include the multi award-winning Grizzly Man, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog productions are the stuff of cinema legend, with stories...

Lyricist Bernie Taupin is one half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of all time. For more than 50 years, he has written the lyrics for Elton John’s songs including Tiny Dancer, Candle In The Wind, Rocket Man, Your Song and hundreds more. Having first met in 1967, after they both answered an advert in the NME placed by a record company seeking new musical talent, Elton John an...

Born George Mpanga, George the Poet is a British spoken-word artist and podcast host. Having started out as a rapper, he made his name as a spoken-word performance poet after leaving Cambridge University. His debut collection Search Party was published in 2015. The same year he was nominated for the Brits Critics Choice Award and the BBC Sound Of 2015 poll. He was also offered an MBE but declined...

One of the world’s most successful living choreographers, Sir Matthew Bourne shook up classical ballet in the mid 1990s with his ground-breaking company Adventures In Motion Pictures, later renamed New Adventures. His breakthrough production, a radical new version The Nutcracker, was followed by a production of Swan Lake where he replaced the traditional female swans with a male ensemble. After in...

Renowned for tackling big themes on stage, Lucy Prebble made her name as a playwright in her mid-twenties when she wrote the hugely successful Enron. The play, which premiered in 2009 and explored the collapse of the American energy corporation eight years earlier, transferred to the West End and also played on Broadway. In 2019 she premiered A Very Expensive Poison which dramatized the assassinat...

Author, poet and performer Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s best loved and most prolific children’s writers, having published hundreds of books over nearly fifty years, including his much-loved We’re Going On Bear Hunt, the story of an exciting family outing, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. As a broadcaster he is well known to Radio 4 listeners as the host of Word of Mouth. He was appointed as Chi...

Angélique Kidjo, often described as "the queen of African music", has recorded fifteen albums, worked with a diverse array of musical collaborators from Burna Boy and Alcia Keys to Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel, and won five Grammy Awards. In 2023 she was the recipient of the Polar Prize, regarded as one of the world’s prestigious musical awards. Born under French colonial rule in 1960 in Dahomey...

One of the world’s most acclaimed ceramicists, Edmund de Waal is renowned for simple, hand-made porcelain pots and bowls which are usually displayed in meticulously arranged groups. His work has been shown in museums and galleries including the V&A, the British Museum, the Frick in New York, and at the Venice Biennale. In 2010 Edmund de Waal became widely known as a bestselling author, after t...

French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani won critical acclaim and a reputation as an author of bold & brutal fiction with her first two novels. Adele is about a bourgeoise Parisian wife and mother who lives a sexually promiscuous secret life. In Lullaby, a nanny kills the children she’s employed to care for, a story currently being adapted as a drama series starring Nicole Kidman. Leïla has also w...

Sally Potter is a ground-breaking film-maker, best known for her bold 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Starring Tilda Swinton, it was nominated for two Academy Awards and won more than 25 international film prizes. With her 1983 debut feature The Gold Diggers, which starred Julie Christie, Sally Potter led an all-female cast and crew, establishing herself as a trailblazing figure...

Actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry first made his name as a comic performer as a Cambridge University undergraduate with the Footlights company. He went on to forge a television partnership with his university friend Hugh Laurie on the sketch show A Bit Of Fry and Laurie and later the comic drama series Jeeves and Wooster, adapted from the PG Wodehouse stories. Among many stage an...

Ian McEwan made his name in the 1970s with short stories and slim novels that explored the darker aspects of human nature. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 with his novel Amsterdam, and its follow up Atonement, was adapted as a film and nominated for several Academy Awards. McEwan primarily writes psychological dramas about relationships, but often within a global context of issues including climat...

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain’s official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields as in museums and galleries. In his work The Battle of Orgreave he restaged a modern civil conflict; a clash between striking miners and police officers. He persuaded a traditional brass band to play...

Errollyn Wallen is one of Britain's most acclaimed and widely performed contemporary composers. Born in Belize and brought up in north London, she was first ever woman to win a Ivor Novello Award for a body of work, and the first ever black woman to have a composition played at the BBC Proms. Errollyn has written 22 operas, as well as orchestral, chamber and choral works which are performed around...