Start the Week

In a special programme recorded at the Cheltenham Literature Festival Andrew Marr talks to Bernhard Schlink, author of 'The Reader', about his latest novel to be translated, which pits youthful idealism against the reality of terrorism. Margaret MacMillan explores the uses and abuses of history, while Peter Snow tries to unpick the man from the legend in his biography of Wellington. Sebastian Faul...

Andrew Marr talks to Jonathan Franzen, hailed as a 'Great American Novelist' for his latest book, Freedom. Amidst the backdrop of the war on terror, environmental disaster and class war, Franzen chronicles the lives, choices and compromises of one family. The playwright Shelagh Stephenson also explores family tensions in her new play, about what happens when a missing child returns home. Philosoph...

Andrew Marr talks to the economist Will Hutton about the need to transform a country blighted by inequality and indebted to big finance. While Will Hutton argues for a fairer society, Lars Kroijer comes clean about the life and decisions of a hedge fund manager. Also arguing for greater fairness is Billy Ivory whose latest screenplay, Made In Dagenham, charts the walkout of the women workers at th...

In the first programme of a new series of Start the Week the former MP Lord Hattersley charts the life and politics of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of the welfare state, and a working class man who came to understand the pitfalls of a coalition government. Andrew Marr looks back to the 1980s with the writer Andy McSmith who argues this was the conflict decade...