Arts & Ideas Folgen

Anne McElvoy talks to celebrated Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose latest novel MaddAddam competes her dystopian trilogy that began a decade ago with Oryx and Crake and continued six years later with The Year of the Flood.

Historian Simon Schama joins Philip Dodd to discuss his book and TV series The Story of the Jews. Stephen Hopgood and Clive Stafford Smith debate the pros and cons of the human rights industry, and whether it has shifted to serve Western interests. Director Beeban Kidron on her documentary InRealLife, which explores the impact of the internet on children and young people.

In a special event recorded in front of an audience at London's Royal College of Music Anne McElvoy talks to John le Carré to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking Cold War espionage novel, The Spy who Came in from the Cold. It's the book which brought him international fame and which was described by Graham Greene as 'the best spy story I have ever read'. He discusses his extraordinary childhood as well as the state of Britain today, and the revelations of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden.