Arts & Ideas Folgen

Sir Michael Marmot delivers the opening lecture of the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival 2013, exploring the traits that determine a healthy life span and arguing that we need to rethink the relationship between health, wealth and self-control. Professor Marmot is one of the global pioneers of research into health inequalities - how stress, status and diet can affect our wellbeing. His ground-breaking Whitehall Studies followed the health and stress levels of British civil servants over a decade and he coined the term "status syndrome" to describe his discovery that being lower down the pecking order leads to a shorter life span. Recorded on Friday 25 October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead.

Neil Tennant, singer of pop duo Pet Shop Boys, grew up in the fishing port of North Shields and went to a Catholic school in Newcastle. He talks to Philip Dodd about the influence of the North East on his career, which began in publishing and magazines. Last year the Pet Shop Boys performed at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics and they have just returned from a tour which has taken them to 29 countries.

Matthew Sweet leads an elite party of literary explorers - Linda Grant, Aminatta Forna, Naomi Alderman and Tim Stanley on an expedition to find "the common reader" -- being stalked by Woolf in the 20th Century and by Johnson in the 18th. Both believed that the common reader "uncorrupted with literary prejudices" was the final arbiter of "poetical honours" so it's a quest that's clearly still relevant today. The question is what does a common reader look like in our digital age? What are they reading? Where? And how?