Start the Week Folgen

Start the Week is at the Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival in Gateshead. Anne McElvoy talks to the historian Catherine Merridale about the Kremlin - a Russian fortress which has retained its original medieval function to intimidate and control, and which holds a special place in the imagination. Few buildings in England inspire such fear, but Simon Thurley explores how the country's architecture has influenced the world. The Newcastle-born writer Michael Chaplin looks to the history of the River Tyne to understand the changing fortunes of the city and its population; and the Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri attempts to save the remnants of Calcutta's colonial past under its ever-changing skyline. Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week Stephanie Flanders asks the head of the British Red Cross, Sir Nick Young, whether the charity's principle of neutrality is still as relevant today as it was 150 years ago. The journalist Lindsey Hilsum has reported on the major international conflicts and atrocities in the last few decades and wrestles with the moral complexities of being neutral and impartial. Making judgements about who deserves to be helped and how many, concerns the economist Paul Collier, as he attempts to defuse the explosive subject of immigration. And the Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng proposes selling working visas to the highest bidder. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe discusses the role and place of contemporary art in today's global, digital world with the artist Grayson Perry. While the Director of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis looks back to a time when images held such power and caused such outrage that they had to be destroyed, in an exhibition on iconoclasm. Philip Davis offers a defence of the value of reading serious literature. And Nicholas Lovell looks at the money that artists can make, using the internet to change the way they relate to their fans. Producer: Katy Hickman.