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In a special edition of Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to Salman Rushdie. For a decade the writer was forced to live under police protection after being 'sentenced to death' by the Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. He talks about living in hiding, under an alias, Joseph Anton, and how he gradually secured his freedom. Rushdie argues that we are 'story-telling animals', but more than twenty years since his controversial book was banned around the world, Andrew Marr asks what impact this has had on the stories we tell.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to Maajid Nawaz about his journey from Islamist extremist to a champion of democracy. Growing up in Britain in the 1980s Nawaz found his sense of identity in political Islam. National identity and the state of the nation is at the heart of Robert Chesshyre's book in which he argues that the roots of many of today's problems, especially the increase in inequality, were planted under Margaret Thatcher's leadership. But one of the new intake of Conservative MPs, dubbed the 'New Radicals', Elizabeth Truss, looks to an alternative future where "decline is not inevitable." And the former ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, turns his attention to the rich and powerful across the world, to see how different power networks operate.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr goes in search of a better life. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips praises the life unlived: the people we have failed to be, and explores how far frustration is interlinked with satisfaction. While the philosopher Julian Baggini argues that Aristotle has more to tell us about how to live than Freud. The writer Helen Dunmore slips between past and present, and in her latest collection of poems stories of loss intermingle with rediscovery. And the scientist Frances Ashcroft has transformed the lives of those born with diabetes, and discusses how her breakthrough gave meaning to her own life.