Start the Week Folgen

In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, ‘Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me…/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?’ Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces Du Fu’s journeys across China. He lived through war and famine, but his poetry found beauty and grandeur in the minutiae of everyday life and the natural world. Michael Wood tells Tom Sutcliffe how Du Fu’s poetry has the timeless quality of Shakespeare or Dante. The travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa goes on a different journey into China, finding out about the lives of Africans living there today. In Black Ghosts she traces the waves of immigration from the 1950s onwards, which benefitted African students and economic migrants who found Europe closed to them. As she meets those from all walks of life – from visa-overstayers to top surgeons – she considers the precarity of their lives, and the ultimate power imbalance in Sino-African relations. China is Africa's largest trading partner and in the past China has lent huge sums for infrastructure in its Belt and Road project. But as China’s economy begins to falter, the economist and China specialist George Magnus looks at the implications. Abroad many African countries are deeply indebted, and at home after 40 years of China’s seemingly irrepressible rise, the country is now facing a surge in urban youth unemployment and signs of deflation.Producer: Katy Hickman

The American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant often uses fictional or mythological characters in her songs, to capture contemporary and political concerns. Her latest album, Keep Your Courage, is a song cycle composed entirely of love songs. She tells Kirsty Wark she wanted to explore the isolation of illness and the power of care, felt in the last few years. In his new book, Musical Truth, the educator and broadcaster Jeffrey Boakye creates a soundtrack that encapsulates key historical moments of the 20th and 21st century – from the carving up of Africa to feminism and football. Using jazz, disco and hip hop he explores how music both feeds into and mirrors its time, as well as its political and cultural impact.But the writer Michel Faber is more interested in how music affects the individual. In a collection of essays, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, he explores what’s going on inside when we listen to a whole range of tunes. And he asks two questions: how do we listen to music and why?Producer: Katy Hickman

The plasma product Factor VIII was heralded in the 1960s as a miracle treatment that helped those with haemophilia to live fuller lives. By the 1980s it was killing them in their thousands, as the product from the US was riddled with hepatitis and AIDs. The investigative journalist Cara McGoogan pieces together the sorry tale of medical negligence, commercial greed and government failures in The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood.In many other countries inquiries have been held, compensation paid out and individuals sent to prison, but the victims and their families in the UK are still waiting, 40 years later. Jason Evans was just 4 years old when his father died after being infected by HIV in Factor VIII. He has dedicated his adult life to getting to the truth and is now awaiting the findings of the public inquiry which began in 2018, and is expected to publish its report in March 2024.The public health expert and physician Dr Gabriel Scally is a veteran of medical inquires – from the Bristol heart scandal to the Cervical Smear failures in Ireland. He has spent his career arguing for a system of clinical governance with a duty of candour placed not just on organisations but individual medics too. He tells Tom Sutcliffe why he thinks scandals and cover-ups continue to happen, and whether a public inquiry is the best way to get to the truth.Producer: Katy Hickman