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The internationally-renowned artist Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his creativity and political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father. In 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, translated by Alan H. Barr, he looks back at the blighted life of his father Ai Qing, once China’s most celebrated poet before he was banished during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei tells Tom Sutcliffe about his own journey to becoming an artist and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.The Professor of Political Theory, Lea Ypi, understands only too well growing up in a repressive Communist state – she was born in Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe. In her memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History she describes how the isolated world of her childhood was swept away. But also how the promised freedoms after the fall of the Berlin Wall quickly turned sour. The pianist Kirill Gerstein was born in the former Soviet Union, but is now an American citizen based in Berlin. His career and musical heritage is similarly international, and he plays all around the world. Gerstein considers what creative freedom has meant to some of his favourite composers – from Viktor Ullmann to Shostakovich – who produced great art during times of intense political upheaval.Producer: Katy Hickman Photo credit: Ai Weiwei studio

‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening’, wrote George Orwell in 1940. In Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit explores how the writer’s love for growing things, especially flowers, seeps into his work. She reflects on how he uses pleasure, beauty and joy as powerful acts of resistance. And how far these can counter the political and environmental challenges we face today.The father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was also driven by a desire to reform the society he lived in at the turn of the 20th century. The biographer Claire Tomalin brings to life his early years in The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World. He was born into poverty and achieved international fame, but never lost his boundless curiosity for the world around him, and the possibilities of science to change it.The journalist Peter Hetherington asks why land reform is not higher on the government’s agenda. In Land Renewed he looks at the competing elements in the reshaping of the countryside and aiding nature’s recovery, including protecting valuable farmland, encouraging more local food production, re-wilding and ‘re-peopling’ remote places. But he argues it needs a wider vision to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all.Producer: Katy Hickman

In his new book, Rationality, the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human beings have the power to think, act and behave rationally, if given the right tools to do so. He asks why rationality so often plays second fiddle to opinion, bias and prejudice. And he believes that in order to ensure our survival as a species we need to learn how to apply rational thought to our daily lives.Our attitudes towards sexual desire may not always be regarded as rational. Amia Srinivasan is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University and in ‘The Right to Sex’ she considers this universal topic from a modern feminist perspective – a collision of pleasure, ethics and gender politics.If physical relationships are often the result of irrational decisions, then the belief in ghosts takes the human scope for irrationality to a whole new level. In The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, British Museum curator Irving Finkel goes right back to the beginning and shows how the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians believed in the spirit world and considers why this enduring belief in ghosts is something that spans diverse cultures and historical periods.Producer: Natalia Fernandez