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The economic historian and former trader Anne Murphy looks back at the Bank of England in the 18th century. In Virtuous Bankers she shows how a private institution became ‘a great engine of state’ and central to Britain’s economic and geopolitical power. Anne Murphy tells Adam Rutherford that both its inner workings and outer structure had to command the respect of the general public. Interest was a fact of life long before the involvement of central banks and goes back as far as ancient Mesopotamia. In Price of Time the financial historian and Reuters’ commentator Edward Chancellor explores its long history and warns of the financial instability caused by years of low interest rates. Far from benefitting the majority of individuals, the ultra-low rates following the banking crash in 2008 have proved a boon for bankers, financiers and corporate stakeholders.After the crash, the businessman David Fishwick was concerned that few people or small businesses in his home town of Burnley could get access to credit. His challenge to the traditional high street banks was to set up his own banking enterprise which became Burnley Savings and Loans – a story told in a Channel 4 series and the film Bank of Dave (on Netflix). He argues for a return to banking as a means to serve and grow the local economy.Producer: Katy Hickman

What to do with the art of monstrous men? That’s the question Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She wonders whether she can or should continue to love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? And if it’s possible to divorce the art from the artist.How do we now view the glorious, technicolour paintings of Paul Gauguin’s works from Tahiti? The writer Devika Ponnambalam has imagined the life of one of his muses Teha’amana in her latest novel, I Am Not Your Eve. Gauguin was 43 when he first arrived on the island in 1891 and made numerous teenage girls his ‘unofficial wives’.The science writer Michael Bond is interested in the psychology behind fandom. In his book Fans he looks at the pleasure of tribalism and sense of belonging, but also what happens when one’s hero falls short, and the cognitive dissonance needed to continue to stay true to a monstrous genius.Producer: Katy Hickman

Adam Rutherford asks what ordinary life was like in the Soviet Union and how far its collapse helps to explain Russia today. Karl Schlögel is one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union. In his latest book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (translated by Rodney Livingstone), he recreates an encyclopaedic and richly detailed history of daily life, both big and small. He examines the planned economy, the railway system and the steel city of Magnitogorsk as well as cookbooks, parades and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow.The historian Katja Hoyer presents a more nuanced picture of life in East Germany, far from the caricature often painted in the West. In Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 she acknowledges the oppression and hardship often faced by ordinary people, but argues that this now-vanished society was also home to its own distinctive and rich social and cultural landscape.But what did it feel like to live through the fall of communism and then democracy? These are the questions Adam Curtis looked to reveal in his 7-part television series, Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone (available on BBC iPlayer). The archive footage from thousands of hours of tapes filmed by BBC crews across the country records the lives of Russians at every level of society as their world collapsed around them.Producer: Katy Hickman