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DH Lawrence was once a towering figure in literature in the 20th century but his reputation has taken a battering, with accusations of nostalgia, self-indulgence and misogyny. But Frances Wilson tells Andrew Marr that it’s time to look again at this complex and courageous man, and the full spectrum of work he produced – from his novels, poetry, criticism and letters. In Burning Man Wilson focuses on a decade in his life from the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915 through his years of travelling to his diagnosis of tuberculosis. Lawrence mined his own life in his novels, populating them with the people he met, pioneering the genre of ‘auto-fiction'. The award-winning writer Salman Rushdie rejected that form in his own novels, preferring ‘magic realism’. In his latest collection of essays Languages of Truth Rushdie explores the power of storytelling, and the relationship between reality and fantasy. The poet Simon Armitage – an admirer of DH Lawrence – looks to rescue glorious poetry from pretention and obscurity, arguing the form offers ‘the best opportunity for reflection and scrutiny’. A Vertical Art brings together the public lectures he gave during his tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. In them he offers his personal reflections of the work and lives of poets from Ted Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop and Douglas Dunn.Producer: Katy Hickman

Once-indomitable glaciers – from high up in the Himalayas to the polar regions – are today in grave peril, as our climate warms at an accelerating rate. The glaciologist Jemma Wadham says that melting ice sheets not only leads to meltwater overwhelming sensitive marine ecosystems but could also release vast quantities of methane. In her book Ice Rivers she shows that far from being freezing sterile environments, the world’s glaciers are teeming with microbial life, as rich and fascinating as the forests. Record ice loss last year and the effect of climate change are also having an impact on geopolitics and international relations. Dwayne Ryan Menezes, the founding director of the think tank Polar Research and Policy Initiative looks at the viability of a busy sea route through the arctic region as ice recedes for longer periods. And he explains why the recent elections in Greenland – a territory of just over 56,000 people – sent reverberations around the world. The importance of nature’s finely-tuned system to our everyday lives is at the heart of Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s research at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. In her new book Tapestries of Life she uncovers many of the lifesaving secrets of the natural world which impact directly on humans, from medicines to pollution control, carbon sequestration to spiritual health. Producer: Katy Hickman

The Nobel prize-winning economist and Professor of Psychology Daniel Kahneman focuses his latest research on the high cost of inconsistent decision making. In Noise, co-authored with Oliver Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, he looks at why humans can be so unreliable, and what can be done about it. He tells Andrew Marr that people working in the same job often make wildly different judgements, influenced by factors like their current mood, when they last ate, even the weather. He argues that ‘noise’ is distinct from bias and has been neglected by organisations and businesses.Gillian Tett is Editor-at-Large for the Financial Times and is also focused on transforming the world of business. But whereas Kahneman uses the methods of psychology, Tett argues for anthropology. For over a century anthropologists have immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, studying the hidden rituals at play. In her book Anthro-Vision, Tett uses similar techniques to reveal the underlying structures and human behaviour in our modern world – from Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley to City trading floors.Ann Cairns is the Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard which has hundreds of offices worldwide. She explores how psychology and anthropology can help to manage the company’s fortunes and employees through times of flux and change. Cairns started out as a research scientist before developing an interest in offshore engineering, becoming the first woman qualified to work offshore in Britain. She moved into banking in the late 1980s and joined Mastercard in 2011. Producer: Katy Hickman