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Chaucer is renowned as the father of English literature. But in a new biography Marion Turner argues he is a far more cosmopolitan writer and thinker than we might assume. She tells Andrew Marr how the 14th-century author of The Canterbury Tales moved from the commercial wharves of London to the chapels of Florence, and from a spell as a prisoner of war in France to the role of diplomat in Milan. The academic Emma Smith challenges audiences to look with fresh eyes at the plays of Shakespeare. In a series of essays she reveals how his plays have as much to say about PTSD, intersectionality and #MeToo as they do about Ovid, marriage and the divine right of kings.When Charles Dickens started his writing career, his ambition was global: to speak to ‘every nation upon earth’. And he succeeded. His stories reached Russia, China, Australia, even Antarctica, and he was mobbed in the street when he visited America. Juliet John, co-curator of the exhibition Global Dickens, examines how Dickens’s work could travel so far, when the settings of his novels were much closer to home.Producer: Katy Hickman

'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced', wrote the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. His new biographer, Clare Carlisle, explores the life experiences that moulded Kierkegaard's ideas as he struggled to understand how to be a human being in this world. She tells Amol Rajan that Kierkegaard was very much a philosopher of the heart.DeRay Mckesson’s reality became one of struggle and action after he quit his job as a school teacher and became a key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. He spent 400 days on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, often walking day and night after a new law was introduced making it illegal to stand still. In his memoir, On the Other Side of Freedom, he explores the intellectual and political framework of the liberation movement that has dominated American life in the 21st century. The award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams’s latest work also explores freedom and power, but in a world where fate and vengeful gods hold sway. His epic poem The Half-God of Rainfall begins with a game of basketball in Nigeria with the Yoruba gods looking on, and ends with a demonstration of female revenge – both human and mythological.While Kierkegaard was focused on the subjective experience of being a human, and how we create ourselves through our action, the writer Elizabeth Day is interested in what happens when those actions go awry. ‘How To Fail’ is a painfully honest exploration of things going wrong, and what we can learn from our mistakes.Producer: Katy Hickman

We underestimate how difficult it is to live in remote areas, says travel writer Dan Richards. He tells Kirsty Wark how he trekked to high mountain huts and distant snowy cabins for his new book, Outposts. Richards followed in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl and Jack Kerouac, who all found inspiration in the wilderness. But just as Kerouac went temporarily mad living on a remote mountainside, so today’s tourists in the Scottish Highlands and Nordic isles underestimate “hard nature’s indifference”.Icelandic model turned sheep farmer Heida Asgeirsdottir knows how challenging countryside life can be. After an early career as a model in New York, she returned to Iceland to take over her parents’ sheep farm in a region of volcanoes and elemental storms. But even this distant region needs modern power and infrastructure, and this means a new hydro-electric plant whose owners want to flood her farm.A family feel stuck in the middle of nowhere in Chekhov’s searing play Three Sisters. Rebecca Frecknall is directing a new production at the Almeida Theatre, exploring the thwarted ambitions and dreams of a provincial Russian town. Sisters Irina, Olga and Masha long to return to Moscow, but become bogged down in dead-end jobs and trapped by mortgages and marriage.Chekhov’s play could easily be set in a British town today, says Sarah O’Connor from the Financial Times. She looks at the stark problems facing our seaside resorts and post-industrial towns. In her Orwell Prize-winning study of Blackpool, she challenged the idea that our seaside towns lack aspiration and are destined to fail. Now she explains why terms like “the Left Behinds” are dangerously misleading.Producer: Hannah Sander