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The celebrated artist, Sir Grayson Perry, has a new exhibition of work, Delusions of Grandeur, made in direct response to the masterpieces at the Wallace Collection in London (until 26th October). He candidly admits he initially found the Collection’s opulence difficult to work with, until he created an alter-ego artist, Shirley, who was inspired by the aesthetic.In recent years museums and art galleries have become a regular battleground in the culture wars. One of today’s anti-woke warriors is the writer Lionel Shriver. Her latest satirical novel, Mania, imagines a world where intellectual meritocracy is heresy; the words 'stupid' and 'smart' are no longer acceptable, and novels like The Idiot and My Brilliant Friend are banned.In Shriver’s imaginative world language and thought is heavily policed, speech is free only if it doesn’t offend. The academic Fara Dabhoiwala has written about the emergence of this contested idea, in What Is Free Speech? He shows in the shifting story of the last three hundred years that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which different societies have drifted or dissented, but a much more mercurial, complicated matter.Producer: Katy Hickman

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.’ In his latest novel, Theft, he returns to the streets of his childhood home in Zanzibar, to trace the intertwined lives of three young people in a story of love, betrayal and kindness. The Possibility of Tenderness is a memoir by the prize-winning poet Jason Allen-Paisant as he moves from his family home in the rural Jamaican hills, to Oxford’s gleaming spires, to the woodlands of Leeds. It’s a story about the transformative power of plants and the legacy of dreams. Language, music and food are at the heart of Samantha Ellis’s new book, Chopping Onions On My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, she grew up surrounded by the noisy, colourful sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, a language in danger of being lost forever. Producer: Katy Hickman

Five years ago, in response to the Covid pandemic, the government mandated a series of lockdowns, with the closure of schools and businesses and social distancing. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by guests to discuss how such a monumental event could have had affected brain cognition, and whether there have been lasting effects on young people. But he also hears tales of resilience among neurodiverse communities.The neuroscientist Daniel Yon looks at the cognitive impact of unprecedented events in his forthcoming book, A Trick of the Mind - How the Brain Invents Your Reality (published, June 2025). He explains how times of instability and uncertainty upset the brain’s ability to understand the world, and make people more susceptible to conspiracy theories. The Covid-19 Social Study was the largest study exploring the psychological and social effects of the pandemic on the UK population. Dr Daisy Fancourt, Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London explains what they learnt about the impact of social isolation. The developmental psychologist at Cambridge University, Professor Claire Hughes, has looked more closely at families with young children, across six different countries, with very different lockdown policies. Although there was a link between family stress related to the pandemic and child problem behaviours, more recent work questions whether the lockdown has had longer term effects. The artist and zinemaker Dr Lea Cooper has co-curated a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice (until 14th September). Zines are self-published works, and Dr Cooper says several on display were created during lockdown, and showcase personal stories of resistance and self-expression.Producer: Katy HickmanPart of BBC Radio 4's series of programmes exploring Lockdown’s Legacy