Start the Week Folgen

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the playwright Ben Power whose latest work interweaves three of DH Lawrence's dramas to evoke a lost world of manual labour and working class pride. The sociologist Mike Savage proposes a new way to think about class in Britain which not only looks at economic and social issues, but cultural preferences. Meanwhile the American writer Siri Hustvedt questions the cultural misogyny at play in the world of art, and Peter Davies celebrates the artists inspired by the northern industrial landscape. Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week the classicist Mary Beard tells Tom Sutcliffe that Ancient Rome matters: its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil liberty. The Magna Carta is the starting point for the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker's latest play which draws parallels between the King's abuse of power in 1215 and the global business elite today. The film director Stephen Frears tells the story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most celebrated and controversial sportsmen in recent history, Lance Armstrong, and of the journalist who was vilified when he tried to expose him. Lurid headlines take centre stage in the play Clarion, directed by Mehmet Ergen, which takes a satirical look at nationalism and the state of the British media. Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to historian Niall Ferguson about his biography of Henry Kissinger. Reviled and revered in equal measure Kissinger was the statesman at the heart of American foreign policy for decades, and Ferguson argues that far from being a Machiavellian realist he was driven by idealism. Jane Smiley's trilogy of novels chart a hundred years of American life through the lives of one family. She shows clearly how the big political and social upheavals of the time were reflected in the day-to-day. The personal and political come together in the extraordinary diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador to London before WWII. Gabriel Gorodetsky has compiled the diaries which document Britain's drift to war during the 1930s. Producer: Katy Hickman.