Start the Week Folgen

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe explores the fracturing political landscape and the rise of anti-establishment parties. The politics lecturer Robert Ford explains the increasing support for the SNP, UKIP, and the Greens and what that means for the forthcoming General Election. Catherine De Vries is a Professor of European politics and compares what's happening across the Channel. Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders of Otpor - the movement that played a pivotal role in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic - and he advises how using humour, rice pudding and lego men can change the world. The Royal Opera House is staging Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a satire on money, morality and pleasure-seeking, and its director John Fulljames seeks out the contemporary resonances in this story of consumerism and loss of humanity.Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr looks at what happens when political power fractures and how 'soft power' retains its influence. Peter Pomerantsev spent a decade working in Russia's fast-growing television industry and tells the story of a country changing from communism and nascent democracy to a mafia-state and oligarchy. The political analyst Joseph Nye coined the phrase 'soft power' in 1990 and in his latest essay argues that while America's economy may have been overtaken by China, the US century is far from over. Impressionist art continues to grow in popularity and price-tag, and the curator Anne Robbins looks back on the life of Paul Durand-Ruel, the 19th century art dealer and visionary who foresaw its power and marketability worldwide. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Anne McElvoy talks to the novelist Adam Thirlwell about his latest book, described as 'suburban noir'; its setting "a kind of absence, without a focus or centre". The academic Nick Hubble takes issue with the cultural representation of suburbia and the snobbery surrounding it. When Richard McGuire created his graphic masterpiece 'Here' he collapsed millennia of history into the corner of one suburban house, and the photographer Hannah Starkey looks back at photos from the end of the twentieth century to see what they say about changing Britain.Producer: Katy Hickman.