Podcasts by Private Passions

Dame Ottoline Leyser from 2023-12-10T12:01

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant gen...

Walter Murch from 2023-12-03T12:01

Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discuss...

Kevin O'Hare from 2023-11-26T12:01

Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the ...

Daniel Handler from 2023-11-19T12:01

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket.

Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortun...

Mali Morris from 2023-11-12T12:01

The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years.

She was born in Wales and studied at th...

Abdulrazak Gurnah from 2023-11-05T12:01

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University...

Chris Addison from 2023-10-29T12:01

Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director.

You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless...

Black History Month from 2023-10-22T12:00

A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music writ...

Brian Cox from 2023-10-15T11:01

Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last sixty years, working with the most esteemed theatre companies and renowned Hollywood and TV directors.

Fay Dowker from 2023-10-08T11:01

Professor Fay Dowker is a theoretical physicist fascinated by space and time. She was obsessed with maths from a young age and went on to study at Cambridge University. There Professor Stephen H...

Olivia Harrison from 2023-10-01T11:01

Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harr...

Peter Frankopan from 2023-09-26T10:09

Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries.

In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, pu...

Rhiannon Giddens from 2023-09-17T11:01

Rhiannon Giddens has won two Grammy awards for her folk music albums, and a Pulitzer Prize for her opera, Omar, proving that she’s a musician who can’t be quickly categorised.

She grew up...

Jeremy Deller from 2023-09-10T11:01

Jeremy Deller is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s won the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, but you’re just as likely to find his work on our streets as in a galle...

Raynor Winn from 2023-09-01T08:50

Raynor Winn is a writer whose first book, The Salt Path, followed the remarkable 630-mile journey she and her husband Moth made around the South West Coastal Path.

It was a story of endu...

György Ligeti from 2023-08-20T11:01

2023 marks the centenary of the composer György Ligeti's birth, and in this programme, first broadcast in 1997, he joined Michael Berkeley to share some of his musical passions. They include pia...

Isabella Tree from 2023-07-09T11:01

Isabella Tree is an author and travel writer. Her award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, describes how she and her conservationist husband Charlie decided after many...

Alexander Polzin from 2023-07-02T11:01

Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographer...

Naomi Alderman from 2023-06-18T11:01

Naomi Alderman is a writer who likes to question established ways of thinking. In 2017 her novel The Power won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. It imagines a world where women develop the...

Beccy Speight from 2023-06-11T11:01

Beccy Speight has been the chief executive officer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 2019. It is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity with over a million members and...

Kit de Waal from 2023-06-04T11:01

Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood...

Sarah Lee from 2023-05-28T11:01

Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in En...

Norman Ackroyd from 2023-05-21T11:01

Artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds in 1938. He fell in love with the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, riding around on his bicycle as a young boy and studied art despite his...

Mary-Ann Ochota from 2023-05-14T11:01

Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do.

Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest ...

Ben Watt from 2023-05-07T11:01

Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everyt...

Isabel Wilkerson from 2023-04-30T11:01

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape p...

Libby Jackson from 2023-04-16T11:00

Libby Jackson is the head of Space Exploration for the UK Space Agency. She has turned a childhood passion for space into a wide-ranging career. She was flight instructor and controller at Euro...

Steve Rosenberg reveals his all-time musical highlights from 2023-04-09T11:00

Steve Rosenberg is the BBC’s Russia editor.

After studying Russian at university, he moved to Moscow in 1991 and since then has charted the transformation of the country – from the confl...

Robert Powell from 2023-03-28T15:34

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Th...

Helena Kennedy from 2023-03-19T23:39

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow Univers...

Peter J Conradi from 2023-03-12T14:09

Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the s...

Wayne Sleep from 2023-02-26T23:13

Wayne Sleep tells Michael Berkeley about the music that has inspired his career of nearly 60 years.

Wayne Sleep is one of the most celebrated dancers of all time. He’s performed more than...

Susie Boyt from 2023-02-21T12:21

The novelist and journalist Susie Boyt tells Michael Berkeley about her lifelong passions for music, theatre and dancing.

Whether she’s writing black comedies about dysfunctional families...

Simon Thurley from 2023-02-12T16:30

The historian Simon Thurley tells Michael Berkeley about his passion for ancient buildings and the music associated with them.

At the age of seven, Simon Thurley dug up what turned out to...

Kaffe Fassett from 2023-02-05T13:00

Kaffe Fassett’s textiles are unmistakable: in bright cerise and crimson and cobalt, his stripes and flowers burst onto the scene back in the seventies, and he’s been designing ever since. Brough...

Joanna Scanlan from 2023-01-29T13:00

Joanna Scanlan is one of our great comic actors; she’s best-known for “The Thick of It”, where she plays the obstructive civil servant Terri Coverley. But her range is much wider than comedy. Sh...

Hugh Brody from 2023-01-23T10:54

Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the...

Diana Melly from 2023-01-15T13:00

The author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her life lived on a rollercoaster: she has experienced passion, great friendships and celebrity but also depression, illness, heartbreak and t...

Todd Field from 2023-01-08T12:00

Todd Field began his career as a jazz musician and as an actor; he has appeared in over forty films, including Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”. He then went on to direc...

Jonathan Romain from 2022-12-11T13:00

Rabbi, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Romain is minister of Maidenhead Synagogue and one of Britain's leading rabbis in Reform Judaism. He’s the author of twenty books – some scholarly and lea...

Roma Agrawal from 2022-12-04T13:00

The structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal tells Michael Berkeley about her passions for tall buildings, bridges, concrete and Indian classical dance.

Roma Agrawal is a highly succes...

Adam Rutherford from 2022-11-27T13:00

The geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford tells Michael Berkeley how his passion for music allows him to escape the rigours of science and enjoy the emotional side of life.

Adam Rut...

Simon Warrack from 2022-11-20T13:00

Simon Warrack travels the world restoring the most sacred and beautiful buildings. As a stonemason he’s worked on the Rose Window of Canterbury Cathedral, the Trevi fountain in Rome, and the Tem...

Julia Blackburn from 2022-11-13T13:00

The writer Julia Blackburn talks to Michael Berkeley about how music helped her through her traumatic childhood and about the joy of late-flowering love.

Julia Blackburn is the author of n...

Stuart MacBride from 2022-11-06T13:00

Stuart MacBride was born in Dumbarton and raised in Aberdeen; abandoning his studies to become an architect, he went to work on the oil rigs, scrubbing toilets. He then tried out careers as an a...

William Kentridge from 2022-10-23T11:11

It’s hard to think of an artist with a more striking and ambitious range than William Kentridge; his work spans etching, drawing, collage, huge tapestries - as well as film, theatre, dance and o...

Arifa Akbar from 2022-10-17T09:38

Arifa Akbar tells Michael Berkeley about her nocturnal life as a theatre critic and her desire to tell the story of her sister's death from tuberculosis.

Arifa Akbar almost never has a qui...

Ronnie Archer-Morgan from 2022-10-09T12:00

Ronnie Archer-Morgan, from The Antiques Roadshow, tells Michael Berkeley about his tumultuous life and the music that has accompanied it.

Ronnie had a terrible start in life. His English f...

Jules Montague from 2022-10-03T08:41

Jules Montague trained as a doctor in Dublin before moving to London and becoming a consultant neurologist, specialising in treating people with dementia. This led to her first book, "Lost and F...

Gwen Adshead from 2022-09-25T12:00

The Broadmoor psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead shares her passion for choral music with Michael Berkeley.

When people ask Gwen Adshead what she does for a living she someti...

James Runcie from 2022-09-18T12:00

Sometimes a musical work of art is so perfect, so magnificent, that it’s almost impossible to remember the work that’s gone on, behind the scenes, from the early drafts to the anxiety and relief...

Katherine Rundell from 2022-07-09T12:00

Katherine Rundell started writing for children at the age of only 21; in little more than a decade she’s become one of our leading children’s writers, with six books so far, including the award-...

Francesca Simon from 2022-06-12T12:00

Anyone who’s spent any time with children in the last thirty years will know Horrid Henry and his brother, Perfect Peter. They’re the creations of Francesca Simon, and they’ve appeared in 25 boo...

Anne Glenconner from 2022-06-07T11:00

In this special programme for the Queen’s platinum jubilee, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the author and former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Anne Glenconner, who tells Michael about her l...

Jarvis Cocker from 2022-05-29T12:00

In a wide-ranging and engaging interview, musician Jarvis Cocker tells Michael Berkeley about the role classical music plays in his life and relationships.

Fortunately for the world of mus...

Kat Arney from 2022-05-22T12:00

The science writer and broadcaster Dr Kat Arney shares with Michael Berkeley her passion for the harp and her revelatory new research into the causes of cancer.

Gone are the days when canc...

Waheed Arian from 2022-05-15T12:00

As we’ve watched the war in Ukraine unfold, we’ve seen huge crowds of people queuing at the border, dragging small suitcases, carrying babies and children, leaving their homeland behind. Dr Wahe...

Osman Yousefzada from 2022-05-01T12:00

The fashion designer and artist Osman Yousefzada tells Michael Berkeley about his childhood in a strictly religious Pashtun community in Birmingham.

Osman Yousefzada shot to fame when Bey...

Clare Marx from 2022-04-24T12:00

Looking ahead to International Women’s Day, this is a second chance to hear Michael Berkeley’s interview with the trailblazing surgeon Dame Clare Marx, who sadly died in November 2022; the progr...

Tim Birkhead from 2022-04-17T12:00

For Easter Day, Private Passions celebrates Spring and the music of birdsong with one of the world’s leading experts on birds, Professor Tim Birkhead.

An award-winning scientist, author an...

Francesco da Mosto from 2022-04-03T22:50

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the architect, author and broadcaster Francesco da Mosto.

With his shock of white hair, boundless energy and unmistakable accent, Francesco da Mosto is for man...

Richard Holloway from 2022-03-27T12:00

Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, talks to Michael Berkeley about faith, doubt, compassion and the powerful emotions stirred up by his favourite music.

In 1948, at the age of ...

Misan Harriman from 2022-03-20T13:00

Misan Harriman didn’t become a photographer till five years ago, when his wife gave him a camera for his fortieth birthday. Since then he’s become world-famous, photographing celebrities such as...

Katy Brand from 2022-03-13T13:00

Katy Brand talks to Michael Berkeley about obsession, opera, brass bands and juggling her career as a comedian, actor, novelist and screenwriter.

On television, Katy Brand’s Big Ass Comed...

Esther Rantzen from 2022-03-06T13:00

Back when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister, it was said there were three powerful women in Britain. There was Mrs Thatcher herself; there was the Queen; and there was Esther Rantzen. Breaking int...

Theaster Gates from 2022-02-27T13:00

Theaster Gates is a potter, a sculptor, a film-maker, a curator of black history, a real estate developer and a professor of fine art in Chicago, where he lives - and where he’s also transformed...

Kate Bingham from 2022-02-20T13:00

On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old grandmother became the first person in the world to be given the Covid jab as part of a mass vaccination programme. Within six months more than 30 million peopl...

Sanjeev Gupta from 2022-02-13T13:00

The geologist Sanjeev Gupta tells Michael Berkeley about his search for evidence of ancient life in rocks on Mars with the help of NASA’s Mars Rovers, and he plays unique recordings of sounds fr...

Barbara Taylor Bradford from 2022-02-10T13:02

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s life story is every bit as extraordinary as one of her novels. As she tells Michael Berkeley in a warm and frank interview, she was born in the back streets of Leeds in...

Jamila Gavin from 2022-02-09T13:20

Jamila Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas; her Indian father and English mother met as teachers in Iran and married in Mumbai. By the age of 12, she’d lived in an Indian palace in ...

Katherine Parkinson from 2022-01-23T13:00

Actress, comedian and playwright Katherine Parkinson shares her favourite music with Michael Berkeley.

Two years out of drama school and heavily in debt, Katherine Parkinson was offered a ...

Dame Stephanie Shirley from 2022-01-16T13:00

Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived in Britain from Vienna as a five-year-old, without her parents. It was 1939, and she was one of 10,000 Jewish children brought by train on the Kindertransport to e...

David Nutt from 2022-01-09T13:00

Professor David Nutt is an expert on drugs, and how they work on the brain. He trained as a psychiatrist, and for almost 50 years his research has focused on new drug treatments for anxiety, dep...

Meg Rosoff from 2022-01-02T13:00

Meg Rosoff waited until she was 45 to write her first novel, How I Live Now, the story of a passionate love affair between young teenage cousins, set against the background of apocalyptic war. I...

Valentina Harris from 2021-12-26T13:00

Over the last 40 years, Valentina Harris has done more than anyone else to convince the British public that there is a lot more to Italian food than pizza and Spaghetti Bolognese. Her television...

John Cleese from 2021-12-12T13:00

John Cleese has been making us laugh for more than 50 years. Back in the 1970s, he became a comedy legend in Monty Python and in Fawlty Towers, and he now has a second generation of fans, discov...

Hayley Mills from 2021-12-05T13:00

In a warm and frank interview, Hayley Mills talks to Michael Berkeley about the joys and difficulties of growing up in Hollywood as a child star and about the music that reminds her of her famil...

Iain Sinclair from 2021-11-28T13:00

Iain Sinclair describes himself as an urban prophet: in book after book, he has walked through London, recording the graffiti, the rubbish, the electric-green scum of a canal, the things you gli...

Nick Lane from 2021-11-21T13:00

Nick Lane is a scientist who peers down microscopes at incredibly small cells in order to ask really big questions. How did life on Earth begin? Why is life the way it is? Why do we have sex? Wh...

Tamsin Edwards from 2021-11-07T13:00

In a special edition of Private Passions for COP26, Michael Berkeley talks to Dr Tamsin Edwards about her career as a climate scientist and her lifelong passion for music.

As a child, Tam...

Matthew Walker from 2021-10-31T13:00

In this special programme for Radio 3’s Twilight Season, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the sleep scientist Professor Matthew Walker.

So many of us have trouble sleeping, and are longing to f...

Rory Stewart from 2021-10-28T11:23

Diplomat, Soldier, Explorer, Politician, Academic – Rory Stewart defies easy labels. By his own admission, his identity is complicated: he describes himself as “a Scot, born in Hong Kong and bro...

Mark Solms from 2021-10-18T16:23

Mark Solms is a neuroscientist who has spent his whole career investigating the mysteries of consciousness. His research throws light on some of the most difficult questions of all: how does the...

Esther Freud from 2021-10-10T12:00

Esther Freud talks to Michael Berkeley about her extraordinary childhood and her passion for story telling in both words and music.

After attending drama school and making appearances in ...

Walter Iuzzolino from 2021-09-26T12:00

Walter Iuzzolino is an Italian television presenter who has become well known on our screens thanks to Walter Presents, Channel 4’s free streaming service of European television dramas. He’s a m...

Francesca Stavrakopoulou from 2021-09-19T12:00

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is fascinated by the Bible, and she’s a leading scholar of those ancient texts which have so profoundly shaped how we see the world. She’s Professor of Hebrew Bible and ...

Helena Attlee from 2021-09-12T12:00

The writer Helena Attlee transports Michael Berkeley to the sounds, smells, tastes and music of Italy.

Helena has spent most of her life immersed in Italian culture, and she has written t...

Peggy Seeger from 2021-09-05T12:00

Peggy Seeger’s extraordinary musical career spans six and a half decades. Since the age of 17 she has been writing, performing and recording songs pretty much non-stop. At the age of 80 she won ...

Michio Kaku from 2021-07-25T12:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku - without doubt the only guest ever to have built a particle accelerator in their garage while still in high school. After th...

Carole Boyd from 2021-07-18T12:00

Carole Boyd is an accomplished theatre actress: she has recorded some three hundred audio books, and she does all the female voices in Postman Pat. But all this pales into insignificance compare...

Veronica O'Keane from 2021-07-04T12:00

One of the things that stands out, over more than 20 years of Private Passions, is the very strong connection between music and memory: as people choose music, which takes them way back, vividly...

Alastair Campbell from 2021-06-27T12:00

For almost a decade, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s right-hand man, first as Press Secretary and then as Downing Street Director of Communications. He was at the heart of power through the G...

Natalie Haynes from 2021-06-20T12:00

Comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, making the classics funny and the joy of running.

Just like the ancient Greek dramatists she lov...

Anya Hurlbert from 2021-06-06T12:00

If you’ve ever wondered why you love blue and hate the colour khaki, or have spent hours arguing over a colour chart because you and your partner can’t agree on how to paint the bedroom, you’ll ...

Laura Cumming from 2021-05-30T12:00

The writer and art critic Laura Cumming talks to Michael Berkeley about the music and art she loves and the extraordinary story of her family.

Laura has been writing about art for The Obs...

Zandra Rhodes from 2021-05-23T12:00

With her shocking pink hair and extravagantly colourful clothes, Dame Zandra Rhodes has been an instantly recognisable figure on the British fashion scene for more than fifty years. An artist as...

George Szirtes from 2021-05-09T12:00

George Szirtes arrived in Britain at the age of eight, wearing only one shoe. It was 1956, and as the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, George and his family fled on foot across the border to A...

Camilla Pang from 2021-05-02T12:00

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her; in fact, she asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for human...

Margaret Heffernan from 2021-04-27T09:26

The writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan shares her lifelong passion for classical music with Michael Berkeley and describes how we can best prepare for an unpredictable future.

Born...

James Shapiro from 2021-04-25T12:00

James Shapiro is one of the world’s great Shakespeare scholars. A professor of English at Columbia University in New York, he is the author of seven major books, including the bestsellers "1599"...

Kieran Hodgson from 2021-04-12T09:40

Kieran Hodgson tells Michael Berkeley how he turned his lifelong obsession with Mahler, and his own struggle to write a symphony, into comedy gold.

Fortunately for us Kieran put aside an ...

Sister Teresa Keswick from 2021-04-04T12:00

Some 40 years ago, Teresa Keswick exchanged her career as a London lawyer for life as a nun in an enclosed and largely silent Carmelite monastery in Norfolk. She’s devoted her life to prayer and...

Bill Browder from 2021-03-28T12:00

Bill Browder describes himself as Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy. When Putin came to power, Browder was the most successful international businessman in Moscow, seizing the opportunities offe...

James Rebanks from 2021-03-21T13:00

The shepherd and writer James Rebanks shares his favourite music with Michael Berkeley and describes how he is restoring the balance of nature on his Lake District hill farm.

James Rebanks...

Sean Scully from 2021-03-14T13:00

Dublin-born artist Sean Scully is known worldwide for his abstract paintings of blocks and stripes of bold colour. You can see his work in the Tate, the Guggenheim, and the National Gallery of I...

Caroline Bird from 2021-02-26T10:40

Caroline Bird was only fifteen when she had her first collection of poems published; she’s been writing since she was eight, hiding in the corner behind her bunk beds at home. This was in Leeds,...

Tim Harford from 2021-02-14T13:00

The economist Tim Harford shares his passion for contemporary classical music with Michael Berkeley.

Tim Harford has for many years been the Undercover Economist at the Financial Times; he...

Rachel Clarke from 2021-01-31T13:00

Rachel Clarke is a doctor who specialises in palliative care. She’s now on the Covid frontline; in March 2020 she moved to Horton General Hospital outside Banbury to care for the most gravely un...

Jamie Parker from 2021-01-24T13:00

Jamie Parker shot to fame as one of Alan Bennett’s original History Boys – he was the one who played the piano. In this week’s Private Passions he tells Michael Berkeley about the vital role mus...

Nadifa Mohamed from 2021-01-17T13:00

Since the publication of her first novel while she was still in her twenties, Nadifa Mohamed has been a writer to watch. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, won her the Somerset Maugham...

David 'Kid' Jensen from 2021-01-03T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to disc jockey David ‘Kid’ Jensen about his career in pop music and his lifelong love of classical music.

In 1968 David Jensen left his native Canada to become the ...

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason from 2020-12-20T13:00

Anyone who saw Sheku Kanneh-Mason play the cello at the Royal Wedding, or win BBC Young Musician of the Year at the age of only 17, will realise that he comes from the most extraordinary family....

Judith Herrin from 2020-12-13T13:00

On this darkest day of the year, Judith Herrin brings to Private Passions the dazzling gold of medieval icons and mosaics: she has spent a lifetime exploring the history of Byzantium, that thous...

Alexandra Harris from 2020-11-29T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to Alexandra Harris, one of the very first Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, about her passions for landscape, weather and music.

As the evenings draw in and the weat...

Mike Brearley from 2020-11-15T13:00

Mike Brearley, the former England cricket captain, talks to Michael Berkeley about the wide range of classical music that inspires him.

Mike is one of the most successful cricket captains ...

Sarah Perry from 2020-11-01T13:00

Sarah Perry’s novels are like extraordinary highly coloured dreams - or nightmares. Her bestseller The Essex Serpent features a mythical sea-creature that roams the Blackwater marshes, and the n...

Johny Pitts from 2020-10-27T12:45

Michael Berkeley talks to writer, photographer and broadcaster Johny Pitts about the music from his European and American heritage that inspires him.

Johny was brought up on a housing est...

Gretchen Gerzina from 2020-10-21T09:50

Gretchen Gerzina says that she’s drawn to writing about those who cross boundaries of time, place, and race. During a distinguished academic career, she’s explored the lives of black people in 1...

Jack Klaff from 2020-09-27T12:00

Jack Klaff’s first movie was Star Wars: a two-day booking for which he was paid £250. Star Wars fans still write to ask him for his autograph. But to focus on that one film from 1976 is to miss ...

Heather Phillipson from 2020-09-20T12:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the artist Heather Phillipson whose giant swirl of cherry-topped, fly-blown whipped cream has recently been installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

...

Anthony David from 2020-09-13T12:00

Professor Anthony David works at the mysterious interface between the mind, the brain and the body. The Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London, he’s published 13...

Brian Moore from 2020-08-30T12:00

In an emotional and highly personal interview, the former rugby international Brian Moore tells Michael Berkeley about the role music has played during his extraordinary life.

Brian is a m...

Helen Macdonald from 2020-06-28T12:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the writer Helen Macdonald, whose book "H is for Hawk" shot to the top of the bestseller lists, not just here but around the world. It’s perhaps no surprise that ther...

Peter Stanford from 2020-06-14T12:00

For more than 20 years, in more than 20 books, Peter Stanford has grappled with religious belief. Starting with a book called Catholics and Sex, he’s gone on to write the lives of Martin Luther ...

Patricia Wiltshire from 2020-05-31T12:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the forensic ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire, a solver of puzzles who has carved out a whole new discipline within forensic science. Patricia solves crimes wit...

Brian Greene from 2020-05-27T11:31

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York; he’s renowned for his ground-breaking discoveries in superstring theory. But the reason he's well known...

Andrew O'Hagan from 2020-05-10T12:00

In a moving and personal interview the novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan talks to Michael Berkeley about his family and the music that inspires his writing.

Andrew O’Hagan grew up on...

John Dyson from 2020-04-26T12:00

John Dyson spent 23 years as a judge, moving up through the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and finally becoming Master of the Rolls. He retired as Master of the Rolls three y...

Chris Watson from 2020-04-12T12:00

Wildlife sound recordist and sound artist Chris Watson talks to Michael Berkeley about how his favourite music is inspired by the natural world. Chris is most famous for his sound recordings for...

Jools Holland from 2020-04-05T12:00

Jools Holland, king of boogie-woogie piano, reveals his lifelong passion for classical music in conversation with Michael Berkeley.

The piano is at the heart of everything Jools Holland d...

Stephen Schwartz from 2020-03-22T13:00

Stephen Schwartz is a master of musicals. He wrote Godspell, Pippin, and The Baker’s Wife; he’s written the lyrics for films such as Pocohontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Enchanted - and many...

Isabel Allende from 2020-03-15T13:00

Isabel Allende’s first novel, “The House of the Spirits” catapulted her to literary stardom, and was acclaimed as a classic of Latin American magic realism. That was nearly forty years ago and s...

Women Composers Compilation from 2020-03-08T13:00

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of female composers, Michael Berkeley draws together some of his guests who have championed works by women.

Turner Prize-winner Helen Cammock introduces t...

Piers Gough from 2020-03-02T12:03

Piers Gough co-founded his own architectural practice while he was still at college, at the age of only twenty-two. He made his name during the redevelopment of London’s Docklands, though you ca...

Chibundu Onuzo from 2020-02-23T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to author Chibundu Onuzo about the challenge of writing novels while studying for her A-levels, and the role of music and faith in her life.

At the age of nineteen, ...

Jonathan Aitken from 2020-02-16T13:00

In a frank and moving interview the priest and former politician Jonathan Aitken talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that has accompanied his rollercoaster life.

At one time Jonatha...

Ann Wroe from 2020-02-09T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Ann Wroe about the inspiration and comfort she finds in music.

Ann spends the first 36 hours of each week wrestling with the challenge of distilling t...

James Thornton from 2020-02-02T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the environmental lawyer James Thornton about tackling the climate crisis, about Zen Buddhism and about James's love of the violin.

Every day we’re bombarded wit...

William Sieghart from 2020-01-19T13:00

William Sieghart, the founder of the Forward Prizes for poetry and National Poetry Day, talks to Michael Berkeley about the music and poetry he loves.

Over the last twenty-five years Nati...

Helen Cammock from 2020-01-12T13:00

Helen Cammock grew up wanting to be a singer, and performed on the folk circuit as a teenager. But then she stopped, and became a social worker for more than ten years. Finally, at the age of 35...

Carlo Rovelli from 2020-01-05T13:00

As we start a new year, our thoughts turn towards the year ahead with all its plans and resolutions. And yet of course it is irrational to make this complete distinction between December and Jan...

Darcey Bussell from 2019-12-29T13:00

Darcey Bussell became principal dancer of the Royal Ballet at the age of only twenty; she went on to become a household name thanks to her seven years as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, a job ...

Matthew Bourne from 2019-12-22T13:00

As a small child, Matthew Bourne used to put on shows in his parents’ living room in East London; by the age of eight or nine, he was staging musicals for the whole school, co-opting his friends...

David Nott from 2019-12-08T13:00

David Nott is a Welsh consultant surgeon and Professor of Surgery at Imperial College London; for more than twenty-five years he has volunteered as a surgeon in disaster and war zones across the...

Hannah Rankin from 2019-12-01T13:00

Hannah Rankin grew up on a sheep farm near Loch Lomond. Earlier this year she made history by becoming the first Scottish woman to win a boxing world title when she became the IBO (International...

YolanDa Brown from 2019-11-17T13:00

In a special programme to coincide with the London Jazz Festival the outstanding saxophonist YolanDa Brown talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for spreading the joy of music, especially ...

Ken Loach from 2019-11-10T13:00

The film director Ken Loach talks to Michael Berkeley about the classical music he’s loved throughout his life and the dangerous power of music in film.

Ken Loach began his career directin...

Philippa Perry from 2019-11-04T14:42

Psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of music to shape our emotions and tell the stories of our lives.

Philippa left school at 15 and did all...

Venki Ramakrishnan from 2019-10-27T13:00

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan is President of the Royal Society and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 for his research into the ribosome – the mysterious ancient molecule that decodes DNA, what he te...

Selina Cadell from 2019-10-20T12:00

Selina Cadell is one of our most versatile and accomplished actresses - from French and Saunders to Chekhov on Broadway, and from Alan Bennett to Shakespeare, she brings humour and sensitivity t...

Peter Tatchell from 2019-10-13T12:00

Peter Tatchell was still a teenager, living in Australia, when he started on what has been a long and headline-grabbing career of political protest. He was only fifteen when he began campaigning...

Deborah Levy from 2019-10-06T12:00

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine...

Jock Stirrup from 2019-09-23T09:23

Lord Stirrup, former Chief of the Defence Staff, talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for music from Renaissance motets to twenty-first-century opera.

Jock Stirrup was lucky to sur...

Siri Hustvedt from 2019-09-15T12:00

It’s hard to sum up the extraordinary reach of Siri Hustvedt’s work. On the one hand, there are popular novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, which became international best-se...

David Cannadine from 2019-09-08T12:00

David Cannadine describes himself as “staggeringly lucky”: he found what he wanted to do early in life, and it has rewarded him richly. He is one of our most distinguished historians; his period...

James Ellroy from 2019-08-25T12:00

James Ellroy has been dubbed the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’, a label he relishes. His crime novels, fifteen to date, are international best-sellers; the world they depict is Los Angel...

Hannah Sullivan from 2019-08-18T12:00

Earlier this year, when Hannah Sullivan won the biggest prize in the poetry world, the TS Eliot Prize, the chair of the judges announced: “A star is born. Where has she come from?” Such a presti...

Peter Piot from 2019-07-28T12:00

At the age of 27, Peter Piot’s life was changed by the arrival of a special package from Africa. He was working as a researcher in a microbiology lab in Antwerp, Belgium; and, in September 1976,...

James Burke from 2019-07-14T12:00

As the 50th anniversary of the moon landings approaches, James Burke talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that brings back memories of the heady days when, new to science broadcasting, he w...

Sarah Langford from 2019-07-07T12:00

Sarah Langford is a barrister; in her words, her job is “to represent the mad and the bad, the broken and the hopeful” – telling their stories in court. After thirteen years of practice, she dec...

Harry Enfield from 2019-07-04T10:05

In the early 1990s Harry Enfield went from being a part-time milkman to one of our biggest comedy stars, and many of the characters he created have become embedded in our national psyche - Loads...

June Spencer from 2019-06-16T12:00

June Spencer can walk down the street unrecognised, but as soon as she starts to speak, she’s known instantly by millions. That’s because, since the very first episode in 1950, she’s played Pegg...

Lucasta Miller from 2019-06-09T12:00

Lucasta Miller is a writer fascinated by the Romantic, and the dark excesses of the Gothic. Her latest subject is a poet, Letitia Landon, whose life was scandalous and whose sudden death is like...

Robert Icke from 2019-06-02T12:00

At thirty-two, Robert Icke is already one of this country’s leading theatre directors. He’s best-known for his modern adaptations of classic texts; his version of the Greek tragedy the Oresteia ...

Jess Robinson from 2019-05-19T12:00

The actress and comedian Jess Robinson tells Michael Berkeley how her training as a classical singer informs her impressions of a vast range of singers, including Kate Bush, Bjork, Lady Gaga, Bi...

Barbara Hosking from 2019-05-13T11:06

Barbara Hosking was born above her father’s dairy in Penzance, back in the 1920s, and ended up in the corridors of power serving two British prime ministers. Two years ago, at the age of 90, she...

David Wilson from 2019-04-28T12:00

David Wilson has spent his life working with violent men – particularly those who have committed murder and serial murder. Currently Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City Universi...

Roger Kneebone from 2019-04-14T12:00

The surgeon Roger Kneebone tells Michael Berkeley how his work with tailors, lacemakers, Formula One teams, and musicians has transformed his understanding of medicine.

Roger Kneebone beg...

Jo Brand from 2019-04-07T12:00

The comedian Jo Brand tells Michael Berkeley about the important role classical music plays in her life.

Jo Brand has enjoyed a pretty unusual career path - from psychiatric nurse to The ...

Uta Frith from 2019-03-31T12:00

For forty years, Uta Frith has dedicated her life to understanding the enigma of autism; she was one of the first neuroscientists to recognise autism as a condition of the brain, rather than the...

Mark Morris from 2019-03-17T13:00

Over the last 40 years, Mark Morris has established a reputation as the most musical of choreographers. Inspired by both baroque and twentieth-century music, he’s most famously choreographed Pur...

Greta Scacchi from 2019-03-10T13:00

From Hollywood to European art house cinema, from Shakespeare to contemporary drama, Greta Scacchi is one of our most versatile actors.

She talks to Michael Berkeley about the film that m...

Rachel Parris from 2019-03-03T13:00

The comedian Rachel Parris talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions and how her life as a classical musician led to her career in comedy. Her hugely versatile career includes improvi...

Julian Baggini from 2019-02-24T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the philosopher Julian Baggini about the pleasures of serendipity, transience, philosophy and music.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Do They Think You’re Stupid?...

Preti Taneja from 2019-02-10T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the writer Preti Taneja about her wide-ranging love of music, from Indian gazals and ragas to Vivaldi and Shostakovich.

Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are You...

Oliver Ford Davies from 2019-02-03T13:00

When he started out on an acting career, Oliver Ford Davies was given some extremely discouraging advice by his first director, who said: “You’ll be OK when you’re forty, and even better when yo...

Lisa Appignanesi from 2019-01-27T13:00

Memory, desire, madness: these are the themes that fascinate Lisa Appignanesi and that she’s explored over the last forty years in novels, in memoirs, and in prize-winning books such as “Mad, Ba...

Tim Firth from 2019-01-20T13:00

Tim Firth is the man behind the show that captured the nation’s heart: Calendar Girls, the true story about a Women’s Institute who produced a naked calendar. It’s been a film, a play, and is no...

Sigrid Rausing from 2019-01-13T13:00

Sigrid Rausing is a writer, publisher and philanthropist. She’s the co-founder of Portobello books, the owner of Granta books, and the editor of Granta literary magazine, a role she says she hug...

Clarke Peters from 2019-01-06T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the actor Clarke Peters about his passion for breaking down barriers between musical traditions.

Best known for his television roles as Detective Lester Freeman ...

Jan Ravens from 2018-12-23T13:00

This week’s Private Passions is pretty crowded, with Kirsty Wark, Fiona Bruce, Emily Thornberry and Theresa May all putting in appearances - in the person of Jan Ravens, from the award-winning R...

Daniel Evans from 2018-12-16T13:00

Actor and theatre director Daniel Evans shares with Michael Berkeley his passions for musical theatre, opera and the piano.

Daniel Evans grew up in the Rhondda Valley and won praise and p...

David Rieff from 2018-12-02T13:00

David Rieff has admitted ruefully that he’s made a career out of telling people what they don’t want to hear: whether it’s the politics of the global food crisis in his book “The Reproach of Hun...

Rebecca Stott from 2018-11-25T13:00

Rebecca Stott grew up in a community where the following things were forbidden: newspapers, television, cinema, radio, pets, universities, wristwatches, cameras, holidays – and music. Her family...

Margaret MacMillan from 2018-11-11T13:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest on the centenary of Armistice Day is the historian Margaret MacMillan.

In this year’s Reith Lectures, Margaret Macmillan delivered a powerful series of lectures ex...

Anil Seth from 2018-11-04T13:00

It’s the size and shape of a cauliflower, and weighs about 3 lbs. And yet the average human brain has so many intricate and complex connections that if you counted one connection every second it...

Richard Powers from 2018-10-21T12:00

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of forests this autumn, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the American novelist Richard Powers. His latest novel, The Overstory, is his twelfth, and it’s a monumental ...

John Bird from 2018-10-14T12:00

Big Issue founder John Bird talks to Michael Berkeley about the role music played in transforming his life.

For two weeks in 1970 John Bird worked in the Houses of Parliament washing dish...

Ed Vulliamy from 2018-10-07T12:00

Ed Vulliamy has worked all around the world as a journalist; he’s best-known for his prize-winning coverage of the war in Bosnia, on television and in The Guardian. The war crimes he reported on...

Bel Mooney from 2018-09-30T12:00

Bel Mooney describes her pleasures as: watching for kingfishers, riding pillion on a motorbike, and dancing to a 1962 Wurlitzer. That entertaining list reflects something of her enjoyment of a l...

Bella Hardy from 2018-09-16T12:00

Michael Berkeley’s guest is Bella Hardy, a passionate interpreter of traditional songs who has also blossomed into an accomplished songwriter, drawing on the Peak District, where she grew up, as...

Steve Punt from 2018-09-09T12:00

Steve Punt is well known thanks to the popular Radio 4 Friday night comedy, The Now Show - with fellow-host Hugh Dennis, he’s been mocking politicians and celebrities for an astonishing twenty y...

Eugenia Cheng from 2018-09-02T12:00

At first glance chocolate brownies, puff pastry and Battenberg cake don’t seem to have a great deal in common with theoretical maths, but Eugenia Cheng has harnessed her love of cooking in order...

Lauren Child from 2018-08-05T12:00

Michael Berkeley's guest is the best-selling author, illustrator, and Children's Laureate Lauren Child.

I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato; I Am Too Absolutely Small for School; I Am Not S...

Henry Blofeld from 2018-07-29T12:00

Ahead of this week's first test against India, Michael Berkeley's guest is cricket commentator Henry Blofeld.

Henry was a very promising young cricketer, but his prospects of a first-class...

Audrey Niffenegger from 2018-07-22T12:00

Audrey Niffenegger had a huge worldwide success with her first novel, The Time-Traveller's Wife, which sold eight million copies in thirty-six languages. It was made into a film, of which, she s...

Paco Peña from 2018-07-15T12:00

Paco Peña first started playing the guitar at the age of six; it was his older brother's guitar, and since there were nine children in the family, all living in two rooms in a crowded house in C...

Adjoa Andoh from 2018-07-08T12:00

The actor Adjoa Andoh talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for theatre, opera, and the music that reflects both her English and African heritage.

Whether you're a regular at the Nat...

Kim Moore from 2018-06-24T12:00

Kim Moore won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize this year for her first poetry collection, "The Art of Falling", and is still only in her thirties. The judges described her prize-win...

Miranda Krestovnikoff from 2018-06-17T12:00

As part of Radio 3's week in the forest, Michael Berkeley talks to wildlife presenter, President of the RSPB and accomplished musician Miranda Krestovnikoff.

She's dived with sharks, shown...

Richard Smith from 2018-06-10T12:00

Dr Richard Smith heads an organisation called Patients Know Best, and having been editor of the British Medical Journal for most of his career, he now enjoys stirring things up in a provocative ...

Peter Florence from 2018-05-27T12:00

The Hay Festival began in 1988 with 250 people in a field in mid Wales. Thirty years later, the crowd has swelled to more than quarter of a million - 265,000 people are expected to turn up this ...

Elisabeth Luard from 2018-05-20T12:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the food writer, artist and journalist Elisabeth Luard about her favourite music and the memories it conjures up of the joys and tragedies of family life.

The wi...

Lubaina Himid from 2018-05-06T12:00

For Lubaina Himid, winning the Turner Prize is recognition for thirty-five years of work as a painter, curator and installation artist. Her work is witty, vibrantly coloured, and provocative; in...

Anne Sebba from 2018-04-22T12:00

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anne Sebba, the best-selling biographer of iconic women including Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill's mother Jennie, Laura Ashley, and Mother Teresa.

Her most r...

Phyllida Barlow from 2018-04-08T12:00

The artist Phyllida Barlow shares her passion for music that reflects her sculpture, in its defiance of convention and delight in surprise.

For years Phyllida Barlow was so desperate for ...

Richard Coles from 2018-04-01T12:00

In a revealing and entertaining programme for Easter Day, the Reverend Richard Coles talks to Michael Berkeley about his double life as a celebrity priest and his enduring passion for classical ...

Xavier Bray from 2018-03-25T12:00

Xavier Bray is a renowned specialist in 17th- and 18th-century art, and he's been director for a year now of the Wallace Collection, that rich collection of rococo painting, china, and armour, h...

Gwyneth Glyn from 2018-03-18T13:00

The poet and singer-songwriter Gwyneth Glyn talks to Michael Berkeley about the music she loves from Wales and around the world.

Gwyneth has been described as a poet among singers and a s...

Richard Flanagan from 2018-03-11T13:00

Richard Flanagan first came to worldwide attention in 2001 with one of the most original titles ever: "Gould's Book of Fish, a Novel in Twelve Fish". It was his third novel, the story of a 19th-...

Katherine Grainger from 2018-03-04T13:00

In a special edition to mark International Women's Day next week, Michael Berkeley talks to Britain's most decorated female Olympic athlete, the rower Dame Katherine Grainger.

Katherine wo...

Bishi from 2018-02-18T13:00

Singer, multi-instrumentalist, electronic sitar player, performer and DJ, Bishi has performed with everyone from Yoko Ono, Pulp, Goldfrapp, the LSO, and the Kronos Quartet. A glamorous and extra...

Bernard Cornwell from 2018-02-11T13:00

Bernard Cornwell is now one of the world's most popular writers of historical fiction. He's famous for his Sharpe series, about a British soldier during the Napoleonic wars, and for his Last Kin...

Frances Barber from 2018-02-04T13:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the actress Frances Barber about the music and friendships that have inspired her throughout her career. From Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre to the evil Madame Kovarian...

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough from 2018-01-28T13:00

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is steeped in Viking lore. She travels through the icy landscapes of the Far North in the footsteps of those Norse "far travellers" who have left us their wonderful ...

Alistair Spalding from 2018-01-21T13:00

Alistair Spalding talks about dance with the zeal of the convert. Although he's headed Sadler's Wells since 2004, commissioning new work from leading international choreographers - Akram Khan, M...

Helen Czerski from 2018-01-14T13:00

The physicist and broadcaster Helen Czerski talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, inspired by her Polish heritage and her fascination with technology and exploration.

Havin...

Alfred Brendel from 2017-12-31T13:00

Alfred Brendel is one of the great musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He's renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt an...

Bach compilation from 2017-12-24T13:00

Many Private Passions guests over the years have revealed their passion for Bach. But for some, the great composer has really transformed their lives.

The great primatologist Jane Goodall...

Jane Birkin from 2017-12-17T13:00

Jane Birkin came to fame in the swinging 60s, thanks to her wild beauty and daring appearances in avant-garde films such as Blow-up, and thanks also to her tempestuous relationship with Serge Ga...

Michael Frayn from 2017-12-10T13:00

The playwright and novelist Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley.

Michael Frayn is an acute observer of the absurdities and pain of the human condition, and his ...

Susan Richards from 2017-12-03T13:00

Susan Richards, writer and commentator on contemporary Russia, talks to Michael Berkeley about her fascination with the country and her passion for 20th-century Russian music.

Susan's fir...

John Surman from 2017-11-19T13:00

As part of Radio 3's coverage of the London Jazz Festival, Michael Berkeley talks to the saxophonist and bass clarinettist John Surman, who over a career of dizzying versatility that spans more ...

Simon Sebag Montefiore from 2017-11-12T13:00

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning writer whose books return again and again to Russia. His latest novel is Red Sky at Noon, the last of his Moscow Trilogy, following Sashenka and One Nigh...

Ronan Bennett from 2017-11-05T13:00

Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter whose latest drama series on the BBC, "Gunpowder", dramatizes the story of Guy Fawkes from the point of view of the Catholics, who were persecuted in...

Allan Corduner from 2017-10-22T12:00

Allan Corduner is an astonishingly versatile actor, equally at home in the West End, on Broadway, in television series such as Homeland, or in films like Yentl, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Mike Le...

Sir Simon Wessely from 2017-10-15T12:00

As part of Radio 3's Why Music? The Key to Memory weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to the psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely. Professor Sir Simon Wessely is one of our most eminent psychiatrists: unti...

Hildegard Bechtler from 2017-10-08T12:00

As part of the BBC's opera season, designer Hildegard Bechtler talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music and some of the twenty-seven operas she has worked on all over the world. Hildega...

Maurice Riordan from 2017-10-01T12:00

Maurice Riordan is a poet much preoccupied with time - how time suddenly stands still, or speeds up, or loops you back in dreams to childhood - in his case, to the countryside of County Cork where ...

Stephen Poliakoff from 2017-09-24T12:00

Stephen Poliakoff made his mark as a playwright very early; he began writing plays as a schoolboy and got first review in The Times when he was only seventeen. At the age of twenty-four he became w...

Sebastian Barry from 2017-09-10T12:00

Sebastian Barry's great-grand-father was a traditional Irish musician, who played on the wooden flute and piccolo. His mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; his aunt Mary O'Hara had...

Michael Craig-Martin from 2017-08-27T12:00

Michael Craig-Martin is one of our most influential artists, celebrated for his huge black and white wall drawings and intensely coloured paintings of everyday objects, as well as his installations...

Vivien Duffield from 2017-08-13T12:00

Dame Vivien Duffield is one of our leading philanthropists, and her passion for the arts - and particularly opera - is reflected in her giving. Her Foundation, the Clore Duffield Foundation, has su...

Nick Davies from 2017-08-06T12:00

Nick Davies is an expert in the art of deception - as practised by the cuckoo. He has spent his career studying that deceiving, murderous bird, and living in woods and wild gardens, even up in a mo...

Shirley Hughes from 2017-07-16T12:00

On her 90th birthday, Shirley Hughes, the creator of many of our best-loved and most enduring children's books, talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions. In a career spanning nearly s...

Dan Pearson from 2017-07-09T12:00

Dan Pearson discovered his passion for gardens very young, building landscapes for his toy trolls out of stones. He's now one of our most influential landscape designers, with work ranging from pri...

Lindsey Davis from 2017-07-02T12:00

Lindsey Davis is best known for her series of historical crime stories about a laid-back amateur sleuth called Marcus Didius Falco. Set against the turmoil of the 1st-century Roman Empire, the book...

Canada 150: Madeleine Thien from 2017-06-25T12:00

As part of Canada 150, a week of programmes marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of the nation, Michael Berkeley talks to Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien. Born in Vancouver, she is the ...

Patsy Rodenburg from 2017-06-18T12:00

Michael Berkeley talks to Patsy Rodenburg, the most highly acclaimed voice teacher of her generation, about the music she loves. Patsy Rodenburg has worked with pretty much every actor you can na...

Nishat Khan from 2017-06-12T12:47

Nishat Khan is one of India's finest musicians; born into a dynasty of famous sitar players, he first went on stage with his father and uncle when he was only seven. Since that first appearance in ...

Ivo van Hove from 2017-06-04T12:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the award-winning theatre director Ivo van Hove about his musical passions. The director of Amsterdam's prestigious Toneelgroep theatre, Ivo works all over the world, not...

Bettany Hughes from 2017-05-21T12:00

Bettany Hughes talks to Michael Berkeley about the music that's shaped her family life, and the music she's come to love during her travels as a historian. Bettany has more than 50 radio and telev...

Gabriele Finaldi from 2017-05-07T12:00

Gabriele Finaldi, the Director of the National Gallery, talks to Michael Berkeley about his artistic and musical passions. When Gabriele Finaldi took up his post as Director of the National Galler...

AL Kennedy from 2017-04-23T12:00

It's not easy starting out to make a living as a writer, and A.L. Kennedy began with one of the most challenging jobs ever: as a puppeteer and clown, chasing children around a field in Fife with a ...

Mark Padmore from 2017-04-16T12:00

Over the last 20 years Mark Padmore has established a reputation as one of Britain's most outstanding tenors. His performances combine emotional power with intellectual rigour; and he's not afraid ...

Thomas Ostermeier from 2017-04-02T12:00

Michael Berkeley talks to the director Thomas Ostermeier about his musical passions. Thomas is the outstanding German theatre director of his generation, known for his gritty realism, and for work...

Juliet Nicolson from 2017-03-19T13:00

Juliet Nicolson's childhood was dominated by secrets. She spent a lot of time - she now confesses - listening at doors, picking up the telephone and holding her breath so that nobody knew she was t...

Vesna Goldsworthy from 2017-03-05T13:00

Thirty years ago, Vesna Goldsworthy fell in love with a young Englishman she met at a summer school in Bulgaria; she moved to England to be with him, much to the disapproval of her parents, arrivin...

Petina Gappah from 2017-02-19T13:00

Petina Gappah grew up in Zimbabwe during segregation, when black girls were not thought worthy of education. Despite this, she became a lawyer and was awarded law degrees from the University of Zim...

Peter Robinson from 2017-02-12T13:00

Crime-writer Peter Robinson tops the best-seller lists year after year, across the world; in fact his detective, DI Banks, is probably even better known than he is. DI Banks is a straight-talking Y...

Sarah Lucas from 2017-02-05T13:00

Sarah Lucas burst onto the art scene in the early 1990s, one of the wildest and most provocative of the Young British Artists. Her work was challenging, bawdy, revolutionary: her first solo show in...

Stephanie Flanders from 2017-01-29T12:00

Stephanie Flanders is familiar to most of us from the years she spent as the BBC's Economics Editor, untangling graphs and statistics and treasury policies with great clarity and cheerful common se...

Philippe Sands from 2017-01-15T13:00

Philippe Sands is a human rights lawyer who recently won the biggest non-fiction prize in the UK, the £30,000 Baillie Gifford Prize, for his book "East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and C...

Archbishop John Sentamu from 2016-12-25T13:00

Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, is a special guest for Christmas Day. In Private Passions, he talks to Michael Berkeley about being the middle child of thirteen children, in Uganda. His fathe...

Edward Watson from 2016-12-18T13:00

Royal Ballet Principal Edward Watson talks to Michael Berkeley about his life in dance and shares the music that has inspired him both professionally and personally. Known for his dramatic flair a...

Chris Hadfield from 2016-12-04T13:00

Chris Hadfield has described going into space as 'strapping yourself on top of what is essentially a large bomb'. He is one of the world's most respected astronauts, and his career has included Spa...

Charlie Phillips from 2016-11-20T13:00

Charlie Phillips is a Jamaican-born photographer whose work has been exhibited across the world, and is part of the permanent collections of The Tate and the V&A. He's best known for his photograph...

Geoff Dyer from 2016-11-13T13:00

Geoff Dyer is a writer who joyously defies categorisation. The winner of many literary prizes, and frequently described as one of the most original writers of his generation, he surprises at every ...

Therese Oulton from 2016-11-06T13:00

Thérèse Oulton burst on to the scene in 1984, fresh out of art school, with a highly-praised solo exhibition, which was followed three years later by a nomination for the Turner Prize. From the ve...

Helen Oyeyemi from 2016-10-23T12:00

Helen Oyeyemi wrote her first novel The Icarus Girl, about a mixed race child and her imaginary friend, in secret, while she was still at school studying for her A levels. Four more novels have fol...

Paterson Joseph from 2016-10-16T12:00

Paterson Joseph bunked off school when he was thirteen and spent the next two years going to the local library instead, reading his way from Agatha Christie through to Alexander Pushkin. It was a g...

Lara Feigel from 2016-10-09T12:00

Lara Feigel made her name writing about the relationship between life, love, literature and history in London during the Second World War with her wonderfully titled and highly praised book The Lov...

Grayson Perry from 2016-10-02T12:00

Grayson Perry burst into the public consciousness in 2003 when he accepted the Turner Prize with the words: 'It's about time a transvestite potter from Essex won the Turner.' Since then he's become...

Sound Frontiers: Dame Joan Plowright from 2016-09-25T12:00

As BBC Radio 3 celebrates 70 years of pioneering music and culture, Michael Berkeley travels to Sussex to meet Dame Joan Plowright for a special edition of Private Passions. Dame Joan's extraordi...

George Shaw from 2016-09-18T12:00

A former Turner Prize-nominee, George Shaw is renowned for his highly detailed approach and suburban subject matter, and for his idiosyncratic medium - Humbrol enamel paint, typically used to colou...

Daniel Libeskind from 2016-09-11T12:00

On this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, Michael Berkeley's guest is Daniel Libeskind, a world-renowned architect, known for concert halls, opera sets, museums, hotels and universities. In 2003 Lib...

Steve Silberman from 2016-08-28T12:00

Steve Silberman is an award-winning investigative reporter based in San Francisco; he writes for The New Yorker, Nature, Wired and Time Magazine. He has spent ten years researching the untold histo...

Carol Ann Duffy from 2016-08-24T10:42:19

Michael Berkeley welcomes the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as his Private Passions. The first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay person to hold the post, she was appointed in 2009, ...

Steven Berkoff from 2016-08-24T10:41:55

Michael Berkeley welcomes the actor, playwright and director Steven Berkoff, renowned for the visceral quality of his plays such as East, West, Decadence, Greek, Sink the Belgrano, Scumbags, Ritual...

Judith Kerr from 2016-08-24T10:40:42

Michael Berkeley's guest on Private Passions this week is the best-selling children's author Judith Kerr. Now 89, Judith was born into a distinguished pre-war German Jewish intellectual family: her...

Sound of Cinema: Mike Leigh from 2016-08-24T10:39:29

Michael Berkeley's guest this week is the filmmaker, writer and playwright Mike Leigh, who began his career in the theatre and with TV dramas such as 'Abigail's Party' and 'Nuts in May', and went t...

Jasper Conran from 2016-08-24T10:37:16

Michael Berkeley's guests is Jasper Conran, one of Britain's best-known fashion designers. In 1978, Conran began producing women's clothing, and has since concentrated on such diverse fields as hom...

Michele Roberts from 2016-08-24T10:32:36

Michael Berkeley's guest on Private Passions is the novelist and short story writer Michele Roberts. The child of a French mother and English father, she was brought up and still divides her time b...

Lucy Hughes-Hallett from 2016-08-24T10:31:32

Michael Berkeley's guest is the historian, biographer and critic Lucy Hughes-Hallett, whose books include a cultural history of the ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra and a story of heroism told thro...

Private Passions: George Steiner from 2016-08-24T10:25:39

George Steiner discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 2002 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Marina Lewycka from 2016-08-24T10:24:15

Marina Lewycka, a post-war baby born to Ukrainian parents in a German refugee camp, has lived in England since she was one. Her parents settled in a village near Pontefract, and she has lived in so...

Sam Taylor-Wood from 2016-08-24T10:23:27

Michael Berkeley meets Turner Prize-nominated conceptual artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood, whose latest work, Nowhere Boy, documents the early life of John Lennon. Much of her work has been in...

Anoushka Shankar from 2016-08-24T10:21:36

Michael Berkeley's guest today is the sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, one of the stars of world music today. She studied exclusively with her father, the great Indian sitar player Ravi ...

Private Passions: John Peel from 2016-08-24T10:19:48

Broadcaster, John Peel discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 1996 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Private Passions: Sir Isaiah Berlin from 2016-08-24T10:17:09

Philosopher, Isaiah Berlin discusses his personal music choices with Michael Berkeley in 1996 - drawn from the archive to mark 20 years of Private Passions.

Anna Pavord from 2016-08-21T12:00

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anna Pavord, the distinguished writer about gardens and landscape. Her best-known book is The Tulip, a biography of the bulb that created a mania in the 17th century, bu...

Stephen Hugh-Jones from 2016-08-14T12:00

Stephen Hugh-Jones is a fellow of King's College Cambridge and has spent 45 years researching - and living among - the Amazonian Indians who live on the Equator, in South-Eastern Colombia. They are...

Janine di Giovanni from 2016-08-07T12:00

Janine di Giovanni has spent more than two decades reporting from some of the most dangerous places on earth: Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria. She's the Middle East Editor of Newswe...

Timberlake Wertenbaker from 2016-07-24T11:00

Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of our leading playwrights, adapters and translators. Her parents were American, but she was brought up in Basque country in France and has spent much of her life in G...

Alexandre Desplat from 2016-07-17T12:00

Alexandre Desplat is one of the world's leading composers of film music, with more than 120 scores to his name. His big breakthrough came in 2007 with Girl With A Pearl Earring, and since then he's...

Julia Donaldson from 2016-07-10T12:00

Julia Donaldson began her working life busking and writing songs, and when one of her songs became a children’s book, her phenomenally successful career as an author was born. She’s been the bigges...

Glenda Jackson from 2016-06-26T12:00

For three decades Glenda Jackson was one of our most acclaimed actors, winning BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Emmys, and two Oscars - for Women in Love and for A Touch of Class. And alongside her film c...

Andrew Solomon from 2016-06-19T12:00

Andrew Solomon is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia Medical Centre in New York, and a writer with a wide-ranging interest in families. He spent ten years talking to parents who faced ext...

John Sutherland from 2016-06-13T10:26

The scholar and critic John Sutherland talks to Michael Berkeley about his passions for film, music, and Victorian literature. An unsuccessful career at school and a backbreaking job laying railw...

Tanita Tikaram from 2016-06-05T12:00

Tanita Tikaram became an overnight success when she was only a teenager; her debut album "Ancient Heart" sold four million copies in the late 80s and gave her hit singles like 'Twist in My Sobriety...

Jane Goodall from 2016-05-22T12:00

Jane Goodall was only twenty-four when in she went to live among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and she went on to spend more than 55 years there. She has done more than anyone...

Rose Tremain from 2016-05-15T12:00

Rose Tremain is one of our finest writers, and her bestselling books - both novels and short stories - are garlanded with prizes. She defies categorisation and is equally at home with historical an...

Roger Allam from 2016-05-01T12:00

Roger Allam is an actor equally at home with Shakespeare, musical theatre, detective shows, and comedy on both radio and television. From the Globe Theatre to Game of Thrones, through Endeavour, Th...

Jonathan Bate from 2016-04-24T12:00

Sir Jonathan Bate is one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of our time. He's also a biographer, broadcaster and critic, and a passionate advocate of the importance of the humanities in education....

Melly Still from 2016-04-10T12:00

Melly Still is a theatre and opera director whose work has been described as inventive, ambitious and magical. She stages the unstageable - mermaids, angels animals, underwater realms - putting who...

Sunil Khilnani from 2016-03-29T18:08

Professor Sunil Khilnani is the Director of the India Institute at King's College London and the presenter of Radio 4's epic history of India: 'Incarnations: India in 50 Lives.' His books include a...

Melanie Reid from 2016-03-27T12:00

For Easter Sunday, Michael Berkeley's guest is Melanie Reid, who writes a weekly column in The Times about her life as a tetraplegic. Six years ago, on Good Friday 2010, she was out cross-country r...

Martha Lane Fox from 2016-03-06T13:00

To mark International Women's Day, Michael Berkeley's guest is Martha Lane Fox. At the age of only 25 she co-founded Lastminute.com, which floated at the peak of the dot-com bubble and was sold sev...

Katharine Whitehorn from 2016-02-21T13:00

A chance to hear Michael Berkeley talk to the veteran journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, who died in January 2021 at the age 92. In this programme from 2016, Katherine Whitehorn talks about the music...

Robert Harris from 2016-02-07T13:00

Robert Harris made his name with Fatherland, a thriller which imagined what life would have been like in Britain had Hitler won the War. It sold over three million copies, was translated round the ...

Shirley Collins from 2016-01-31T13:00

Shirley Collins talks to Michael Berkeley about her musical passions and her sixty-year career in folk music. Much praised for her clear, unaffected singing voice, she has won worldwide acclaim as ...

Baaba Maal from 2016-01-24T13:00

As a prelude to the Folk Connections weekend on Radio 3, Michael Berkeley's guest is the world music singer and instrumentalist Baaba Maal. He performs at Glastonbury and Womad, and fills venues li...

Gerald Barry from 2016-01-03T13:00

For New Year New Music, Michael Berkeley's guest is the Irish composer Gerald Barry. We tend to think of 'New Music' as something deadly serious and even agonised; Gerald Barry utterly confounds th...

Chilly Gonzales from 2015-12-27T13:00

Canadian pianist Chilly Gonzales is on a mission - to get us all playing. His piano books and online pop music masterclasses attract hundreds of thousands of hits. Classically trained, he has one o...

Alan Bennett from 2015-12-20T13:00

Michael Berkeley's guest this week is Alan Bennett. We know him as the much-loved playwright and diarist who's been entertaining and moving us as a writer and performer since Beyond the Fringe in 1...

Akram Khan from 2015-12-13T13:00

Akram Khan is hardly ever still; an international star, he spins around the world with his dance company - just this last month he's been performing in Santa Barbara, Corby, Moscow, Seattle, Spain,...

Northern Lights: Sara Wheeler from 2015-12-06T13:00

As part of Radio 3's Northern Lights season, Michael Berkeley's guest is the award-winning writer on the Polar Regions, Sara Wheeler. Sara Wheeler spent years resisting the magnetic North. She est...

Christopher Ricks from 2015-11-29T13:00

Michael Berkeley's guest is the distinguished scholar Sir Christopher Ricks, who was described by W.H. Auden as 'the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.' He has championed the work of new ...

Christina Lamb from 2015-11-22T13:00

Christina Lamb is one of Britain's leading foreign correspondents. As a young journalist barely into her twenties, she went to live with the Afghan Mujahidin fighting the Russians; her dispatches s...

Free Thinking: Sugata Mitra from 2015-11-08T13:00

As part of Radio 3's Free Thinking weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to Sugata Mitra, who has started a revolution in education. He believes schools as we know them are obsolete; that exams shut down...

Kim Brandstrup from 2015-11-01T13:00

Kim Brandstrup is one of the leading choreographers of his generation. He talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for telling stories through music and dance. Born in Denmark, he originally tra...

Owen Sheers from 2015-10-25T13:00

Owen Sheers' career as a poet began aged 10, when he won a competition at Abergavenny Show for a poem in which he found a rhyme for "orange" - a mountain in the Brecon Beacons called the Blorenge. ...

David Tang from 2015-10-11T12:00

David Tang arrived in Britain from Hong Kong aged 13 and not speaking a word of English. Since then he has thoroughly embraced Britishness, and the British have thoroughly embraced him, culminating...

Athene Donald from 2015-10-04T12:00

Dame Athene Donald is one of our leading physicists, and an outstanding role model and campaigner for women in science. She is Master of Churchill College, Professor of Experimental Physics at the ...

Why Music? Weekend: Frank Wilczek from 2015-09-29T12:53

As part of Radio 3's Why Music? weekend, Michael Berkeley talks to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek. Frank Wilczek was brought up in Queens, New York, the son of a radio repairman. B...

Amitav Ghosh from 2015-09-13T12:00

Amitav Ghosh is a writer with a worldwide reach. Born in Calcutta, educated in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria, he lives now between New York and Goa; his books have sold over 3 million copies, and ha...

Val McDermid from 2015-09-06T12:00

Val McDermid is one of the biggest names in crime writing. Her novels - 30 so far - have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 30 languages. But in Private Passions sh...

Jancis Robinson from 2015-08-30T12:00

In her forty-year career writing and broadcasting about wine, Jancis Robinson has probably done more than anyone else to make wine an accessible and joyous part of our lives, and to strip away a gr...

Virginia Ironside from 2015-08-16T12:00

Agony aunt, novelist and stand-up Virginia Ironside talks to Michael Berkeley about her favourite music, the Swinging Sixties, ukuleles, and growing old disgracefully. Virginia has worked for pret...

Faramerz Dabhoiwala from 2015-08-09T12:00

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who is Professor of History at Exeter College, Oxford, has proved that what people got up to in the past is a serious and neglected subject of historical enquiry. His book The ...

John Lahr from 2015-08-02T11:00

John Lahr talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for the American Songbook, his award-winning biographies of Tennessee Williams and Joe Orton, and his father, the actor Bert Lahr, who was the ...

Mona Siddiqui from 2015-07-20T09:56

Muslim theologian Mona Siddiqui talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for piano music, how she came to love classical music through the cinema, and the sometimes controversial role of music i...

Henry Marsh from 2015-07-12T12:00

Henry Marsh is one of the country's leading neurosurgeons: as a senior consultant at St George's University Hospital in South London, he has pioneered brain surgery for more than 30 years.These are...

Rachel Nicholson from 2015-06-28T12:00

Rachel Nicholson has an extraordinary artistic background: her mother was Barbara Hepworth, her father Ben Nicholson. Yet despite, perhaps because of, the burden of that parentage, she herself did ...

Alison Goldfrapp from 2015-06-21T10:30

As part of the BBC's Classical Voice season, Michael Berkeley's guest is singer Alison Goldfrapp. Alison Goldfrapp burst ontothe music scene fifteen years ago, as lead singer in the duo Goldfrapp ...

Jung Chang from 2015-06-14T10:30

It's impossible to imagine what it must have been like to live in a society where Western Classical music was forbidden on pain of severe punishment, or where playing a musical instrument was somet...

Christopher Le Brun from 2015-06-07T10:30

The President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Christopher Le Brun, gives Michael Berkeley a tour of this year's Summer Exhibition and shares his musical and artistic passions. The RA Summer Exhibit...

Alan Moses from 2015-05-31T10:30

Sir Alan Moses is a distinguished lawyer who sat as a judge for almost 20 years, latterly in the Court of Appeal. He resigned last autumn to become the first Chairman of the new Press Standards Org...

Iqbal Khan from 2015-05-17T10:30

Michael Berkeley's guest is the opera and theatre director Iqbal Khan. He has brought to the stage everything from Madame Butterfly and Sondheim's Into the Woods to an RSC production of Much Ado A...

Tim Rice from 2015-05-03T10:30

Tim Rice has written the lyrics for some of the most successful musicals of our generation: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ... Jesus Christ Superstar ... Evita ... For 45 years he has...

20th Anniversary Programme from 2015-04-19T12:00

"As a composer I've always been intrigued by the way people who are not professional musicians talk about music and how they tend to reveal things about themselves when they do. And so twenty years...

Jane Hawking from 2015-04-12T10:30

Jane Hawking's personal life is very much in the public eye at the moment, thanks to the success of the film 'The Theory of Everything'. It tells the story of her love affair and then marriage to t...

Lucy Winkett from 2015-04-05T10:30

Michael Berkeley talks to the Reverend Lucy Winkett, the Rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, and formerly Canon Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral, about her lifelong passion for music. A clas...

Sarah Hall from 2015-03-29T10:30

A husband and wife go for a walk in the woods; full of energy, the wife starts to walk on the tips of her toes - suddenly she takes off, across the forest. Startled, the husband calls out to her - ...

Robert Cohan from 2015-03-22T11:30

Robert Cohan is the founding father of contemporary dance in Britain. Born in Brooklyn in 1925, he was first struck by the power of dance whilst on leave from serving in France during the Second Wo...

Andy McNab from 2015-03-15T11:30

Andy McNab is very lucky to be alive today; in fact from the beginning his life has been characterised by exceptional risk and danger. As a baby, he was found abandoned in a Harrods carrier bag on ...

Anna Meredith from 2015-03-08T11:30

Michael Berkeley's guest is Anna Meredith - one of Britain's leading composers coming up from the younger generation. She is hard to label as she composes and performs both acoustic and electronic ...

Ben Okri from 2015-02-22T11:30

Writer Ben Okri chooses his favourite music and talks to Michael Berkeley about the power of stories and their central place in human life. The author of the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road...

Nicky Clayton from 2015-02-08T11:30

Nicky Clayton is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Comparative Cognition at Cambridge, and she's done more than any other scientist to transform the way we think about animal intellige...

Henrietta Bowden-Jones from 2015-01-25T11:30

Henrietta Bowden-Jones has spent the last three decades studying the mind. Born in Italy to an English father and an Italian mother, she has dedicated her career to helping people overcome addicti...

Paul Cartledge from 2015-01-18T11:30

If you want to know how to wield a Spartan spear, or whether Athens really was the cradle of democracy - or indeed what ancient Greek music might have sounded like, Paul Cartledge is the man to go ...

Kate Gross from 2015-01-08T11:44

On Private Passions Michael Berkeley's guest is the charity CEO and cancer blogger, Kate Gross, who sadly died on Christmas morning, at the age of only 36. Michael Berkeley writes:'Kate Gross was ...

Roger Moore from 2014-12-28T11:30

James Bond, Simon Templar... Michael Berkeley's guest today can only be Roger Moore. He played Bond for twelve years, in seven films, more than any other actor. And before that he was a much-loved ...

Vivienne Westwood from 2014-12-21T11:30

Dame Vivienne Westwood needs little introduction; her name and her brand are known across the world. Indeed, in the Far East she's made it into the top ten most recognised global brands, with Coca ...

Breaking Free - Martin Luther's Revolution: Eamon Duffy from 2014-12-14T11:30

Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, Eamon Duffy has changed for ever the way we view the Reformation. His books, including The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath,...

Jill Paton Walsh from 2014-12-07T11:30

Jill Paton Walsh lives with the ghost of Lord Peter Wimsey - having taken on the mantle of Dorothy L Sayers and continuing, to great acclaim, her hugely successful detective stories. But before L...

Anthony Green from 2014-11-30T11:30

Anthony Green, senior Royal Academician, is one of the UK's most eminent and best-loved figurative painters. His career as an artist has now spanned fifty years, and his brightly coloured, irregula...

John Harvey from 2014-11-16T11:30

Crime writer John Harvey has no shortage of fans. His prize-winning books have sold over a million copies and have been translated and published all over the world. His Nottingham detective Charlie...

Roger Law from 2014-11-09T11:30

Roger Law was the evil genius behind the mocking caricature puppets of Spitting Image, the award-winning TV series, which ran for over 12 years. No politician escaped: John Major was entirely grey ...

Kathryn Tickell from 2014-11-02T11:30

Michael Berkeley's guest is the Northumbrian musician Kathryn Tickell. Kathryn Tickell is rooted in the remote hill farms of Northumbria; her grandparents were shepherds, and she grew up playing t...

Kika Markham from 2014-10-26T11:30

Michael Berkeley's guest is the actor Kika Markham, widow of Corin Redgrave. 'Actors by their nature are curious, fickle, insecure people: flirts. They should not live together.' So says Kika Mark...

David Lan from 2014-10-19T10:30

David Lan is a huge force in theatre in Britain, indeed internationally. But how he got there is surprising. Brought up in Cape Town, he began his career as an anthropologist, living for two years ...

Roy Foster from 2014-10-12T10:30

As the first incumbent of the only chair in Irish History in Britain, at Oxford, Roy Foster has devoted his career to bringing Irish history to the forefront of British minds. Unafraid to challenge...

Charles Spencer from 2014-09-28T10:30

Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, is probably best known as the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, and is remembered above all for the moving eulogy he gave at Diana's funeral. But h...

Sir Timothy Gowers from 2014-09-21T10:30

Timothy Gowers is the son of a composer, the brother of a violinist, and a keen jazz pianist. But that's not how he makes a living. In fact, Sir Timothy Gowers is one the country's most distinguish...

Sophie Hannah from 2014-09-07T10:30

Sophie Hannah is a prize-winning poet, whose work is studied in schools and universities across the country, and the author of nine dark psychological thrillers. Alongside the thrillers - one a yea...

Mark Miodownik from 2014-08-31T10:30

From concrete to chocolate and teacups to tennis racquets, it's the everyday stuff of life that fascinates Mark Miodownik. He's Professor of Materials and Society at University College London where...

Helen Ghosh from 2014-08-24T10:30

National Trust Director General Helen Ghosh takes Michael Berkeley on a tour of Leith Hill Place, now a National Trust property but once the childhood home of Ralph Vaughan Williams. She chooses h...

Miles Jupp from 2014-08-10T10:30

Miles Jupp burst onto the comedy scene when he won the 'So You Think You're Funny' contest at the Edinburgh Festival at the age of just twenty-one. He'd already, as an undergraduate, won the part o...

Stephen Grosz from 2014-08-03T10:30

Stephen Grosz waited until he was 60 to publish his first book, 'The Examined Life'. It was a huge overnight success - a bestseller here in Britain and translated into more than 20 languages across...

Phyllida Law from 2014-07-27T10:30

Phyllida Law burst onto the stage in the mid 1950s and since then her career has spanned everything from the first British production of The Crucible, to musicals such as La Cage aux Folles and tel...

Richard Holmes from 2014-07-13T10:30

Biographer Richard Holmes shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley, and his fascination with opium dreams, telescopes and balloons. Best known for his biographies of the Romantics - most ...

Music in the Great War: John Keane from 2014-06-29T10:30

As part of Radio 3's 'Music in the Great War' season, Michael Berkeley's guest is John Keane, who was appointed the official British War Artist during the first Gulf War. The job involved travellin...

Eva Schloss from 2014-06-15T10:30

Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss shares her extraordinary life story with Michael Berkeley and reveals the music that has brought her comfort, that conjures memories, and that brings her joy.
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Nitin Sawhney from 2014-06-08T10:30

Nitin Sawhney is a multi award-winning musician, producer and composer. With nine studio albums to his credit, he has collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney, Joss Stone, Sting and Nelson Man...

Irving Finkel from 2014-06-01T10:30

Assyriologist Irving Finkel talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for clay tablets, chamber music, and Jimi Hendrix.

Irving Finkel is one of the world's leading experts in the world'...

Emma Bridgewater from 2014-05-18T10:30

Nearly 30 years ago Emma Bridgewater, a young English graduate, went shopping for a cup and saucer for her mother's birthday present. She couldn't find anything she liked - so she designed one hers...

Lady Brenda Hale from 2014-05-11T10:30

Lady Hale is a trailblazer. 30 years ago, she was the first woman to be appointed to the Law Commission (and the youngest person there); 10 years ago, she was the first female judge to be appointed...

Jonathan Meades from 2014-04-27T10:30

Writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades's fascination with architecture began on a school trip to Marsh Court in Stockbridge, Hampshire - designed by that great architect of English Country Houses E...

Nicholas Penny from 2014-04-20T10:30

For this special Easter edition of Private Passions, Michael Berkeley is given a backstage tour of the National Gallery by its Director, the distinguished art historian Nicholas Penny. For this pro...

Charlotte Mendelson from 2014-04-13T10:30

Charlotte Mendelson's novels are in danger of making you laugh out loud: the absurdities of family life, the excruciating embarrassment of being young, or clumsy, or not quite English enough. There...

Theo Fennell from 2014-03-30T10:30

There's a huge revival in British craftsmanship going on at the moment, with a new generation keen to learn how to make beautiful things. For 40 years now, Theo Fennell has been one of the country'...

Craig Brown at Southbank Centre from 2014-03-23T11:30

Craig Brown has been described by The Sunday Times as "our greatest living satirist". He invented the conservative Spectator columnist Wallace Arnold, and Bel Littlejohn, the long-standing Guardian...

John Finnemore from 2014-03-09T11:30

John Finnemore is one of our most successful comedy writers and performers. A star turn in Miranda as the doting husband Chris, he writes and stars in the award-winning Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressur...

Kwasi Kwarteng from 2014-02-23T11:30

If you should happen to be walking through the House of Commons, and hear loud Wagner blasting out along those corridors of power ? you know you're heading for the office of Kwasi Kwarteng. He's be...

Joan Armatrading from 2014-02-16T11:30

When Joan Armatrading's mother bought a piano 'as a piece of furniture' little did she know what she was starting. The fourteen-year-old Joan taught herself to play it, then to play the guitar too ...

Michael Horovitz from 2014-02-09T12:00

Michael Horovitz is one of the last surviving Beatniks, 'the big daddy of the British Beat Movement'. In the 1950s, he founded a ground-breaking magazine which was the first to publish new work by ...

Michael Sheen from 2014-01-26T11:30

Michael Sheen is famous for playing real people on screen - from Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams to Brian Clough and David Frost. And it was playing another real person - but this time on stage - t...

Lewis Wolpert from 2014-01-19T11:30

Lewis Wolpert is a distinguished scientist -and a familiar lanky figure on his bicycle, cycling through the Bloomsbury traffic to University College London where he is Emeritus Professor of Biology...

Music in the Great War: Pat Barker from 2014-01-05T11:30

Writer Pat Barker is fascinated by the First World War; for twenty years now, her award-winning novels have returned again and again to the trauma and grief and erotic intensity of wartime. Her nov...

Hugh Masekela from 2013-12-29T11:30

Hugh Masekela is a jazz legend. Brought up in South Africa during Apartheid, he left the country at 21, and spent the next 30 years in exile, releasing album after album - 43 to date - and performi...

Justin Welby from 2013-12-22T11:30

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, talks to Michael Berkeley about his favourite music and the meaning of Christmas. His choices include Christmas music from Bach and Britten, and music Ju...

Tom Hooper from 2013-12-08T11:30

Somehow Tom Hooper has cracked the secret of making films which audiences really love. Whether you count Oscars and Baftas or box office takings he is, at 41, right up there as one of Britain's top...

Laura Mvula from 2013-12-01T11:30

Laura Mvula is more than just a pop star; before she had a best-selling album and industry awards she studied composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. In an in-depth interview in Private Passio...

Private Passions: Maggi Hambling from 2013-11-24T11:30

As part of Radio 3's Britten Centenary weekend, Michael Berkeley travels to Aldeburgh beach to meet the artist Maggi Hambling at her controversial memorial to Britten in the form of two giant inter...

Martin Gayford from 2013-11-10T11:30

Martin Gayford has a passion for painting and music, and has spent his career writing about artists - Constable, Van Gogh, David Hockney, Lucian Freud - and thinking about the connection between ar...

Roddy Doyle from 2013-11-03T11:30

It was a band called The Commitments that first brought Roddy Doyle fame 25 years ago - not a real group of musicians, but a comic novel about a group of Dublin teenagers who get together and form ...

Free Thinking: Chris Mullin from 2013-10-27T13:00

Private Passions makes its first visit to Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of ideas. Michael Berkeley talks to Chris Mullin, former MP, thriller writer and one of the sharpest political diarists of...

Rory Kinnear from 2013-10-13T10:30

Michael Berkeley's guest is the actor Rory Kinnear.

Rory Kinnear is in danger of becoming a national treasure. Audiences across the world know him thanks to two Bond movies, where he plays...

Greg Doran from 2013-10-06T12:01

Greg Doran is one of those lucky people who seem to have found his perfect place in life. From the age of 13, when his mother first took him to the theatre in Stratford, Shakespeare's been his pass...

Sound of Cinema: Beeban Kidron from 2013-09-29T12:00

Beeban Kidron is a rare and very unpredictable film-maker. A woman in a man's world, she's made highly successful dramas such as the BAFTA-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and the blockbusti...

Sound of Cinema: Philip French from 2013-09-15T12:01

It's quite possible that Philip French has seen more films than anyone else on the planet. Obsessed with cinema since the age of four, he has been reviewing films for the Observer for the past fift...

Angie Hobbs from 2013-09-08T12:01

Angie Hobbs is no ordinary philosopher. Her job takes her to places as varied as cathedrals, airforce bases and merchant banks, as well as frequently to our radio and TV screens. As our first ever ...

Gillian Lynne from 2013-09-01T12:01

Gillian Lynne is best known as the choreographer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera, among other West End hits. She received a lifetime Olivier Award earlier this year. But her career began more than...

Sally Davies from 2013-08-18T14:01

The Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, is on our TV screens almost every week as the authority we appeal to in every health scare: horsemeat in burgers, antibiotic resistance, three-parent babies...

Adam Nicolson from 2013-08-11T14:01

Adam Nicolson has the privilege, and the burden, of an extraordinary inheritance: Sissinghurst, that quintessentially English house and garden created by his grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita S...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell from 2013-08-04T14:01

The astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell changed the way we see the universe. At the age of only 24, as a Phd student, she discovered a totally new kind of star, a pulsar. Her older male colleagues ...

Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks from 2013-07-21T14:01

Lord Sacks ends his twenty-year tenure as Britain's Chief Rabbi this coming autumn. At his retirement dinner (24 June) Prince Charles described him as "a light unto this nation" and praised him for...

Robert Macfarlane from 2013-07-14T14:01

Robert Macfarlane is a writer and scholar who has spent years exploring the wild spaces of the world. In this location edition of Private Passions, he takes Michael Berkeley to an uninhabited islan...

Ruth Rogers from 2013-07-07T14:01

Ruth Rogers has become one of our most celebrated cooks and best-selling food writers since she and her friend the late Rose Gray opened a modest cafe in West London more than twenty five years ago...

Rufus Wainwright from 2013-06-30T14:01

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright can justifiably be described as a member of folk royalty. The son of Loudon Wainwright 3rd and the late Kate McGarrigle, he is also the nephew o...

Paul Muldoon from 2013-06-23T14:01

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country talk about their musical passions with Michael Berkeley.

Paul Muldoon, born and raised in Northern Ireland, is one...

Sean O'Brien from 2013-06-09T14:01

As part of the British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the UK reveal their favourite music.

Sean O'Brien is a perfect choice for Private Passions because his poems capture the m...

Gwyneth Lewis from 2013-06-02T14:00

As part of British music season on Radio 3, poets from across the country reveal the music which inspires them.
Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis has the unusual distinction of having written the larges...