Start the Week

What can the cosmos tell us about our past and future? Tom Sutcliffe and guests look skyward and deep into the quantum world to ask how much we can really know about the universe - and about ourselves. Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, presenter of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, shares her passion for inspiring the next generation to think big, as she explores the wonders of our solar system and the questions that still puzzle astronomers. Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies introduces his new book Quantum 2.0, charting the strange and revolutionary principles of quantum mechanics and how they are reshaping technology, science, and our understanding of reality itself. From the Natural History Museum, Caroline Smith brings insights from meteorites — fragments of ancient worlds — and explains how these cosmic messengers help scientists search for life beyond Earth and piece together the story of our solar system’s origins. Together, in Radio 4's weekly ideas discussion programme Start the Week, they consider the limits of knowledge: whether in decoding quantum mysteries, interpreting rocks from space, or imagining the motivations of those who first looked to the stars.Producer: Ruth Watts Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

What can genetics and palmistry tell us about how we understand identity, character and health? Adam Rutherford is joined by Professor of Zoology Matthew Cobb; the historian Professor Alison Bashford and the geneticist Charlotte Houldcroft.Matthew Cobb discusses his biography Crick: A Mind in Motion. From the discovery of DNA’s structure to Francis Crick’s later work on consciousness, Cobb reveals a restless thinker whose collaborations — with scientists, artists and poets — shaped some of the most profound ideas of the 20th century.Alison Bashford turns to palm reading in her new book Decoding the Hand, a history of palmistry and its surprising entanglement with science, medicine and magic.The geneticist Charlotte Houldcroft's research uses ancient DNA to work out how DNA viruses - such as smallpox and herpes - change over time and the consequences of this evolution for our immune systems.Producer: Natalia Fernandez

How can we reclaim the internet? Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss the digital age - its supporters and discontents. Tech critic Cory Doctorow introduces his new book Enshittification, a blistering diagnosis of how online platforms have decayed — from innovation to exploitation — and what we can do to make it better for ordinary users. Novelist and broadcaster Naomi Alderman draws on history in Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, arguing that we’ve lived through information crises before, and that lessons from the invention of writing and the printing press can help us navigate today’s digital turbulence. Journalist Oliver Moody, the author of Baltic: The Future of Europe, discusses Estonia’s radical embrace of digital governance, and what it reveals about the possibilities — and limits — of a truly connected state.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Threats to the natural world are the focus of today’s conversation. Adam Rutherford talks to wildlife biologist Jonathan Slaght, novelist Juhea Kim and criminal psychologist Julia Shaw.Jonathan Slaght discusses Tigers Between Empires, his account of the international effort to save the Siberian tiger from extinction in the wake of the Cold War. Juhea Kim’s short story collection A Love Story from the End of the World imagines lives lived in precarious balance with nature, from biodomes in Seoul to landfill islands in the Pacific. Dr Julia Shaw’s Green Crime investigates the psychology behind environmental destruction, profiling the perpetrators of ecological harm and the people fighting to stop them.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

In her latest novel, One Aladdin Two Lamps, the writer Jeanette Winterson takes inspiration from the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights. But she calls on the reader to look again at stories we think we know, unpick how fiction works, and have the courage to challenge and change the narrative.The saxophonist and presenter Soweto Kinch will perform his new album, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, with the London Symphony Orchestra (at the Barbican, London, on Friday 14th November), combining British jazz, hip-hop and orchestral music. This is the finale of his acclaimed trilogy of politically charged, genre-defying works that tell different stories of the past, present and future. The former MP Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade in Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and Borders, and wrote a column for a local newspaper. In Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders he’s collected together these fragmentary moments from rural life and local politics to capture a wide-ranging portrait of life and stories from the Cumbrian countryside. Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

The internationally renowned choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor swaps stage for gallery in a landmark exhibition exploring his multifaceted career at Somerset House (from 30 Oct 2025–22 Feb 2026). ‘Infinite Bodies’ investigates how Wayne McGregor has combined body, movement and cutting-edge digital technologies to redefine perceptions of physical intelligence. Throughout the gallery space he draws together designers, musicians, engineers and dancers to bring the artworks to life.The Booker prize winning novelist Anne Enright is in the studio to talk about her latest work, ‘Attention, Writing on Life, Art and the World’. Unlike her fiction, in these essays, Enright speaks directly to the reader, elucidating her thoughts on everything from family history to Irish politics and the control of women, to new perspectives on literary legends. There’s a screen idol at the heart of Tanika Gupta’s new play, Hedda (at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, until 22nd November). Inspired by the life of Anglo-Indian film star Merle Oberon, Gupta sets her play just after India’s independence and transforms Ibsen’s classic into a story about power, identity and representation.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, tells the story of the discovery of a treasure-trove at the heart of University College London. In a long-forgotten room James found thousands of maps and atlases. This abandoned archive reveals how maps have traced the contours of the world, inspiring some of the greatest scientific discoveries, as well as leading to terrible atrocities and power grabs. But maps have not always been used to navigate or reveal the world, according to a new exhibition at the British Library on Secret Maps (from 24 October 2025 to 18 January 2026). Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Four Points of the Compass, explains how mysterious maps throughout history have been used to hide, shape and control knowledge. The biographer Jenny Uglow celebrates a different kind of mapping in her new book, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer. In 1781 the country curate Gilbert White charted the world around him – from close observation of the weather, to the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming harvest – revealing a natural map of his Hampshire village.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Of the 7,000 languages estimated to exist, half will have disappeared by the end of this century. That’s the stark warning from the Director of the Endangered Languages Archive, Mandana Seyfeddinipur. The evolution of languages, and their rise and fall, is part of human history, but the speed at which this is happening today is unprecedented. Mandana will be appearing at the inaugural Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages at the Barbican in October. A sense of loss also runs through Sverker Sörlin’s love letter to snow. The professor of Environmental History in Stockholm writes about the infinite variety of water formulations, frozen in air, in ‘Snö: A History’ (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma), and his fears about the vanishing white landscapes of his youth.In the Arctic the transformation from frozen desert into an international waterway is gathering pace. Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and with co-author Mia Bennett sets out the fight and the future of the Arctic in ‘Unfrozen’. While territorial contest and resource exploitation is causing tensions within the region, there is also potential for new ways of working, from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

The economist Yanis Varoufakis found himself in the eye of the storm as Greece’s Minister of Finance in 2015, at the height of the country’s debt crisis. Now he reflects on his political awakenings and the women who influenced him in Raise Your Soul. It’s a family story that starts in Egypt in the 1920s and traces Greece’s tumultuous century through Nazi occupation, civil war, dictatorship, socialism and economic crisis. The historian Professor Mary Vincent focuses on the Spanish Civil War and has written about fascism, political violence and its impact on the people. She sees both similarities and stark differences between the Greek and Spanish Civil Wars and ponders the question of how global politics influence what happens in nation states.As a new translation of Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War (by Robin Waterfield) is published, the classicist Professor Paul Cartledge explains why this ancient text has remained essential reading for military leaders and politicians for centuries. Thucydides’s account of the war between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BCE depicts the devastation of civil war and reflects on the nature of political power.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

The experimental cognitive psychologist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker delves into the intricacies of human interactions in his latest book, ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage’. From avoiding the elephant in the room to the outing of the emperor’s new clothes, Pinker reveals the paradoxes of human behaviour. Common knowledge can bind people and communities together in a shared purpose, but Aleks Krotoski, the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Artificial Human and The Digital Human, journeys to the fringes of human endeavour in The Immortalists. There, Silicon Valley tech billionaires are using their wealth to focus on their own futures, attempting to disrupt and defy their own mortality.How people behave to strangers and how much they’re willing to spend to help them, is at the heart of David Edmonds’s biography of the philosopher Peter Singer. Death in a Shallow Pond considers Singer’s most famous thought experiment and his contention that we’re morally obliged to come to the aid of those less fortunate if we can. It’s a practical philosophy that has divided opinion, but also inspired a new movement of effective altruism.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez