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PODCAST

Private Passions

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical passions and talk about the influence music has had on their lives.

music personal journals

All Episodes

32:07

Susie Boyt

Private Passions ·

2023/02/21

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 or about her intense love of Judy Garland, Susie Boyt is unafraid to address the big questions in all our lives. Her seven novels explore how we can best take care of people, how we can survive life’s inevitable traumas and how we might live alongside the loss of people we love. Susie chooses pieces by Mozart,

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35:14

Simon Thurley

Private Passions ·

2023/02/12

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 be Roman remains in his back garden in Cambridgeshire, and a lifelong passion for history - and historic buildings - was ignited. He went on to work as Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and as the Director of the Museum of London. Then, in 2002, at the astonishingly young age of 39, he was appointed Chief Executive

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37:43

Kaffe Fassett

Private Passions ·

2023/02/05

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. Brought up in a log cabin on the Californian coast, he’s lived for fifty years in Kilburn, north-west London, a house where every surface is painted or mosaicked or embroidered – and stuffed full of antique textiles and pots. In fact, it’s so full of stuff that his partner, Brandon, had to retreat to a white room

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38:14

Joanna Scanlan

Private Passions ·

2023/01/29

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. She’s extraordinarily moving in “After Love”, Aleem Khan’s 2021 film about a widow who discovers her husband’s secret life – a performance so powerful that it dominates the whole film, and won her BAFTA’s lead actress award in 2022. Before that, she played Charles Dickens's long-suffering wife, Catherine, in

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41:28

Hugh Brody

Private Passions ·

2023/01/23

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 Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their languages, discovering their ways of being in the world, and helping map their territories so they could claim land rights. He has also worked in isolated villages in the west of Ireland, in the southern Kalahari, on Skid Row in Edmonton, Canada, and in tribal

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35:11

Diana Melly

Private Passions ·

2023/01/15

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 the deaths of two of her children.Running through her life for 46 years was her enduring - but extremely complicated - marriage to the jazz musician and bon viveur George Melly, who died in 2007.She has written two novels, a searingly honest memoir, and has co-edited the letters of her friend Jean Rhys as well

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33:06

Todd Field

Private Passions ·

2023/01/08

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 direct two full-length award-winning films, “In the Bedroom” - about grief and revenge in a close-knit family - and “Little Children”, starring Kate Winslet. Both were nominated for multiple Oscars. This week his third feature film “Tar” opens in Britain. Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tar, the conductor of a major

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35:00

Jonathan Romain

Private Passions ·

2022/12/11

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 learned, and others which are very funny – revealing the ups and downs of his day-to-day work, in a way that will resonate with vicars, priests and religious leaders of any description. He’s become a kind of agony uncle, dispensing advice on love affairs, marriage, parenthood, and he’s written about all this in

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36:26

Roma Agrawal

Private Passions ·

2022/12/04

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 successful woman operating in what is still very much a man’s world. Her job is, essentially, to make sure that the buildings, bridges, roads and tunnels we use every day don’t collapse. She spent six years working out the incredibly complex structure of the spire and foundations of the Shard in London, the tallest

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39:21

Adam Rutherford

Private Passions ·

2022/11/27

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 Rutherford’s career in science has taken him from a PhD on the role of genetics in eye development to becoming a well-known broadcaster who campaigns against pseudoscience and racism.Presenter of Radio 4’s Start the Week and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, he’s also the author of six bestselling books; a

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39:50

Simon Warrack

Private Passions ·

2022/11/20

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 Temple of Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Coming from a professionally musical family - his father is the music writer John Warrack, his grandfather was the composer and conductor Guy Warrack – it’s no surprise that classical music is very important to him. But after taking a degree in Renaissance History at Warwick,

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36:00

Julia Blackburn

Private Passions ·

2022/11/13

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 novels, poetry, plays and books about historical figures including Napoleon, Billie Holiday, Goya, and the Norfolk artist John Craske, as well as books about grief, her love of animals, and the natural world. She’s also published memoirs, including an astonishing book about her childhood, The Three of Us.Julia shares

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38:18

Stuart MacBride

Private Passions ·

2022/11/06

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 actor, a web designer, and a computer programmer, all the while writing away after work – he wrote four novels before his first, Cold Granite, was published in 2005. Since then, he’s become one of our most successful and prolific crime writers, with twenty-four titles in all, sometimes labelled as “tartan

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35:51

William Kentridge

Private Passions ·

2022/10/23

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 opera. He was born in Johannesburg and brought up during the apartheid regime; his art is highly politically charged. His parents, both lawyers, were notable figures in the anti-apartheid movement – his father being Sir Sydney Kentridge, who represented Nelson Mandela. For forty years now William Kentridge has

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40:09

Arifa Akbar

Private Passions ·

2022/10/17

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 quiet night in; as chief theatre critic of the Guardian she is out reviewing a production almost every evening. She also sits on the boards of the Orwell Foundation and of English PEN, and judges prizes including the UK Theatre Awards and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, she

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31:18

Ronnie Archer-Morgan

Private Passions ·

2022/10/09

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 father died in a car crash before he was born and his Sierra Leonean mother had severe mental health problems that made her violent and abusive. His childhood was spent in and out of the care system. He tells Michael Berkeley how a school trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London ignited his life-long

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34:33

Jules Montague

Private Passions ·

2022/10/03

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 Found: Why losing our memories doesn’t mean losing ourselves". After fifteen years as a doctor, she has now left clinical practice to become an investigative journalist, focusing on some of the deeper questions raised by her medical work. Her second book is called The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis gets us

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39:01

Gwen Adshead

Private Passions ·

2022/09/25

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 sometimes tells them she is a florist, because she is unable to face another conversation about why she has devoted her life to working with ‘monsters’. Gwen has spent thirty years as a psychiatrist and as a pioneering forensic psychotherapist working at Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire with some of society’s most violent,

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34:57

James Runcie

Private Passions ·

2022/09/18

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 of the first performance. That’s certainly true of a masterpiece such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But writer James Runcie wants us to think about what went on in Bach’s mind while he was creating that magnificent Passion, and he’s written both a play and a novel about it. The novel, his twelfth, is called

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31:10

Katherine Rundell

Private Passions ·

2022/07/09

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-winning Rooftoppers, the story of a girl who travels across the rooftops of Paris looking for her mother. Katherine herself is a roof climber and a tightrope walker. Born in 1987, she grew up in Zimbabwe and Brussels; after taking her undergraduate degree at Oxford, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls

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