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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

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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38:23

Francesca Simon

Private Passions ·

2022/06/12

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 books, been translated into 31 languages and sold 25 million copies. They seem to embody archetypes: the chaotic, naughty brother who’s always in trouble, and the neat well-behaved sibling who’s always anxious to please the parents. In Private Passions, Francesca Simon tells Michael Berkeley that her own

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38:20

Anne Glenconner

Private Passions ·

2022/06/07

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 long life as a friend of the royal family, her marriage to the outrageous Colin Tennant, and how she survived unimaginable family tragedy. At 11.15am on June 2nd 1953, Lady Anne Coke stood at the door of Westminster Abbey, dressed in a gorgeous embroidered white satin gown. She was 20, one of six maids of

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41:11

Jarvis Cocker

Private Passions ·

2022/05/29

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 music Jarvis Cocker abandoned his early ambition to be an astronaut and instead, at the age of 14, had the idea of forming a band called Pulp during an Economics lesson at school in Sheffield. Some 15 years later, Pulp was one of the most successful bands in the world, with a string of witty, emotionally raw, and

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34:53

Kat Arney

Private Passions ·

2022/05/22

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 cancer could not be mentioned but was “the Big C”. It is just as well, since about half of us will develop cancer during our lifetime. And as the treatments and drugs improve all the time, so does our knowledge of what causes it. Kat Arney’s latest, award-winning, book, Rebel Cell: "Cancer, Evolution and the Science of

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43:17

Waheed Arian

Private Passions ·

2022/05/15

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 Waheed Arian knows what it’s like to be forced to leave your home, suddenly, and under fire; he’s a refugee from an earlier war, the Soviet-Afghan War, which lasted for almost ten years and claimed the lives of as many as two million Afghan civilians. Five million people are estimated to have left the country as

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33:26

Osman Yousefzada

Private Passions ·

2022/05/01

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 Beyoncé wore one of his designs to the 2013 Grammy Awards. Lady Gaga, Thandiwe Newton and Taylor Swift are among his many other celebrity clients. He is also an acclaimed artist, curator and film-maker, and the creator of one of the world’s largest ever pieces of public art: the ‘wrapping’ of the Selfridges building in

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37:00

Clare Marx

Private Passions ·

2022/04/24

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 programme is repeated by kind permission of her husband, Andrew. Clare Marx was the first woman to become President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 2014, and the first woman to become the Chair of the General Medical Council five years later. Clare Marx had to overcome significant prejudice to reach

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41:28

Tim Birkhead

Private Passions ·

2022/04/17

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 and university lecturer, Tim Birkhead is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Sheffield, and the author of many books that communicate his life-long passion, including “What it’s like to be a bird” and most recently “Birds and Us”, a 12,000-year history of our relationship with birds, from cave art to

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40:33

Francesco da Mosto

Private Passions ·

2022/04/03

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 many of us the quintessential Venetian.His distant ancestors were some of the first settlers to colonise the swampy islands that were to become Venice, fleeing Attila the Hun in the 5th century, and since then the da Mosto family has been at the forefront of Venetian public life.One of the team of architects who

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34:28

Richard Holloway

Private Passions ·

2022/03/27

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 just 14, Richard Holloway left his home in a small town near Glasgow to train for the priesthood at an Anglican monastery in Nottinghamshire. Nearly four decades later, after working in some of Scotland’s most deprived inner-city parishes, he was appointed Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Church of Scotland

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37:15

Misan Harriman

Private Passions ·

2022/03/20

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 Tom Cruise, Cate Blanchett, and Meghan Markle – his was the romantic black-and-white photograph of Harry and Meghan announcing her pregnancy last year. Alongside these high-profile celebrity commissions, he’s also become a photographer known for documenting Extinction Rebellion, anti-Trump protests, and the

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