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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

31:36

Anna Pavord

Private Passions ·

2016/08/21

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, but she's written extensively about plants, and places, and spent years as gardening columnist of the Independent. Her latest book "Landskipping: painters, ploughmen and places", is an exploration of how, through the ages, we have responded to the land. The programme is recorded on location in the landscape

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32:33

Stephen Hugh-Jones

Private Passions ·

2016/08/14

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 still one of the most remote peoples on earth, and when Dr Hugh-Jones and his wife Christine first went to live there, in the late 1960s, this was a people, and a culture, completely untouched by modern life. This was partly because people were afraid of them; they had a reputation for being dangerous and

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32:58

Janine di Giovanni

Private Passions ·

2016/08/07

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 Newsweek, and writes for the New York Times, as well as for glossy magazines - winning numerous prizes, including two Amnesty International Media Awards. She's also written seven books - including most recently "Dispatches from Syria: The Morning They Came for Us", a moving account of the horror, and boredom, of

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25:54

Timberlake Wertenbaker

Private Passions ·

2016/07/24

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 Greece. Not surprising, then, that her major theme is exile, displacement, flight. She's best known for her play about convicts in 18th century Australia, "Our Country's Good", which was first staged in the late 1980s and which was revived recently at the National Theatre. It has become a set text in

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33:06

Alexandre Desplat

Private Passions ·

2016/07/17

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 been nominated for innumerable awards, including eight Oscars. 2015 was a particularly interesting year as Alexandre was Oscar-nominated for two films, with The Grand Budapest Hotel beating The Imitation Game on the night. Alexandre talks to Michael Berkeley about the pressures of writing up to ten film

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33:44

Julia Donaldson

Private Passions ·

2016/07/10

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 biggest selling author in Britain for the last six years. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has anything to do with young children, who adore her vibrant and funny rhyming picture books - which include A Squash and a Squeeze, The Snail and the Whale, and the tale of that much-loved monster, The

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32:06

Glenda Jackson

Private Passions ·

2016/06/26

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 career were ground-breaking stage performances for directors such as Peter Brook and Peter Hall, and a television career which included an astonishing portrayal of Elizabeth I - a performance few of us will forget. But in 1992 she gave it all up to become the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, eventually

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36:27

Andrew Solomon

Private Passions ·

2016/06/19

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 extraordinary challenges, because their children had turned out so very different from them: either through disabilities, or because they were musical prodigies - or because they had committed serious crimes. The resulting book, "Far From the Tree - Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" has won many

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37:15

John Sutherland

Private Passions ·

2016/06/13

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 railway tracks were an unlikely start in life for the future Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London.John Sutherland is hugely respected for his academic work on Victorian literature, but his infectious passion for books has led him to write for a popular

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28:36

Tanita Tikaram

Private Passions ·

2016/06/05

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'. Since then she's gone on to release eight more albums, with some rather interesting silences in between - when she almost gave up on music altogether. In 2016 she toured Europe with her ninth album, 'Closer to the People'. In Private Passions, Tanita Tikaram talks to Michael Berkeley about the effect of

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32:31

Jane Goodall

Private Passions ·

2016/05/22

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 else to transform our understanding of chimpanzees - and beyond that, her work has raised questions about how we treat these highly intelligent primates, and indeed about the rights of all animals. Now in her early eighties, she's on an extraordinary mission travelling round the world to protect

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38:16

Rose Tremain

Private Passions ·

2016/05/15

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 and contemporary fiction: she has created characters as diverse as Merivel, the physician turned fool at the court of Charles II; a 19th-century gold miner in New Zealand; and a transsexual growing up in rural Suffolk. Rose talks to Michael Berkeley about her latest novel, The Gustav Sonata, the story of a

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31:35

Roger Allam

Private Passions ·

2016/05/01

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, The Thick of It and Cabin Pressure, to the RSC and the West End, he refuses to be typecast.He talks to Michael Berkeley about his lifelong passion for music and why he became an actor rather than an opera singer. And he explains how he overcame his initial reservations about the Globe Theatre to play

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36:09

Jonathan Bate

Private Passions ·

2016/04/24

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. Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, he is the author of many influential books on Shakespeare and the joint editor of the RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. And he's turned playwright himself, with the one-man play Being Shakespeare, written for Simon

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31:03

Melly Still

Private Passions ·

2016/04/10

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 whole worlds of myth and magic into the theatre or opera house. She came to fame 10 years ago with Coram Boy at the National - the play about Handel, his Messiah and the Foundling Hospital. Since then she's directed at the Proms and Glyndebourne, and her new production of Cymbeline for the RSC opens later

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33:31

Sunil Khilnani

Private Passions ·

2016/03/29

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 an accompaniment to the series and the acclaimed The Idea of India. He talks to Michael Berkeley about his musical passions, which reflect a life lived all over the world, and chooses music by Mozart, Berg and Beethoven, as well as a ghazal from 13th century India; a piece of southern Indian classical music

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33:37

Melanie Reid

Private Passions ·

2016/03/27

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 riding in the Scottish countryside near her home in Stirlingshire. The horse refused a jump and she was thrown off - flipping her body. She broke her neck and back. Since then Melanie Reid has been paralysed from the armpits down.When you're well and young, or young at heart, and busy devouring life,

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31:54

Martha Lane Fox

Private Passions ·

2016/03/06

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 seven years later for £577m. Since then, Lane Fox was appointed, at 40, the youngest female member of the House of Lords (she's a cross-bencher) and the Chancellor of the Open University. She's also championed digital inclusivity and has recently founded Doteveryone. Voted one of the most powerful women in

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24:05

Katharine Whitehorn

Private Passions ·

2016/02/21

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 she loved all her life. She’s often quoted as saying: ‘Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it.’ Katharine explains that she had quite a few false starts along the way - running away from school, failing as an architecture student, dabbling in modelling - until she found her

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35:39

Robert Harris

Private Passions ·

2016/02/07

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 world, and became the first of three films inspired by his books. He went on to write thrillers about the Enigma Code, the financial crash, the Dreyfus Affair, and the destruction of Pompeii. And Ghost, a memorable book and film about a ghost-writer to a politician who closely resembles Tony Blair. Robert

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