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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

55:32

Annabel Croft

Private Passions ·

2025/11/02

Annabel Croft first picked up a tennis racquet at the age of nine. Within six years, she’d become the youngest British player to compete in the Wimbledon main draw for almost a century. At the age of 17, she won the junior championships at both Wimbledon and the Australian Open, and at 18 she was the British number one. Then – aged 21 – she retired from tennis and moved into broadcasting. She was soon back at the world’s major tennis tournaments, this time as a commentator and reporter. In 2023 her

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51:42

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer

Private Passions ·

2025/10/26

The Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer is the seventh Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.Prior to his political career, he was a barrister and served as Director of Public Prosecutions. He was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2015 and became Labour leader in 2020.A former Guildhall School of Music scholar, Sir Keir Starmer is a flautist but also played piano, recorder, and violin in his youth.He shares his love of music including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich and

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53:19

Hollie McNish

Private Passions ·

2025/10/19

Hollie McNish has been writing poems about – as she puts it – ‘anything and everything’ since she was seven years old. Her work now reaches audiences of millions, through her books, performances and short videos, making her one of the UK’s most widely shared poets. In 2017 she won the Ted Hughes Award for her book Nobody Told Me, a collection of poetry and diary entries that she kept from the moment she discovered she was pregnant until her daughter was three. She has published six other

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52:34

Shobana Jeyasingh

Private Passions ·

2025/10/05

The pioneering choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has produced more than 60 original works, many of them created for outdoor or unusual settings.She was born in India and came to England in her late teens to study English literature at Sussex University. She had learned classical Indian dance as a child and in her early twenties, she drew on that passion, touring first as a dancer and then founding her own dance company in 1989 to develop her own work.Since then, she has collaborated with scientists,

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52:42

Richard Armitage

Private Passions ·

2025/09/28

The actor Richard Armitage refuses to be pigeon-holed. He first made a national impact as the mill-owner John Thornton in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Audiences around the world know him as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson. He’s played a serial killer in Hannibal, a spy in Spooks, and has starred in four Harlan Coben thrillers on Netflix. He’s also written thrillers: the most recent is The Cut, which examines childhood trauma and the

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49:14

Deborah Prentice

Private Passions ·

2025/09/21

Deborah Prentice became the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 2023.She’s the first American to take on the role, and she’s leading the university at a challenging time for higher education in the UK, with questions about funding, freedom of expression, student protest, striking academics and even vice-chancellors’ pay never far from the headlines.Before Cambridge, she was Provost at Princeton University, and a professor of psychology, where she focused on the social norms that govern

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52:21

Mark Kermode

Private Passions ·

2025/09/14

Mark Kermode began reviewing films 40 years ago, and has established himself as one of our most foremost critics, both in print and on air. He co-presents Screenshot on Radio 4 and the podcast Kermode and Mayo’s Take, with his long-term collaborator Simon Mayo.He’s said he goes to every screening hoping it will be the next Citizen Kane – but he’s also renowned for his energetic rants against the films he finds most disappointing. Music is another lifelong love – and for nearly 30 years he’s played

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51:51

Kathleen Marshall

Private Passions ·

2025/07/27

The American director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall has been nominated for nine Tony awards, winning three times for Broadway productions of Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game and Anything Goes. She was the first woman to complete a trio of achievements - directing a play, directing a musical and choreographing a musical on Broadway.She also won an Olivier Award for her 2021 production of Anything Goes in London. It was the first big musical to open after numerous Covid lockdowns, and received an

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50:51

Dame Rachel de Souza

Private Passions ·

2025/07/13

Dame Rachel de Souza is the Children’s Commissioner for England. She’s the fourth person to take on this role, which was established in 2004 to promote and protect the rights of all children. Before becoming the Commissioner in 2021, she worked as a teacher and headteacher, and was credited with improving failing schools in less than privileged areas. In her current post, she’s said that her priority is to listen to children, to hear about their lives and champion their voices – and she’s focused

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50:22

Daniel Katz

Private Passions ·

2025/07/06

Daniel Katz is a renowned art dealer, collector and gallery owner who has very much beaten his own path through the tangled forests of the art world. Although he left school at the age of 14, his energetic curiosity brought him early success, making a profit of £15 on the first bronze he bought, and discovering something quite unexpected inside a grandfather clock. Danny is an expert on European sculpture, but has also branched out into new fields, including antiquities, Old Masters, Impressionist

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50:32

Jay Griffiths

Private Passions ·

2025/06/29

Jay Griffiths first wanted to be a writer – an entity she believed to be a “god-like” creature - when she was just four years old and already captivated by words. And she’s fulfilled that early ambition. Her books include Wild, the product of seven years’ work, travelling to wildernesses including the Amazon rainforest, the Canadian Arctic and the Australian outback. She has also written very honestly about her experience of bipolar disorder in her book Tristimania: a Diary of Manic Depression

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49:52

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Private Passions ·

2025/06/22

Gabriel Zuchtriegel is the director of Pompeii, one of the world’s most important ancient historical sites. It sits at the base of Mount Vesuvius, the still active volcano which erupted in 79AD and buried the city under volcanic ash and pumice, preserving a unique snapshot of life there nearly 2000 years ago.Gabriel grew up in Germany, where ruins and ancient myths first sparked his interest in our ancient past, and led him to study archaeology. Prior to Pompeii he oversaw Paestum, a site about 60

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51:15

Suzanne Vega

Private Passions ·

2025/06/15

The American singer songwriter Suzanne Vega released her first studio album almost exactly 40 years ago – and it soon found an audience, particularly here in the UK where it sold more than 300, 000 copies. Listeners responded to her understated, acoustic sound and thoughtful lyrics, in songs such as Marlene on the Wall and Luka. Another of her songs, Tom’s Diner, took on a life of its own. It’s been sampled by dozens of artists and one remix became a global hit.Suzanne recently released her tenth

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52:23

Hilary Cottam

Private Passions ·

2025/06/08

Hilary Cottam is a writer, innovator and social entrepreneur who wants to find solutions for some of the most intractable problems of our time - from the design of prisons to how we provide care for the elderly and might end long-term unemployment.In her book Radical Help, she argued that we need to re-invent the Welfare State to match the challenges of the 21st century. In her most recent book, The Work We Need, she focuses on how we could re-imagine work in a way that benefits everyone, in a

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53:11

Adam Buxton

Private Passions ·

2025/05/25

The comedian, writer and podcaster Adam Buxton first burst onto our TV screens 30 years ago. He and his friend Joe Cornish created The Adam and Joe Show, which featured pranks, songs and re-enactments of famous films like Titanic and Trainspotting using their childhood stuffed toys. Along with work on radio and film, an eye for the weird and wonderful quirks of music videos, and a multi-award winning interview podcast, he has also written two memoirs. The first, Ramble Book, included a very

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52:40

Philip Hoare

Private Passions ·

2025/05/18

Philip Hoare is an award-winning writer whose books often describe the lure of the sea, the strange and beautiful creatures that live in it and the inspiration artists have found in its murky depths. His book Leviathan won the Samuel Johnson Prize: it drew on his lifelong obsession with whales, which began with the gigantic skeletons in the Natural History Museum and continued with his own encounters with them at sea. His most recent book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, traces Blake’s

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48:54

Emma Rice

Private Passions ·

2025/05/11

The theatre director Emma Rice is renowned for her bold stagings of much-loved films and books including Brief Encounter, Wuthering Heights and the Red Shoes. For twenty years she worked as an actor, director, and eventually artistic director of Kneehigh, an international touring company based in Cornwall, known for its energetic productions with an inventive use of music and puppetry. In 2016, Emma became artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, the reconstructed Elizabethan theatre on the south

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50:07

Jonathan Sumption

Private Passions ·

2025/05/04

Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, isn’t afraid of hard work or an intellectual challenge. He’s combined a high-profile legal career with a passion for medieval history, and his books include a five volume, 4000 page account of the Hundred Years War, widely described as ‘monumental.’ For much of his career he was a very successful barrister working on commercial law, constitutional law and human rights cases, with clients ranging from the British government to Roman Abramovich. Then in 2012 he made

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46:51

Colum McCann

Private Passions ·

2025/04/27

The writer Colum McCann isn’t afraid to take on big subjects – and his ambition has delivered a shelf full of awards, from both sides of the Atlantic. He grew up in Dublin but moved to the United States in the mid-1980s and now lives in New York. That city is the setting for his international bestseller Let the Great World Spin, in which Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 plays a key role. He’s also written a novel about both sides of the conflict between Israel and the

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48:44

Romola Garai

Private Passions ·

2025/04/20

Romola Garai won her first professional acting roles as a teenager, and since then, her career has taken her in a wide range of dramatic directions. Most recently, she won a 2025 Olivier Award for her role in The Years, a sometimes shocking play based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux – and she was competing against herself, with a nomination in the same category for her part in Giant, a play about Roald Dahl.Her previous stage work includes playing Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen’s King

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