Month: March 2011

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Start the Week - 07/03/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the human rights lawyer, Peter Harris, who represented the ANC when apartheid in South Africa was at its height. He discusses how the law was always seen to be done, even when justice was denied. Richard Susskind wants to revolutionise the justice system: as the new President of the Society for Computers and Law he sees technology as the answer to today's problems. Australia has been the recent victim of natural disasters - floods, storms and wild fires - and the country's leading conservationist, Tim Flannery, puts forward his views on the future of the planet. And as the longest running study of elephants in the wild turns 40, Phyllis Lee, explains what they've learnt about, what John Donne called, "Nature's great masterpiece". Producer: Katy Hickman.

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World Book Club - Javier Cercas – Soldiers Of Salamis

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Spanish writer and historian Javier Cercas about his haunting novel Soldiers of Salamis.

Internationally feted and winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004, Soldiers of Salamis delves into the painful history of Spain's Civil War through the gripping, death-defying story of fascist soldier Sanchez Mazas.

In his meditation on the nature of heroism and humanity in war, of remembrance and forgetting after war, the narrator moves from cynical indifference through fascination to wholehearted empathy as the true hero of the story eventually emerges centre stage.