Month: April 2012

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Start the Week - Peter Carey on Start the Week

Andrew Marr talks to the prize-winning novelist, Peter Carey about his latest work, The Chemistry of Tears. At its heart is a small clockwork puzzle and Carey muses on how the industrial revolution has changed what it means to be human. The science writer Philip Ball goes back another century to the world of Galileo and Newton, to study the changes in thinking and knowledge embodied by the scientifically curious. And the historian Rebecca Stott rediscovers the first evolutionists, and the collective daring of Darwin's scientific forebears who had the imagination to speculate on the natural world.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

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Start the Week - Peter Carey on Start the Week

Andrew Marr talks to the prize-winning novelist, Peter Carey about his latest work, The Chemistry of Tears. At its heart is a small clockwork puzzle and Carey muses on how the industrial revolution has changed what it means to be human. The science writer Philip Ball goes back another century to the world of Galileo and Newton, to study the changes in thinking and knowledge embodied by the scientifically curious. And the historian Rebecca Stott rediscovers the first evolutionists, and the collective daring of Darwin's scientific forebears who had the imagination to speculate on the natural world.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

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World Book Club - Toni Morrison – Beloved

World Book Club celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of that modern classic novel Beloved with another chance to hear the programme with American writer Toni Morrison.

In 2009 Toni Morrison came to the South Bank Arts Centre beside the River Thames in London to talk to a packed audience about her Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller Beloved.

Having lost none of its power to shock a quarter of a century on, Beloved stares unflinchingly into the abyss of racism and transforms history into a poetic chronicle of slavery and its terrible, unending aftermath.

(Image: Toni Morrison. Credit: Peter Devlin)

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More or Less: Behind the Stats - Stamp prices and the first maths book

The Royal Mail says UK stamp prices are still among the best value in Europe, despite an imminent steep price rise. Tim Harford finds out whether this is true, and compares the price of postal services around the world. Plus, he finds out how, after being invented by Indian mathematicians, modern numbers became established in the ancient Arab world and then journeyed on to Europe in what was essentially the first maths textbook ever written, "Liber Abaci". Its author was Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci. Tim speaks to Keith Devlin, author of The Man of Numbers, to find out more. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.