Month: October 2017

Kathleen Horan writes obituaries for the living. Her Audible original series, Mortal City, is an anthology of lesser-known New York characters: Douglas the sanitation worker, Serge the barman, Rocky the ambulance commandant. “I just kept feeling like there were people that I was missing,” says Horan. She prefers to talk to people who live and work on the city’s margins: “They just can’t help but show you higher up on the thigh of their story.”

In the Spiel, the latest page in the very long scrapbook on President Trump’s communication catastrophes.

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Are humans distinguished not just by a capacity to think, but by our need to believe - where the search is not so much for my place in the world, but for our place in the cosmos? Neil MacGregor, the former Director of the British Museum, discusses Living with the Gods, his Radio 4 series, in which he focuses on the expression of shared beliefs, across thousands of years, and around the globe, through objects from the Museum's collections and beyond.

The curator Jennifer Sliwka looks at a world in black and white, in a celebration of the monochrome in art across the centuries, from medieval sacred works, where the elimination of colour was thought to focus the mind, to contemporary paintings.

The historian Dan Jones tells the story of the ultimate holy warriors, the Knights Templar, a story of power, politics and fanaticism.

The writer Caspar Henderson takes a step back to consider the awe-inspiring - from divine visions to transcendent moments - and to ask whether we are in danger of losing our sense of wonder in the modern world.

Presenter Andrew Marr Producer Katy Hickman

Photograph: (c) The Trustees of the British Museum.