Author: BBC Radio 4

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the poet Elaine Feinstein about her work from over half a century of writing, from her early poems of feminist rebellion to reflections on middle age and marriage, to wry amusement on the fallibility of memory. The curator Rebecca Daniels looks back at the life and work of one of Australia's most celebrated modern painters, Sidney Nolan, and challenges the audience to look beyond his early depictions of the outback and the outlaw Ned Kelly, to see a world artist. The theatre director Trevor Nunn finds the comedy in pitting idealistic Hamlet-esque youth against a wealthy businessman in his production of Rattigan's Love in Idleness. The composer Ryan Wigglesworth has produced a new operatic interpretation of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's study of love, loss and reconciliation.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: A section of 'Myself' by Sidney Nolan, 1988.

On Start the Week, Tom Sutcliffe considers the relationship between play and creativity. Steven Johnson examines how the human appetite for amusement has driven innovation throughout history. Writer and theatre maker Stella Duffy has revived Joan Littlewood's 1960s concept of The Fun Palace- a 'laboratory of fun' for all. The economist Tim Harford advocates embracing disorder in every area of our lives, from messy desks to messy dating. Journalist and former cricketer Ed Smith believes that creativity in sport is a combination of skill and luck.

Producer: Kirsty McQuire.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores how childhood experiences affect later life.

The screenwriter Paul Abbott famously put his early life into the television series Shameless. Although his later work, including his latest police drama No Offence, moves far beyond his own experiences, he excels at finding the comedy in the tragic.

In France the writer Édouard Louis has caused a storm with his brutal autobiographical novel about class, violence and sexuality. The book is his attempt to bury his childhood.

The psychiatrist Gwen Adshead spent years working at Broadmoor Hospital studying the nature of human violence and looks at the moral choices people make.

The poet Paul Farley is interested not in the early life of poets but in their dying. From Shelley's drowning to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide their deaths have become the stuff of myth casting a backward shadow on their work, creating a skewed image of the poet's life as doomed and self-destructive.

Amol Rajan discusses Turkey past and present with the authors Elif Shafak and Kaya Genç, Chatham House's Fadi Hakura and the historian Bettany Hughes.

Shafak's new novel, The Three Daughters of Eve, moves between Turkey and Britain, and is a tale of friendship, faith and betrayal. It portrays Turkey as a country riven by deep divisions in society, politics and religion.

Kaya Genç reports from across Turkey, exploring the lives of the country's angry young people on both sides of the political divide, while Fadi Hakura from Chatham House considers Turkey's changing relations with the outside world amid increasing nationalist feeling and isolationism.

Bettany Hughes's biography of Istanbul is the story of three cities - Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul - and reveals a city that's been at the heart of political life between the East and the West for the last eight thousand years.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Amol Rajan discusses Turkey past and present with the authors Elif Shafak and Kaya Genç, Chatham House's Fadi Hakura and the historian Bettany Hughes.

Shafak's new novel, The Three Daughters of Eve, moves between Turkey and Britain, and is a tale of friendship, faith and betrayal. It portrays Turkey as a country riven by deep divisions in society, politics and religion.

Kaya Genç reports from across Turkey, exploring the lives of the country's angry young people on both sides of the political divide, while Fadi Hakura from Chatham House considers Turkey's changing relations with the outside world amid increasing nationalist feeling and isolationism.

Bettany Hughes's biography of Istanbul is the story of three cities - Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul - and reveals a city that's been at the heart of political life between the East and the West for the last eight thousand years.

Producer: Katy Hickman.