Author: BBC Radio 4

How do people learn new skills and become real experts? These were the questions the author Adam Gopnik wanted to answer in his new book, The Real Work – a term magicians use for their accumulated craft. He apprenticed himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor to see if could get to the bottom of the mystery of mastery, and better himself.

Rebecca Struthers is a true master of her profession – horology. In Hands of Time, A Watchmaker's History of Time she reveals the inner cogs and workings of clocks, and explores the ways in which they have helped shape human history. But she also regrets the endangered art of traditional watchmaking and the loss of heritage skills.

The neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow explains what’s happening in our brains when we learn new things, especially later in life. And she argues that two heads may be better than one. In her latest book, Joined Up Thinking, she extols the virtues of working and learning together.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image Credit: Rebecca Struthers for Hands of Time

The world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Kirsty Wark talks to an historian, scientist and novelist about how to convey the story and impact of climate change.

Floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and solar activity have all shaped the natural history of our world from its formation. In The Earth Transformed the historian Peter Frankopan looks back at how the climate has constantly changed our world, but also at the impact of extreme climatic events on ancient human civilisations – often violent and epic in scale, from regime change to demographic decline. However, since the Industrial Revolution the balance has shifted and anthropogenic impacts on the climate can be seen more clearly. Peter Frankopan tells Kirsty Wark that learning lessons from the past has never been more important in tackling a precarious future.

Professor Dame Jane Francis is Director of the British Antarctic Survey. As a geologist by training, she studies fossils to understand the change from greenhouse to icehouse climates in the polar regions over the past 100 million years. Her research enables others to map the huge changes now happening in the Antarctic and the range of possible scenarios for the future.

“As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability, and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality, and did what we had always done. . . .” One of the narrators of Jessie Greengrass’s novel The High House realises too late the disastrous impact of climate change. In what has become known as the literary genre clifi – climate fiction – Greengrass reveals the physical and emotional challenges the survivors face.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image: An iceberg in Antarctica

The writer Sarah Bakewell explores the long tradition of humanist thought in her latest book, Humanly Possible. She celebrates the writers, thinkers, artists and scientists over the last 700 years who have placed humanity at the centre, while defying the forces of religion, fanatics, mystics and tyrants.

But placing humans at the centre isn’t without problems – critics point to its anthropocentric nature and excessive rationalism and individualism, as well its Euro-centric history. The philosopher Julian Baggini guides the listener in unpicking the tenets of humanism. His latest books is How to Think Like a Philosopher: Essential Principles for Clearer Thinking.

Humanism may have relegated the divine to the side lines, but for the characters in Leila Aboulela’s novels faith and devotion are integral to their sense of themselves. In her latest book, River Spirit, set in Sudan in the 1880s, her young protagonists struggle to survive and find love amidst the bloody struggle for Sudan itself.

Producer: Katy Hickman

George Eliot was a leading novelist who scandalised Victorian society by eloping to Germany with a married man and living in unlawful conjugal bliss. She dedicated her books to ‘her husband’ and wrote of 'this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength'. The philosopher and writer Clare Carlisle has written a new biography of George Eliot which places The Marriage Question at the centre of her art and life.

The playwright David Eldridge is writing a trilogy of plays about relationships. Beginning, which premiered in 2017, and Middle, from last year, take place overnight in one uninterrupted scene as the couples share their thoughts and feelings on love and loneliness. The final play will be called End.

The prize winning poet Claudia Rankine talks about her collection Plot, published in full for the first time in the UK. In a series of conversations, reflections and dreams Rankine reveals the hopes and fears of Liv and Erland – a couple navigating the birth of their new baby.

Producer: Katy Hickman

It’s twenty years since the US and UK invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kirsty Wark discusses the lead up to the war, the impact on the lives of Iraqis and the legacy.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad left his job in Baghdad and became a journalist during the Iraq War in 2003. He witnessed first-hand the liberation of his country from a megalomaniac leader and then its descent into factionalism and violence. In A Stranger In Your Own City he movingly recounts the very real human cost of the invasion, as well as the civil wars and rise of ISIS that followed.

Emma Sky volunteered to help rebuild Iraq post-invasion and went on to serve as the representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and then as a political advisor to the US army in the following decade. Now an academic at Yale University, she looks back at why the Iraq invasion failed and its implications across the region. She's the author of The Unravelling and In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt.

The BBC’s Security correspondent Gordon Corera was a young reporter during the frenetic build up to the war, talking to spies, defectors and politicians. In a 10-part series – Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On (from 13th March at 1.45 and on BBC Sounds) – he talks to those at the centre of that decision to go to war, and looks at the far-reaching consequences, from trust in politics, security and liberal intervention.

Producer: Katy Hickman