Podcast appearances and mentions of adam mars jones

A Resurgence of Julian Jaynes' Theory of Consciousness By Peter Sellick Read by Michael R. Jacobs (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.theungoogleable.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@VoidDenizen⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Adam Mars-Jones begins his review of Alvaro Enrigue's “You Dreamed of Empires” (London Review of Books, Volume 46, Number 10) with the following: “Culture shock​ seems too mild a phrase to describe the arrival of Europeans in South and Central America. In his 1976 maverick classic, The Origin of consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn't have full mental autonomy but only ‘protosubjectivity'. They functioned largely by a sort of automatism, acting according to unchanging patterns and ritual clues, able to absorb only slight disruptions to their routines, so that this was less a clash of civilisations than of mental structures.” This sent me scrambling for my old copy of Jaynes' monumental book that I read in the late 80s. Read the complete text from this episode here: https://www.julianjaynes.org/2024/08/16/a-resurgence-of-julian-jaynes-theory-of-consciousness/ Learn more about Julian Jaynes's theory or become a member by visiting the Julian Jaynes Society at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.julianjaynes.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

An seinem 18. Geburtstag beobachtet Colin am Box Hill, einem Biker-Treffpunkt südlich von London, neugierig die starken Kerle im Motorrad-Outfit.

Robert McCrum discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Robert McCrum is a writer and editor whose most recent book, Shakespearean was published to great acclaim in 2021. Formerly the editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, and literary editor of the Observer, he is also the author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004), and a classic memoir, My Year Off (1998). From 1980 to 1996, McCrum was editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, where he published Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Danilo Kis, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, Adam Phillips, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jayne Anne Phillips, Orhan Pamuk, and Adam Mars-Jones. At the same time, he wrote seven novels, and co-authored the BBC TV series, The Story Of English, for which he was awarded an Emmy in 1986, followed by a Peabody Prize in 1987. In July 1995, McCrum suffered a serious stroke, a personal crisis he described in My Year Off, a book now regarded as an essential study in the understanding of the condition. He was literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2010. Globish (2010) was an international bestseller. In 2024, he will publish The Penalty Kick: The Story of A Game-changer with Notting Hill Editions. The Lost Art of Silence by Sarah Anderson https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/animal-emotions/202312/the-art-and-power-of-connecting-to-the-sounds-of-silence The River Granta https://www.wildlifebcn.org/news/river-granta-gets-wiggle The invention of the penalty kick in football https://epicchq.com/story/william-mccrum-the-irish-inventor-of-the-penalty-kick/ Alfred the Great https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n09/tom-shippey/what-did-he-think-he-was Kindness https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-enthralled-a-generation/ Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqrzmdevQSI This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Caret continues the adventures of the irrepressible John Cromer, begun in Pilcrow (2008) and continued in Cedilla (2011) – part of Adam Mars-Jones' ‘semi-infinite' novel series, praised by one reviewer as ‘a genuine, almost miraculous oddity'. Mars-Jones was in conversation with the journalist and critic Leo Robson.Buy Caret: lrb.me/caretpodMore events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – ​Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, ​Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Penman was joined in conversation by Adam Mars-Jones.Buy a copy of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors: lrb.me/fassbinderFind more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Adam Mars-Jones on the "fractal brocade" of his semi-infinite novel series; and Amber Massie-Blomfield revisits Susan Sontag's production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, thirty years on.'Caret', by Adam Mars-JonesProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as forager-hunters, our lives intimately entwined with the lives - and then deaths - of the animals that we ate.  And then we cut that link and now we eat meat in plastic packages with cute pictures on the front to remove our awareness of the death that has arisen. And yet at our deepest levels, we know that meat is murder.  How do we resolve this paradox?Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association. The Meat Paradox is his first book and it's one of the best, deepest, and most genuinely engaging that I've read of the many that seek to address the huge cultural divide that surrounds our consumption of meat.   This is a book that delves into neuroscience (denial, cognitive dissonance and the lies we tell ourselves), indigenous spiritual/shamanic practice, ancient ancestral practice as depicted in cave paintings that were created over a span of 30,000 years (that's a long time for an art form) and the actual experience of what it is to stand in an abbatoir and make eye contact with a cow as she walks into the stun cage. Reading this book will change your life.  Talking to Rob on the podcast was a joy and an inspiration and we ranged across all of these subjects and more.  We didn't get to the last-line dedication to Odin, which I had thought would be the core of the podcast, but then I discovered in the pre-recording conversations that Odin is a rescue dog (which is wonderful, but not quite the backbone of a shamanic/spiritual podcast that I'd imagined). Nonetheless, this is a deeply felt, deeply touching podcast that delves deep into the very meat of our identities in the modern world. The Meat Paradox: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9781408713815Web: rob-percival.com https://rob-percival.com/Twitter: @rob_percival_ https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_IPES report: The Politics of Protein: http://ipes-food.org/pages/politicsofproteinSustainable Food Trust Report: 'Feeding Britain': https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/LRB: A Million Shades of Red by Adam Mars-Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/adam-mars-jones/a-million-shades-of-red

Love during a lockdown is at the centre of Sarah Hall's latest book Burntcoat. Monica Ali's new novel is called Love Marriage and looks at love across two cultures and different ideas about feminism, family and careers. Adam Mars-Jones' Box Hill is a darkly affecting love story between men set in 1975. The authors join Shahidha Bari for a conversation exploring writing about relationships. Burntcoat by Sarah Hall and Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones are both out now. Monica Ali's novel Love Marriage is published in February 2022. Producer: Jessica Treen You can find other conversations about writing in the Free Thinking Prose and Poetry playlist https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Critic Leo Robson is our erudite and eloquent guide as we lose ourselves in the estuaries and marshes of Henry James’s sinuous “blue river of truth.” We begin in the archives of Leo’s G-chat and Whatsapp messages, where he first heard--and ignored--whispers of KOK’s boundless literary project. His indifference breaks down, however, after he and friend of the pod Christian Lorentzen take a desultory post-stag-party walk through Barcelona. A lugubrious Leo, sick of John Berger’s Marxist reading of Picasso, opens his Blackberry to find that James Wood has written an essay on Perr Petersen, which makes him think of that other Norwegian, the one with the endless maybe-novel underway, which leads him back to Lauren and Drew, who discover their friendship is coterminous with My Struggle’s publication history: they met, devoted listeners will know, over a drunken discussion about The Queen is Dead in summer 2010, just after Volume 1 had appeared on American Shores. Where are they now,  in their actual reading of My Struggle itself? Leo asks. “I don’t fucking know,” says Lauren.  Leo’s self-described “big data” survey of Knausgaardiana elicits comparisons between chronological expansions and contractions in My Struggle and Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”--are these examples of “big data” narratives? Richard Brody will soon be coming on the pod soon to anatomize Linklater’s use of time.   Leo suggests that Harold Brodkey and Adam Mars-Jones might be seen as Knausgaard’s precursors in the aesthetic tradition of what Wood lyrically deemed “autopsied minutiae” and “psycho-pointillism” (Lauren jeers at the latter term).  Drew takes this opportunity to proclaim Brodkey his “hero.” Drew and Leo discuss a near-mythical public conversation between James Wood and Brodkey, held in London in 1991. Link: https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0801XX-0100V0 We then embark on a disorderly Odyssey into Knausgaard’s reception in the anglosphere--and, somehow, into the history of realism and its discontents. For Schylla and Charybdis, we have David Shields and V.S. Pritchett (or something like that). Along the way, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Frederick Jameson help us pick apart the itemized thinginess ("choisisme") of Knausgaard’s project: are things differentiated? Are things merely commodified, or, in their very banality, redeemed? Robbe-Grillet and his New Novelists provide an obsessively textural counterpoint to Knausgaard’s seemingly blank litanies of objects and products.  Geoff Dyer takes a break from writing a blurb for Lauren’s eponymous Easter roast chicken to serve as another formal model for My Struggle and its reverberations. Like Brodkey and Mars-Jones, in his work, “nothing happens in a really a big way.” Here Drew invokes sensuous sun worshipper John Updike who, via a review of The Adventures of a Photographer in Los Platas by Adolfo Bioy Cesares, provides us with these weirdly apt sentences: “The novel arrests our attention and wins our respect by the things it disdains to do: it does not overdramatize or moralize, it denies events a deeper meaning. A clean if desolate flatness results” Does KoK fit into David Shields’ anti-novelistic canon of Reality Hunger? Lauren and Leo get into some narratological weeds: is Karl Ove an ironized character, or a source of Shields-approved wisdom writing?  Things are rambling along nicely until Drew “artlessly opens a can of worms.” Defending the so-called novelistic tradition against Shields’ claims of lifeless conventionality and formal tidiness, he brandishes a long quotation from V.S. Pritchett’s essay on Dead Souls (first collected in In My Good Books, 1942) :  “The modern novel has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces. In the modern novel we are looking at a neatly barbered suburban garden; in the standard works how often do we have the impression of bowling through the magnificent gateway of a demesne only to find the house and gardens are unfinished or patched up anyhow, as if the owner had tired of his money in the first few weeks and after that had passed his life in a daydream of projects for ever put off. We feel the force of a great power which is never entirely spent, but which cannot be bothered to fulfill itself. In short, we are up against the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do”  Pritchett inspires Leo  to give us an intricate tour of the history of tensions between form and chaos in the novel: the wet and the dry, the tidy and baggy. “We’ve conspired to mention every writer in the Western canon,” Leo says. “There’s the mess and the chaos--but there’s also the art.”     

Adam Mars-Jones talks about his newly-published novel, ‘Box Hill’ with Richard Scott. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Adam Mars-Jones is an award-winning novelist and critic. His most recent novel, Box Hill, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo novel prize. An apt award for someone who is also one of Britain’s most erudite and singular voices in film criticism. In late 2019 a collection of his film criticism, Second Sight, was published. It collects a significant portion of his reviews from his days as The Independent’s film critic (the paper’s first) as well as work for outlets including the Spectator. In this, the first episode of season 11 proper, Neil sits down in Adam’s kitchen for a chat that takes in art, reappraisal, Kubrick, Altman, music, Galaxy Quest, masterpieces and Don Siegel. Thanks to Adam for his time and to Reaktion Books for sending out a copy to us and facilitating this conversation.   You can also listen to The Cinematologists here: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854?mt=2 PlayerFM: https://player.fm/series/series-2416725 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists

Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including comedian Alexei Sayle, TV presenter Janet Ellis and film critics Adam Mars Jones and New Generation Thinker Iain Smith to look at remakes and new interpretations of the '80s from Stephen King's 1986 horror novel IT - now in cinemas as It Chapter Two, Rambo - first seen on screen in 1982 and now the inspiration for Last Blood and My Beautiful Launderette, which Hanif Kureishi has adapted for a UK theatre tour this Autumn - to TV series like Stranger Things. Second Sight The Selected Film Writing of Adam Mars-Jones is out now. The Film of My Beautiful Launderette has been reissued on DVD by the BFI and a theatrical version by Hanif Kureishi opens at the Curve Leicester Sept 20th and travels to Cheltenham, Leeds, Coventry, Birmingham. Alexei Sayle's books include Thatcher Stole My Trousers. During the 1980s he performed with the Comic Strip, in the Secret Policeman's Other Ball, The Young Ones and various other TV series and movies including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Revelation Of The Daleks. Doctor Who and Whoops Apocalypse. His series Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar can currently be heard on BBC Radio 4. Janet Ellis presented TV series Blue Peter and Jigsaw between 1979 and 1987. Her second novel How It Was is out now. Dr Iain Smith teaches film at Kings College, London and is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

Pedro Almodovar's new film Pain and Glory has been hailed as his most personal to date The Doctor at London's Almeida Theatre is Robert Icke's latest production. Freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, it's a play about ethics, morals and the repercussions of decisions both personal and professional. And how does what we say we are affect other people's perceptions of us? Peter Pomerantsev's "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality" is a book exploring the wreckage of liberal democracy and a search for the signs of its revival. Brassic is a new TV series on Sky, co-created by This Is England’s Joe Gilgun and Bafta-winning writer Danny Brocklehurst. It's about a group of working-class friends in Lancashire finding ways to win at life Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Adam Mars Jones, Dorian Lynskey and Kit Davis. The producer is Oliver Jones Podcast Extra recommendations Adam: Winter Journey by Roderick Williams and Fosse Verdon on BBCTV Kit: Stay Free podcast and There There by Tommy Orange Dorian: Succession Series 2 and This Had Oscar Buzz podcast Tom: Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

A new play by Anders Lustgarten, The Secret Theatre opens at London's Sam Wannamker Playhouse and is about Sir Frances Walsingham- Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster Paul Theroux's latest novel Mother Land is comic work about a ghastly matriarch exerting a poisonous influence on her grown-up children 20th century designer Erte worked in fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor. An exhibition of his work at London's Grosvenor Gallery includes his exquisite alphabet. "What's your idea of romance"? American indie film Beach Rats explores the story of a young man discovering his sexuality and confused by what's on offer. BBC documentary Joe Orton Laid Bare looks at the life of the playwright who died 50 years ago. Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Adam Mars Jones, Ellen E Jones and Louise Doughty. The producer is Oliver Jones.

Shahidha Bari discusses LGBTQ in the history of philosophy.As part of the BBC's Queer Icons series Philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell discusses Plato's Symposium, and novelist Adam Mars-Jones talks about Bruce Bagemihl's book Biological Exuberance which explored homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Plus, we hear from the winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. Queer Icons is a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures choose an LGBTQ artwork that is special to them. You can find more details on the Front Row website on BBC Radio 4. You can find the BBC's Gay Britannia season of programmes on radio and tv collected on the website. They include documentaries, Drama on 3 from Joe Orton and exploring Victim the 1961 film starring Dirk Bogarde, episodes of Words and Music and more editions of Free Thinking including Philip Hoare on Cecil Beaton, Jake Arnott on Joe Orton and Peggy Reynolds on Sappho. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Matteo Garrone's fantasy film Tale of Tales is a modern interpretation of a 17th century fairytale collection filled with dark gothic strangeness. Ralph Fiennes plays Richard III in a new production at London's Almeida Theatre. He's a very cynical psychopath as well as a ruthless monarch Annie Proulx's Barkskins is a large novel dealing with an enormous subject - the irreversible catastrophe of deforestation Tate Modern has opened a new extension: Switch House. It improves the gender balance of artists on display and broaden the geographical reach of works BBC TV is launching a new horror drama The Living and The Dead - early last century a country doctor begins to experience eerie goings-on Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Meg Rosoff, Adam Mars Jones and Cahal Dallat. The producer is Oliver Jones.

A celebration of Evelyn Waugh to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Matthew Sweet is joined by two writers who are long term admirers - Adam Mars-Jones and Bryony Lavery and by Waugh's latest biographer, Philip Eade and his grandson and editor, Alexander Waugh. Brideshead Revisited - adapted by Bryony Lavery - runs at York Theatre Royal from Fri 22 Apr - Sat 30 Apr and then goes on tour to Bath, Southampton, Cambridge, Malvern, Brighton, Oxford, Richmond.Evelyn Waugh - A Life Revisited by Philip Eade will be published in JulyProducer: Zahid Warley.

Mark Lawson has a problem. He is writing a memoir but he's always had the habit, when writing or broadcasting, of avoiding the first person pronoun. This rather puts him at odds with modern culture. Journalists and presenters are urged to use the one-letter vertical word. Bloggers, Vloggers and Tweeters lay their lives on-line and autobiography is an ever more crowded literary form. So in his series of One to One, Mark takes the opportunity to discuss self-revelation with artists who - in various ways - have taken themselves as their subject-matter, starting with the writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones. Long admired for his fiction and criticism, Adam has just published a work of non-fiction, Kid Gloves, which describes the experience of becoming end-of-life carer to his father, a retired judge, Sir William Mars-Jones. Mark and Adam reflect on the honesty and self knowledge needed when writing about your own life. Producer: Lucy Lunt.

Spectator editor Fraser Nelson & critic Adam Mars-Jones talk books with Harriett Gilbert.

Science journalist and self-experimenter Michael Mosley joins Kate Silverton and Suzy Klein. Michael's varied career started in banking and then he qualified as a doctor before joining the BBC. He talks about the Fast Diet, reveals the most terrifying experiment he's undertaken, and why he's now investigating life before birth. In the week that the Queen becomes Britain's longest-serving monarch, listener Steve Evans talks about his experiences as this month he becomes the longest serving Paramedic in the North West. Shelby Holmes' family run a travelling family fair. Despite missing a lot of school when she was growing up she has just graduated from Oxford University. Shelby discusses her experiences and future plans. Ann Davidson a retired nurse living near Bodrum in Turkey talks about helping Syrian refugees. JP Devlin ventures to the bottom of author Cressida Cowell's garden to see if there are dragons in her shed. Marin Alsop, the conductor for this year's Last Night of the Proms, shares her Inheritance Tracks. Critic and author Adam Mars-Jones talks about the relationship with his father Sir William Mars-Jones, a free thinking, maverick high court judge, who was involved in some of the most famous criminal cases of the 20th century. Michael Mosley's Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You is a three part series which begins on Monday, 14th September, at 9pm on BBC 2. Cressida Cowell's How to Fight a Dragon's Fury is out now. Marin Alsop's tracks are Piano Quartet by Robert Schumann and Victory Stride by James P. Johnson. Kid Gloves, a Voyage Around My Father by Adam Mars-Jones is out now.

Catholic theologian Hans Küng in his new work asks 'Can We Save The Catholic Church?'. He discusses this and more with Anne McElvoy. Anna Raeburn and Adam Mars-Jones review the first episode of Masters of Sex and discuss the work of Masters and Johnson. In a theatre critique, Susannah Clapp comes straight from the Donmar Warehouse to the studio for a first night review of Arnold Wesker's 'Roots'. And the author Wendy Lower has written a new book 'Hitler's Furies - German women in the Nazi Killing Fields' and Anne asks her what she found there.

With Anne McElvoy, including an interview with the best-selling american novelist Claire Messud about her latest book The Woman Upstairs featuring a narrator consumed with anger. David Runciman, Michela Massimi and Matthew Taylor join Anne to examine the genesis of "Progress", the idea and the extent to which it remains persuasive, despite the setback of the 20th Century. Adam Mars Jones reviews a new biopic written and directed by David Mamet in which Al Pacino plays the music producer Phil Spector. And Joshua Oppenheimer reflects on his gripping but chilling documentary The Act Of Killing.

With Mark Lawson Pedro Almodovar's film I'm So Excited features Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, and returns to the comedic style of his early works such as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. When technical problems develop on board a plane, the pilots and flight attendants strive to keep morale high. Adam Mars-Jones reviews. Film and TV producer Tony Garnett's work includes Kes, Cathy Come Home and This Life, and the British Film Institute is marking his 50 year career with a retrospective season. In a rare interview, he discusses how personal tragedies affected his work, the battles that went into making films tackling controversial issues - including back-street abortions - and why he wouldn't work in television now. More from the Cultural Exchange project, in which 75 leading creative minds share their passion for a book, film, poem, piece of music or other work of art: tonight writer and performer Meera Syal selects To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Amanda Knox's autobiography, Waiting To Be Heard, is being published in America today, but its UK release has been indefinitely postponed, on account of the British legal system. This is not the first time that a book has been unavailable in the UK but available in other countries. Professor of English Literature John Sutherland and lawyer Susan Aslan consider the issues this raises. Producer Claire Bartleet.

Adam Mars-Jones reviews the first West End revival of the nine Tony award winning; A Chorus Line. What is old age, and when we get there, how do we face the end? Philip Dodd discusses with the best-selling novelist Lynne Reid Banks, historian Pat Thane and Professor of English Literature at Oxford, Helen Small. Plus an interview with the controversial Israeli historian Shlomo Sand.

Nicole Kidman has taken on two emotionally challenging roles in the psychological horror Stoker and the thriller The Paperboy. She talks to Mark Lawson about her decision to take risks with the roles she chooses and why she never googles herself. David Mitchell's award-winning novel, Cloud Atlas, consists of six interweaving stories set in different times - from a slave on a 19th century ship, to a composer in 1930s England, to a clone in 22nd century Korea, to a tribe in a post-apocalyptic 24th century. It's now been turned into a film, written, produced and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski (of Matrix fame) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). The film version features a set of lead actors including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant, who all play different roles in each of the storylines - and are sometimes almost unrecognisable under heavy make-up. Author and critic Adam Mars-Jones joins Mark to assess how successfully the film captures the spirit of the novel. Writer Margaret Forster discusses her latest novel, The Unknown Bridesmaid, inspired by a chance discovery in a second-hand bookshop, and explains why she is content to be left behind by advances in technology. Producer Nicki Paxman.

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the life and work of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, born 150 years ago this month. Adam Mars-Jones reviews Utopia, a new drama on Channel 4. Which should be our priority, growing the economy or protecting the environment? Environmental campaigner Tony Juniper joins Anne, along with Dr Benny Peiser to discuss. And the historian Jonathan Healey, one of our New Generation Thinkers, reflects on the proposals to change succession laws and what they might mean for the future of our monarchy.

Adam Mars-Jones imagines J.K. Rowling bringing the manuscript ‘The Casual Vacancy’ to him for advice. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

With Mark Lawson Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter Macy Gray talks about her latest disc, Covered, her own take on the cover album. The songs come largely from the indie scene of the last decade, with versions of tracks by Arcade Fire, Radiohead and My Chemical Romance - as well as a special appearance by actor Idris Elba. Culture Minister Ed Vaizey discusses why he's optimist about the future of library services in England, and why he believes giving responsibility for library development to the Arts Council will help individual libraries stay relevant to their local communities. Composer Michael Berkeley and writer Adam Mars-Jones discuss the many attempts by novelists over the years to replicate the condition of music in their prose, from James Joyce to Anthony Burgess to the latest example, Sound by T.M. Wolf. The British Museum is re-opening a gallery dedicated to its extensive collection of money, at a time when the global economic system is in extraordinary focus. The Citi Money Gallery gives a historical context to today's concerns, starting 4500 years ago, and ending with the latest developments in digital technology. The BBC's Economics editor Stephanie Flanders gives her verdict. Producer Lisa Davis.

With Mark Lawson. Singer and songwriter Carole King enjoyed her first hit fifty years ago, and released her landmark album Tapestry four decades ago. She discusses her career so far and her first-ever seasonal album, A Christmas Carole, including a Chanukah Prayer recorded with her daughter and grandson. Eddie Redmayne takes the title role in a new staging of Shakespeare's Richard II, directed by Michael Grandage. Adam Mars-Jones gives his verdict. Don DeLillo, whose novels include the epic Underworld, talks about his new collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda, and reflects on his approach to writing and the depictions of time and history shown in his work. Two films out this week make visual references to other films from the same production team. Mark Eccleston discusses the art of inter-film referencing, undertaken by directors including Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick. Producer Georgia Mann.