Armando Iannucci, Booker shortlisted author Maggie Shipstead, Paul McCartney on Penny Lane

Meet the anagrammatical Orbis Rex, Queen Dido, Blind Dom’nic, as they battle a wet and withered bat from Wuhan in Front Row as Armando Iannucci, Samira Ahmed’s guest, reads from and talks about Pandemonium, his new mock-heroic epic poem written in response to the Covid pandemic and the times we live in.

The sights and sounds of Liverpool are evoked as Paul remembers the 1967 Beatles single Penny Lane.

In the last of our Booker Prize Book Groups, listeners put their questions to shortlisted author Maggie Shipstead, whose novel Great Circle tells the story of Marian Graves, a pioneering female pilot in the first half of the 20th century, and in a separate strand in the present, Hadley Baxter, an actress playing Marian in a Hollywood movie.

Daniel Clark is one of ten young poets from around the world chosen through a Poetry Society competition to perform work that addresses the climate crisis at Cop 26. He reads, and talks about poetry as activism.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May