Dorothy Byrne has worked in journalism for more than 40 years, including almost 20 years as Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 from 2003 to 2020. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the sexism and harassment she experienced as a young producer, which she detailed in her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2019, in which she added that she would still recommend journalism to young women today - ‘in what other line of work, when... you hear of some absolute disgrace, can you say to yourself “I’m going to make a programme exposing that and I’ll put a stop to it!” And sometimes you even do.’ She has also argued that challenging journalism which calls politicians to account is a vital part of any healthy democracy. Since 2021 she has been President of Murray Edwards College, a women-only college at the University of Cambridge. Her music choices include pieces by Mozart, Handel, Amy Beach and Nina Simone, as well as a recording of her college choir performing music by Hildegard of Bingen.Producer: Graham Rogers

Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has published seven collections of her verse. She’s performed her poems to thousands of students at Poetry Live events, a scheme founded by her late husband Simon Rhys Powell. Imtiaz was born in Lahore in Pakistan and was six months old when her family moved to Glasgow. There she grew up as – in her words – “a Muslim Calvinist”. When she was 17 she fell in love with her first husband, married in secret and eloped to India. As a result she was disowned by her family, but began to publish her first poems. She illustrates all her collections with pen and ink drawings.

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the Science Museum in London – one about the Hadron Collider, another about the Sun, and his first book was called How To Make An Apple Pie from Scratch, a title which draws on a comment by the astronomer Carl Sagan: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". His most recent book Space Oddities looks at some of the strange things – anomalies - that are currently confounding scientists, and transforming our understanding of physics.

Percival Everett, the American writer, discusses his novel 'James' reimagining Huck Finn's tale from Jim's perspective. He shares a diverse range of interests from fly-fishing to jazz and horse training. The conversation touches on the incorporation of Emmett Till's story in 'The Trees' and the transformative power of art.

Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black. Alison probably knows better than most what it’s like to be a young woman in the spotlight, as the mother of a high-profile star herself: the singer Lily Allen. Her music choices include Beethoven, Coltrane, Ravel and Puccini.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we write and think today. She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World. Her writing and teaching are based on decades of scholarship, with a focus on ancient Greek drama, and she’s also a familiar voice as a broadcaster, on programmes such as In Our Time.Her most recent book is Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks and Me - a deeply personal account of the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, drawing parallels between her own family history and characters from Greek tragedy. Edith's music selection includes Schubert, Beethoven, Gluck and Handel.

Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English but he went to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.He started out writing for newspapers, winning the Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002. He now writes for The Times. In 2008 he published his memoir of his early life called The Boy With the Topknot.More recently he has focused on our colonial history. In 2021 he published Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, which was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards. Then came Empireworld: How British Imperialism has shaped the Globe, which quickly became a best-seller. Sathnam's musical choices include Bach, John Coltrane, Debussy and Jasdeep Singh Degun.

Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.” Her painstaking work and expertise mean she can work out how people have met their end, and police forces, the Foreign Office and the UN have called on her evidence in countless high profile investigations. She was the lead forensic anthropologist to the British forensic team during the international war crimes investigations in Kosovo and the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Operation. Back in the UK she provided evidence that helped prosecute Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring. She is currently the President of St John’s College, Oxford, and in 2021 she entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer. She has just been appointed to the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in Scotland. Sue's music selections include Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn and Elgar.(Photo: Sue Black. Credit David Gross)

David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii – and back again.Closer to home, he drew on his own childhood in Worcestershire in his coming-of-age tale Black Swan Green, about a teenager attempting to overcome a stammer and negotiate playground hierarchies, all against the backdrop of the Falklands War.His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, charts the rise of an imaginary rock band in the late 1960s.David's musical choices include Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius and Hildegard von Bingen.

John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes. In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering. Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on high-profile public roles: he was the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he faced the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He’s also a cross-bench peer and was principal of Jesus College, Oxford, for a decade. His musical choices include Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Corelli.