Private Passions

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies around the world, along with a film starring Jim Carrey and a series on Netflix. Lemony has published many more books for children, and Daniel has also written seven novels for adults under his own name, as well as a screenplay inspired by Verdi’s Rigoletto. He’s also a keen accordion player and has performed with bands including Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists and the Magnetic Fields. Daniel has described himself as an ‘unrepentant classical zealot’ and his musical choices include Dvořák, Scriabin and Berlioz.

The director Clio Barnard won prizes and critical acclaim for her first feature film The Arbor: it blended fact and fiction to depict the short, troubled life of the brilliant Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Since then she’s taken on a wide range of British stories. She directed Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in The Essex Serpent, a six part adaptation of the best-selling book by Sarah Perry. She returned to Bradford for Ali and Ava, a love story which won a BAFTA nomination for outstanding British film, and for The Selfish Giant, the tale of two children trying to make money from selling scrap metal. Music often plays an important part in her films, and her choices include Alice Coltrane, Biber and Philip Glass.

Richard Thompson began his career as a guitarist and a songwriter when he was still a teenager – and six decades on, his passion for making and sharing music is as strong as ever. In the late 1960s he co-founded the pioneering folk-rock band Fairport Convention. In 1969 alone, they released three albums. All featured the voice of Sandy Denny, and one - Liege and Lief - was later acclaimed as the most influential folk album of all time. In the early 1970s, Richard left the band to form a decade-long musical partnership with his then wife Linda. He’s now spent over 30 years as a solo artist, winning an Ivor Novello Award for songwriting, a Lifetime Achievement Award from BBC Radio 2 and countless plaudits for his guitar playing. Richard's music choices include Beethoven, Purcell, Britten and Manuel de Falla.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has long been passionate about food – not just about what we eat and how we cook it, but about how it’s produced and the wider environmental consequences of our appetites. He first appeared on our TV screens in 1995 in A Cook on the Wild Side - foraging for roadkill and frying up woodlouse fritters, earning him the nickname Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-it-all.He went on to document his early attempts as a smallholder trying to produce seasonal, ethical food in the River Cottage series on Channel 4. Out of this came the highly successful River Cottage Cookbook. Over two dozen books have followed – the latest of which is How to Eat 30 Plants a Week. He’s also enjoyed success as a food campaigner. Hugh’s Fish Fight brought about changes in fisheries law at the European level, Britain’s Fat Fight examined the national obesity crisis and War on Waste challenged supermarkets and the fast food industry to change how they operate. Hugh's music choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi and Keith Jarrett.

Olivia Laing has won prizes and critical acclaim for her books, but readily admits that she led quite a wild life before becoming a writer: she dropped out of university, lived in a treehouse on an anti-road protest and later trained and worked as a herbalist. Her non-fiction books include The Trip to Echo Spring, which examined how writers who were damagingly addicted to alcohol could still produce great literature. She drew on her own experience of extreme loneliness in New York to write The Lonely City, which blended memoir with reflections on the works of artists including Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Memorial Prize. And most recently she’s written The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. It’s an account of how she’s restoring a walled garden in Suffolk - and an investigation into the history of gardens and the solace and pleasure they can bring.Olivia's music choices include Puccini, Purcell, Wagner and Bach.

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s security correspondent, familiar to millions of viewers and listeners from his reports, which regularly take him around the world.He’s also written six books, including a memoir about his 25 years in the Middle East, and more recently, four thrillers about the adventures of MI6 operative Luke Carlton. In 2004, while filming in Saudi Arabia, Frank and his cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by al-Qaeda gunmen. Simon was killed and Frank was shot six times and left for dead. He survived, but was partially paralysed. He returned to reporting within a year, using a wheelchair. Frank's music choices range from Schumann and Shostakovich to Fats Waller, and he also includes part of a concerto for oboe and strings written by his father, Neil Gardner, who was a keen and accomplished amateur musician.

For years Professor Brian Cox has encouraged us to look up to and beyond the stars and to understand that the universe is very, very large and our place in it very, very small. He is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester – and through his extensive work on television and radio, he’s shared the wonders of the universe and of science with millions of us around the world. As a teenager and then a student, Brian combined his passion for physics with a parallel career in pop music as a keyboard player. His choices include music from the jazz improviser Keith Jarrett, Mahler, Charles Ives and Richard Strauss.

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.