Private Passions

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.

Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe – Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan – which went for $108 million in June 2023. Helena also plays the violin and the piano and her musical background has come in handy when standing on the auction block. She also loves the cross-over between music and art and how one can inspire the other. Her musical choices include Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Bach.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the digital innovations of our own times. Mark has interviewed many of the most significant directors and actors of the past half century, and with Tilda Swinton he created the Screen Machine, a large portable cinema which they and their supporters sometimes pulled by hand through the Scottish Highlands. Mark’s choices of film music range from Doris Day and Henry Mancini to a score by Alfred Schnittke and a song from Neneh Cherry.

Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events.He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including a version of Jude the Obscure with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet.He’s worked extensively with Steve Coogan, starting in 2001 with 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson. More recently they’ve made four series of the BAFTA award-winning series The Trip, in which Coogan and Rob Brydon tour restaurants in England, Italy, Spain and Greece.Many of his films react to real-world events, including Welcome to Sarajevo and The Road to Guantánamo. In 2022 he co-wrote and co-directed This England, a TV series about Boris Johnson’s leadership during the Covid crisis, with Kenneth Branagh playing the former Prime Minister.Michael’s most recent film, Shoshana, is a political thriller set in the 1930s in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.His music choices include Schumann, Bach and Philip Glass.

The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a few. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians including Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Sting, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. His most enduring collaboration has been with Elton John. Ray is on more than 90 of Elton’s recordings, and has performed over 1000 concerts with him, most recently on the Farewell Tour.In 1979, Ray was asked by George Harrison to help run Handmade Films and he remained at the helm for just over a decade, overseeing the production of seminal British films such as Withnail and I, Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday. Ray's musical choices include Bach, Shostakovich, John Tavener and Elton John. Producer: Clare Walker

Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Trilogy, she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and unpalatable truths in her fiction, exploring issues of identity, sexuality, class, immigration, viral pandemics and shady economics. Her latest book, To the Dogs, is a thriller centred around a university professor who finds himself dragged into his former life of violence and danger when his son is arrested on drugs charges. But despite these serious themes, Louise’s work is punctuated by a playful, dry sense of humour, highlighting the absurdity of certain situations - and a vivid vocabulary. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and she loves to collaborate. She has written short stories and plays, edited collections of poetry and has a long-standing working relationship with the composer Stuart MacRae, with whom she’s written four opera librettos. Her musical choices include works by Debussy, Purcell and Verdi.

Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied range of settings – including original songs for the recent film Wonka, a chamber opera inspired by Tolstoy for Covent Garden, and the theme tune for the sitcom Father Ted. Neil talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland with a bishop for a father, writing his first pop song when he was 14, and how, as a self-described "pathetic twerp", he managed to make it in the pop world. His typically wide-ranging musical passions include works by Puccini, Stravinsky, Chopin and Ravel, alongside tracks by Michael Nyman, Kate Bush and Scott Walker. Producer: Graham Rogers