A Point of View

Linda Colley reflects on an historic week in British politics. She turns to Lawrence Stone's famous book, "The Causes of the English Revolution", to cast light on the present turmoil. And she asks if the bitter fractures over Brexit could eventually turn out to be the modernizing force the UK needs.Producer: Adele Armstrong

As many Christmas presents start making the surreptitious trip to the charity shop, Stella Tillyard argues that many of us appear to be freeing ourselves from the unfulfilling grip of "things". She asks if - as the earth is dying under the weight or our excesses - we're "reaching a wider, bigger moment: a weariness with acquisition itself".Producer: Adele Armstrong

"There is little more infuriating", writes Tom Shakespeare, "than some quotidian website which demands you devise a new 11 letter password, including a capital letter, a lowercase letter, a number and a non-alphanumeric character, just to buy a tee shirt."Tom muses on the near impossible task of remembering an ever-growing number of online passwords. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson on the joys of city parks. "I am, and always have been, a lover of city parks", he writes. "A park finishes, that's its beauty. It is circumscribed. If you want more you can walk it twice. If you want less you can slip back out into the city". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Is our taste for righteous self-blown indignation so indurated and inwrought" writes Howard Jacobson, "that we will never again be able to shrug our shoulders, forget who we are and what we believe and embrace people who believe differently?"Howard explores the destructive nature of the Cult of Self. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"I listen to Money Box on Radio 4 as others might to a recording of Indonesian gamelan music", writes Will Self, "thrilling to the intricacies, even as I find them altogether alien". Will ponders why personal finance is such an alien concept for him. But his thoughts move to “those hundreds of thousands out there for whom the words ‘personal finance’ are, quite simply, terrifying”. Producer: Adele Armstrong

"Two things seem incontrovertible about the mounting environmental catastrophe", writes Will Self.. "It's genuinely unprecedented - and we really are in it together". Will wonders what we should say to our children about global warming and our role in it. He says we have to hope that some sort of collective wisdom can emerge "because the alternative is frankly terrifying: a degraded, dystopic and nakedly Darwinian future". Producer: Adele Armstrong

Roger Scruton argues that political correctness, far from being the cure to our conflicts, is actually the ultimate source of them.The "isms" and "phobias", he says, have been used in order to "put some complex matters beyond discussion, so that only one perspective can be publicly confessed to". "In the world of political correctness", he writes, "there is no presumption of innocence, but only a hunger for targets". Producer: Adele Armstrong

"For most of my adult life", writes Stella Tillyard, "I have had a template which I have used not only to understand myself but also to interpret the world around me. History has been my guide". But today, she says, history appears inadequate "to describe the chaos that now seems to surround us".Producer: Adele Armstrong

Stella Tillyard on how we bury and remember our dead. The idea of immortality, she believes, is taking hold in a new form. "Surely it will not be long before a new form of cemetery is created...a virtual space where all the digital remains of a person will be gathered, curated and tended".Producer: Adele Armstrong