A Point of View

Sarah Dunant looks at different aspects of debt, including the debt owed to those who have been a force for change in Arab countries. Producer: Sheila Cook.

The author and philosopher John Gray on the merits of living for the present. "We tend to look forward to a future state of fulfilment in which all turmoil has ceased", Gray writes. But, he says, "when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now". He argues that we should give up our obsession with endings and urges us not to be wary of change. "Humans are sturdy creatures, built to withstand disruption". "Conflict never ceases", he says, "but neither do human resourcefulness, adaptability and courage". On Europe, he writes, "wherever Europe's elites turn for support, the pillars begin to crumble and shake. Eventually every utopian project comes to grief - and while it started as a benign creation, the European project has long since acquired an unmistakably utopian quality. The efforts that are being made to renew the project are only accelerating its demise"."Renewing our lives in the face of recurring evils", he concludes, "is the task...that has always faced human beings. Looking to an end-time is a way of failing to cherish the present - the only time that is truly our own". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Lisa Jardine reflects on the power of music to move, especially at Christmas, when the singing of carols unites singers and listeners alike, in an outpouring of community spirit. She also celebrates each advance in technology which has made music available to all, not just an elite, from the fifteenth century mass production of carol books to the screening in cinemas worldwide of opera live from the Met in New York. Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine thinks selective hearing skews the debate over climate change and urges climate scientists to fully engage in a conversation with their sceptical critics. "Graphs and pie charts have evidently failed to convince. Perhaps a more discursive approach which focuses on observable change backed up by scientific evidence may be more persuasive." Producer: Sheila Cook.

The historian Lisa Jardine recalls CP Snow for lessons on the dangers of leaving political decisions to technocrats and experts and calls for better informed debate by politicians and public alike in the fields of science and economics.Producer: Sheila Cook.

The historian Lisa Jardine welcomes recent moves to promote the teaching of history in schools and finds herself converted to the value of family history after the discovery of a tape recording shed light on a puzzling family photograph which was taken in 1906. Producer: Sheila Cook.

Mary Beard reflects on the purpose of the much-maligned "Oxbridge interview" and defends the "Would you rather be an apple or a banana" school of questioning.... Producer: Adele Armstrong.

With the euro in turmoil, Mary Beard reflects on the very first monetary union, two and a half thousand years ago. And she contemplates the detail of the modern euro coins. "Take a closer look at those heads-and-tails" she writes, "and you'll find some rather disconcerting angles on European history and politics". She decides that it is the Greek Euro-coinage that offers the most food for thought. The bull on the back of the 2 euro coin is, in fact, part of a depiction of a rape. Zeus, the king of the gods turned himself into a bull and snatched Princess Europa. Mary says she understands why the Greeks wanted this scene on their coins. It suggests that "without Greece there would have been no Europe - that Greece had invented the continent". But she's never quite worked out "how the Greek people so easily came to terms with the idea of having a picture of rape jingling around amongst the small change in their pockets". Then she turns her sights to the 1 euro coin, with its beady-eyed owl, an exact copy of a fifth-century BC Athenian coin. The little bird was the symbol of Athena, the protector of the city of Athens. In the fifth century BC, she points out, Athens was a democracy yet also "an exploitative empire, controlling many other states around the Mediterranean". The Athenians made their neighbours get rid of their own currency and use the owls instead. "Its hard to resist the conclusion", she says, "that the Athenian imperialists were using monetary union to display their political muscle - and hard not to imagine that vengeance for that has finally come, 25 centuries later". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Mary Beard takes a peek at Miss World 2011 and ponders why - unlike her days as a radical feminist teenager -the whole occasion doesn't fill her with fury. "It all felt" - she writes - "like a scantily-clad, tabloid version of University Challenge....but with a kind of high-minded worthiness". Long gone the old beauty contest ambitions of travelling and starting a family. "These contestants talked of becoming international lawyers, museum curators, architects, diplomats". So does this lack outrage mean she has she sold out on feminism? "That's not how it seems to me" she writes. "At 56 I count myself as strong a feminist as I was at 26". Just a bit more laid back. "The less I see my own body as a positive asset" she says - joking about her greying hair and her thickening toe nails - "the less I have wanted to interfere with what other women choose to do with theirs". "Times do change and some battles honestly do get won" she concludes. "I don't any longer feel that Miss Venezuela is much of an enemy". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

From the ingeniously ghastly ways they killed their opponents to their weird forms of dress, Mary Beard reflects on the uncanny similarities between Colonel Gaddafi and the tyrants of ancient Rome. She argues that the similarities were present in life - and in death. "On 11 March 222 AD," she writes, "a posse of rebel soldiers tracked down the Roman emperor Elagabalus to his hiding place. The tyrant was holed up in a latrine, desperately hoping to keep clear of the liberators, who were out for his blood". She continues: "The story goes that the rebels rooted him out, killed him, triumphantly dragged his body through the streets of Rome and then threw his mutilated remains into a drain." Mary suggests modern and ancient tyrant are portrayed as sharing a penchant for eccentric accommodation, like Gaddafi's tent and Nero's infamous "Golden House". And they seem to enjoy dubious hobbies - such as Emperor Domitian's obsession with stabbing flies and Gaddafi's obsessive collection of pictures of Condoleeza Rice, which were stuck in a scrapbook. But she argues that these stereotypes of tyrants are little more than half-truths and hearsay....an easy way of making a figure of fear into a figure of fun. The reality, she says, is much more nuanced. "Badness", she suggests, "comes in inconveniently complicated ways. Most bad people are good in parts". How often, she asks, are we told that life expectancy in Libya far exceeds that of its neighbours, that Libya has substantially lower child mortality than its neighbours, the highest literacy rate in North Africa, free hospitals and free childcare. "My point is not that we should see Gaddafi as a good man" she says. Rather that "among all the things that have been going terribly wrong under the Gaddafi regime, some things have been going right". Producer: Adele Armstrong.