A stifling culture of safety is now spreading throughout Western academic institutions leading to a crisis in mental health, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He tells Amol Rajan that the current obsession with ‘safe spaces’ and no-platforming, is not only a breach of freedom of speech, but is creating a generation unable to cope with modern life.But the commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues that free speech has often been used as a justification to spout hate speech and prejudice. She defends political correctness as a means to build a safer, more compassionate world.The writer Olivia Sudjic made her name after the publication of her debut novel Sympathy which explored surveillance and identity in the internet age. But as she became the focus of attention she felt trapped in a spiral of self-doubt. She looks at the epidemic of anxiety among the so-called ‘snowflake’ generation.Changing attitudes are at the heart of Mark Ravenhill’s new play, The Cane. Should a well-respected teacher be punished retrospectively for past actions which are now deemed unacceptable, but few questioned at the time?Producer: Katy Hickman

Poland turns 100 this November. The country had existed for a thousand years but it was only in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles that an independent Poland was created. Amol Rajan explores its turbulent history.No nation's story has been so distorted as Poland's, says historian Adam Zamoyski. He looks back to the great medieval nation that was once a European heavyweight. But Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland up in 1797 and turned it into a backwater - before the Nazis and Soviet soldiers arrived to do more damage.The decades since independence in 1918 have seen extraordinary twists in the tale. Composer Roxanna Panufnik combines Polish poetry with a Catholic mass in her new oratorio Faithful Journey - Mass for Poland. This huge work for choir and orchestra covers the bloodshed of two world wars, the relative prosperity and optimism of the 1930s, the censorship of communist rule and a new hope for the coming years.In the 1950s Stalin offered the people of Warsaw a choice between two gifts: a metro system or a vast skyscraper. They asked for the metro. He built the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science instead. Today the Palace is one of Poland's most recognisable sights and has starred on the cover of Vogue. But Michal Muraswki explains that to Poles today the Palace represents their communist legacy - something that the ruling Law and Justice Party are keen to forget,The reforms of the Law and Justice Party, including a move to ban all abortions, have been met with criticism at home and abroad. Award-winning journalist Witold Szablowski examines Poland's relationship with Europe, with its neighbours and with its past.Producer: Hannah Sander

Andrew Marr talks to the journalist Lindsey Hilsum about the extraordinary life of the war correspondent Marie Colvin. Throughout her career she travelled to the most dangerous places in the world, to bear witness to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. She wrote: “it has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.’ She was killed in Syria in 2012.For most of her career Marie Colvin wrote for The Sunday Times newspaper. Eve Pollard knows only too well the added pressures of getting a scoop for the nation’s weekend papers, as she formerly edited both the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Express. She’s now the UK Chair of Reporters Without Borders which this week will honour courage, impact and independence in journalism.Anabel Hernandez is an investigative reporter who has fought to lay bare the terrible facts behind the disappearance of forty-three Mexican students in 2014. Her book, A Massacre in Mexico, details the systemic corruption and cover-up among state officials, from the local police to government ministers.It is a hundred years since the poet Wilfred Owen died in battle, just a week before the end of WWI. The poet Gillian Clarke explores how Owen’s poetry brought to light the physical and mental trauma of combat, and how in her own work she’s reflected contemporary conflicts. Producer: Katy Hickman

On Budget day, Andrew Marr discusses what is broken in our economic and social system, and how it could be mended - if only those in charge were bold enough.Oxford’s Paul Collier is an economist known around the world for his work on inequality. His new book, The Future of Capitalism, focuses on the great rifts dividing Britain, with solutions on how to close them.David Willetts, the former Conservative minister, is focused on generational fairness and the increasing tensions between the successful and the struggling in society. The Resolution Foundation, of which he is chair, suggests the state must do more to redistribute wealth and responsibility.Baroness Helena Kennedy has been a campaigning lawyer and a feminist throughout her career. Her new book, Eve was Shamed, looks at how British justice has been failing women - and comes up with solutions.And for those who think bad news for other people may be good for them, Tiffany Watt Smith explains that most British of Germanic concepts: schadenfreude.Producer: Hannah Sander

Pirates come in many forms – from swashbuckling Captain Hook to today's poverty-stricken pirates off the coast of Somalia. It’s 400 years since one of the most charismatic and controversial figures in English history was executed. Sir Walter Ralegh was a favourite of Elizabeth I and was a famous adventurer and poet. But his exploits divided opinion even in his own lifetime, and his biographer Anna Beer tells Kirsty Wark the Spanish regarded him as a state-sponsored pirate.Captain Hook, Long John Silver and Jack Sparrow are at the heart of a new exhibition on fictional pirates at the V & A Museum of Childhood. The exhibition, curated by Will Newton, explores adventures on the high seas and charts how the moral ambiguity of Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation became the romanticised and sanitised version in today’s popular imagination.In 2012 the journalist Michael Scott Moore, who had covered the first trial in Europe of a Somali pirate, travelled to the Horn of Africa to find out more. He ended up being kidnapped and held captive for 977 days. He explores the historical and political case for piracy in Somalia, as well as religious extremism and the art of survival aboard a hijacked ship.Last month an American and a Chinese ship nearly collided in the South China Sea - which would probably have led to a major war, explains Veerle Nouwens. Through her role at defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) she monitors the ongoing race to control the South China Sea. She explains when an island is not an island, and why a calamity in this shipping route could bring chaos to the global economy.Producer: Hannah SanderPlastic pirate figures © Papo

Francis Fukuyama once famously announced ‘the end of history’. He now turns his attention to what he sees as the great challenge to liberal democracy: identity politics. He tells Andrew Marr that today’s descent into identities narrowly focused on nation, religion, race or gender have resulted in an increasingly polarised and factional society.Birkbeck Professor of Politics, Eric Kaufmann, is looking at populism, immigration and the future of white majorities. He argues that the concerns of white people should be listened to and questions whether it's possible to transform and redefine the debate about ethnic diversity. But the black student activist Roseanne Chantiluke argues that for too long issues of race have been side-lined to maintain the status quo. She was involved in the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and to challenge imperialist attitudes within the University. Sexual politics, power and identity are at the heart of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The director Josie Rourke explores what happens when the actors playing the powerful male Deputy and the powerless female Novice alternate from one act to the next. Producer: Katy Hickman

It’s nearly a century since the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was first conceived. It has gone on to become a multi-million pound industry categorising people from thinking introverts to feeling extroverts. But the mother-daughter team who came up with the idea had no psychological expertise and the test itself has no scientific basis, as the author Merve Emre explains to Tom Sutcliffe.Our genes are the most important factor in shaping who we are, according to the psychologist Robert Plomin. He argues that DNA influences everything from physical traits to intelligence and personality, and that nature not only trumps nurture, but is the main driver of it too. But the educationalist Naomi Eisenstadt argues that environment has a significant impact on children, especially in their early years. Eisenstadt was the first director of the Sure Start Unit when it was set up at the end of the 1990s and has been a government advisor on education and inequality. She questions whether there is any role for DNA testing in government policy. Producer: Katy Hickman

Yuval Noah Harari offers his 21 lessons for the 21st century. In a wide ranging discussion with Andrew Marr, Harari looks back to his best-selling history of the world, Sapiens, and forward to a possible post-human future. Technological disruption, ecological cataclysms, fake news and threats of terrorism make the 21st century a frightening prospect. Harari argues against sheltering in nostalgic political fantasies. He calls for a clear-sighted view of the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead.Producer: Katy Hickman

The prize-winning novelist William Boyd has set his latest novel, Love Is Blind, at the turn of the 20th century. He tells Amol Rajan how his young Scottish protagonist travels across Europe in a tale of obsession, passion and music.Lust and violence combine in Strauss's opera Salome in which a young princess performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Director Adena Jacobs has put a bold new spin on the story for English National Opera in her psychologically challenging interpretation. Nietzsche may have written the famous phrase 'God is dead' but he also wrote movingly about love, guilt and hate. Biographer Sue Prideaux argues that Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers. She explodes prevailing myths that he was a Nazi-sympathising, humourless misogynist.And popular culture is under the spotlight in the film critic Peter Biskind's latest book, The Sky is Falling. He argues that zombies, androids and superheroes heralded the age of political extremism.Producer: Katy Hickman.

It is 40 years since Sir David Attenborough told the story of Life on Earth, from its very first spark 4 billion years ago to the abundance of plants and animals today. He tells Andrew Marr how more pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place over the last four decades. The German ornithologist Michael Quetting spent a year hand rearing seven goslings: caring for them as they hatched, helping them learn to swim, and teaching them to fly alongside his aircraft. The project is part of an ambitious scientific research programme to understand birds in flight and use them to gather weather data for us.Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, looks beyond the earth to ask about potential life among the stars. He sees the future of humanity as bound to the future of science, and believes that space explorers in the next century will be electronic and not organic.A hundred years after Holst wrote The Planets, leading composers are again trying to capture the essence of our solar system in music. But this time they are working in collaboration with scientists. The geologist Dr Philippa Mason has helped bring deeper insight to Venus: a planet once thought to be a lush tropical swamp world, but in reality a crushing, violent inferno.(Producer: Katy Hickman).