Lee Child created his tough guy protagonist Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who roams America fighting crime, in 1997. Writing a book a year since his debut Killing Floor, Lee Child established himself as one of the most acclaimed and popular novelists in his genre, and has now sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The Reacher books have been adapted for a film starring Tom Cruise and, more recently, an Amazon Prime television series. Lee Child’s latest publication, Safe Enough, is a collection of short stories. Talking to John Wilson, Child recalls his upbringing in Birmingham and how his childhood passion for reading was fuelled by frequent visits to the local library. For This Cultural Life, he chooses a Ladybird book which told the Biblical story of David and Goliath as an early inspiration, acknowledging that the giant figure of Goliath probably inspired the physique of 6’5” tall Reacher. He also remembers the impact of a book called My American Home which depicted an array of houses and apartments throughout America, the country in which Child would later live and set his novels. He also discusses how working for 18 years as a Granada television producer, overseeing the transmission of dramas including Brideshead Revisited, helped forge his understanding of storytelling. His work as a union shop steward, which brought him into conflict with management and eventually led to him being made redundant, was the catalyst for his new career as a crime novelist in the late 1990s. His debut Reacher novel, a violent tale of vengeance and rough justice was, he admits, written out of anger following his dismissal from Granada. Lee Child also chooses the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, as another influence on the creation of his fictional hero Jack Reacher. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Reading from Worth Dying For by Lee Child, The Knight Errant: Lee Child - A Culture Show Special, BBC2, 20 Dec 2012 Clip from Brideshead Revisited, Granada Television, ITV, 12 October 1981 Clip from Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner, 1990 Clip from Jack Reacher, Christopher McQuarrie, 2012

The grandfather of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake is one of most influential and popular artists of his generation. A Royal Academician with work in the national collection, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, he is renowned for paintings and collages that borrow imagery from advertising, cinema and music. Having created The Beatles’ Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve in 1967 he became the go-to album designer for other musical artists including The Who, Paul Weller, Madness and Oasis. He was knighted for services to art in 2002.Sir Peter tells John Wilson how, after a working class upbringing in Dartford, Kent, he won a place at the Royal College of Art alongside fellow students Bridget Riley and Frank Auerbach. He recalls being influenced by early American pop artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and how he began making art inspired by everyday popular imagery. He chooses Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood as a work which captivated his imagination and later inspired a series of his artworks based on the characters, and also cites Max Miller, the music hall artist known as 'the Cheeky Chappie'; as a creative influence. Sir Peter remembers how he made the iconic Sgt Pepper sleeve using waxwork dummies and life size cut-out figures depicting well-known people chosen by Peter and The Beatles themselves. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, performed by Richard Burton, BBC Third Programme, 25 Jan 1954 Max Miller, introduced by Wilfred Pickles at the Festival of Variety, BBC Light Programme, 6 May 1951 Max Miller archive from Celebration, The Cheeky Chappie, BBC Radio 4, 3 July 1974 Monitor: 89: Pop Goes The Easel, BBC1, 25 March 1962 Peter Blake: Work in Progress, BBC2, 21 February 1983 Newsnight, BBC2, 7 February 1983 Ian Dury, Peter the Painter

Director and actor Simon McBurney, one of the founders of the ground breaking theatre company Complicité, reveals his creative inspirations and influences. For over four decades McBurney has created innovative and experimental works, from immersive staging to the reinvention of classic texts. His works include A Disappearing Number, The Encounter and Mnemonic, a landmark production which has been recently revived at The National Theatre. Simon McBurney tells John Wilson about his childhood in Cambridge where his father, an archaeologist, helped foster an early fascination with time and memory. For This Cultural Life he chooses the 1969 Ken Loach film Kes as a formative influence, offering an insight to a childhood very different to his own middle class upbringing. He recalls seeing the band The Clash whilst at Cambridge University, an experience that had a profound impact on his own creativity and political engagement through the arts. He also chooses the writer and critic John Berger as an inspirational figure, and recalls collaborating with Berger on the immersive Artangel project The Vertical Line in 1999. Simon McBurney also describes how the experience of meeting indigenous Amazonian people inspired his 2016 Complicité show The Encounter. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive clips from: Kes, Ken Loach, 1969 The Clash Live at Rock Against Racism, Victoria Park, 1978 The Dead Class, Tadeusz Kantor, 1976 Friday Night...Saturday Morning: Cambridge Footlights, BBC1, Nov 1979 Ways of Seeing, Episode 1, BBC2, Jan 1972 The Vertical Line, Complicité, BBC Radio 4, 1999 The Encounter, Complicité, Barbican Theatre, May 2018 Face to Face, BBC2, Oct 1995 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie, 2015

One of the world’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie has won many prestigious international literary awards and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, a novel that was also twice voted as the best of all-time Booker winners. In 1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous and pronounced a death sentence against its author. For over a decade he lived in hiding with close security, a period of his life that he wrote about in the 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. His most recent book Knife details the horrific stabbing he survived in 2022.Talking to John Wilson, Salman Rushdie recalls his childhood in Bombay, and the folk tales and religious fables he grew up with. He chooses Indian independence and partition in 1947 as one of the defining moments of his creative life, a period that formed the historical backdrop to Midnight’s Children. He discusses how, having first moved to England as a schoolboy and then to New York after the fatwa, the subject of migration has recurred throughout much of his work, including The Satanic Verses. Rushdie also explains how "surrealism, fabulism and mythical storytelling” are such an influence on his work, with particular reference to his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet which was inspired by the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As Rushdie says, "truth in art can be arrived at through many doors”.Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used:BBC News, 12 Aug 2022 Newsnight, BBC2, 12 Aug 2022 BBC Sound archive, India: Transfer of Power, 15 August 1947 Nehru: Man of Two Worlds, BBC1, 27 Feb 1962 Midnight's Children, Book at Bedtime, BBC Radio 4, 27 August 1997 Advert, Fresh Cream Cakes, 1979 BBC News, 14 Feb 1989 The World At One, BBC Radio 4, 14 Feb 1989 BBC News, 28 May 1989 Today, BBC Radio 4, 27 April 1990 Clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 9, episode 3

John Wilson's guest is the pioneering American artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California, she established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She is best known for a ground-breaking installation piece called The Dinner Party, a monumental work which was made with the help of a team of ceramists and needle-workers over five years and first displayed in 1979. Now enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, Judy Chicago is regarded as a trailblazing figure in the art world.Judy recalls studying at the Art Institute of Chicago's children's classes at the age of five, and afterwards wandering around the galleries upstairs where she was particularly drawn to the Impressionists. It was here that she first decided to become an artist. As a young woman she moved to the west coast to pursue her dream. Although she found the art scene there "inhospitable" to women, she was inspired by a group of male artists including Ed Rucha, Larry Bell and Bill Al Bengton, associated with the LA-based Ferus gallery. Judy also cites discovering Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born French medieval poet at the court of King Charles VI of France, as a turning point in her own research and art practice. Like Judy herself, de Pisan had faced obstacles because of her gender and sought to challenge contemporary attitudes towards women by creating an allegorical City of Ladies. She is one of the women represented in Judy Chicago's landmark work The Dinner Party.Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Omnibus: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, BBC1, 13 January 1981 Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, BBC4, 10 July 2020

Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and novelist Neil Jordan made his name with the 1984 movie The Company Of Wolves, adapted from an Angela Carter short story. His 1986 film Mona Lisa earned BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for its star Bob Hoskins. Jordan scored an even bigger critical and commercial hit worldwide with The Crying Game, which had six Academy Award nominations including best screenplay which was won by Neil Jordan himself. His 20 feature films made over 40 years also include an adaptation of Ann Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire, Irish revolutionary drama Michael Collins and The End Of The Affair, adapted from the Graham Greene novel. Neil Jordan talks to John Wilson about his upbringing in a Dublin suburb, the son of a school teacher father who encouraged an early love of storytelling. After working as a labourer, and in a Dublin theatre for a while, he met filmmaker John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance, The Emerald Forest) who, in 1980, was shooting his Arthurian legend film Excalibur at film studios in Ireland. Boorman invited Neil Jordan to direct a documentary about the making of Excalibur, an experience which started his filmmaking career. Jordan also chooses the 1943 Jean Genet novel Notre Dame des Fleurs - Our Lady Of The Flowers - as a formative influence on his screenwriting. He recalls the struggles to make The Crying Game and how the film’s producer Harvey Weinstein objected to the inclusion of a trans character, a supporting role for which Jaye Davidson was nominated as best actor at the 1992 Academy Awards.Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Clip from A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone, 1964 Clip from Excalibur, John Boorman, 1981 Clip from The Crying Game, Neil Jordan, 1992 Neil Jordan accepts his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, 1992 Clip from The Crying Game, Neil Jordan, 1992 Clip from Michael Collins, Neil Jordan, 1996

Zadie Smith grew up in north west London and studied English at Cambridge University. After a publisher’s bidding war when she was just 21, her debut novel White Teeth became a huge critical and commercial hit on publication in 2000 and won several awards including the Orange Prize, now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread first novel award. Since then, with books including On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the world’s most successful and popular living novelists, renowned for her witty dialogue and explorations of cultural identity, class and sexuality. Her most recent book The Fraud is her first historical novel. Zadie Smith talks to John Wilson about her upbringing in Willesden, North West London, with her Jamaican born mother and white English father. She chooses C S Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an early formative influence and remembers how its themes of danger, power and betrayal were intoxicating to her as a young reader. Zadie talks about the creative influence of her husband, the poet Nick Laird, and of the cultural impact of a trip she made to west Africa in 2007 which inspired much of her 2016 novel Swing Time. She also reflects on her role as an essayist who in recent years, has increasingly written about global political and social issues.Producer: Edwina PitmanReadings from: Swing Time, Zadie Smith, 2016 White Teeth, Zadie Smith, 2000

Renowned for the autobiographical candour of her lyrics, Lily Allen has sung about the pitfalls of fame, drugs, broken relationships and motherhood. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her debut album Alright Still and after the release of It’s Not Me, It’s You in 2010 won a Brit Award and three Ivor Novello Awards, including Songwriter of the Year. In 2021 she embarked on a stage acting career starring in 2.22 A Ghost Story, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award. More recently, with her childhood friend Miquita Oliver, she launched her BBC podcast series Miss Me.Talking to John Wilson, Lily recalls a sometimes sad and troubled childhood. Her father, the actor and comedian Keith Allen, had left the family home when she was four, and her film producer mother Alison Owen was often away working. She chooses as her first formative experiences a school concert in which she performed the song Baby Mine from the Disney movie Dumbo and captivated the audience. She recalls how the first started writing and recording her own songs, and built up a fanbase with the on-line platform MySpace. She chooses, as key musical influences the 1979 song Up The Junction by Squeeze, and the 2004 album A Grand Don’t Come For Free by Mike Skinner, otherwise known as The Streets. Lily Allen also reflects on the pressures of juggling life in the spotlight with motherhood, and how theatre acting has offered her a new creative challenge.Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Adams, a celebrated composer and conductor known for blending Minimalism with late-Romantic orchestral harmonies, discusses his influences including Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, and Charles Dickens. He reflects on his early experiences with music, the impact of California's landscape on his compositions, his challenges with musical minimalism, and the controversy surrounding his portrayals of Palestinian terrorism in his operas.

Irish novelist Anne Enright is the author of seven novels, including The Gathering, winner of the Booker Prize in 2007. Her 2012 novel The Forgotten Waltz won the Andre Carnegie Medal for Fiction and her novel The Green Road won The Irish Novel of the Year in 2015, the same year that she was appointed as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest novel The Wren, The Wren has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024.Anne tells John Wilson how her childhood home in the suburbs of Dublin, and holidays spent at the Pollock Holes in Kilkee inform her writing. She recalls her book-devouring household and first reading Ulysses while on a cycling holiday at the age of 14. The play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill was also a creative influence, particularly in the way Churchill wrote dialogue for women who were at the time, so underrepresented on stage. Anne also cites the influence of the writer Angela Carter, both as a writer of contemporary fiction and as her tutor and mentor at the University of East Anglia. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive and readings used:Extract from The Gathering, read by Anne Enright Extract from The Wren, The Wren, read by Charlotte Pyke Extract from Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, BBC, 1992