Explore every episode of the podcast A Point of View

As Donald Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, Mark Damazer reflects on America's leadership in the world.

Eavesdropping on a focus group recently, Mark tells us that the country's leadership was seen as 'a burden and a luxury - and a luxury they wanted to do without.'

'There was a time when large chunks of the world were grateful for American involvement...but gratitude is now more thinly expressed', he says. 'And Donald Trump well understands that.'

In this new world order, Mark argues, 'we have our work cut out to find a response.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

In deepest, darkest January, Adam Gopnik muses on light and dark.

Adam reminds us that - from the natural world of the ghost moth to the politics of today's America - although we live in a 'gloomy moment' we can 'adjust our eyes to the gloom.'

'Every little bit of light we make,' writes Adam, 'in every decent thing we do and every indecency we refuse to accept, illuminates some small corner of our universe. Even at night, after all, we still see light. The stars shine, too.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler explains why every week for several decades - despite knowing nothing about art - she has called in to London’s National Gallery to look at the same two paintings.

'This habit of mine,' writes Sara, 'started by accident when I moved to London forty years ago' when she first set eyes on Botticelli's 'Portrait of a Young Man' and van Eyck's 'Portrait of a Man.'

'I have come to realise,' says Sara, the extraordinary power of 'familiarity, close contact and regular attention'.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan rediscovers a childhood diary with her first New Year's Resolutions.

She was fascinated and appalled, she says, by what she read:. The final resolution, underlined, read simply 'be a better person!'

These days, Megan looks on self-improvement in a rather different way - less an attempt at perfection and more 'an attempt to courageously embrace living in all its chaos.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Mary Beards reflects on what really lies behind our attachment to Christmas ritual and tradition.

In a special edition of A Point of View, recorded in Mary's kitchen as she prepares her Christmas puddings, she ponders 'why those of us who aren't particularly wedded to the idea of tradition for the rest of the year, fall hook, line and sinker for it at this time.'

'My hunch,' Mary says, 'is that our fixed traditions are about constructing a family identity for ourselves, about displaying to ourselves as a family - changing, expanding and contracting as families always are - what makes us 'us.''

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound design: Peregrine Andrews Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Reading of Dickens/Herodotus: Simon Slater Reading of Mrs Beeton: Ruth Everett

ARCHIVE

1. Extracts of Keith Floyd from A Farewell to Floyd, produced by Cactus TV. 2. The ancient recipe for Herodotus pudding is from Herodotus, Histories 2. 40.

With water companies reeling from criticism over sewage discharge and rising bills, Stephen Smith squelches through London's watery underworld.

'Descending into London's Victorian sewers', Stephen says, 'is like spelunking through the layers of the city's history, and reminds you that problems over water and sanitation have been the norm rather than an aberration' for centuries.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel on the joys of seeing the world through the eyes of her 9 month old daughter.

'Where previously I would barely have noticed them,' Zoe writes, 'I now size up trees from below in terms of buds, leaves, colour, height - and how all of these may look to my little lady viewed from her pram or carrier in which her neck swivels constantly like a periscope, or an owl.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott ponders the task of clearing her Mum's house, and the enormous difficulty of dismantling the things her mother loved and that Rebecca remembers her buying from bric-a-brac and antique shops.

'The beauty of the objects in my mother's house exists in her artistry,' writes Rebecca, 'the way she had placed some of them so that the evening light falls on them, the way that the kooky little Italian lamp sits next to the framed print of the Venetian canal... the way that everything is in the place that she had chosen for it.'

It gets her wondering about how many other people are doing the same with their parents' homes, in towns and cities across the country.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray believes the British state is broken, and that we urgently need a new centre ground in British politics.

'Outside the echo chamber of metropolitan opinion', John writes, 'there is a restive electorate perplexed and discomforted by the country the UK has become'.

He says our politicians seem bent on continuing the status quo, seemingly unable to comprehend a surge in support for populist politics.

But he wonders if the election of Kemi Badenoch could be a first step towards creating something radical in a new centre ground.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From the escape of Cholmondley the chimp from London Zoo in 1848, to Chichi from the Kharkiv Zoo in 2022, to a group of 43 macaque monkeys from a research facility in South Carolina last week, Megan Nolan reflects on the great annals of animal escapes and why they hold an almost mystical appeal to humans.

She believes the reason they are so potent is that they contain the 'dazzling knowledge that things which ARE so, need not REMAIN so'.

'In a week where it felt especially apparent that we have no meaningful ability to shape the world in which we live', writes Megan, the realisation that we can defy inevitability is intoxicating.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler reflects on the valuable perspective offered by out-of-date guide books. They shed light on the life of the early traveler - advised to pack an iron bedstead and a portable bath tub - and reveal how destinations may have evolved or be frozen in time.

'The chief question I ask the old guides is whether the spirit of a place - the genius loci - can survive the upheaval of the years. Is the spirit of the place immutable or can it change?' asks Sara.

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Co-ordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

In the last of his essays reflecting on America's search for meaning, James Naughtie recalls a meeting a year ago with General Michael Hayden - the former head of the CIA - who, without fanfare, expressed concern for the future of US Democracy.

'I don’t know that we’ll come through this,’ he said. ‘Right now I think it’s about 50-50.’

James reflects on past presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, and his dedication to the promotion and protection of democracy around the world, and compares it to the present, as we enter the final days of the 2024 campaign.

What might a tight result might mean in the coming months? 'The system will be on trial,' he writes, recalling the legal battles over the 'hanging chads' of 2000 in which the fate of the nation was decided on just 537 votes.

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

James Naughtie argues that a common American identity will be achieved - one day - despite the heightened political rhetoric around immigration, that is making it one of the most contentious issues in this year's presidential election.

He recalls Ronald Reagan's 'homely evocation of an American character'. For Reagan, James says, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses', had real contemporary power.

For many Republicans today, he says, it's a very different story.

But he sees signs of change. On a recent visit to the US border in Arizona, he met a 'cattleman of resolute conservative views in his 80s', who tells James that although he's fed up with armed drug runners using his land, he believes most people cutting through the fence are 'good people, in search of new lives'.

'The huddled masses will be absorbed... eventually', James writes. 'But the question right now is how much damage will be done in getting there - to the principles of their democracy, and perhaps to their precious belief in themselves.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From the description of Alexander Hamilton as 'the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar', to Lyndon Johnson's depiction of Gerald Ford as a man who 'couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time', James Naughtie argues that American political language has long been teeming with insult.

He recalls as a student in 1974, queuing at the back door of the White House one evening and coming away with transcripts of the Watergate tapes, full of 'expletive deleted' notes 'that blacked out various Nixon explosions.'

But in our own time, James says, something quite different is at play. The language of politics today, he says, 'instead of being punctuated by insults, it's become enslaved to them. And the more exaggerated political language becomes, the more it is devalued - because it has lost its true purpose.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

James Naughtie presents the first of four personal essays exploring America's 'wild search for meaning' in the run-up to November's presidential election.

From the freezing waters of Nantucket Sound in Moby Dick, via sunken levees of the Mississippi and the railroad blues of New Orleans, to the ‘raucous expeditions into an underworld of…richly wounded humanity’ in contemporary crime novels, James contemplates this moment in the United States through its fiction.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik revisits two famous American essays from the 1960s and finds a remarkably contemporary vision - and one 'that seems to have an application to our own time and its evident crisis.'

He couples Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' with Daniel Boorstin's 1962 classic on 'image' and America's tenuous relationship with facts.

'It is the admixture of Hofstadter's political paranoia with Boorstin's cult of publicity,' writes Adam, 'that makes Trump so very different from previous political figures.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

From Kamala Harris' 'word salads' to her views about wealth redistribution, Zoe Strimpel finds little to like in a Harris presidency.

But it's her views on Israel that Zoe finds particularly hard to stomach.

'In those halcyon days of my youth,' says Zoe, 'our family's concerns that the leader of the free world protect Israel was normal, uncontroversial and, with Clinton and Bush at the helm, not a particular worry... But Kamala's hazy demands for instant deals and ceasefires,' she writes, 'are like nails on a chalkboard to me.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

With the help of certain Conservative politicians, form number 48879-2039-876/WC and a rabbit hutch, Howard Jacobson takes a wry look at the advantages of a nanny state.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Sarah Wadeson

Three of Megan Nolan's close friends have given birth in the past year. Another two are doing IVF. And anyone who can afford to, Megan says, is freezing their eggs.

Megan reflects on how attitudes to having children have changed profoundly in Ireland in the space of a generation.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

As America gears up for next week's debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Sarah Dunant looks at the seismic shift in sexual politics in the US since Trump debated with Hillary Clinton.

'Looming, threatening, even the word stalking was used' to describe that encounter, Sarah remembers.

But when this presidential debate gets underway in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, Sarah thinks it will be a very different story.

'An encounter worth losing sleep for,' she reckons.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

In the week that one of Britain's most famous Paralympians Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced to crawl off a train, Tom Shakespeare describes his encounters with crawling.

'Don't get me wrong,' Tom says, I am not against crawling.' His holidays, he says, involve a lot of crawling: in Egypt to visit the apartment of the poet Constantine Cavafy or in Italy to see the childhood home of the communist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci.

But in day to day life, Tom argues, 'crawling is no way for adults to go about their business.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

At a village fete in rural France, AL Kennedy finds herself among barrel organs, sleeping piglets and 'a guy in a flowing blue smock gliding about on an ancient motor bicycle, just because he could.'

After US Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz turned the word 'weird' into 'the soundtrack of our summer,' Alison relishes how the concept is reclaiming its roots.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

David Goodhart says that with 40% of universities facing deficits and, he believes, too many graduates chasing too few graduate jobs, it's time for a rethink on universities.

And he has a reassuring message for those who didn't make the grade in Thursday's A level results.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Jonathan Glover Production coordinator: Sabine Schereck Editor: Tom Bigwood

Sara Wheeler on why sleeping in Captain Scott's bunk in the Antarctic got her thinking about imposter syndrome.

'It took me many years,' writes Sara, 'to realise that I had as much right to be in Captain Scott's hut as anyone else, because nobody owns the Antarctic, or the hut, or Scott's legacy."

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Rod Farquhar Production coordinator: Janet Staples Editor: Tom Bigwood

Will Self muses on change as he prepares for a stem cell transplant, an operation 'which will result in the greatest change in what has been a notably changeable life.'

And he discusses the preparations he's making which he believes put him 'in pole position to race with this ...devilish adversary.'

He concludes that the art of living is about recognizing that 'life is in continual flux - and our vacillating wills and changeable natures, psychic and physical alike, are just part of the cosmic churn - nothing in fact endures, but change itself.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

As the Olympics gets underway, Michael Morpurgo says we need to take care that the event doesn't stray too far from the ideals of the Olympics and the Paralympics.

'The announcement this year,' writes Michael, 'that athletes at the Olympics will, for the first time, be awarded prize money - $50,000 for each gold medal - sets a precedent in the Games' 128 year history.'

But, he says, 'over the next two weeks, I should like to think that the Olympics will uphold the spirit that has sustained the Games for so long... that the glory is in the laurel wreath or the medal, that the heroism is in the triumphs and disasters.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

Adam Gopnik muses on why he'll always love the steam baths in New York.

'My own pet answer,' Adam says, 'justified by intuition and half-heard rumours, is that it helps sleep to have a low internal body temperature. All that sweating lowers my own burning inner furnace and makes me more able to sleep.' This is, he admits, 'a perfectly sound scientific explanation that I have no intention of checking.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Tom Bigwood

Sarah Dunant argues that Joe Biden's refusal to understand his moment in history is forcing the nation to confront the fact that she is no longer young.

'In the relatively short history of America from new country to super power,' writes Sarah, 'she has always - even when she behaves badly - projected an aura of self confidence, a vitality, almost cocky certainty that we associate with youth. And for the longest time, it made for an optimism, a sense of can do, that sometimes felt like manifest destiny.'

That, Sarah argues, is starting to change.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

A night walk, listening to nightingales, and a memory of her late father lead Rebecca Stott to ponder Iris Murdoch's theory of 'unselfing'.

The theory, writes Rebecca, was 'essentially about looking out and beyond ourselves and away from what Murdoch described as the 'fat, relentless ego.''

In this post election moment, Rebecca says, 'to rise to the challenges of housing, global migration, war, the cost of living, and the crisis of climate breakdown, as well as countering the global rise of nationalism and tribal politics, we might have to find ways to radically unself not just as individuals but as whole nations.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor Tom Bigwood

Mary Beard argues that 21st Century disputes about what museums should own - or give back - are far from being a modern phenomenon.

'Almost as far back as you can go, there have been contests about what museums should display, and where objects of heritage properly belonged,' writes Mary. 'These debates are written into museum history.'

From the Great Bed of Ware to the Lewis Chessmen, Mary reflects on how we determine who owns objects from the distant past.

Sometimes, she says, as in the case of the Broighter Hoard, it comes down to the kind of craziness of deciding whether 'some anonymous Iron Age bloke had planned to come back for his stuff, or not!'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan ponders her generation's housing crisis.

'Sometimes it all crashes over me, how adrift I am, and how laughably inconceivable the idea is that I would ever own a place on my own,' writes Megan.

But there are other ways of framing this dilemma too, she believes. 'My favourite of those is to think that I'm unusually capable of feeling at home in the world at large, instead of just one building, or just one town....There are parts of me that would not exist except for my privilege to live in other places, those parts were born all over the world, and I remember the luck of that when I feel at a loss about bricks and mortar.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the 'commercial exploitation' of fandom.

From Swiftie 'friendship bracelets' to beauty products and sportswear, she argues that you can no longer be a true superfan, or a true popstar, without the merch.

'But it is striking,' writes Zoe, 'that rather than reject the purely cynical commercialism of their fandom, fans demand it. Which begs the question of whether we are really fans of artists these days, or whether fandom has been consumed by corporations who have shape-shifted into the form of pop stars.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

When it comes to fast cars or literary festivals, Howard Jacobson reckons that, for the average male, there isn't usually much of a contest. 'You don't get as many men at a literary festival as you do on a street corner where there's a Lamborghini parked,' writes Howard. 'Or you didn't.'

But he senses a change - and a new interest in men talking and reading about love.

It's not that men find female characters too soft - rather, that they often find the male characters aren't soft enough.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Mark Damazer looks to George Orwell's essay, 'Politics and the English Language', to see if he can be our guide through the fractious language of the next few weeks of the election campaign.

He says Orwell's critique in 1946 of the political slogans, the carefully honed phrases and the rehearsed answers of his day remind us that there's never been a golden age of political language.

A thought to hold on to, perhaps, 'as we enjoy - or endure - the next few weeks'.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler asks whether trying to get away from it all is a futile endeavour.

'We go to all that trouble', writes Sara, 'up at 4.30, cancelled planes and trains and bent tent poles - only to find ourselves, boring as ever, glum and pink on a beach or glum and damp in a Welsh cottage!'

But there are still good reasons, Sara argues, why so many of us want a change of scene. And so 'off we go, in large numbers. At every opportunity'.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Katie Morrison Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare calls for new thinking to fix the current crisis in our prisons. Against a backdrop of overcrowding, violence and high rates of reoffending, he says we need a clearer vision of what prisons are really for.

"We want them to do lots of rather different things: punish people who have broken our laws; protect the public from violent criminals; rehabilitate offenders and teach them useful employment skills. Yet we are guilty of stigmatising people who have spent some time in prison."

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Bridget Harney

Rebecca Stott is on a quest for a decent-tasting apple. Along the way she discovers a revival of interest in wonderful heritage varieties: the rough-textured russets like Ashmead's Kernel, the rich, aromatic Saltcote Pippin or the sharp tanginess of the Alfriston.

Rebecca asks why - given the UK has an impressive two and a half thousand varieties of apple - we can only buy four or five in the average supermarket.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Megan Nolan on the allure of New York and the city's 'main character' syndrome.

The city is, she says, 'the place that makes me happier to be alive than anywhere else - not in spite but because of its thoroughly human hopelessness.'

'Nature is nature, permanent and without moral taint,' writes Megan, 'but cities are paeans to the marvellous filth of the human spirit.'

'The real challenge is being moved by the effort to remain open to one another despite being consoled by surroundings made not of beauty and relief, but of cement and strife.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Patients care apps - which give patients unprecedented access to their health records - are being rolled out by NHS trusts across the country.

You might imagine, says Will Self, that 'this previously unimaginable access to such a wealth of medical data should empower me, make me feel I have a choice, and enable me to assist those treating me by being what every conscientious statistic wants to become: a good patient.'

Will argues that, on the contrary, this 'revolution in healthcare' only makes us more impotent, reduces patients to the status of customers and undermines the authority and expertise of medical professionals.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Caleb Azumah Nelson on why anger is no longer a stranger to him, but a friend.

He talks of a childhood in which he tried to navigate a world which was 'already coding a young black man as dangerous, threatening. Angry.'

'As I've grown older,' writes Caleb, 'the question is not whether I should be angry, but do I love myself enough to be angry, to object when I feel wronged or faced with injustice.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher: Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler reflects on the experience of being a sibling to her brother who has a lifelong disability.

"Posting on social media on National Siblings Day, which fell on a Wednesday this year, brothers and sisters like me express pride. 'You love them more, not less' is a common thread. Because what all this is really about is the sibling's acute awareness of the lack of empathy routinely shown to the disabled - after all, childhood gives us, the siblings, a unique perspective. It's 'Does he take sugar?' times ten - ignoring the point of view of the disabled person and not even trying to stand in her shoes. Ask us. We know."

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Penny Murphy

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the extraordinary experience of ‘crossing the rubicon separating non-motherhood from matrescence’.

‘I had never quite put aside an abiding ambivalence about having a baby, even during pregnancy,’ writes Zoe.

But in the space of thirty minutes - and the delivery of a baby girl by C-section - Zoe says, ‘my hop over the long-tended, long-contemplated border with motherland rapidly resolved as her tiny features came into focus and a sense of interestingness became a sense of desperate affection and even of familiarity.’

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

A L Kennedy argues that, as a country with low productivity, we must urgently address our unhealthy relationship with work.

But creating more workaholics like herself, she says, is the last thing we should be doing.

'Toxic work doesn't just blight our business hours - it wearies our affection, steals our time for each other,' Alison writes.

'We rely on free moments and free energy to invent, to recharge, to create. An exhausted, stressed population is docile, but doesn't solve problems well.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray assesses what's going wrong for liberals in the US election.

'It's not chiefly Joe Biden's alleged faltering mental powers that lie behind Trump's march to the White House', John writes. 'Far more, it's the evident inability of American liberals to learn from their mistakes.'

And he believes they are displaying a 'reckless hubris' for which they risk being severely punished come November. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik warns of our tendency to normalise evil behaviour. What may pass for entertainment in Mafia movies, must be seen through a different lens in real life.

"The risk of crime is not crime alone, but the abyss that opens at our feet when once we have decided that the rules that count for other people don't count for us."

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self believes we are reaching a state of 'peak envy'.

'Is it any surprise,' Will writes, 'that in this, arguably the second century of self, when for the most part humans see nothing around them but images of those better off than themselves, envy should be quite so epidemic: a greenish toxin - the very mustard gas of modernity.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sarah Dunant reflects on martyrdom past and present.

As Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is laid to rest, Sarah looks to history to ponder what his legacy might be.

And she turns to the work of the 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: 'The tyrant dies and his rule is over...the martyr dies and his rule begins'.

'History is a long game,' Sarah writes. 'And the shelf life of martyrs in particular is impressive.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Penny Murphy

Following a recent incident in a London theatre where, it appears, Jewish Israelis were targeted by a comedian because they wouldn't stand for a Palestinian flag, Howard Jacobson reflects on the power of mockery and the liberation of laughter.

'Do the best comedians truly turn the world upside down', Howard asks, 'or do they merely strap us into a fairground roller-coaster so that we can feign fear and scream in unison?'

He argues that the norms of outrage have been jettisoned in the reaction to events in Israel on October 7.

'Once the world is turned upside down,' he writes, 'humanity and justice fall like loose change from our pockets.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott says the idea of 'going down a rabbit hole' is often characterised as a bad thing - here, she makes the case for what's to be gained.

"These days we invariably use the phrase 'down the rabbit hole' to describe a negative experience...where people get lost, then become overwhelmed, ensnare themselves in conspiracy theories and can't get back out," she says.

"But I don't believe rabbit holes are bad in themselves. If we avoid them altogether we lose the chance to experience their joy and excitement."

She recalls her own experience of discovery - and tells the story of how Charles Darwin once spent eight years distracted by barnacles.

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Tom Shakespeare reflects on the 'endangered skill of handwriting.'

'The most ambitious thing I author,' writes Tom, 'is the shopping list on my fridge. And several times a week I scrawl with my index finger when something is delivered'.

His handwriting, he says, has gone to pot. He knows he's not alone.

So he resolves to put that right and get more practice.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith