This week Andrew Marr is joined by Susan Pinker, Simon Russell Beale, Marina Warner and Clay Shirky.
Why do girls do increasingly well at school and university, yet men still dominate senior positions in adult professional life? Clinical psychologist SUSAN PINKER argues that it’s due not to simple discrimination but rather to fundamental biological differences between men and women which propel them to want different things out of work and life. The Sexual Paradox is published by Atlantic Books.
A chorister at St Paul's Cathedral from the age of 8, the actor SIMON RUSSELL BEALE has embarked on a journey to uncover the history of Western sacred music in a new documentary series for BBC Four. Helped by the award-winning choir The Sixteen, he explores how music was forever changed by the 'big bang' of polyphony in 12th-century Paris and developed by the likes of Palestrina in Rome and Thomas Tallis in London, before it reached the pinnacle with Bach in 18th-century Lutheran Germany. Sacred Music with Simon Russell Beale is on Fridays on BBC Four from Friday 21 March for four weeks. An Easter Celebration concert accompanying the series will be on BBC Four on Easter Sunday 23 March.
The Arabian Nights – tales drawn together by the teller Scheherazade, who wards off her execution by telling stories night after night - has long captivated generations of readers. The novelist and critic MARINA WARNER unpicks its huge influence on the Western imagination and argues that a deeper understanding of the long, imaginative interactions between the Middle Eastern and Western worlds can allow a cultural exchange between East and West that is needed more than ever today. The public workshop The Compass of Story: The Oriental Tale and Western Imagination takes place at The British Academy on 28 and 29 March.
The internet is transforming how we come together in groups, whether it’s to lobby a bank over its charges, arrange a risky political demonstration or simply swap notes on a hobby. The academic CLAY SHIRKY argues that the web is also bringing about new kinds of collaboration and networking that may change our political landscape beyond recognition. His book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, is published by Allen Lane and he is giving a talk at the RSA on Tuesday 18 March.
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