In his autobiography, On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in the New South Africa, Tony Leon, leader of the opposition to the ANC for thirteen years, looks back on a half century of South African politics from the fight to end Apartheid to the birth and near death of the Democratic Alliance and his struggle with Thabo Mbeki over AIDS, Zimbabwe and race. In a no-holds-barred assessment he provided an insider’s account of the dramas and events which have helped shape and define modern Sou...

Have we learnt anything from the economic crisis that rocked the world only too recently? At the time of going to print, the UK was one of the few Western countries still not officially out of recession. Gillian Tett followed the crisis closely, Adam LeBor looked at how Madoff could fool so many people and Oliver James repeatedly put capitalism in the dock. Here they discussed the various facets of the crisis, structural or psychological, and investigate our responses to it and the choices we...

The internationally acclaimed ceramicist, Edmund de Waal, retraced the history of his family through an inherited collection of netsuke – tiny Japanese figurines. He spoke here to James Harding about the painstaking journey he unwittingly embarked upon. He evoked vanished worlds – whether 19th century Paris or 20th Vienna – exquisitely, conveying the horrors of the destruction of cosmopolitan Europe and exploring the relationship between collectors and their collections.

As a foreign correspondent in his own country, Arkady Ostrovsky has experienced Russia’s modern history first-hand. From the suddenly wealthy, to the media, to the Kremlin spin doctors, in The Invention of Russia he explores those who have shaped the new Russia. Peter Pomerantsev describes his unique journey into the surreal heart of 21st century Russia in his award-winning Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. They are in con...

Thomas Harding, prize-winning author of Hanns and Rudolf, talks to his cousin, James Harding, about The House by the Lake, the story of their family’s German summer house. Thomas Harding intermingles narratives of the successive inhabitants of his family’s modest family-built summer house, set on a beautiful lake outside Berlin, with concurrent events in Germany, from the late 19th century up to the present day.

Trust in the media is at an all-time low. How does the media exert its power, and are the stories that are told in repressive regimes so different from those conveyed in the West’s liberal democracies? James Harding, John Lloyd and Matthew d’Ancona, in conversation with professor and broadcaster, Rana Mitter, investigate exactly how truth can be mediated and distorted.