Front Row

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by reviewers Nancy Durrant and Tim Robey for this week's review.
Keira Knightley stars in The Lives of Others, adapted for the stage and directed by Robert Icke, from the 2006 film, about love and Stasi surveillance in East Germany.
La Bola Negra is Spain's nomination for the foreign language Oscar. It's a gay love story set during the Spanish Civil War intertwining three timeframes and the complications of love and war.
Twice Booker Prize-nominated author Tom McCarthy's latest novel, The Rhyl Poster, about a jurist -turned- double agent in the Court of Justice of the European Union.
We speak with Baillie Gifford Prize winner Edmund Richardson, whose book about Alexander The Great has won this year's £50,000 award.

Acclaimed artist Sam Taylor Johnson has photographed a wide range of actors, artists and musicians including Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tracey Emin, Philip Seymour-Hoffman and Alexander McQueen. She's also made biographical feature films about John Lennon and Amy Winehouse, and has repeatedly turned the camera on herself. As a new monograph of her work is published, she talks to us about the art of portraiture and what she has learned about selfhood.
Oscar winning writer and director Sian Heder talks to us about Being Heumann, her unflinching feature about the Disability Rights Movement which is based on true events and stars Ruth Madeley as Judith Heumann, a lifelong activist for people with disabilities, who died in 2023.
Later this month a conference commemorates the centenary of the publication of what is billed as "the wildest, most ambitious, most controversial poem in Scottish literature": Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The modernist poem, in which a drunk man on a moonlit hillside addresses the thistle, the nation and the universe is widely credited with igniting a literary renaissance in Scotland, and also contributed towards the formation of a new nationalist movement. MacDiarmid's official biographer Alexander Linklater and the poet's daughter-in-law, Deirdre Grieve, also a writer, join us to discuss the significance of the poem, how we read it a hundred years on, and the contradictions in MacDiarmid's own life.
Presenter: Kirsty Wark
Producer: Mark Crossan

Musician Nitin Sawhney's latest composition has been inspired by Samantha Harvey's Booker prize-winning novel Orbital. Called Orbiting Orbital, it also includes original writing by Samantha. They discuss the work and their collaboration with Kate.
Author Jasper Rees talks about the acclaimed actor Michael Gambon's life and career as his new authorised biography is released - from being spotted by Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre through to his role as Dumbledore later in life.
Curator Charlene Prempeh introduces the new exhibition The Nue Black Aesthetic at the Design Museum.
And we pay tribute to the musician Juan Atkins who is widely regarded as the godfather of techno.
Presenter: Kate Molleson
Producer: Lucy Collingwood

Grandmaster Flash, one of the founding fathers of hip-hop, talks about his memoir, Birth of a Culture, and the music and events that shaped his life and his music.
The Ramayana is one of the world’s oldest stories and as the new film, Rise of A Legend, hits screens this week telling of the epic battle between the evil Ravana and righteous Rama, we look at the cultural and literary significance of this famous tale with performance storyteller and author Vayu Naidu and writer and director Jatinder Verma.
Patrick Stewart won people's hearts from his Shakespearean theatre work to his portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. We hear an interview he gave to Front Row from 2023, in which he discusses his journey from working class Yorkshire to Hollywood.
And the voice of K9, John Leeson, has died. Actor and comedian Toby Hadoke pays tribute to the man behind Doctor Who's iconic robot dog.
Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Andrea Kidd

Nina Raine has adapted George Eliot's Middlemarch for the RSC, into a 2 part, 6-hour long stage play. How does it measure up to the book and the much-loved TV adaptations?
The British Library is celebrating the life and writing of Agatha Christie in an exhibition to mark 50 years since her death. She wrote the world's longest-running theatre play - The Mousetrap, (75 years so far) - and has sold more than 2 billion books. But who was the woman behind the stories? With artefacts and handwritten notes, this exhibition also looks at her pre-novelist career.
The film Gentle Monster from Maria Kreutzer is about a family that is confronted by the father committing an appalling crime. How do they rationalise his actions... can they?
And is Russia's targeted bombing of Ukrainian book storage depots, libraries and bookshops part of a campaign to erase Ukraine's culture?
Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe