Nina Simone is first black person to be Desert Island Discs’ most selected artist of year
Exclusive: Analysis shows change in guests and tastes help jazz musician keep classical music off top spot
July 2023
I can’t solve Brexit or the culture wars – but I’ve learned to see the other side of even the most polarised debates
Anne McElvoy
Evan Davis: ‘I found out at my wedding that my father had killed himself’
Podcast claims it may have first recording of Banksy’s voice
Miranda Sawyer on podcasts and radio
The week in audio: Into the Dirt; The Retrievals; Taste; Walt Disney: A Life in Films – review
A month in Ambridge
Charlotte Higgins on The Archers: if you’re going to cause a scene, do it in a Swindon cafe
Stanley Tucci says straight actors should be free to play gay roles
June 2023
Adam Kay tells of life ‘transformed’ by two babies
A month in Ambridge
Charlotte Higgins on The Archers: stray virgins better watch out in pagan Ambridge!
May 2023
Richard Coles says he felt ‘hurtled towards the exit’ by BBC
Desert Island Discs to move to BBC’s for-profit division in bid to make money
Bleak Expectations review – agreeably funny Dickensian spoof as cosy as a woollen teapot
Iain Johnstone obituary
Radio 4 flagship Today loses 800,000 listeners in a year to podcasts and rivals
‘I kept my alcoholism secret on Mission: Impossible set,’ Simon Pegg reveals
Miranda Sawyer on podcasts and radio
The week in audio: Revolutionary Letters; A Living Leg-End; Today in History With the Retrospectors and more – review
April 2023
It was 60 years ago today… schoolboy’s tape of the Beatles transports us to an era of optimism
Samira Ahmed
Private-school pupils unselfconsciously screamed for their working-class heroes
A month in Ambridge
Charlotte Higgins on The Archers: has there ever been a more callous use of a bring-and-buy sale?
This month, Beckettian shop buddies Justin and Jim are due a reckoning and Brian speeds beyond his wife’s death quicker than you can say ‘Jenny darling’
Has London reached peak toxicity?
David Mitchell
The UK capital, stagnant with oligarchs, is now so despised that even institutions such as the BBC are jumping ship
March 2023
DM Thomas obituary
Author, poet and scholar of Russian literature whose greatest success came with his controversial 1981 novel The White Hotel
