Talking in the Library - Series Three

Jonathan Miller
Jonathan Miller started something with Beyond the Fringe but was content to let the next generation try to finish it, although few of them had his gift for penetratingly intelligent humour. He went on to host arts televison programmes and become the most sought-after director of opera in the world. But it was increasingly evident from his several big television series on science that his deeper interests lay in the brain itself, the source of all creativity. Talking in the library, Miller attempts to redirect the attention of an arts-bound plodder towards the true centre of the action. Typically, Miller is so lyrical about the adventure of science that his explanations bring us back to art by another route.

Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam went on from Monty Python to become one of the most original film directors Hollywood has known: sometimes too original for the comfort of the studio bosses. With a piece of paper and a pencil he can create a personal world for four pence. On film he needs millions of dollars, but he spends it to rare effect. Those who believe, as I do, that Brazil is a political film ranking with the achievements of Costa-Gavras and Gillo Pontecorvo, will welcome the rare opportunity to see and hear Gilliam expressing himself outside the usual restrictions of the talk show. His torrential inventiveness is as evident as his boundless humour.

Jung Chang
Jung Chang ranks with Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the author of a great book that dispelled the last illusions about a great tyranny. Wild Swans matches The Gulag Archipelago for its power and horror, with the difference that the personality of its narrator seems so frail. But the frailty is an illusion. She is a tough-minded woman, as the ghost of Mao Zedong is about to find out, because after nine years she is just finishing his biography. In this programme, she looks back on her nightmarish childhood and forward to a transformed China.

Howard Jacobson
​​Howard Jacobson is one of the most fearless commentators of our time. Shocking and subversively funny, he has a permanently fresh knack for breaking taboos like stale biscuits. In his novels and newspaper columns he is famous for his provocative eloquence, but the surprise is that he talks that way in real life, with an unmatched capacity to put a complex point of view in a string of elegantly formed declarative sentences. Talking in the library, he faces the hard questions about what it means to be Jewish in a purportedly multicultural Britain and in a world put out of joint by the turmoil in the Middle East.

Ahdaf Soueif ​
Ahdaf Soueif has written two of the most important novels to have come out of Egypt in recent times: The Map of Love and In the Eye of the Sun. Her first concern is the position of Egypt in relation to Britain, the old colonialist power. She has lived the relationship in her own person, as an exile and as a representative of women's liberation in the Islamic world. Her further concern is with the position of Islam in a world context. Clive James does his best to convince us that her charm and beauty are irrelevant to the argument.

Sir Jeremy Isaacs
Sir Jeremy Isaacs rapidly established himself as the most creative television executive of our time when he green-lighted such revolutionary programmes as Rock Follies and The Naked Civil Servant. He personally launched Channel 4 and shaped its early course. His World at War series set the standards for a genre. As director of the Royal Opera House he got into a war of his own, which he characteristically allowed the television cameras to observe. He is possibly the last example of a type that changed Britain: the cultural grandee. Talking in the library, Isaacs effortlessly proves that charm and enthusiasm have always been two of his most potent weapons.