In his new book, Metazoa, Australia’s ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the evolution of animal consciousness through the inner workings of a cast of marine characters - everything from soft coral and glass sponges to hermit crabs and banded shrimp.

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Understanding animal consciousness

Ashley Gray tells the untold story of the rebel West Indian cricketers who toured apartheid South Africa.

Rebel cricketers and the price they paid

The best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman explores the rich and complex history of our relationship with the planet's 37 billion acres of habitable land: who mapped it, owned it, stole it, cared for it, fought for it, and gave it back.

Simon Winchester on the history of land ownership

The self portrait is an obvious subject for women artists through history who have had to fight for access to studios, resources, time and recognition. Their self-portraits tell us a lot about the world they lived in.

What do women artists and their self-portraits tell us?

In her memoir The Soul of A Woman, the best-selling Chilean author Isabel Allende explores how feminism has shaped her life over the past seven decades. 

Isabel Allende: a feminist life

Join our cheery panel as they find reasons to laugh about some of the darkest parts of the year that was, and reflect on what defined 2021, and which issues slipped under the radar.

2021 Year in review - the funny, the serious and the downright ugly

David Williamson has retired from writing plays and screenplays and instead has written a memoir of his life. He talks honestly about how so many of the 56 plays he wrote over fifty years were based on conflicts and controversies from his own life and his friends and family around him. He decided that in his memoir, he would be as honest about his own failings as he had been about the flawed characters he had created for the stage.

David Williamson: A life reflected on stage and screen

In his final commentary for 2021 Ian Dunt discusses an event at Number 10 last Christmas that this week is front page news across the UK, and new laws to deter asylum seekers.

Ian Dunt's UK

Most of us give little thought to the back of a book - it's just where you go to look things up. But a new book reveals that the index has a curious history which can be traced from thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first.  Every time we perform a Google search, we are using ‘technology’ invented by a medieval polymath in Oxford and a group of Parisian monks who were looking for ways to navigate their books more efficiently.

A brief history of the book index

Covid-19 has torn through the world for the past two years, leaving a global death anywhere between 10 and 19 million people. How did we get the vaccines we are now using? Biologist and journalist Brendan Borrell tells the dramatic story of the scientists, public servants, business people and politicians racing to get a vaccine out in the United States during the height of the 2020 pandemic. 

The race for the vaccine

Bruce Shapiro looks back on 2021 that started with the January 6 insurrection and looks at where the country is now - still fragile and divided despite the change in President. The new year will present many more challenges for President Biden, and the Supreme Court will be ruling on cases addressing abortion rights which will generate even more division in the community.

Bruce Shapiro reflects on 2021

Mazes have gone in and out of fashion over the centuries but in recent years, Adrian Fisher has played a major role in reinvigorating the art and business of creating them. He estimates he has built 700 mazes in 42 countries, ranging from traditional hedge mazes to ones made of water. His Blenheim Palace maze now features on the British five-pound note.

The joy and mystery of mazes

Yanis Varoufakis covers a difficult year in global politics from COP26, to geo-political instabilities. He also reflects on the death of his father.

Yanis Varoufakis on 2021

Laura Tingle has the latest from Canberra, including election commitments from the ALP and a look back at the issues that took hold during a pandemic-ravaged 2021.

Laura Tingle's Canberra

“Outside my work,” Orwell wrote in 1940, “the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening.” The American author Rebecca Solnit went in search of the fruit trees Orwell planted in his cottage garden in Hertfordshire in 1936. But what she found was rose bushes - something she at first thought was incongruous with the “grim, grey” figure she supposed Orwell to be. 

Rebecca Solnit unearths George Orwell's passion for gardening

LNL stories separated out for listening. From razor-sharp analysis of current events to the hottest debates in politics, science, philosophy and culture, Late Night Live puts you firmly in the big picture.

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