Histories, emotions and identity

Three prize-winning authors in today's discussion programme hosted by Tom Sutcliffe:

The German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of peasants rose up to demand a new, more egalitarian order—only to be crushed in a brutal counterattack that left up to 100,000 dead. The historian Lyndal Roper argues that this rebellion was far from chaotic: it was a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical ideals of the Protestant Reformation. Her book Summer of Fire and Blood is the winner of the 2025 Cundill History Prize.

The neurologist Masud Husain explores the human mind through the stories of seven patients. In asking what it is that makes us who we are, he explores how our identity can shift when we lose just a single cognitive ability. He examines the stories a man who ran out of words, a woman who stopped caring what others thought, and another who, losing her memory, believed she was having an affair with her own husband. His account of the science of identity, Our Brains, Our Selves, won the Royal Society's 2025 Trivedi Science Book Prize.

The historian Hannah Durkin explores the stories of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on her original research she uses first hand accounts to tell the stories of the enslaved in their own words. Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade is the winner of the 2025 Wolfson History Prize.

Producer: Ruth Watts