Private Passions

Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a love of books until much later in life. Her bestselling first novel, My Name is Leon, written in her 40s, draws on her own childhood experiences and her early career as a legal worker in the foster care system, and she devoted some of the proceeds to setting up a scholarship for aspiring authors from working class backgrounds. Her music choices include tracks from classic film scores - her father was an avid film buff - including Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway version of Carmen, alongside Bach, Chopin and Miles Davis.Producer: Graham Rogers

Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in English Literature at University College London. The offer of free film and the use of a dark room proved irresistible. Since then her images, with their focus on people, have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Time magazine and many more. She’s worked for the Guardian newspaper for more than 20 years and is an official photographer for the BAFTA awards. There she captures the likes of Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio backstage or on the red carpet, in intimate black and white shots. Her musical choices range from Bach and Mozart to Scarlatti and Nina Simone.

Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do. Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest parts of Dhaka and Delhi to the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster zone. She has lived with Yak herders in the high plains of Tibet and sailed across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Closer to home, she’s written two books about British archaeology, full of tips on how to read the landscape from ancient burial mounds to medieval woodlands. Landscapes have inspired some of her musical choices – from the Scottish Highlands to Mount Fuji in Japan.

Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everything But the Girl – taking their name from the slogan of a local furniture shop. Over the next twenty years, they had 12 top 40 singles and 7 top 20 albums. Since then Ben has experimented in dance and electronic music, run his own record label and returned to songwriting with the release of two solo albums. Ben has also written two acclaimed books. The first about his experience of a life-threatening autoimmune disease and the second, a poignant portrait of his parents. Most recently, he’s returned to making music with his wife Tracey Thorn in a new Everything But the Girl Album.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about this exodus in her bestselling and widely acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, the product of 15 years of research and more than 1200 interviews. She started out in newspapers as a reporter and feature writer, and in 1994 she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, when she was Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. More recently she published her second book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents, an examination of racial stratification. The New York Times described it as the “keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far” and it also won praise from President Obama. Isabel's choices include works by Camille Saint-Saëns, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Georg Philipp Telemann.

Libby Jackson is the head of Space Exploration for the UK Space Agency. She has turned a childhood passion for space into a wide-ranging career. She was flight instructor and controller at Europe’s Mission Control Centre for the International Space Station. She then joined the UK Space Agency in 2014 and led their education programme when the astronaut Tim Peake went into space. She is now one of Britain’s leading experts in human spaceflight, and last year was awarded an OBE for her work. Libby’s musical passions reflect the vast wonder of space but also her love of choral music and her adventures in Newfoundland as a teenager with works by Handel, Verdi and Shanneyganock.Producer Clare Walker

Steve Rosenberg is the BBC’s Russia editor. After studying Russian at university, he moved to Moscow in 1991 and since then has charted the transformation of the country – from the conflict in Chechnya and the Beslan school siege to President Putin’s rise to power and the impact of the current war against Ukraine. His musical passions include - perhaps unsurprisingly - Russian composers such as Rachmaninov, but his choices also draw on childhood memories and the many hours he spent watching TV. Steve is a keen pianist, and he recalls the moment he played for President Gorbachev, who sang Russian songs to his accompaniment. Steve also posts piano improvisations and compositions on social media - anything from Postman Pat in the style of Tchaikovsky to a piece he wrote inspired by birds sitting on a telegraph wire.Producer Clare Walker

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous theatre roles, and television appearances which have included six years on Holby City. For many people, though, he will always be Gustav Mahler thanks to Ken Russell’s 1973 biopic; for some, he became a memorable representation of Jesus Christ, thanks to his starring role in Zeffirelli’s six-hour epic. Robert Powell begins by choosing Mahler’s famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. He listened to Mahler non-stop when rehearsing for the role, but was still surprised by some of the eccentric things Ken Russell asked him to do: he will never forget floating for hours in a freezing lake. He talks about the impact of early fame, conjuring up the excitement of the King’s Road in the “swinging sixties”, and meeting his wife, Babs, who danced with Pan’s People. And he tells the story of how, when he was playing Jesus, he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and “something really extraordinary happened”. These days he is a devoted grandfather, making up for the time he couldn’t spend with his family when he was away filming. Other music choices include Stravinsky, Bach, Janacek, and his hero Bob Dylan. A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow University to read English and becoming a teacher, as they expected, she startled everyone by travelling to London - to study for the Bar. Some of her friends misunderstood and thought she’d gone south to find bar work. This was the end of the sixties, a time when there were extremely few women barristers. Since then, her ambition, fierce intelligence and considerable charm have taken her right to the top, and she now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws. She created a huge stir when she published her first book, Eve was Framed, in 1992 – a shocking examination of how the criminal justice system fails women. Three years ago, she felt so little had changed that she published a sequel – in a book with the title Misjustice. Helen Kennedy campaigns now too on wider human rights issues, such as the persecution and murder of women in Iran and the shocking genocide of the Uighurs in China. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Helena Kennedy looks back to the childhood which has been so influential on her campaigns for justice, and chooses the music which has sustained her through a series of difficult and high-profile cases. Her playlist includes Handel, Bach, Schubert, George Benjamin, James MacMillan, and her favourite Puccini opera, with Mimi’s famous aria from La Boheme.A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the speaker there changed the whole course of his life. The writer was Iris Murdoch. She became a friend, and he became – in his words – her “disciple”, and eventually her biographer. And then Peter and his partner, Jim O’Neill, spent eight months caring for Iris at the end of her life, as Alzheimer's took hold – they listened to a lot of music together. Peter has spent his career as an English Professor at the University of Kingston and his biography of Iris Murdoch is not his only book: he’s also written about Dostoevsky, John Fowles, and Angus Wilson; about grief, about becoming a Buddhist, and about dogs.In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Peter discusses the extraordinary power Iris Murdoch exerted over all her friends and lovers, and her secretiveness, so that each would be kept in a separate compartment. He remembers how she kept singing and dancing right up to the end. And he reveals his own mental health struggles, and how Buddhism has helped him. Music choices include Strauss, Bartok, Bach, Britten’s War Requiem, and the Anthem by Leonard Cohen that contains the famous words “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke