Start the Week Creators & Guests

Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a British political commentator, television presenter, and host of Start the Week.

Meehan Crist is a science journalist. Currently, she is the writer in residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is the host of the live show and podcast "Convergence: A Show About the Future."Crist's work has appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Nation, Scientific American, and Science, and has been collected in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. She co-edited the collection "What Future," which was published in 2018. Her nonfiction book about the climate crisis, "Is It OK to Have a Child?," is forthcoming.

Yuval Noah Harari is an author, public intellectual, historian, and Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.

Mary Costello is a writer.Mary Costello was born in Galway.Before becoming a full-time author, Costello was a teacher.Costello's work has been serialised on BBC Radio 4. Her first book, the collection "The China Factory," was published in 2012. Her second book, the novel, "Academy Street," was published in 2014, and her second novel "The River Capture" was published in 2019.

Robert Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and former museum director and currently the founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. In 2010, MacGregor presented a series on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service entitled A History of the World in 100 Objects.

Linda Kinstler is a writer, journalist, and editor. Currently, she is the Deputy Editor at The Dial Magazine and a contributing writer for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine.Previously, Kinstler covered British politics for The Atlantic. She has been a contributing writer at Politico Europe, which she helped launch. Before that, she was the managing editor of The New Republic, where she covered the war in Ukraine.Kinstler's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Wired. Her first book, "Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends," was published in 2022.

Julie Bindel is a long time feminist campaigner and journalist. She co-founded the law reform group Justice for Women.

Dr. Catherine Anne Merridale is a writer and historian with a special interest in Russian history. Currently, she is a freelance writer and senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.Merridale was Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary University of London until her retirement from full-time academia in 2014.Merridale's work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, and the Literary Review. She has also contributed to BBC Radio. Her first book, "Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925-32," was published in 1990.

Hilary Mantel is a writer.

William MacAskill is a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is also a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford.

David Barrie is a mariner, psychologist, and author.As a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, Barrie has sailed all over the world. He served in the British Diplomatic Service, then worked in the arts and as a law-reform campaigner.Barrie's first book, "Sextant," was published in 2014. His second book, "Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way," was published in 2019.Barrie received his B.A. in Experimental Psychology and Philosophy from Oxford University.

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor is an Indian British sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.Roy is best known for her first novel, "The God of Small Things," which was published in 1997, and which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.

Lucy Worsley is a British historian, author, curator, and television presenter.

Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist and screenwriter.