Two of the most impressive Scottish writers and thinkers are also great friends. Andrew O'Hagan and Professor Karl Miller discuss the power of landscape and history in shaping Scottish imagination and writing, and why Scotland's consistently punched above its weight in these terms. This interview was originally broadcast on 6th September 2012. Guests: Karl Miller died in 2014. Andrew O'Hagan will be at the Melbourne Writers Festival in May 2024.

Long before the satirical film American Fiction made it to our screens, writers and publishers have grappled with the idea of the ‘race novel’. And just as the Black American characters in the film confronted race and class expectations, First Nation writers in Australia find themselves at the mercy of similar prejudices.  Writer Tony Birch joins Phillip Adams to discuss First Nations writing in Australia today.

The world’s most expensive spice appears in the written record as early as 2300 BCE, and is revered by cultures around the globe. It takes between 70,000 and 200,000 flowers to produce just one kilogram of dried saffron threads. But the precious and sacred plant is under serious threat from climate change. Guest: Nina Elkadi, Plant Humanities Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard

South Africa goes to the polls on May 29 and the ANC - the party of Nelson Mandela - which has ruled South Africa unchallenged for thirty years, is in trouble electorally.  Guest: John Matisonn, journalist and author of God, Spies And Lies: finding South Africa's future through its past, published by Ideas for Africa.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson introduces us to the brave people inside China that are challenging the Chinese Communist Party on its most sensitive ground: its control of history.

Donald Trump spent his first day in the dock as a criminal defendant. Bruce Shapiro talks us through the day, including the reported snooze from the former President. Guest: Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor with The Nation magazine; Executive Director of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.

Our lives are full of choices, but what if they aren't really an exercise in free will? Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we are slaves to our biology and wrestles with what this might mean for how we govern ourselves and others.

Laura Tingle on how the media found itself in hot water over its reporting on the Bondi Junction killings and its involvement in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial. Plus why Labor is fast losing support in key seats over its handling of Israel's attacks on Gaza.  Guest: Laura Tingle, Chief Political Correspondent, 7.30

Have you ever paused to think how and when books and text became divided into chapters? Nicholas Dames has. Nicholas Dames: Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. Author of The Chapter; a segmented history from antiquity to the 21st century ( Princeton University press)

In 2014 and 2016, two shipwrecks were found which answered a lengthy mystery – what happened to Sir John Franklin’s North-West Passage expedition, which had been missing since 1845? The wrecks were found thanks to Inuit testimony, and now people are wondering why it took so long for that local knowledge to be trusted.  Guest: Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, author of “Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge - The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth” published by Bloomsbury Academic press