The Spark (and other audio work)

What’s the big idea? In BBC Radio 4’s The Spark, Helen Lewis talks to leading thinkers about how to change the world. From evidence-based parenting to abolishing prisons, from Karen Stenner on authoritarianism to Henry Marsh on assisted dying, discover the people – and the ideas – shaping our world.

The first four series of the Spark are now available as an audiobook. The eighth series begins soon.

Why did Mrs Nabokov carry a gun? Why didn’t Mrs Tolstoy believe her husband was serious about his vow of celibacy? And why did Mrs Gertrude Stein – also known as Alice B. Toklas – not even get to write her own autobiography?

Great Wives explores the pain – and joy – of living with a genius. Meet the women who knitted socks, cooked dinners, posed in bathtubs, typed manuscripts and wrangled wombats – all for their more well-known, and well-rewarded, husbands.

Everywhere you look on the internet, people are giving – and receiving – advice. How to eat. How to think. How to get rich. How to manage our time.

Across 8 episodes of The New Gurus, Helen Lewis travels through the strange, powerful and sometimes hidden digital spaces created by these new gurus. Why are so many of us turning away from the mainstream – mainstream medicine, mainstream politics and the mainstream media – and embracing the power of charismatic individuals instead?

Helen Lewis was raised a Catholic, but is now an atheist – and has also spent the last ten years writing about feminism. Recently, she was asked if she thought feminism had replaced religion in her life.

It’s a timely question, since the British Social Attitudes Survey says that the decline of religious belief is “one of the most important trends in post-war history”. But have we really become less religious? Or has politics taken its place?