A Point Of View

John Gray reflects on the controversial "safe spaces" policy being pursued by some universities.It may have been devised to ensure that people of all identities are entitled to a tolerant environment ...but John Gray argues that the policy not only threatens a fundamental liberal value but represents a demand to be sheltered from human reality. He says the point of education used to be to learn how to live well in full awareness of the disorder of life. "A lack of realism ...was considered not just an intellectual failing but also a moral flaw". He says we ignore this lesson of history at our peril. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray assesses what lies behind the Trump phenomenon and the remarkable political upheaval that could - possibly - see Donald Trump propelled into the White House. From the start, he says, Trump's campaign has been an audacious experiment in mass persuasion. "His uncouth language, megalomaniac self-admiration and strangely coloured hair....all deliberately cultivated" to help him profit from the popular resentment against the elites of the main parties. "Whatever happens", writes Gray, "there will be no return to pre-Trump normalcy". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Wheelchair user, Tom Shakespeare, reflects on what it feels like to be dependent on others. He says care often leaves the recipient in a devalued state. He calls for society to respond to the challenge of delivering help "without creating domination and infantilisation" and for care to be funded properly. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

John Gray muses on what his idea of heaven is....and why it shouldn't be a perfect world. History teaches us that trying to create a perfect society leads to hell on earth, he writes. "But dreams of a perfect world don't fail because human beings are incurably flawed. They fail because human beings are more complicated and interesting that their dreams of perfection".

Tom Shakespeare - a new dog owner - reflects on what dogs can teach us about contentment. Remembering his childhood obsession with the Peanuts cartoon, he quotes Snoopy "My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm Happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?" Dogs, writes Tom, have a much greater capacity for contentment than people and we can all learn from this.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self reflects on the joys of genealogy - truffling in census returns and parish records and establishing "our genuine links to multiple generations of nonentities"! "As a passionate Londoner", he writes, "I wanted to establish when the first Self had arrived in the city". Entire family sagas, he says, are today vanishing into thin air, in an era of nuclear families. Gone are those generations of extended families where over a cup of tea, the same old stories were told about the same old relatives. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self explores what's wrong with modern art. "I've been responsible for a fair amount of absolutely total nonsense in my time", he writes, but says most contemporary art is little more than "overvalued tosh and useless ephemera". Instead of a world where Russian oligarchs "buy artworks by the metric tonne and plaster them on the walls of their vulgar houses", he calls for a genuine understanding of art where - once again - we become "capable of conveying and explaining the subtle ambiguities of genuine art". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self explains why he finds it hard to always act his age."To alternate between being an errant child and a corrective adult must, I think, be intrinsic to the human condition." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Tom Shakespeare gives a very personal view of the implications for society of a prenatal screening technology due to be announced shortly. Tom inherited the genetic condition, achondroplasia, or restricted growth from his father and passed it on to both his children. Soon we will have to decide, he writes, what sort of people we are prepared to accept in our families and in our society. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Via steak and kidney pie and a spot of Morris dancing, AL Kennedy reflects on Englishness...at a time, she writes, "when Englishness is struggling to decide what it can be". She appeals to England - with all its different views, customs, history and opinions - to "treasure yourself, all of yourself". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy ponders the importance of facts... in a world dominated by opinion. "The Chilcot report highlights how a war can conjure the demons it promised to suppress", she writes "because facts were dodged or massaged and fantasy outcomes were taken as certainties". While facts may be grim, "avoiding them puts us all at increased risk". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The historian Mary Beard presents the last in the series in which some of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit". Mary Beard asks whether the referendum result will change our cultural identity. And as she sits at a David Gilmour concert in the ancient amphitheatre at Pompeii, Mary reflects on the "New Europe that we British seem to be about to lose". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Peter Hennessy sees the UK's vote to leave the European Union as the biggest strategic shift in British history since the Second World War, rivalled only by the disposal of the British Empire. As a consequence, we need a serious national conversation using a new political vocabulary to tackle "multiple and overlapping anxieties". "If we do hold that national conversation, rise to the level of events and draw on those wells of civility and tolerance, we may yet surprise ourselves - and the watching world - by the quality, the care and the foresight of what we do and what we say." Producer: Sheila Cook.

In these special editions of A Point of View, five of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become.Today, the philosopher Roger Scruton reflects on democracy after Brexit and explains why he feels it is the ordinary people of this country who care about democracy, not the urban elites."The referendum gave these people a voice", writes Scruton, "and what they have told us is that their country, its laws and its sovereignty are more important to them than the edicts of anonymous bureaucrats striving to rule from nowhere".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

In these special editions of Radio 4's long-running essay programme, A Point of View, five of Britain's leading thinkers, give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become.Today, the philosopher John Gray who has presented on Radio 4 for many years, argues that Britain should look to Brexit as a new beginning in which it "can throw off the dead weight of a failing European project". He says we should now accept the new opportunities given to us and "make our home in a more spacious world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The philosopher Onora O'Neill criticises the standard of public debate on both sides of the European Union decision and asks how this democratic deficit can be repaired. "The disarray that we now witness, and the retractions, revelations and recriminations that spill out on a daily basis, show that large parts of each campaign failed to communicate with the public, did not offer adequate or honest accounts of the alternatives, and did not provide the basic means for voters to judge the real options, the real opportunities or the real risks." This is the first of a series of special editions of Radio 4's long-running essay programme, A Point of View, in which five of Britain's leading thinkers give their own very personal view of "Brexit" - what the vote tells us about the country we are, and are likely to become. Producer: Sheila Cook.

"Transitions shake us" writes AL Kennedy. "and you don't need me to tell you that as a nation we're sharing one". Alison reflects on how disturbing transitional times can be ...and writes of her own personal experience and that happening in post-Brexit Britain. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

The philosopher John Gray argues that Brexit will have a greater impact on the EU than it will on the UK. And he predicts the British experience is likely to be repeated across much of continental Europe over the next few years. But, he says, rather than recriminating about what is past, we should be looking to the future. "We find ourselves in a new world", he writes. "Why not make the best of it?" Producer: Adele Armstrong.

AL Kennedy reflects on how being able to communicate clearly is the work of a lifetime. She argues that the present school testing regime could have a catastrophic effect on our children's ability to find their voice.Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Roger Scruton says the fashion for government by petition is out of step with representative democracy in which representatives are not elected to relay the opinions of their constituents but to represent their interests. "The common good, rather than mass sentiment, should be the source of law, and the common good may be hard to discover and easily obscured by crowd emotions.".