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Michael Berkeley's guest is the the historian and political biographer D R Thorpe, whose biographies include three British Prime Ministers of the mid-20th century - Sir Anthony Eden, Sir Alec Douglas-Hume, and Harold Macmillan. 'Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan', published in 2010, has been described as 'the best biography of a post-war British Prime Minister yet written', and was shortlisted for the Orwell Political Prize.

Richard Thorpe taught history at Charterhouse for over 30 years, and is a Fellow of St Antony's College and Brasenose College, Oxford. His musical choices begin with 'Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul' from Elgar's 'Dream of Gerontius', which reminds him of the great Huddersfield choral tradition in the area where he grew up. English music is one of his great passions, represented here by the final movement of Vaughan Williams' 'A Sea Symphony', and the opening of George Butterworth's rhapsody 'A Shropshire Lad', a piece of great poignancy, given that Butterworth was killed on the Western Front just after his 31st birthday. The three composers who mean most to Richard Thorpe are Richard Strauss, Wagner and Britten, and he has chosen excerpts from Strauss's Elektra and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, as well as 'Depart' from Britten's early song-cycle 'Les Illuminations', based on poems by Rimbaud. His final choice is the close of Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, the end of another great 20th-century symphonic cycle.