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Andrew Marr talks to the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer. In her latest book she explores the tensions at the heart of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid, through the lives of an interracial couple in suburban South Africa. The past and present also collide in the poet Jack Mapanje's attempt to understand why he was arrested by the Malawian secret police, and imprisoned without charge. Richard Dowden looks to the future of Africa to ask whether Chinese investment, an explosion in mobile technology and a growing middle class, means this will be Africa's decade. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr talks to Colm Toibin about the ways writers write about families, and also the impact of their own often dysfunctional relationships - from Thomas Mann and WB Yeats, to the nightmares of John Cheever's journals. In her novel, The Children's Book, AS Byatt explored how far a writing mother can harm her children, and yet she argues that she'd prefer to know nothing about a writer's private life. The novelist Will Eaves mined his own family background for his latest book, but insists it's more a work of imagination, than memoir. And it's these relationships, and culture, that are the key to the success of our species, rather than consciousness, language and intelligence, according to the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr celebrates middle age with the scientist David Bainbridge, who dismisses any suggestion of mid-life crisis, to argue that there's much more to middle age than just a period between youth and being old. The poet Simon Armitage asks in 'Knowing what we Know Now', whether we'd choose to live our life backwards once we got to the mid point, but the writer Deborah Moggach suggests there's a gender divide to reaching 50. And the psychologist Claudia Hammond discusses perceptions of time, and explores why we're so obsessed with its passing. Producer: Katy Hickman.