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On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores goodness and its uneasy relationship with pleasure. The historian Robin Lane Fox looks to the work of Augustine and what is thought to be the first autobiography detailing the sinful excitement of youth before his anguished and hesitant conversion to Christianity. The philosopher Clare Carlisle explores Augustine's views on the link between desire and habit, while the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks why pleasure is more highly prized when it's perceived to be forbidden and guilty. Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to others and asks why do-gooders provoke deep suspicion in Western culture. Producer: Katy Hickman.

On Start the Week Mary Ann Sieghart takes a satirical look at the world with the novelist Jonathan Coe. His latest book is a state-of-the-nation satire which takes aim at politics, social media and inequality. It's the battle between ideals and pragmatism in the cynical world of the political elite of the 1920s which takes centre stage in the play Waste, famously banned when it was first written, now revived and directed by Roger Michell. The Times' political cartoonist, Peter Brookes, celebrates the power of the visual image to lampoon the country's leaders and the playwright Mia Chung explores whether satire can do justice to the questions raised by a regime like North Korea and talks about her latest play about two sisters fleeing the country. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr was in Paris on Friday to record a special edition of Start the Week about France. Hours later the Paris attacks happened. This programme is not about these attacks or Islamic State or the French role in the war in Syria, but it is a conversation about the political, cultural and religious fault lines in France from the 19th century to today. As BBC Radio 4 plans to broadcast a retelling of Emile Zola's 20 novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, the journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet explores whether Zola is a 19th century gateway into understanding modern France. The novelist Agnès Desarthe has set her latest novel at the beginning of the 20th century and mixes the intimate with the great events of French history. The French Resistance is one of France's heroic myths and is central to the country's identity, but the historian Robert Gildea says the reality is far more complex. And contemporary France in all its complexity is represented in Karim Miské's thriller set among the radical Islamic preachers, Christian fundamentalists and corrupt police officers in one of the poorest suburbs of Paris. Producer: Katy Hickman.