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MEET THE GUESTS

Iranian writer Azar Nafisi, author of best selling book Reading Lolita in Tehran, deconstructs the power of silence and absence in her latest memoir Things I've Been Silent About. She believes that a habit of silence was damaging to her family but believes that under other circumstances silence can be unbelievably articulate.

Cosmologist and mathematician Roger Penrose now believes that asking what came before the Big Bang is no longer a silly question. He contends that the Big Bang was not just a beginning, it was simultaneously the far future of a previous aeon ie the infinity of each succeeding aeon equals the zero hour of its successor.

One of the world's leading scholars of the fairy tale, Jack Zipes, deconstructs the DNA of fairy stories such as Little Red Riding Hood to show that far from being simply the stuff of bedtime entertainment, they are intimately entwined in the story of human cultural and biological evolution, thus explaining their relevancy to successive generations and societies.