Mary asks how controversial memory is; and about the connection between London's Trafalgar Square as a memorial to 19th century Empire, and as a democratised space where we gather to celebrate, protest, and remake our national identity. While many are thinking about how we'll memorialise the pandemic (a statue of Chris Whitty? Red hearts daubed on riverbank walls?), Mary will be asking what counts as a successful site of memory when she talks to David Adjaye, and visits his new memorial to Cherry Groce, an innocent woman who was shot by the Metropolitan Police in her Brixton home in 1985. Visual artist Cornelia Parker will be at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with a preview of a new exhibition Breaking the Mould, remembering the work of female sculptors in Britain since the Second World War, and thinking about how we reconfigure our landscape as an act of remembrance. In discussion with Edmund de Waal, Elif Shafak and Lemn Sissay, she'll be asking how and what we choose to forget - how we edit our ideas of our past, and how sometimes others do the editing for us. And there will be one or two throwbacks to the ancient romans, who were expert at remembering and forgetting. This memorable start to the new series is rounded off with actor Jane Horrocks giving us a tour of her Memory Shop, a space she's created at the heart of the winding Georgian lanes of Brighton for this year's Festival, interrogating how different generations remember the same family events in strikingly different ways.

Mary Beard embraces finally being on the move - whilst acknowledging we are not going very far! What do we lose from arts and culture when we cannot travel? Mary meets James May to discuss grand tours old and new, and in London’s St Pancras station, she asks if it is architecture and art that give train station reunions their romantic edge. Private pilot and singer Gary Numan tells Mary why the ability to travel is so key to a musician’s creativity. And Mary is joined by historian David Olusoga, comedian and Channel 4’s Trip Hazard presenter Rosie Jones and writer William Dalrymple to debate if the traditional genres of travel literature and travel documentaries are slowly dying. Even without a pandemic or climate change, do we need to travel to understand other cultures?

Mary's exploration of culture continues as she asks: why do we have to act our age?

Mary is in conversation with critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her latest book, Notes on Grief, conveys her startlingly powerful reaction to losing her father last year, the man she credits with instilling in her a powerful feminist instinct. Her writing is both tender and fierce, whether it’s her Women’s Prize-winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun or her influential essay We Should All Be Feminists, and she’s often named one of Africa’s best writers. In her first public appearance since the devastating news of her mother’s death, she talks to Mary about the power of literature to heal, how it feels to have Beyonce using her words in her songs and why Enid Blyton was her inspiration to write as she was growing up in Nigeria.