Midweek - 29/07/2009

Lively and diverse conversation with Libby Purves and guests. Sylvie Silver is the winner of the 2009 Daily Mail Inspirational Women of the Year award for her work with two organisations that represent the youth of today and the older generation. For the past five years, she has been wing commander in charge of the London Air Training Corps, comprising 30 squadrons and 1,300 air cadets aged between 13 and 19. She also works as director of the charity NAPA - the National Association for Providers of Activities for Older People - which aims to improve the quality of activities for older people. The writer William Fiennes's first book The Snow Geese, which he wrote while recuperating from an illness, follows the snow geese on their 3,000-mile spring migration. In his latest book The Music Room, he gives a moving account of growing up in a moated castle with his parents, sister and two brothers, including Richard, who developed epilepsy which eventually was to prove fatal. Clara Salaman is an actress and writer, probably best known for playing DS Stanton in The Bill. In her first novel Shame on You, she draws on her own experiences of growing up and being educated in a religious sect which her parents became members of during the 1960s. Terry O'Neill is the legendary portrait photographer who has stills of every famous face from the Beatles and Brigitte Bardot to the Queen and Nelson Mandela. He started working as a photographer at Heathrow Airport and one day took a black and white still of Rab Butler asleep on a bench. The print was bought by the Daily Sketch and his career was born. His latest exhibition, Terry O'Neill: Behind the Scenes, is at the Getty Images Gallery, Westfield, in London.