Tom Sutcliffe and guests Lisa Appignanesi, Ryan Gilbey and Denise Mina discuss the cultural highlights of the week including two times Booker winner Hilary Mantel's new book of short stories "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher," in which she turns her gaze away from Tudor England to the challenges of the recent past.

The first major of retrospective of German artist Anselm Kiefer in the UK opens at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. From mythology to the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah, alchemy, philosophy and the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Kiefer's work wrestles with the darkness of German history and considers the complex relationship between art and spirituality.

Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of Berlin's SchaubÃ1/4hne's Theatre, launches the Barbican's International Ibsen season with a potent adaptation of An Enemy of the People, catapulting Ibsen into a modern world of environmental and financial crises and involving direct participation from the audience.

Pawel Pawlikowski's award winning film Ida is his first set in his native Poland - he left Warsaw aged 14 - and explores the relationship between a novice and her magistrate aunt in 1960's Poland struggling to come to terms with its recent history.

And Transparent is a new ten part series from Amazon, which was greenlighted after a pilot was aired on line garnering positive viewer feedback. Directed by Jill Soloway (writer and producer of Six Feet Under), whose own father came out as transgender, this dark comedy, starring Jeffrey Tambor as Mort / Moira, is not directly autobiographical, but is heavily influenced by her own experiences. What impact is the consumption of TV on demand and via the internet having on the kind television drama currently being produced?