Reaction Time
"Your breasts look fantastic in that dress." From abysmal chat-up lines like this, to love at first sight in Victoria Train Station, BBC Radio Four listeners have some incredible relationship stories...
14 Feb 201631min
Jarvis on McCullers
The writing of Carson McCullers has perhaps never been as popular or acclaimed as that of contemporaries such as Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams, but nonetheless she remains one of the most remarkab...
9 Feb 201630min
Gay Bombay
Why is homosexuality still illegal in the world's so-called largest democracy? In his celebrated family memoir 'And All is Said', historian Dr Zareer Masani made no bones about his own homosexuality ...
5 Feb 201628min
Herland
In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who we...
2 Feb 201642min
Raising the Dead
For the past few decades music teacher and pianist Francesco Lotoro has been collecting music written in concentration camps from the Second World War. Francesco's life is entirely given over to recov...
26 Jan 201628min
Deciding Fast and Slow
What is it really like to make decisions affecting millions of people, knowing that a mistake might be pounced upon instantly and your career left in tatters? Government ministers face this challenge ...
22 Jan 201629min
Work Is a Four Letter Word
Many of us have grown up with the belief that a strong work ethic is a positive thing, and that by contrast idle hands are the devil's playthings. According to Professor Andrew Hussey, that argument m...
8 Jan 201658min
Miles Jupp and the Plot Device
How many stories are there in the world? According to William Wallace Cook, dime novelist and prolific producer of American pulp, there were precisely 1,462 and in Plotto, his "Master Book of All Plot...
5 Jan 201628min
